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…
Edited and translated by Robert McChesney, B.A. 1967 and Ph.D. 1973, and Mohammad Mehdi Khorrami.
This book comprises English translations of Nizhādnāmah-i Afghān (Afghan Genealogy) and Taẕakkur al-Inqilāb (Memoir of the Revolution), the culminating works of Fayż Muḥammad Kātib Hazārah’s monumental history of Afghanistan, Sirāj al…
Imarets have long been recognized as one signature institution of the Ottoman Empire. These public kitchens were typically located in mosque complexes or multi-structured complexes, which included some or all of the following buildings: mosque, medrese, mekteb, tomb, caravansaray, sufi tekke (or tekye) , hospital,…
Edited by Olga M. Davidson, Ph.D. 1983
Ferdowsi's Shahnama: Millennial Perspectives celebrates the ongoing reception, over the last thousand years, of a masterpiece of classical Persian poetry. The epic of the Shahnama or Book of Kings glorifies the spectacular achievements of Iranian civilization…
Zachary Lockman, B.A. 1974.
Field Notes reconstructs the origins and trajectory of area studies in the United States, focusing on Middle East studies from the 1920s to the 1980s. Drawing on extensive archival research, Zachary Lockman shows how the Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford foundations played key roles in conceiving, funding,…
Eric L. Ormsby, Ph.D. 1981
Fine Incisions is a collection of twenty-four gracious, intelligent and occasionally fractious essays, wide-ranging in their interests and rigorous in their analyses. Ormsby’s reverence for language is luminously clear as he examines his international travels, the work of James Merrill, the state of…
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…
Ruth A. Miller, Ph.D. 2003.
Insightful reinterpretation of data-gathering, surveillance, cloning, and reproductive tissue and their implications for democratic politics.
Challenging the posthumanist canon that celebrates the preeminence of matter, Ruth Miller, in Flourishing Thought contends that what…
Eric L. Ormsby, Ph.D. 1981
Reviews
Ormsby's work has earned the prestigious Ingraham Merrill Prize and Canada's QSpell Award for poetry. The present work adds to the impressive body of poems available in his earlier Coastlines (ECW, 1992) and Bavarian Shrine and Other Poems (ECW, 1990) and…
Joseph Evan LeBaron, Ph.D. 1980
This study explores the relationship between economic development and political evolution during a decisive period of modern Sudanese history. During the first half of the 20th century, Mahdists competed with nationalists in shaping politics and…
Michael Cook's classic study, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge, 2001), reflected upon the Islamic injunction to forbid wrongdoing. This book is a short, accessible survey of the same material. Using Islamic history to illustrate his argument, Cook unravels the complexities of the subject by…
Edited by Lawrence I. Conrad, Ph.D. 1981
This volume presents a selection of twenty-seven studies by the late Marwan R. Buheiry, whose premature death in 1986 deprived Arab scholarship of one of its most original and stimulating thinkers.
An avid student of political power, economics, and the arts, he was keenly aware of the…
Ahmad Ibn Hanbal (d. 855) was the eponymous founder of a school of law, and an influential intellectual who led the Baghdadi masses during the Inquisition. Owing to his status as a jurist, to the religious ideas he propounded and to his model way of life, he is perceived as one of the pivotal figures in the history of Islam and a revered hero…
A groundbreaking reassessment of Foucault’s writings on one of the greatest political upheavals of our time
Were the thirteen essays Michel Foucault wrote in 1978–1979 endorsing the Iranian Revolution an aberration of his earlier work or an inevitable pitfall of his stance on Enlightenment rationality, as critics have long alleged?…
From the dawn of writing in Sumer to the sunset of the Islamic empire, Founding Gods, Inventing Nations traces four thousand years of speculation on the origins of civilization. Investigating a vast range of primary sources, some of which are translated here for the first time, and focusing on the dynamic influence of the Greek, Roman,…
Drawing on a wealth of previously unstudied primary sources in several languages, Vahid Brown and Don Rassler map the anatomy of a group frequently described as the most lethal actor in the Afghan insurgency. The Haqqani network has for decades operated at the centre of a transnational nexus of Islamist militancy, lending support to 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…
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…
As in many areas of pre-modern history, the study of medieval Islamic history has been critically hindered by the lack of available evidence. Unlike many parallel fields, however, the shortage of contemporary documentary evidence for medieval Islam has less to do with the…
Cole Bunzel, Ph.D. 2018.
While the Islamic State dominates headlines through its brutal tactics and pervasive propaganda, there is little awareness of the unique ideology driving the group's strategy. Drawing from private correspondence, statements, speeches, and Islamic theology, Cole Bunzel unpacks the ideology of the Islamic State…
In From Schlemiel to Sabra Philip Hollander examines how masculine ideals and images of the New Hebrew man shaped the Israeli state. In this innovative book, Hollander uncovers the complex relationship that Jews had with masculinity, interrogating narratives depicting masculinity in the new state as a transition from weak,…
Edited by Saiyad Nizamuddin Ahmad, Ph.D. 2000.
