Set in the tumultuous aftermath of the Iranian revolution in 1979, Remembering Akbar weaves together the stories of a group of characters who share a crowded death row cell in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. A teeming world is evoked vividly through the relationships, memories, and inner lives of these…
The Iranian revolution of 1979 overhauled not only the foundations of Iranian society, religion and politics, but also our understanding of the role of religion in modern government. Here Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi takes us on an enlightening journey, showing that the revolution unintentionally opened up the public sphere to competing…
Translated with an introduction & notes by Eric L. Ormsby, Ph.D. 1981
The Book of Love, Longing, Intimacy and Contentment is the thirty-sixth chapter of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali’s Revival of the Religious Sciences. This was the first treatise which established not merely the possibility but the necessity for the love…
One hundred years after the deportations and mass murder of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and other peoples in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, the history of the Armenian genocide is a victim of historical distortion, state-sponsored falsification, and deep divisions between Armenians and Turks. Working together for the first time,…
In Denial of Violence, Fatma Müge Göçek seeks to decipher the roots of this…
Explore the life and accomplishments of the Mongol conqueror who established the largest empire in history. Age Range: 11 to 17 years.
Here Molly Greene moves beyond the hostile “Christian” versus “Muslim” divide that has colored many historical interpretations of the early modern Mediterranean, and reveals a society with a far richer set of cultural and social dynamics. She focuses on Crete, which the Ottoman Empire wrested from Venetian control in 1669. Historians of Europe…
The Ottoman Empire was a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state encompassing most of the modern Middle East, and for much of its 600-year existence it managed to rule effectively its diverse peoples. The essays of this work move beyond the traditional state- and community-centered approaches and instead seek to explore the unknown terrain that…
Molly Greene, Ph.D. 1993.
“The period of Ottoman rule in Greek history has undergone a dramatic reassessment in recent years. Long reviled as four hundred years of unrelieved slavery and barbarity ('the Turkish yoke'), a new generation of scholars, based mainly but not exclusively in Greece, is rejecting this view in favor of a more…
Following the two surveys by CMIP of school textbooks published by the Palestinian Authority in 2000 and 2001, for grades 1, 2, 6, 7, and (as to one textbook) for grade 11, this latest report examines a newer set of some 35 books in various subjects published by the Authority in 2002, mainly for grades 3 and 8. As in the earlier surveys, the…
This report surveys 103 Egyptian textbooks for use in state schools and 16 textbooks for use in the religious Azharite school system; the majority of the books were published in 2002.
Table of Contents
Executive summary
Introduction
The Egyptian educational system
The general attitude to…
In Syria, all schools, including those of the private sector and UNRWA are under the supervision of the Ministry of Education which imposes on them all one curriculum and a single list of textbooks. The Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace undertook a survey of 68 textbooks for grades 1 to 12. In all the 68…
In the academic years 2000–2001 and 2001–2002, the Palestinian National Authority introduced 55 new textbooks and two teachers' guides for grades 1,2,6,7 and 11. This book discusses the results of a comprehensive survey of these textbooks to determine how they relate to peace, tolerance, recognition and…
Analyzes the results of an examination of 93 Saudi textbooks on various subjects for grades 1-10, mostly from the years 1999-2002. In all of these, Islam is presented as the only true religion, while all other religions are false. Consequently, Christians and Jews are denounced as infidels and enemies of Islam and Muslims. It is forbidden to…
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…
Translated by Victoria Rowe Holbrook, Ph.D. 1985
The New Cultural Climate in Turkey is a beautifully written collection of essays by a leading Turkish intellectual. It presents a compelling analysis of cultural politics in Turkey, arguing that the dominant clichéd dualities of East/West and secular/sacred mask a reality of…
Translated by Victoria Rowe Holbrook, Ph.D. 1985
As the midfiwe announces the birth of a girl at the home of a government minister, a bomb exploding at the Istanbul mosque where the Sultan is attending the congregational prayer resounds over the Bosphorus.
Rana will grow up amidst the frenzied politics of the fall of the…
The Sunnī-Shi'a schism is often framed as a dispute over the identity of the successor to Muhammad. In reality, however, this fracture only materialized a century later in the important southern Iraqi city of Kūfa (present-day Najaf). This book explores the birth and development of Shī'i identity. Through a critical analysis of legal texts,…
During the formative period of Islam, in the first centuries after Muhammad's death, different ideas and beliefs abounded. It was during this period of roughly three centuries that two particular intellectual traditions emerged, Sunnism and Shi'ism. Sunni Muslims endorsed the historical caliphate, while Shi'i Muslims, supporters of 'Ali, cousin…
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…
Leor Halevi, B.A. 1994
In cities awakening to global exchange under European imperial rule, Muslims encountered all sorts of strange and wonderful new things—synthetic toothbrushes, toilet paper, telegraphs, railways, gramophones, brimmed hats, tailored pants, and lottery tickets. The passage of these goods across cultural frontiers…
Leor Halevi, B.A. 1994
Winner of MESA’s 2007 Albert Hourani Award
Winner of the American Academy of Religion 2008 Award for Excellence in the category of Analytical-Descriptive studies
Winner of Phi Beta Kappa Society’s 2008 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award
Co-translator Norman Itzkowitz, Ph.D. 1959.
Reviews
A preeminent scholar of Turkish history vividly portrays 300 years of this distinctively Eastern culture as it grew from a military principality to the world's most powerful Islamic state. He paints a…
Edited by Luke Yarbrough (Ph.D. 2012) and Oded Zinger (Ph.D. 2014).
This new edition of Heinz Halm’s The Arabs: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2012) includes 150 pages of primary sources selected, edited, and in some cases translated by NES graduate students Luke Yarbrough (Ph.D. 2012) and Oded Zinger (Ph…
This book examines the most important writings of a tenth century Islamic theologian and jurist who was one of the most original thinkers of his period. It argues that Qadi al-Nu'man's works constituted new and vital genres in Ismaili Shi'i literature, an emergence necessitated by the Fatimids' transition from revolutionary movement to…
Edited by William F. McCants, Ph.D. 2006.
Shows an in-depth understanding of the ideology and goals of Islamist movements Features the original field research of leading specialists who interviewed Islamist leaders and activists in 12 countries across the Middle East and Asia Provides a nuanced and thorough analysis of…
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…
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…
Araştırmalarında ilk elden kaynakları kullanmaya önem veren Şükrü Hanioğlu’nun titiz arşiv çalışmasıyla ortaya çıkardığı kapsamlı inceleme, Jön Türkler hakkında bilinenlerin dışında yepyeni bilgiler sunuyor. Hanioğlu, çalışmasının bu ilk cildini, en anlamlı bölünme anı olarak gördüğü, 1902 İttihat ve Terakki Kongresi’nde bitiriyor.
Collection of articles previously published in Zaman newspaper.
“Çalışma, bir düşünürün düşüncelerini incelemeyi amaçlarken, düşüncenin içinde oluştuğu bağlamdan soyutlanamayacağını da göstermekte ve düşünce-bağlam etkileşimini başarıyla sergilemektedir. Dolayısıyla, çalışmayı okuyanlar, Dr. Abdullah Cevdet Bey'in yaşamı ve düşüncesi dışında, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu'nun son dönemini de yakından tanımak…
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…
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 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…
No other North African legend had been adopted, transformed, and used by as many social groups as that of the Kahina myth. In this book, Abdelmajid Hannoum examines the role the myth played in what may be called an ideological conquest. Since its inception in the 9th century, the Kahina legend has provided the ideological armature for use in…
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…
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…