Translated by Eric L. Ormsby, Ph.D. 1981
This is the first English translation of the final philosophical work of the great eleventh-century Ismaili thinker, poet, and Fatimid emissary, Nāṣir-i Khusraw. Appointed from Cairo by command of the Fatimid Imam-caliph al-Mustansir to serve first as a dā'ī, and then as the hujjat, for the…
This volume is an annotated edition of a work by Idris Bitlisi, an Ottoman Kurdish religious scholar and administrator from Bitlis who began his career in the court of the Aq Qoyunlu (Ak Koyunlu), a dynasty which ruled Iran in the 15th century. After the dynasty was overthrown by the Safavid Isma'il I, he moved to the land of the Ottomans and…
"Did you know that blue eyes, baldness, bad breath and boils were all considered bodily 'blights' by Medieval Arabs, as were cross eyes, lameness and deafness? What…
Boaz Shoshan, Ph.D. 1978
Translation, introduction, notes and index for volumes 1–2 by Robert D. McChesney, B.A. 1967, Ph.D. 1973. Translation and notes for volume 3–4 by McChesney and Mehdi Muhammad Khorrami.
The Sirāj al-tawārīkh is the most important history of Afghanistan ever written. It was…
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…
In Eray’s world of fantasy and fun, there are few boundaries between reality and imagination. There is a roadside tea garden where spirits gather by night to carry on flirtations until they fade into the dawn, and there is a tavern in Bartin where men make their lost illusions of love come alive by thinking of them. The narrator exchanges…
Aksum and Nubia assembles and analyzes the textual and archaeological evidence of interaction between Nubia and the Ethiopian kingdom of Aksum, focusing primarily on the fourth century CE. Although ancient Nubia and Ethiopia have been the subject of a growing number of studies in recent years,…
"Bringing together essays on topics related to Islamic law, this book is composed of articles by prominent legal scholars and historians of Islam. The authors cover a wide swath of issues, ranging from a detailed examination of Shi'i traditions governing legal interpretations about everyday affairs like prayer to the intellectual exchanges…
Medieval interpretations of the Qur'an often serve as points of reference for Muslim thought; yet Qur'an commentaries were shaped not only by the Qur'an itself, but also by their authors' ideological viewpoints, their theories of interpretation, their methods, and the conventions of the genre…
The dog has captured the Jewish imagination from antiquity to the contemporary period, with the image of the dog often used to characterize and demean Jewish populations in medieval Christendom. In the interwar period, dogs were still considered goyishe nakhes (‘a gentile pleasure’) and…
This pioneering study examines the process of reasoning in Islamic law. Some of the key questions addressed here include whether sacred law operates differently from secular law, why laws change or stay the same, and how different cultural and historical settings impact the development of legal rulings. In order to explore these questions, the…
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,…
It is possible to imagine a theory of democracy and a constitutional history independent of human subjectivity.
Ruth A. Miller excavates a centuries-old history of nonhuman and nonbiological constitutional engagement and outlines a robust mechanical democracy that challenges existing theories of liberal and human political…
This Noble House explores the preoccupation with biblical genealogy that emerged among Jews in the Islamic Near East between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. Arnold Franklin looks to Jewish society's fascination with Davidic ancestry, examining the profusion of claims to the lineage that had already begun to…
The Tıflî stories are a corpus of prose fiction produced in the Ottoman Empire from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries and often regarded as the main precursor of the Ottoman novel. At a time when Ottoman high literature consisted almost exclusively of epic or mystical poetry, the Tıflî stories depicted the…
Law and Empire provides a comparative view of legal practices in Asia and Europe, from Antiquity to the eighteenth century. It relates the main principles of legal thinking in Chinese, Islamic, and European contexts to practices of lawmaking and adjudication. In particular, it shows how legal procedure and legal thinking could be used…
Kenneth J. Perkins, Ph.D. 1973.
