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…
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,…
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…
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…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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
"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…
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…
Although Iraqi Jews saw themselves as Iraqi patriots, their community—which had existed in Iraq for more than 2,500 years—was displaced following the establishment of the state of Israel. New Babylonians chronicles the lives of these Jews, their urban Arab culture, and their hopes for a democratic nation-state. It studies their ideas…
Winner of the 2013 Reuven Chaikin Prize, University of Haifa
One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2013
Nasser's Gamble draws on declassified documents from six countries and original material in Arabic, German, Hebrew, and…
“In a crumbling mansion in a gentrified former fishing village on the Turkish coast, the widow Fatma awaits the annual visit of her grandchildren: Faruk, a dissipated historian; his sensitive leftist sister, Nilgün; and Metin, a high schooler drawn to the fast life of the nouveaux riche. Bedridden, Fatma is attended by her faithful servant…
This book examines the political and economic relations between Turkey and Iran since the Iranian Revolution in 1979. It shows that contrary to the expectation that the revolution would usher in an era of ideological hostility between the two neighbors, relations were primarily framed in an imbalanced manner irrespective of ideology. On 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…
Fred McGraw Donner, B.A. 1968, Ph.D. 1975.
This volume reprints nineteen articles that deal with the formation of the first Islamic state under the "rightly-guided" and Umayyad caliphs (632-750 CE). The articles (five of which originally appeared in languages other than English and…
A gripping account of how al-Qaeda in Yemen rebounded from an initial defeat to once again threaten the United States.
Far from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States and al-Qaeda are fighting a clandestine war of drones and suicide bombers in an unforgiving corner of Arabia.
The Last Refuge charts…
Boaz Shoshan, Ph.D. 1978
"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…
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,…
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…
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…
Asad Q. Ahmed, Ph.D. 2007
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…
"In A Common Justice Uriel I. Simonsohn examines the legislative response of Christian and Jewish religious elites to the problem posed by the appeal of their coreligionists to judicial authorities outside their communities. Focusing on the late seventh to early eleventh centuries in the region between Iraq in the east and present-day…