Series editor Şükrü Hanioğlu
The purpose of this series is to provide reasonably priced translations into English of Middle Eastern sources. The first volume to appear is a partial translation of Kâtip Çelebi’s Tuhfet ül-Kibar fi Esfar il-Bihar, or The History of the Maritime Wars of the Turks, a seventeenth-century account of Ottoman naval history from the conquest of Constantimople to the author’s death in 1657. The second volume is an edition of Heinz Halm’s The Arabs: A Short History, which has been expanded to include the addition of 150 pages of annotated documents. The third volume is a collection of fatwas on Muslims living under non-Muslim rule.
Publications List
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…
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,…
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.
Reviews and Endorsements“A beautiful, elegant, and heartbreaking book that provides a…
Milena Methodieva, Ph.D. 2010
DescriptionBetween 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…
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…
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…
Celene Ibrahim, B.A. 2008
First book to explore the entire cast of Qur'anic female figures Provides structural analysis of select Qur'anic surahs involving women figures Offers extensive analysis of sex and sexuality as depicted in the Qur'an Conducts the first comprehensive study of female…
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…
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…
Edited by Khaled Abou El Fadl, Ph.D. 1999.
This handbook is a detailed reference source comprising original articles covering the origins, history, theory and practice of Islamic law. The handbook starts out by dealing with the question of what type of law is Islamic law and includes a critical analysis of the pedagogical approaches…
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…
Yossef Rapoprt, Ph.D. 2002.
Spanning the Islamic world, from ninth-century Baghdad to nineteenth-century Iran, this book tells the story of Islamic cartography and the key Muslim map-makers who shaped the art over the centuries. Muslim geographers like al-Khwārazmī and al-Idrīsī developed distinctive styles, often based on geometrical…
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…
Luke Yarbrough, Ph.D. 2012.
A runner-up for the 2020 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize
The caliphs and sultans who once ruled the Muslim world were often assisted by…
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…
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…
Edited by Celene Ibrahim, B.A. 2008.
Comprised of the wisdom of over fifty scholars, preachers, poets, and artists, this anthology is born of the conviction that open-hearted engagement across our differences is a prerequisite for healthy civic life today. The collection offers…