NES Newsletters

725 Publications

Edited by Luke Yarbrough, Ph.D. 2012.

Tajrid sayf al-himmah li-stikhraj ma fi dhimmat al-dhimmah is a scholarly, Arabic-only edition of a text by 'Uthmān ibn Ibrāhīm al-Nābulusī, which is also available in English translation from the Library of Arabic Literature as The Sword of Ambition. In this work addressed to…

Winner of The Ohio Academy of History Publication Award

Reevaluates the foundation myths of two rival factions in Egypt during the Ottoman era.

This revisionist study reevaluates the origins and foundation myths of the Faqaris and Qasimis, two rival factions that divided Egyptian society during the…

Edited by John E. Woods, Ph.D. 1974.

"Matn-i Fārsī bih taṣḥīḥ-i Jān Vūdz; hamrāh bā tarjumah-i mukhtaṣar-i matn bih Ingilīsī tavassuṭ-i Vlādimīr Mīnūriskī; bā tajdīd-i naẓar va taṣḥīḥ-i Jān Vūdz."

This volume is an annotated edition of a 9th/15th-century literary anthology of Persian poetry on the affection and love for the House of Prophet Muhammad in pre-Safavid Iran. The book is edited on the basis of a unique manuscript dated 849/1445. It contains 81 panegyrics in praise of the Prophet Muhammad and his House, many by poets who are…

Since 2007, five volumes of the collection of Modarressi's early (pre-1979) Persian articles have been published. These include volumes entitled Ijtima'iyat, Qummiyat, Sanadiyat, Kitabiyat, and Tarikhiyat. Having access to these reprints is most welcome given the fact that most of the articles…

Edited by Mustafa Aksakal, Ph.D. 2003.

In a world grappling with refugee crisis, political unrest and economies on the verge of collapse, temporary migration has become an increasingly common phenomenon.

This volume presents a comprehensive picture of the transformative and development potential of temporary transnational…

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…

Eric L. Ormsby, Ph.D. 1981

The first detailed study of Islamic theodicy, the book points out distinctively Islamic formulations and solutions of the problem of the best of all possible worlds” and shows where they coincide with Western versions, such as that of Leibniz.

This Noble House explores the preoccupation with biblical genealogy that emerged among Jews in the Islamic Near East between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. Arnold Franklin looks to Jewish society's fascination with Davidic ancestry, examining the profusion of claims to the lineage that had already begun to…

The Tıflî stories are a corpus of prose fiction produced in the Ottoman Empire from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries and often regarded as the main precursor of the Ottoman novel. At a time when Ottoman high literature consisted almost exclusively of epic or mystical poetry, the Tıflî stories depicted the…

Eric L. Ormsby, PhD 1981

Bringing together all of the poems from Eric Ormsby’s five previous collections alongside a healthy selection of previously unpublished poems, this volume collects the work of one of the most important poets writing today in Canada — or elsewhere. Beautifully crafted, both complex and delicate, intelligent,…

John E. Woods, Ph.D. 1974.

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…

John H. Lorentz, Ph.D. 1974.

Iran is a country with a deep and complex history. Over several thousand years, Iran has been the source of numerous creative contributions to the spiritual and literary world, and the site of many remarkable manifestations of material culture. The…

Co-authored by Norman Itzkowitz, Ph.D. 1959.

From property forfeiture to public flogging to burning at the stake, persecution and torture were all in a day's work for Tom?s de Torquemada-- a monk without mercy for anyone who broke the laws of the Church. Age Range: 11 to 17 years.

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…

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.

Featuring over 250 key thinkers both major and less well-known, and spanning three centuries, this is a comprehensive survey of early Shi'ite literature, and the first of its kind. For each figure, the author offers a summary of their life and achievements, before outlining their literary and scholarly contributions to the canon, and…

In 1923, the Modern Turkish Republic rose from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, proclaiming a new era in the Middle East. However, many of the contemporary issues affecting Turkish state and society today have their roots not only in the in the history of the republic, but in the historical and political memory of the state's imperial history…

Special Issue of Historical Reflaxion/Reflexions Historiques, Vol. 41, no. 3 (2015)

Table of Contents:

Di-Capua, Yoav. “Trauma and Other Historians: An Introduction.”

Archambeau, Nicole. “Miraculous Healing for the Warrior Soul: Transforming Fear, Violence, and Shame in Fourteenth-Century Provence.”

