
Publications List
Edited by Lawrence I. Conrad, Ph.D. 1981
1. Problems in the literary source material -- 2. Land use and settlement patterns -- 3. States, resources and armies -- 6. Elites old and new in the Byzantine and early Islamic Near East



Edited by Lawrence I. Conrad, Ph.D. 1981
Contagion - even today the word conjures up fear of disease and plague and has the power to terrify. The nine essays gathered here examine what pre-modern societies thought about the spread of disease and how it could be controlled: to what extent were concepts familiar to modern epidemiology…
Lawrence I. Conrad, Ph.D. 1981
The influence of Greek medical practices dating back to the fifth century B.C. has had an immeasurable impact on the development of medicine in the West over the subsequent centuries. This text is designed to cover the history of Western medicine from Classical Antiquity to 1800. As one guiding thread it…

Edited by Lawrence I. Conrad, Ph.D. 1981
Modernising scientific medicine emerged in the nineteenth century as an increasingly powerful agent of change in a context of complex social developments. Women's lives and expectations in particular underwent a transformation in the years after 1870 as education, employment opportunities and…

Edited by Lawrence I. Conrad, Ph.D. 1981
The World of Ibn Ṭufayl" consists of ten essays by scholars in different fields in Arab-Islamic studies on Ibn Ṭufayl's “Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān,” one of the most extraordinary works of medieval Arabic literature, and a text with important dimensions in social and intellectual history, literature,…
The Greek pandocheion, the Arabic funduq, and Latin fondaco were hostelries for medieval Mediterranean travellers that evolved into centers of trade between Muslim and Christian regions. Olivia Remie Constable traces the evolution of this family of institutions from the pandocheion in Late Antiquity to the arrival of European merchants in…

For nearly eight centuries, the Iberian Peninsula was remarkable for its political, religious, cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diversity. In Medieval Iberia Olivia Remie Constable brings together nearly one hundred original sources that testify to the peninsula's rich and sometimes volatile mix of Christians, Muslims, and Jews. The documents…

Olivia Remy Constable, Ph.D. 1989.
What do clothing, bathing, or dining habits reveal about one's personal religious beliefs? Nothing, of course, unless such outward bodily concerns are perceived to hold some sort of spiritual significance. Such was the case in the multireligious world of medieval Spain, where the ways in…

Olivia Remy Constable, Ph.D. 1989.
This volume surveys Iberian international trade from the tenth to the fifteenth century, with particular emphasis on commerce in the Muslim period and on changes brought by Christian conquest of much of Muslim Spain in the thirteenth century. From the tenth to the thirteenth century, markets in the…

For some historians, medieval Iberian society was one marked by peaceful coexistence and cross-cultural fertilization; others have sketched a harsher picture of Muslims and Christians engaged in an ongoing contest for political, religious, and economic advantage culminating in the fall of Muslim…
Papers submitted to a conference held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, in the University of London in July 1967
In contrast to the gradual formation of the high cultures of most of the world, the process by which Islamic civilisation emerged and took on its classical form between the 7th and 9th centuries was unusually sudden. The studies collected here are concerned with aspects of this remarkable development. Their topics are varied, including the…

"Bringing together essays on topics related to Islamic law, this book is composed of articles by prominent legal scholars and historians of Islam. The authors cover a wide swath of issues, ranging from a detailed examination of Shi'i traditions governing legal interpretations about everyday affairs like prayer to the intellectual exchanges…



A global account of how and why human history unfolded as it did from the rise of agriculture to the fall of the Twin Towers. Why has human history been crowded into the last few thousand years? Why has it happened at all? Could it have happened in a radically different way? What should we make of the disproportionate role of the West in…

Winner of the Albert Hourani Award (2001) Winner of the British-Kuwait Friendship Society Prize (2001)
Winner of the British-Kuwait Friendship Society prize (2001)
What duty do we have to stop others from doing wrong? The question is intelligible in almost any culture, but few seek to answer it in a rigorous fashion. The…

The key sources for the reconstruction of the early history of Muslim dogma are a group of texts ascribed to authors of the late first century of the Hijra. These texts bear on two major doctrinal controversies, the Murji'ite and the Qadarite, raising issues related on the one hand to the judgement of the events of the First Civil War, and on…
Michael Cook's classic study, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge, 2001), reflected upon the Islamic injunction to forbid wrongdoing. This book is a short, accessible survey of the same material. Using Islamic history to illustrate his argument, Cook unravels the complexities of the subject by…

The Koran has constituted a remarkably resilient core of identity and continuity for a religious tradition that is now in its fifteenth century. In this Very Short Introduction, Michael Cook provides a lucid and direct account of the significance of the Koran both in the modern world and in that of traditional Islam. He gives vivid accounts of…

Just over a sixth of the world's population subscribes to the Muslim belief that 'there is no god but God, and Muhammad is his Messenger'. Michael Cook gives an incisive account of the man who inspired this faith, drawing on the traditional Muslim sources to describe Muhammad's life and teaching. He also attempts to stand back from this…

Edited by Ralph M. Coury, Ph.D. 1984
Arab debates about the critical relationship between religion and modernity began in the early nineteenth century. Such debates are now integral to the struggle for power between a variety of political groups and their opponents, and are vital to understanding the modern Middle East. This unique…

Ralph M. Coury, Ph.D. 1984
Examines the early years of Abd al-Rahman Azzam Pasha, the first Secretary-General of the Arab League from 1945 to 1952 and addresses the development of his nationalism through a richly textured study of Azzam's early years, including his student activism, his resistance during the war, and his emergence as…


This is a controversial study of the origins of Islamic civilisation, first published in 1977. By examining non-Muslim sources, the authors point out the intimate link between the Jewish religion and the earliest forms of Islam. As a serious, scholarly attempt to open up a new, exploratory path of Islamic history, the book has already…