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
In a unique study of rural administration in the Ottoman empire, Amy Singer explores the relationship between Palestinian peasants and Ottoman officials in mid-sixteenth-century Jerusalem. Using court records, the author describes the mechanisms of tax collection and other aspects of local administration. The book emphasizes the interactive…
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…
This book aims to alter profoundly the accepted version of the history of post-World War II Egyptian foreign policy. To this end, Doran convincingly demonstrates the absence of any true pan-Arab front from the very beginning of the Arab League. Reconsidering Cairo's policy decisions during the critical years from 1944 to 1948, he proves that…
Tens of thousands of documents dating form the late Byzantine and early Islamic periods have been found in Egypt. These texts, written on papyrus and a variety of other materials, in Greek, Coptic Egyptian, and Arabic, offer a unique, but underutilized resource for the study…
Boaz Shoshan, Ph.D. 1978.
Arabic and Persian panegyric poetry was one of the most important genres of literature in the medieval Middle East and Central Asia. Jocelyn Sharlet argues that panegyric poetry is important not only because it provides a commentary on society and culture in the medieval Middle East, but also because panegyric writing was one of the key means…
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…
Edited by ʻIrit Abramsḳi-Blai, Ph.D. 1982
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…
Khaled Abou El Fadl, a prominent critic of Islamic puritanism, leads off this lively debate by arguing that Islam is a deeply tolerant religion. Injunctions to violence against nonbelievers stem from misreadings of the Qur’an, he claims, and even jihad, or so-called holy war, has no basis in Qur’anic text or Muslim…
Edited, and with an introduction by Eric L. Ormsby, Ph.D. 1981
Shortlisted: 2003—Griffin Prize for Poetry (Canada); Commended: 2003—Globe Top 100; Commended: 2008—New England Book Festival
The title of this book is taken from Page’s poem, ‘Planet Earth’, which was chosen by the United Nations in 2000 for their celebratory…
Olga M. Davidson, Ph.D. 1983
A milestone in Persian Classical literature, Ferdowsi’s Book of Kings evokes a long span of Iranian history and myths following a chronicle of its kings from the creation of the world to the conquest of Iran by the armies of the Moslem Arabs in the latter half of the seventh century. Drawing on…
Boaz Shoshan, Ph.D. 1978
Offering a new approach to the study of Ṭabarī's History, the most comprehensive historical work written by a classical Muslim historian, this book applies concepts developed by critical theorists and suggests a reading of historiographical material that is not primarily concerned with reconstructing…
Co-edited by Aḥmad Ṭāhir Ḥasanayn, Ph.D. 1977.
Thematic issue of Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 6 (Spring 1986). Text of articles in either English or Arabic; table of contents in English and Arabic. Second edition: al-Dār al-Bayḍā’: ‘Uyūn al-Maqālāt, 1988.
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.
Jacob Olidort, Ph.D. 2015.
Ultraconservative Muslims, or Salafis, have had a tremendous impact on politics in the Middle East over the past decade. Violent Salafis like al-Qaida have fomented revolution in the region and Salafi political parties such as the Al-Nour Party in…
In a lucidly argued revisionist study of military society in Ottoman Egypt, Jane Hathaway contends that the basic framework within which this elite operated was the household, a conglomerate of patron-client ties. Using Turkish and Arabic archival sources, the author focuses on the Qazdagli household, a military group that came to dominate…
Based on an award-winning thesis, this volume is a pioneering study of musical theatre and popular culture and its relation to the production of identity in Lebanon in the second half of the twentieth century.
In the aftermath of the departure of the French from Lebanon and the civil violence of 1958, the Rahbani brothers (Asi and…
Boaz Shoshan, Ph.D. 1978
This is the first book-length study of popular culture in a medieval Islamic city. Dr. Shoshan draws together a wealth of Arabic sources to explore popular religion against the background of the growing influence of Sufism, an important biography of Muhammad that was suppressed by the learned, and the origins…
Kenneth J. Perkins, Ph.D. 1967
In 1904, only the unimposing tomb of a local holy man occupied the site chosen by British officials for the construction of a modern seaport to facilitate the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan's expanded commerce. Built where no urban center had previously existed…
By focusing on Mamluk Cairo, Adam Sabra explores the attitude of medieval Muslims to poverty and the experience of being poor in an Islamic society. He also considers the role of pious endowments (waqfs) in sustaining the poor. In this way the book affords fascinating insights into a world far removed from elite society, hitherto the focus of…
Addresses the ideals and institutions through which Middle Eastern societies have confronted poverty and the poor.
Offering insights and analysis in a field that has only recently come into existence, this book explores the ideals and institutions through which Middle Eastern societies—from the rise of Islam in the seventh century C.E…
Power, Faith, and Fantasytells the remarkable story of America's 230-year relationship with the Middle East. Drawing on a vast range of government documents, personal correspondence, and the memoirs of merchants, missionaries, and travelers, Michael B. Oren narrates the unknown story of how the United States has interacted with this…
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…
Edited by Abdelmajid Hannoum, Ph.D. 1996.
Islam in Africa is deeply connected with Sufism, and the history of Islam is in a significant way a history of Sufism. Yet even within this continent, the practice and role of Sufism varies across the regions.
In June of 1964, three young, white blues fans set out from New York City in a Volkswagen,…
Edmund Burke, III, Ph.D. 1970.
This book will completely transform the standard interpretation of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, a watershed event in the late Ottoman Empire and a key to the emergence of the modern nation-states in the Middle East and Balkans.
Preparation for a Revolution is the first book on the Young Turk Revolution to draw on both the…
Ami Ayalon, Ph.D. 1980
Named an Outstanding Academic Book for 1995 by Choice
Newspapers and the practice of journalism began in the Middle East in the nineteenth century and evolved during a period of accelerated sociopolitical and cultural change. Inspired by a foreign model, the Arab press…
Special Issue title: Insularity in the Ottoman World
Guest editor: Antonis Hadjikyriacou
Islands have no single obvious attribute, geographic or otherwise. Insularity, then, should not be taken literally, i.e. isolation. Rather, it addresses the question of what it means to be, and be perceived as,…