Steinberg,…

Edited by Cornell H. Fleischer, Ph.D. 1982

The subject of this two-volume publication is an inventory of manuscripts in the book treasury of the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, commissioned by the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II from his royal librarian ʿAtufi in the year 908 (1502–3) and transcribed in a clean copy in 909 (1503–4). This unicum…

Co-translator Joseph Norment Bell, Ph.D. 1971.

Translation of ‘Aṭf al-alif al-ma‘lūf.

The earliest major Islamic treatise on mystical love, this work reflects a moderate version of the ecstatic mysticism of the Sufi martyr al-Hallaj. Writing around 1000 C.E., the author summarizes the views of…

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…

Şuhnaz Yılmaz, Ph.D. 2000.

This book aims to take the reader on a journey along the intricate web of Turkish-American relations. It critically examines the process, during which the relations evolved from those of strangers into an occasionally troubled, yet resilient alliance. Through the extensive use of Turkish, American and…

Co-authored by Norman Itzkowitz, Ph.D. 1959.

“Beginning in Inner Asia two thousand years ago, the Turks have migrated and expanded to form today's Turkish Republic, five post-Soviet republics, other societies across Eurasia, and a global diaspora. For the first time in a single, accessible volume, this book traces the Turkic peoples' trajectory from steppe, to empire, to nation-state…

From the cleric-led Iranian revolution to the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, many people have been surprised by what they see as the modern reemergence of an antimodern phenomenon. This book helps account for the increasingly visible public role of traditionally educated Muslim religious scholars (the `ulama) across contemporary Muslim…

Edited by Saiyad Nizamuddin Ahmad, Ph.D. 2000.

The Universal Science (ʿIlm-i kullī) by Mahdī Ḥāʾirī Yazdī, is a concise, but authoritative, outline of the fundamental discussions in Islamic…

Victoria Rowe Holbrook, Ph.D. 1985

When the Ottoman Turkish Empire was divided into modern states after World War I, in Turkey a change of alphabet and radical linguistic reform aimed to free modern Turkish literature from intellectual ties to the East. Holbrook recuperates Ottoman debates on the existential status of language and…

Much traditional historiography consciously and unconsciously glosses over certain discourses, narratives, and practices. This book examines silences or omissions in Middle Eastern history at the turn of the twenty-first century, to give a fuller account of the society, culture and politics.

With a particular focus on the Ottoman…

This volume contains case studies that examine how medieval cultures (western European, Arab/Islamic and Jewish) adopted ideas from the past and from each other in fields such as philosophy, literature, religion, and medicine.

In this volume the McGill University Research Group on Transmission, Translation, and Transformation in…

A documentary by Brigid Maher; [Tiny Leaps Productions & School of Communication at American University present]; produced and directed by Brigid Maher; co-produced [and written] by Karen Bauer].

"Women across the Middle East are trying to reclaim their role as leaders in Islam. Veiled voices goes in-depth into the world of three…

Yossef Rapoport, Ph.D. 2002.

Richly annotated and with a detailed introduction, this volume offers the first academic edition and translation of a first-hand account of the Egyptian countryside, offering a key insight into the rural economy of medieval Islam.

Medieval Islamic society was overwhelmingly a society of peasants,…

“Violence has been a central political issue in many Middle Eastern countries during the past two decades, either episodically (Syria, Iran), or continually (Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Israel/Palestine). This groundbreaking new study sheds light on the dynamics of this phenomenon by going beyond factors usually cited as the…

In Violent Modernity: France in Algeria, Abdelmajid Hannoum examines the advent of political modernity in Algeria and shows how colonial modernity was not only a project imposed by violence but also a violent project in and of itself, involving massive destruction and significant transformation of the population of Algeria. The author…

Katharina Anna Ivanyi, Ph.D. 2012

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

Translated by Alan Verskin, Ph.D. 2010.

In 1869, Hayyim Habshush, a Yemeni Jew, accompanied the European orientalist Joseph Halévy on his archaeological tour of Yemen. Twenty years later, Habshush wrote A Vision of Yemen, a memoir of their travels, that provides a vivid account of daily life, religion, and politics. More than…

Co-authored by Norman Itzkowitz, Ph.D. 1959.

Explore the life of Vlad "the Impaler" Dracula, the fifteenth-century Romanian prince who served as a model for Bram Stoker's infamous vampire. Age Range: 11 to 17 years.