The Princeton Geniza Lab is a collaborative space devoted to making the documentary texts of the Cairo Geniza accessible to scholars and the wider public.
The Lab hosts the Princeton Geniza Project, a searchable database of Geniza texts transcribed from the originals. It also hosts research and other projects that aim to extend the available corpus of Geniza documents.
Publications List
Co-authored by Barbara Sude, Ph.D. 1975.
This monograph analyzes the finances of the militant group al-Qa'ida in Iraq (AQI) in Anbar province during 2005 and 2006, at the peak of the group's power and influence. The authors draw on captured documents that give details on the daily…
Edited by ʻIrit Abramsḳi-Blai, Ph.D. 1982
Edited by ʻIrit Avramsḳi-Blai, Ph.D. 1982
The dog has captured the Jewish imagination from antiquity to the contemporary period, with the image of the dog often used to characterize and demean Jewish populations in medieval Christendom. In the interwar period, dogs were still considered goyishe nakhes (‘a gentile pleasure’) and…
Phillip Ackerman-Lieberman, Ph.D. 2007.
Finalist in the 2014 National Jewish Book Awards (Sephardic Culture Category), sponsored by the Jewish Book Council.
The Cairo Geniza is the largest and richest store of documentary evidence for the medieval Islamic world. This book seeks to revolutionize the way scholars use that…
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…
Edited by Saiyad Nizamuddin Ahmad, Ph.D. 2000.
Contains a series of studies into the philosophical trends and thinkers associated with the Shīʻī tradition from a symposium held September 2-4, 2015, at the Warburg Institute in London, England. The volume offers insight into the rich intellectual history in Shīʻah Islam of examining…
Fatwas of condemnation : Islam and the limits of dissent examines a particularly rich and relatively untapped source for Islamic intellectual history, namely the genre of legal writing represented by the compendia of Islamic legal response to examine the limits of dissent in Islam. Not confining himself to a particular period of history, but…
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…
Translated with notes by Asad Q. Ahmed, Ph.D. 2007.
This book offers for the first time a complete scholarly translation, commentary, and glossary in a modern European language of the logic section of Ibn Sina's (d. 1037 CE) very important compendium al-Najat (The Deliverance). The original, written in Arabic, is the product…
Youssef Rapoport, Ph.D. 2002, and Shahab Ahmed, Ph.D. 1999
Written by leading authorities in the fieldExamines one of the most controversial thinkers in Islamic historyTaqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) is one of the most controversial thinkers in Islamic history. Today he is revered by what is called the Wahhabi movement and championed…
This volume brings together articles on various aspects of the intellectual and social
histories of Islamicate societies and of the traditions and contexts that contributed to their
formation and evolution. Written by leading scholars who span three generations and
who cover such diverse fields as Late Antique Studies, Islamic…
The volume contains highly original articles on Islamic history, law, and thought, each either proposing new hypotheses or readjusting existing ones. The contributions range from studies in the formulation of the pre-Islamic Arabian calendar to notes on the "blood-money group" in Islamic law, and to transformations in Arabic logic in the post…
Asad Q. Ahmed, Ph.D. 2007
Shahab Ahmed, Ph.D. 1999.
One of the most controversial episodes in the life of the Prophet Muhammad concerns an incident in which he allegedly mistook words suggested by Satan as divine revelation. Known as the Satanic verses, these praises to the pagan deities contradict the Islamic belief that Allah is one and absolute. Muslims…
Shahab Ahmed, Ph.D. 1999.
What is Islam? How do we grasp a human and historical phenomenon characterized by such variety and contradiction? What is "Islamic" about Islamic philosophy or Islamic art? Should we speak of Islam or of islams? Should we distinguish the Islamic (the religious) from the Islamicate (the cultural)? Or should we…
*This work was published before Akarca entered Princeton as a graduate student.
Translated and edited by Engin Deniz Akarlı, Ph.D. 1976.
Engin Deniz Akarlı, Ph.D. 1976.
