Maha A. Ghalwash, Ph.D. 1997.

An alternative reading of the relationship between the state and smallholder peasants in mid-nineteenth-century Egypt

This book examines the rural history of Egypt during the middle years of the nineteenth century, a period that is often glossed over, or altogether forgotten. Drawing on a…

Abdelmajid Hannoum, Ph.D. 1996.

This book considers secularism and its narrative expressions. It shows how secularism is articulated and transmitted ubiquitously within state institutions and outside of them. Abdelmajid Hannoum does this by dissecting, in a series of essays, a variety of narrative forms, interrogating modes of their…

Translator Alan Verskin, Ph.D. 2010

In 1524, a man named David Reubeni appeared in Venice, claiming to be the ambassador of a powerful Jewish kingdom deep in the heart of Arabia. In this era of fierce rivalry between great powers, voyages of fantastic discovery, and brutal conquest of new lands, people throughout the…

Noah Amir Arjomand, Certificate in Near Eastern Studies 2010.

News 'fixers' are translators and guides who assist foreign journalists. Sometimes key contributors to bold, original reporting and other times key facilitators of homogeneity and groupthink in the news media, they play the difficult but powerful role of broker between…

Fred M. Donner, BA 1968, PhD 1975.

How did Islam’s sacred scripture, the Arabic Qurʾān, emerge from western Arabia at a time when the region was religiously fragmented and lacked a clearly established tradition of writing to render the Arabic language?

The studies in this volume, the proceedings of a scholarly conference,…

Michael Oren, Ph.D. 1986.

A thrilling literary fiction whodunit for fans of Delia Owens and Jaqueline Winspear.

World War II is raging overseas, but life remains painfully quiet on the rugged New England fishing island of Fourth Cliff. With most of its able-bodied male inhabitants away in the service, the island is now home…

Akel Isma'il Kahera, Ph.D. 1997.

The Place of the Mosque: Genealogies of Space, Knowledge, and Power extends Foucault’s analysis, Of Other Spaces, and the “ideological conflicts which underlie the controversies of our day [and] take place between pious descendants of time and tenacious inhabitants of space…

Co-editor Petra M. Sijpesteijn, Ph.D. 2004.

During the period 500–1000 CE Egypt was successively part of the Byzantine, Persian and Islamic empires. All kinds of events, developments and processes occurred that would greatly affect its history and that of the eastern Mediterranean in general. This is the first volume to map Egypt's…

Co-editor Petra M. Sijpesteijn, Ph.D. 2004

In this volume amulets and talismans are studied within a broader system of meaning that shapes how they were manufactured, activated and used in different networks. Text, material features and the environments in which these artifacts circulated, are studied alongside each other, resulting…

Co-editor İpek Kocaömer Yosmaoğlu, Ph.D. 2005

This book introduces the reader to the past and present of Jewish life in Turkey and to Turkish Jewish diaspora communities in Israel, Europe, Latin America and the United States. It surveys the history of Jews in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, examining the survival of…

Asad Q. Ahmed, Ph.D. 2007

Palimpsests of Themselves is an intervention in current discussions about the fate of philosophy in postclassical Islamic intellectual history. Asad Q. Ahmed uses as a case study the most advanced logic textbook of Muslim South Asia, The Ladder of the Sciences, presenting in…

Jessica M. Marglin, Ph.D. 2012

Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, History Category

How a nineteenth-century lawsuit over the estate of a wealthy Tunisian Jew shines new light on the history of belonging.

In the winter of 1873, Nissim Shamama, a wealthy Jew from Tunisia, died suddenly in his palazzo in…

Aaron Rock-Singer, Ph.D. 2015

Salafis explicitly base their legitimacy on continuity with the Quran and the Sunna, and their distinctive practices—praying in shoes, wearing long beards and short pants, and observing gender segregation—are understood to have a similarly ancient pedigree. In this book, however, Aaron Rock-Singer draws…

Critical edition and introduction by Michael Lecker; annotated translation by Yaara Perlman, Ph.D. 2022.