This groundbreaking study illuminates the Egyptian experience of modernity by critically analyzing the foremost medium through which it was articulated: history. The first comprehensive analysis of a Middle Eastern intellectual tradition, Gatekeepers of the Past examines a system of knowledge that replaced the intellectual and…
Karen A. Bauer, Ph.D. 2008.
“This book explores how medieval and modern Muslim religious scholars ('ulamā') interpret gender roles in Qur'ānic verses on legal testimony, marriage, and human creation. Citing these verses, medieval scholars developed increasingly complex laws and interpretations upholding a male-dominated gender…
Co-editor Edmund Burke, III, Ph.D. 1970.
Orientalism, as explored by Edward Said in 1978, was a far more complex phenomenon than many suspected, being homogenous along the lines of neither culture nor time. Instead, it is deeply embedded in the collective reimaginings that were—and are—nationalism. The dozen essays in
Explore the life and accomplishments of the Mongol conqueror who established the largest empire in history. Age Range: 11 to 17 years.
Eric L. Ormsby, Ph.D. 1981
This fascinating work profiles Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111), the foremost Islamic scholar and mystic of the medieval period. Attracting the patronage of the vizier Nizam al-Mulk early in his career, he was appointed head of the Nizamiyyah College at Baghdad, and attracted audiences from across the…
Edited by Edmund Burke, III, Ph.D. 1970.
Traditionally, scholars have traced the origins and characteristics of social movements to purely local and national determinants. Until recently, the global dimension of such movements has been relatively neglected. This book takes the innovative step of linking social movements to…
Despite President George W. Bush's assurances that Islam is a peaceful religion and that all good Muslims hunger for democracy, confusion persists and far too many Westerners remain convinced that Muslims and terrorists are synonymous. In the aftermath of the attacks of 9/11, the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the recent bombings…
Co-authored by Norman Itzkowitz, Ph.D. 1959.
Explore the life of a poor peasant who became one of the most powerful men in Russia by claiming to have mystical powers. Age Range: 11 to 17 years.
Raphael Danziger, Ph.D. 1974.
Co-translator Nurit Tsafrir, Ph.D. 1993.
The Koran has constituted a remarkably resilient core of identity and continuity for a religious tradition that is now in its fifteenth century. In this Very Short Introduction, Michael Cook provides a lucid and direct account of the significance of the Koran both in the modern world and in…
Uriel I. Simonsohn, Ph.D. 2008
The family stands at the centre of the present volume. Its networks of kinship and influence are a central tenet of Late Antique communities. The relations within the family and between the family and the community occupy an important place in Late…
This is a controversial study of the origins of Islamic civilisation, first published in 1977. By examining non-Muslim sources, the authors point out the intimate link between the Jewish religion and the earliest forms of Islam. As a serious, scholarly attempt to open up a new, exploratory path of Islamic history, the book has already…
Eric L. Ormsby, Ph.D. 1981
This catalogue describes over 2,000 Arabic manuscripts acquired by the Princeton University Library since the 1950s, providing information on an important collection of Arabic works, many of which were previously unknown or unrecorded.
“In a book with a bold new view of medieval Jewish history, written in a style accessible to nonspecialists and students as well as to scholars in the field, Marina Rustow changes our understanding of the origins and nature of heresy itself. Scholars have long believed that the Rabbanites and Qaraites, the two major Jewish groups under Islamic…
Martin S. Kramer, Ph.D. 1982
The foreign hostages in Lebanon are living reminders of the challenge posed to the West by Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed movement of fundamentalist Lebanese Shi’ites. Hezbollah has conducted its operational campaign with a great measure of strategic and tactical savvy. Yet its ideologues understand and…
By analyzing a wide range of Arab and Persian literature, Louise Marlow demonstrates that Islam's initial orientation was markedly egalitarian, but the social aspect of this egalitarianism was soon undermined in the aftermath of Islam's political success. Although the memory of its early promise never entirely receded, social egalitarianism was…
John H. Lorentz, Ph.D. 1974.
Iran is a country with a deep and complex history. Over several thousand years, Iran has been the source of numerous creative contributions to the spiritual and literary world, and the site of many remarkable manifestations of material culture. The special place that Iran has come to hold in contemporary…
Kenneth J. Perkins, Ph.D. 1973.
Reviews
"A valuable addition to the comparatively small collection of reference works about Tunisia. This is a useful, valuable and needed addition..." —CHOICE
Kenneth J. Perkins, Ph.D. 1973.
Containing an updated chronology, additional entries, and an enlarged bibliography, this second edition of the Historical Dictionary of Tunisia offers interested historians the information they need for continued research into this unique African nation. As a link between Arab…
Kenneth J. Perkins, Ph.D. 1973.
The demographically modest, but strategically significant, country of Tunisia has experienced profound and revolutionary change in the almost two decades since the publication of the previous edition of this volume (1997). Most dramatically, a populist uprising in 2011 ousted the entrenched dictatorship…
Translated by Lawrence I. Conrad, Ph.D. 1981
Translation of: al-Takwīn al-Tārīkhī lil-ummah al-ʻArabīyah.
This book is a comprehensive examination of the historical process of social formation that gave rise to the communal consciousness of the Arab nation and determined its sense of identity. It aims to provide a…