Long notorious as one of the most turbulent areas of the world, Lebanon nevertheless experienced an interlude of peace between its civil war of 1860 and the beginning of the French Mandate in 1920. Engin Akarli examines the sociopolitical changes…
Co-edited by Engin Deniz Akarlı, Ph.D. 1976.
Papers presented at a colloquium held May 1972 at Princeton University and sponsored by the Princeton University Program in Near Eastern Studies and Center of International Studies.
Why did the Ottoman Empire enter the First World War in late October 1914, months after the war's devastations had become clear? Were its leaders 'simple-minded,' 'below-average' individuals, as the doyen of Turkish diplomatic history has argued? Or, as others have claimed, did the Ottomans enter the war because War Minister Enver Pasha,…
Usaama Al-Azami (Ph.D. 2018)
An original examination of the role of religious scholars in either supporting the Arab revolutions or advocating their repression. With particular focus on Egypt, al-Azami traces the public engagements and pronouncements of several prominent scholars. Considers how the engagements of counter…Co-editor Joseph Norment Bell, Ph.D. 1971.
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 lexicographers, belletrists, philosophers, physicians, theologians, and mystics on…
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…
The multi-volume chronicle of the Cairo scholar Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti (1753-1825), known in Arabic as caja-’ib al-atha-r fi- al-tara-jim wa-al-akhba-r, which translates roughly as The Most Wondrous Achievements: Biographies and Reports of Events, is the single most important primary source for the history of Egypt over nearly four…
Edited by Ralph M. Coury, Ph.D. 1984
Co-edited by Abderrahmane El Moudden, Ph.D. 1992.
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…
The Modern Middle East presents a wide-ranging and varied collection of translated sources covering the period from 1700 to the present. These sources include official and private archives, the…
Translated by Eric L. Ormsby, Ph.D. 1981
For the public at large Shi’ism often implies a host of confused representations, suggesting more often than not obscurantism, intolerance, political violence and other ignominies running hot or cold in response to world events. In fact for many people, Shi’ism stands for "radical Islam", or –…
Translated by Eric L. Ormsby, Ph.D. 1981
Two major events occurred in the early centuries of Islam that determined its historical and spiritual development in the centuries that followed: the formation of the sacred scriptures, namely the Qur'an and the Hadith, and the chronic violence that surrounded the succession of the Prophet,…
Translated from the German by Eric Ormsby, Ph.D. 1981
In Rethinking Islam, Katajun Amirpur argues that the West’s impression of Islam as a backward-looking faith, resistant to post-Enlightenment thinking, is misleading and—due to its effects on political discourse—damaging. Introducing readers to key thinkers and activists…
Current standard narratives of Ottoman, Balkan, and Middle East history overemphasize the role of nationalism in the transformation of the region. Challenging these accounts, this book argues that religious affiliation was in fact the most influential shaper of communal identity in the Ottoman era, that religion molded the relationship between…
Table of Contents
Map of the Ottoman Balkans ca. 1800
Frederick F. Anscombe, “Introduction”
Antonis Anastasopoulos, “Crisis and State Intervention in Late Eighteenth-Century Karaferye (mod. Veroia)”
Michael R. Hickok, “Homicide in Ottoman Bosnia”
Virginia H. Aksan, “Whose…
What caused the decline of the Ottoman empire in the Persian Gulf? Why has history credited only London, not Istanbul, with bringing about the birth of the modern Gulf States? Using the Ottoman imperial archives, as well as European and Arab sources, Anscombe explains how the combination of poor communication, scarce resources, and misplaced…
Edited by David S. Powers, Ph.D. 1979
In Islamic Legal Thought: A Compendium of Muslim Jurists, twenty-three scholars each contribute a chapter on a distinguished Muslim jurist. The volume is organized chronologically and it includes jurists who represent the formative, classical and modern periods of Islamic legal thought…
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…
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…
Translated by Victoria Rowe Holbrook, Ph.D. 1985.
Scent of the Trace is an expose of an Architect's inner dialogues during the design process. The book contains a detailed and extensive documentation of the internal struggle to conceptually ground and position three different works of architecture; Sancaklar…