Table of contents

Preface
List of Plates
Abbreviations

Introduction
 1 Idols in Conversion Reports
 2 Mecca
 3 Medina (Yaṯrib) (§ 110–117)
 4 Idols…

Usaama Al-Azami (Ph.D. 2018)

Text and Interpretation: Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq and His Legacy in Islamic Law examines the main characteristics of the legal thought of Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, a preeminent religious scholar jurist of Medina in the first half of the second century of the Muslim calendar (mid-eighth century CE). Numerous works in different languages…

Co-edited by Maria Dakake, Ph.D. 2000.

The Routledge Companion to the Qur’an offers an impressive and comprehensive overview of the formative scripture of Islam. Including a wide number of scholarly approaches to the Qur’an by both established authorities and emergent voices, the 40 chapters in this volume represent the…

Boaz Shoshan, Ph.D. 1978.

Edited and translated Eric Ormsby, Ph.D. 1981.

Co-edited by Nadav Samin, Ph.D. 2013.

Senior scholars of Islamic studies and the anthropology of Islam gather in this volume to pay tribute to one of the giants of the field, Dale F. Eickelman. In diversely arrayed, rigorous and compelling chapters, leading historians, anthropologists, and political scientists elaborate through their…

Phillip Ackerman-Lieberman, Ph.D. 2007.

Volume 5 examines the history of Judaism in the Islamic World from the rise of Islam in the early sixth century to the expulsion of Jews from Spain at the end of the fifteenth. This period witnessed radical transformations both within the Jewish community itself and in the broader contexts in…

Co-edited by Orit Bashkin, Ph.D. 2005.

Journeys of dislocation and return, of discovery and conquest hold a prominent place in the imagination of many cultures. Wherever an individual or community may be located, it would seem, there is always the dream of being elsewhere. This has been especially true throughout the ages for Jews,…

George Hatke, Ph.D. 2011.

South Arabia is one of the least known parts of the Near East. It is primarily due to its remoteness, coupled with the difficulty of access, that South Arabia remains so under-explored. In pre-Islamic times, however, it was well-connected to the rest of the world. Due to its location at the crossroads of…

Justin K. Stearns, Ph.D. 2007.

Demonstrating the vibrancy of an Early Modern Muslim society through a study of the natural sciences in seventeenth-century Morocco, Revealed Sciences examines how the natural sciences flourished during this period, without developing in a similar way to the natural sciences in Europe. Offering an…

Kristina Richardson, Certificate in Near Eastern Studies 2003.

In Middle Eastern cities as early as the mid-8th century, the Sons of Sasan begged, trained animals, sold medicinal plants and potions, and told fortunes. They captivated the imagination of Arab writers and playwrights,…

Kathryn Babayan, Ph.D. 1993.

Household anthologies of seventeenth-century Isfahan collected everyday texts and objects, from portraits, letters, and poems to marriage contracts and talismans. With these family collections, Kathryn Babayan tells a new history of the city at the…

Suleika Jaouad, B.A. 2010

A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission and, ultimately, a road trip of healing and self-discovery.

“A beautiful, elegant, and heartbreaking book that provides a…

Milena Methodieva, Ph.D. 2010

Between Empire and Nation tells the story of the transformation of the Muslim community in modern Bulgaria during a period of imperial dissolution, conflicting national and imperial enterprises, and the emergence of new national and ethnic identities. In 1878, the Ottoman empire…

Nebil Husayn, Ph.D. 2016

Islam's fourth caliph, Ali, can be considered one of the most revered figures in Islamic history. His nearly universal portrayal in Muslim literature as a pious authority obscures centuries of contestation and the eventual rehabilitation of his character…

Abdelmajid Hannoun, Ph.D. 1996.

Under French colonial rule, the region of the Maghreb emerged as distinct from two other geographical entities that, too, are colonial inventions: the Middle East and Africa. In this book, Abdelmajid Hannoum demonstrates how the invention of the…

Robert D. McChesney, B.A. 1967, Ph.D. 1973.

In Central Asia, Muslim shrines have served as community centers for centuries, particularly the large urban shrines that seem, in many cases, to have served as the inspiration as well for a city’s architectural development. In Four…

Leslie Peirce, Ph.D. 1988

Without the labor of the captives and slaves, the Ottoman empire could not have attained and maintained its strength in early modern times. With Anatolia as the geographic focus, Leslie Peirce searches for the voices of the unfree, drawing on archives, histories written at the time, and legal texts.

