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…
"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…
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
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,…
Co-editor Edmund Burke III, Ph.D. 1970.
The landscapes of the Middle East have captured our imaginations throughout history. Images of endless golden dunes, camel caravans, isolated desert oases, and rivers lined with palm trees have often framed written and visual representations of the region. Embedded in these…
Translated by Victoria Rowe Holbrook, Ph.D. 1985.
Rumi’s six-volume Masnavi is recognized as a classic of the mystical epic, which employs narratives in verse form to convey the terms of spiritual experience. Due to its complexity and the layers of symbolism, the Masnavi has typically been read through the medium of a commentary.
…Asad Q. Ahmed, Ph.D. 2007
Eric L. Ormsby, Ph.D. 1981
The Baboons of Hada introduces thirty years of Eric Ormsby’s precise and generous poetry. Opening with an exuberant bestiary of spiders and starfish, penguins, snakes and contemplative baboons, the collection moves on to explore a world of intricate wonders and memories: the grandeur of noses, the…
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…
Edited by Ehud R. Toledano, Ph.D. 1979
The undeniable presence of the past and its cultural vestiges in the daily lives of displaced populations has been a noticeable feature of diasporas across the globe. The world of spirits and the…
Co-editor Abderrahmane El Moudden, Ph.D. 1992
Food is a marker of identity, culture, and class, and it denotes power, routine, leisure, and celebration. Despite its importance to every aspect of historical research, this topic has not been sufficiently explored in Ottoman history. This volume places the study of food in the mainstream of Ottoman history by analizing major issues--origins,…
The volume contains highly original articles on Islamic history, law, and thought, each either proposing new hypotheses or readjusting existing ones. The contributions range from studies in the formulation of the pre-Islamic Arabian calendar to notes on the "blood-money group" in Islamic law, and to transformations in Arabic logic in the post…
Aḥmad Ṭāhir Ḥasanayn, Ph.D. 1977
This classic learning aid, popular with teachers and students alike, has now been fully revised and substantially expanded for a complete new edition. With a fully vocalized Arabic text in clear, legible type, this invaluable lexicon now contains more than 3,500 Arabic verbs from 1,450 verb roots…
This volume is an annotated edition of a 9th/15th-century literary anthology of Persian poetry on the affection and love for the House of Prophet Muhammad in pre-Safavid Iran. The book is edited on the basis of a unique manuscript dated 849/1445. It contains 81 panegyrics in praise of the Prophet Muhammad and his House, many by poets who are…
Much traditional historiography consciously and unconsciously glosses over certain discourses, narratives, and practices. This book examines silences or omissions in Middle Eastern history at the turn of the twenty-first century, to give a fuller account of the society, culture and politics.
With a particular focus on the Ottoman…
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…
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…
"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…
For some historians, medieval Iberian society was one marked by peaceful coexistence and cross-cultural fertilization; others have sketched a harsher picture of Muslims and Christians engaged in an ongoing contest for political, religious, and economic advantage culminating in the fall of Muslim…
David S. Powers, Ph.D. 1979
The first eleven essays in this collection treat the application of Islamic law in qadi courts in the Maghrib in the period between 1100 and 1500 CE. Based on preserved legal documents and the expert opinions of Muslim jurists (Muftis), the essays examine family law cases involving legal minority,…
At the turn of the twentieth century, the Ottoman state identified multiple threats in its eastern regions. In an attempt to control remote Kurdish populations, Ottoman authorities organized them into a tribal militia and gave them the task of subduing a perceived Armenian threat. Following the story of this militia, Klein explores the…
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,…
Translated with notes by Asad Q. Ahmed, Ph.D. 2007.
This book offers for the first time a complete scholarly translation, commentary, and glossary in a modern European language of the logic section of Ibn Sina's (d. 1037 CE) very important compendium al-Najat (The Deliverance). The original, written in Arabic, is the product…
This volume contains case studies that examine how medieval cultures (western European, Arab/Islamic and Jewish) adopted ideas from the past and from each other in fields such as philosophy, literature, religion, and medicine.
In this volume the McGill University Research Group on Transmission, Translation, and Transformation in…
"After 13 years in America, Abu Saheeh has returned to his native Iraq, a nation transformed by the American military presence. Alone in a new city, he has exactly what he wants: freedom from his past. Then he meets Layla, a whimsical fourteen-year-old girl who enchants him with her love of American pop culture. Enchanted by Layla's stories and…
İ. Metin Kunt, Ph.D. 1970
In recent decades the history of premodern states and empires has undergone major revision. At the heart of this process stood the court, encompassing the household as well as government institutions. This volume for…
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,…
"Politik und Religion ist wieder Thema wissenschaftlicher Agenda. Mit dem Zuwachs an Diskursen geht auch deren Ausdifferenzierung einher. Ein Teilbereich dieser Auseinandersetzungen beinhaltet die Analyse des Verhältnisses von Demokratie und Religion. Dieser Sammelband untersucht diesbezüglich drei Loslösungsprozesse und verfolgt zum einen die…
This volume presents articles on the topics of biography and autobiography in a range of sources produced within Iran and the larger Persianate world. In the context of a growing scholarly literature devoted to these subjects, especially in the Arabic literary tradition, the volume presents studies that explore still neglected areas, including…
Infectious Ideas is a comparative analysis of how Muslim and Christian scholars explained the transmission of disease in the premodern Mediterranean world.
How did religious communities respond to and make sense of epidemic disease? To…
To better understand the diverse inheritance of Islamic movements in present-day Turkey, we must take a closer look at the religious establishment, the ulema, during the first half of the twentieth century. During the closing years of the Ottoman Empire and the early decades of the Republic of Turkey, the spread of secularist and anti-religious…
In June of 1964, three young, white blues fans set out from New York City in a Volkswagen,…
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…
This book is an attempt to explore how jihadi authors make use of the Sunni tradition in order to bolster their case. Such a discussion is a desideratum even in Islamic studies since oftentimes radical authors are chastised a priori for their untenable misrepresentation of religion. Similarly, their arguments are tossed aside as a…