Kenneth Perkins's second edition of A History of Modern Tunisia, updated with a new chapter, carries the history of this country from 2004 to the present, with particular emphasis on the Tunisian revolution of 2011 – the first critical event of that year's Arab Spring and the…
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…
Edited by David S. Powers, Ph.D. 1979
In Islamic Legal Thought: A Compendium of Muslim Jurists, twenty-three scholars each contribute a chapter on a distinguished Muslim jurist. The volume is organized chronologically and it includes jurists who represent the formative, classical and modern periods of Islamic legal thought…
In Denial of Violence, Fatma Müge Göçek seeks to decipher the roots of this…
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…
Love, family and religion clash in Pirzad's follow up to the internationally acclaimed Things We Left Unsaid
In a small town on the edge of the Caspian Sea, Edmond Lazarian and his best friend Tahereh pass their days playing together,…
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…
This volume brings together articles on various aspects of the intellectual and social
histories of Islamicate societies and of the traditions and contexts that contributed to their
formation and evolution. Written by leading scholars who span three generations and
who cover such diverse fields as Late Antique Studies, Islamic…
The region that is today Macedonia was long the heart of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. It was home to a complex mix of peoples and faiths who had for hundreds of years lived together in relative peace. To be sure, these people were no strangers to coercive violence and various forms of depredations visited upon them by bandits and state agents…
Shaping a Muslim State provides a synthetic study of the political, social, and economic processes which formed early Islamic…
Acquired by the Bodleian Library in 2002, the Book of Curiosities is now recognized as one of the most important discoveries in the history of cartography in recent decades. This eleventh-century Arabic treatise, composed in Egypt under the Fatimid caliphs, is a detailed account of the heavens and the Earth, illustrated by an…
In light of recent concern over Shari’ah, such as proposed laws to prohibit it in the United States and conflict over the role it should play in the new Egyptian constitution, many people are confused about the meaning of Shari‘ah in Islam and its role in the world today. In Reasoning with God, renowned Islamic scholar Khaled Abou El…
Current standard narratives of Ottoman, Balkan, and Middle East history overemphasize the role of nationalism in the transformation of the region. Challenging these accounts, this book argues that religious affiliation was in fact the most influential shaper of communal identity in the Ottoman era, that religion molded the relationship between…
Editors: Arnold E. Franklin, Ph.D. 2001; Roxani Eleni Margariti, Ph.D. 2002; Uriel Simonsohn, Ph.D. 2008; and Marina Rustow, Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East.
"This volume brings together articles on the cultural, religious, social and commercial interactions among Jews, Christians and Muslims in…
Edited by Leor Halevi, B.A. 1994
Written by an international group of highly respected scholars and experts in the field The essays advance our knowledge considerably, bringing to light little-known events in the field of cross-cultural trade Engages with debates in a variety of academic disciplines…
Translated by Mona Zaki, Ph.D. 2015
Translation of: Serab alelyel.. al'elekh.
“Students! Write this down in your notebooks! Chewing is infinite!”
Young Mukhtar is frozen in time, gazing at his beloved Fatma as she disappears into the streets of Tripoli, Libya, destined to a life of prostitution. Around…
Translated by Mona Zaki, Ph.D. 2015
Translation of: Serab alelyel.. al'elekh.
“Students! Write this down in your notebooks! Chewing is infinite!”
Young Mukhtar is frozen in time, gazing at his beloved Fatma as she disappears into the streets of Tripoli, Libya, destined to a life of prostitution. Around…
Phillip Ackerman-Lieberman, Ph.D. 2007.
Finalist in the 2014 National Jewish Book Awards (Sephardic Culture Category), sponsored by the Jewish Book Council.
The Cairo Geniza is the largest and richest store of documentary evidence for the medieval Islamic world. This book seeks to revolutionize the way scholars use that…
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…
This volume is a collection of twenty-three articles dedicated to one of the most distinguished philologists and linguists in Near Eastern Studies and one of the most prolific teachers and translators of Near Eastern languages and literatures, Wheeler McIntosh Thackston, Jr. (Harvard University), on the occasion of…
Translated from the German by Eric Ormsby, Ph.D. 1981
In Rethinking Islam, Katajun Amirpur argues that the West’s impression of Islam as a backward-looking faith, resistant to post-Enlightenment thinking, is misleading and—due to its effects on political discourse—damaging. Introducing readers to key thinkers and activists…
David S. Powers, Ph.D. 1979
There is arguably no field of Islamic law that reflects the situation in the Hijaz during the lifetime of Muhammad as well as the law of inheritance, which is treated at length and in exquisite detail in the Qurʾan. Shortly after the hijra to Medina in 622, six verses regulating different aspects of…
Louise Marlow, Ph.D. 1987.
Received First Place Publication Award from The Association of Art Museum Curators.
Princeton's Great Persian Book of Kings presents the first…
Making sense of Saudi Arabia is crucially important today. The kingdom's western province contains the heart of Islam, and it is the United States' closest Arab ally and the largest producer of oil in the world. However, the country is undergoing rapid change: its aged leadership is ceding power to a new generation, and its society, dominated…