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…

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 –…

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…

Celene Ibrahim, B.A. 2008

Edited by Lawrence I. Conrad, Ph.D. 1981

Modernising scientific medicine emerged in the nineteenth century as an increasingly powerful agent of change in a context of complex social developments. Women's lives and expectations in particular underwent a transformation in the years after 1870 as education, employment opportunities and…

Asma Sayeed's book explores the history of women as religious scholars from the first decades of Islam through the early Ottoman period (seventh to the seventeenth centuries). Focusing on women's engagement with ḥadīth, this book analyzes dramatic chronological patterns in women's ḥadīth participation in terms of developments in Muslim social,…

This novella interweaves the stories of five women who set out to escape the restrictions of family and social life in contemporary Iran. Through murder, suicide and even rape, as well as love, contemplation and spiritual transformation, they succeed, only to face new challenges.

Edited by Lawrence I. Conrad, Ph.D. 1981

The World of Ibn Ṭufayl" consists of ten essays by scholars in different fields in Arab-Islamic studies on Ibn Ṭufayl's “Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān,” one of the most extraordinary works of medieval Arabic literature, and a text with important dimensions in social and intellectual history, literature,…

Literature in the pre-modern Near East was an important conduit for the conveyance of didactic, ethical, and ideological concerns to rulers and other political leaders, and at the same time it served to secure the subsistence, status, and protection of authors. To counterbalance the greater power of their royal…

In 1908, the revolution of the Young Turks deposed the dictatorship of Sultan Abdulhamid II and established a constitutional regime that became the major ruling power in the Ottoman empire. But the seeds of this revolution went back much farther: to 1889, when the secret Young Turk organization the Committee of Union and Progress was formed. M…

Yusuf al-Qaradawi is one of the most influential Islamic scholars living in the Middle East today. Though classically trained in Islamic studies at al-Azhar, his religious and political thought has been heavily influenced by modernity. Using the ideas of prominent philosophers such as Kant and Hegel, as well as of…

In this book, Amr Osman seeks to expand and re-interpret what we know about the history and doctrine of the Ẓāhirī madhhab. Based on an extensive prosopographical survey, he concludes that the founder, Dāwūd al-Ẓāhirī, was closer in profile and doctrine to the Ahl al-Ra’y than to the Ahl al-Ḥadīth. Furthermore, Ibn…

David S. Powers, Ph.D. 1979

Although Muḥammad had no natural sons who reached the age of maturity, Islamic sources report that he adopted a man named Zayd shortly before receiving his first revelation. This "son of Muḥammad" was the Prophet's heir for the next fifteen or twenty years. He was the first adult male to become a Muslim and…