Co-edited by Adam Abdelhamid Sabra, PhD. 1998.

This is the first publication of the official correspondence of the leading religious scholar and literary figure, Shaykh Muhammad ibn Abi al-Hasan al-Bakri al-Siddiqi al-Shafi'i Sibt Al al-Hasan. It provides a window into the world of an influential religious scholar in sixteenth century…

Eric Lob, Ph.D. 2013

Based on over one hundred and thirty interviews with government officials, revolutionary activists, war veterans, and development experts, this is the first full length study in English to examine the significant yet understudied organization and ministry, Reconstruction Jihad, as a basis for understanding the…

Boaz Shoshan, Ph.D. 1978

In Damascus Life 1480-1500: A Report of a Local Notary Boaz Shoshan offers a microhistory of the largest Syrian city at the end of the Mamluk period and on the eve of the Ottoman conquest. Mainly based on a partly preserved diary, the earliest available of its kind and written by Ibn Ṭawq, a local…

This book charts the evolution of Islamic dialectical theory (jadal) over a four-hundred year period. It includes an extensive study of the development of methods of disputation in Islamic theology (kalām) and jurisprudence (uṣūl al-fiqh) from the tenth through the fourteenth centuries. The author uses the…

Co-edited by Luke Yarbrough, Ph.D. 2012.

An alternative perspective on minority encounters in the medieval Mediterranean.

What is a minority? How did members of minority groups in the medieval Mediterranean world interact with contemporaries…

Jessica M. Marglin, Ph.D. 2020

What does an understanding of Jewish history contribute to the study of the Mediterranean, and what can Mediterranean studies contribute to our knowledge of Jewish history? 

Katharina Anna Ivanyi, Ph.D. 2012

In Virtue, Piety and the Law Katharina Ivanyi examines Birgivī Meḥmed Efendī’s (d. 981/1573) al-Ṭarīqa al-muḥammadiyya, a major work of pietist exhortation and advice, composed by the sixteenth-century Ottoman jurist, Ḥ…

Finalist, 2021 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, Textual Studies, American Academy of Religion

Finalist, 2021 Sheikh Zayd Award for Arab Culture in Other Languages

What makes language beautiful? Arabic Poetics offers an answer to what this pertinent question looked like at the height…

By the end of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th century, China was in turmoil, facing an existential crisis. Chinese politicians and intellectuals were trying to find a way out of it and were looking for role models abroad. The late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic were obvious choices.

The Chinese…

Co-edited by Nimrod Hurvitz, Ph.D. 1994, Christian Sahner, Ph.D. History 2015, Uriel Simonsohn, Ph.D. 2008, and Luke Yarbrough, B.A. 2004 and Ph.D. 2012.

Conversion to Islam is a phenomenon of immense significance in human history. At the outset of Islamic rule in the seventh…

Winner of the 2022 Haskins Medal awarded by The Medieval Academy of America.

The lost archive of the Fatimid caliphate (909–1171) survived in an unexpected place: the storage room, or geniza, of a synagogue in Cairo, recycled as scrap paper and deposited there by…

Sara Verskin, Ph.D. 2017

Barren Women is the first scholarly book to explore the ramifications of being infertile in the medieval Arab-Islamic world. Through an examination of legal texts, medical treatises, and works of religious preaching, Sara Verskin illuminates how attitudes toward mixed-gender…

Studying Muslim fundamentalisms, this book compares key movements, examining their commonalities, differences, and intricate relations, as well as their achievements and failures. Muslim fundamentalisms have the sympathy of approximately half of the Muslim population in the world. Yet, they are divided among themselves and are in a constant…

Edited and translated by Justin K. Stearns, Ph.D. 2007

Al-Ḥasan al-Yūsī was arguably the most influential and well-known Moroccan intellectual figure of his generation. In 1084/1685, at the age of roughly fifty-four, and after a long and distinguished career, this Amazigh…

Petra Sijpesteijn, Ph.D. 2004.

Islam at 250: Studies in Memory of G.H.A. Juynboll is a collection of original articles on the state of Islamic sciences and Arabic culture in the early phases of their crystallization. It covers a wide range of intellectual activity in the first…