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…

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…

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.

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Celene Ibrahim, B.A. 2008

Nurit Tsafrir, Ph.D. 1993

Offering the first close study of the ʿAqila, a group collectively liable for blood money payments on behalf of a member who committed an accidental homicide, Nurit Tsafrir analyses the group's transformation from a pre-Islamic custom to an institution of the Shari'a, and its further evolution through…

Abdelmajid Hannoum, Ph.D. 1996

Since the early 1990s, new migratory patterns have been emerging in the southern Mediterranean. Here, a large number of West Africans and young Moroccans, including minors, make daily attempts to cross to Europe. The Moroccan city of Tangier, because of its proximity to Spain, is one of the main gateways…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

David Selim Sayers, Ph.D. 2014.

The “wiles of women” are a timeless literary theme, treated from ancient Egyptian narratives to 21st-century TV series. The theme reaches its greatest flowering in the Islamic world, beginning with the Qur’an and inspiring entire literary traditions in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. The Wiles of Women as…

Leor Halevi, B.A. 1994

In cities awakening to global exchange under European imperial rule, Muslims encountered all sorts of strange and wonderful new things—synthetic toothbrushes, toilet paper, telegraphs, railways, gramophones, brimmed hats, tailored pants, and lottery tickets. The passage of these goods across cultural frontiers…

Jocelyn Sharlet, Ph.D. 2002

Arabic literature is always an expression of its continued literary heritage. This volume, edited by Margaret Larkin and Jocelyn Sharlet, investigates innovative ways in which poets and writers challenge our understanding of the Arabic tradition in the global humanities.
…

Translated by Tom Papademetriou, Ph.D. 2001.

A journey in time … a previous refugee crisis in the Mediterranean … the momentous historical events of 1922 seen through the eyes of third and fourth-generation descendants of those who lived and died through them.

This graphic novel dramatically tells the story of Greeks and…

Edited and translated by Robert McChesney, B.A. 1967 and Ph.D. 1973, and Mohammad Mehdi Khorrami.

This book comprises English translations of Nizhādnāmah-i Afghān (Afghan Genealogy) and Taẕakkur al-Inqilāb (Memoir of the Revolution), the culminating works of Fayż Muḥammad Kātib Hazārah’s monumental history of Afghanistan, Sirāj al…

Edited by George Hatke, Ph.D. 2011.

South Arabia, an area encompassing all of today’s Yemen and neighboring regions in Saudi Arabia and Oman, is one of the least-known parts of the Near East. However, it is primarily due to its remoteness, coupled with the difficulty of…

Keiko Kiyotaki is an Associate Research Scholar in the Department of Near Eastern Studies.

In Ottoman Land Reform in the Province of Baghdad, Keiko Kiyotaki traces the Ottoman reforms of tax farming and land tenure and establishes that their effects were the key ingredients of agricultural progress. These modernizing reforms…

Simon Fuchs, Ph.D. 2015.

Centering Pakistan in a story of transnational Islam stretching from South Asia to the Middle East, Simon Wolfgang Fuchs offers the first in-depth ethnographic history of the intellectual production of Shi'is and their religious competitors in this …

Hassan Khalilieh, Ph.D. 1995.

The doctrine of modern law of the sea is commonly believed to have developed from Renaissance Europe. Often ignored though is the role of Islamic law of the sea and customary practices at that time. In this book, Hassan S. Khalilieh highlights Islamic legal doctrine regarding freedom of the seas and its…

Aaron Rock-Singer, Ph.D. 2015

Following the ideological disappointment of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, an Islamic revival arose in Egypt. Yet, far from a mechanical reaction to the decline of secular nationalism, this religious shift was the product of impassioned competition among Muslim Brothers, Salafis and state institutions and…

Najam Haider, Ph.D. 2007.

Engaging with contemporary debates about the sources that shape our understanding of the early Muslim world, Najam Haider proposes a new model for Muslim historical writing that draws on Late Antique historiography to challenge the imposition of modern notions of history on a pre-modern society. Haider…