Ami Ayalon, Ph.D. 1980

In a brief historic moment, printing presses, publishing ventures, a periodical press, circulation networks, and a mass readership came into being all at once in the Middle East, where none had previously existed, with ramifications in every sphere of the community's life. Among other outcomes, this significant…

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…

Eric L. Ormsby, Ph.D. 1981

Araby is a new collection of poems on the adventures, dreams, hopes, and imaginings of two singular characters: Jaham, the "Father of Clouds," a semi-nomadic poet and auto mechanic, and his inseparable sidekick Bald Adham, also a virtuoso mechanic as well as pillar of Muslim piety. With sly…

Edited by Kathryn Babayan, Ph.D. 1993.

This book rethinks the Armenian people as significant actors in the context of Mediterranean and global history. Spanning a millennium of cross-cultural interaction and exchange across the Mediterranean world, essays move between connected histories, frontier studies, comparative literature, 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…

This book contains the papers that were presented at the Isfahan International Congress on Islamic Arts and Crafts. The papers are on various subjects including  Islamic architecture, the art of calligraphy, arts and cultural dialogue, Islamic paintings and miniature, the influence of Islamic arts and crafts on…

Edited by Olga M. Davidson, Ph.D. 1983

Many spectacular works of classical Persian art—miniature paintings as well as architectural decorations—survive to the present day, safeguarded in Istanbul and beyond. But the fragmentation of these works over time calls for careful historical research in reconstructing the history of the art…

Ehud R. Toledano, Ph.D. 1979

This groundbreaking book reconceptualizes slavery through the voices of enslaved persons themselves, voices that have remained silent in the narratives of conventional history. Focusing in particular on the Islamic Middle East from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, Ehud R. Toledano…

Ashraf `Ali Thanawi (1863-1943) was one of the most prominent religious scholars in Islamic history. Author of over a thousand books on different aspects of Islam, his work sought to defend the Islamic scholarly tradition and to articulate its authority in an age of momentous religious and political change. In this authoritative biography,…

Co-editor Vassilios Christides, Ph.D. 1970.

The philosopher and physician Abū ‘Alī al-Husayn ibn ‘Abdallâh ibn Sīnā (d. 1037 CE), known in the West by his Latinized name Avicenna, was one of the most influential thinkers of the Islamic and European Middle Ages. Yet for a great number of scholars today Avicenna’s thought remains inaccessible. Because he wrote almost all his works in…

“The Ninth Congress of the Comité International des Études Préottomanes et Ottomanes (CIEPO) convened in Jerusalem at the end of July 1990. It focused principally on three topics: the Ottoman city; the foreign relations of the Ottomans; and local and regional sources for Ottoman history. Scholars attended from more than a dozen countries and…

Edited by ʻIrit Avramsḳi-Blai, Ph.D. 1982

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 book aims to reveal Atatürk's detailed intellectual biography. The study is based on various local and foreign archive documents and period publications, especially his notebooks, the marks he made on the works he read and the notes he took, his speeches, interviews, and the books he wrote. By examining the intellectual…

Edited by Petra Sijpesteijn, Ph.D. 2004.

Authority and Control in the Countryside looks at the economic, religious, political and cultural instruments that local and regional powers in the late antique to early medieval Mediterranean and Near East used to manage their rural hinterlands. Measures of direct control – land…

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…

An analysis of the sources and evolution of the metaphysics of Abu Ali ibn Sina (d. 1037 AD) - known in the West by his Latinized name Avicenna - this book focuses on the answers Avicenna and his predecessors gave to two fundamental questions: what is the soul and how does it cause the body? and…

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…

Co-compiled by Norman Itzkowitz, Ph.D. 1959.

The difficult subject of ethnic conflict in the Balkans, and the historical and political background of the area are clarified through broadsheets, historical documents, photographs and illustrations. A history of the…

Sara Verskin, Ph.D. 2017

Barren Women is the first scholarly book to explore the ramifications of being infertile in the medieval Arab-Islamic world. Through an examination of legal texts, medical treatises, and works of religious preaching, Sara Verskin illuminates how attitudes toward mixed-gender…

Eric L. Ormsby, Ph.D. 1981

The poems in this collection, representing work from the decade 1980-1990, range from evocations of common objects, a sea shell or a twisted nail, to explorations of an inner world of memory and imagination. Throughout the collection, there is a…

Co-edited by Abderrahmane El Moudden, Ph.D. 1992.

Translated from the Ottoman Turkish with an introduction and key by Victoria Rowe Holbrook, Ph.D. 1985

The girl Beauty and the boy Love are betrothed to each other as children. But Beauty violates the custom of the tribe by falling in love with him, and Love must undergo the trials of a journey to the Land of the Heart to prove…

Translated and edited by Lawrence I. Conrad, Ph.D. 1981

An extensively illustrated account of traditional bedouin life in the Arab east that extends from desert wildlife and lore on the camel to marriage customs and the history of the enigmatic tribe of Slayb.

Contents

List of Illustrations
…

Shahab Ahmed, Ph.D. 1999.

One of the most controversial episodes in the life of the Prophet Muhammad concerns an incident in which he allegedly mistook words suggested by Satan as divine revelation. Known as the Satanic verses, these praises to the pagan deities contradict the Islamic belief that Allah is one and absolute. Muslims…

Translated and edited by Engin Deniz Akarlı, Ph.D. 1976.

William F. McCants, Ph.D. 2006.

Online resource.

This book explores the life of el-Hajj Beshir Agha (ca. 1657-1746), the most powerful Chief Harem Eunuch in the history of the Ottoman Empire Enslaved in his native Ethiopia as a boy, then castrated in Egypt, el-Hajj Beshir became one of hundreds of East African eunuchs who inhabited the imperial palace's enormous…

Lev Weitz, Ph.D. 2013.

In the conventional historical narrative, the medieval Middle East was composed of autonomous religious traditions, each with distinct doctrines, rituals, and institutions. Outside the world of theology, however,…

Milena Methodieva, Ph.D. 2010

Between Empire and Nation tells the story of the transformation of the Muslim community in modern Bulgaria during a period of imperial dissolution, conflicting national and imperial enterprises, and the emergence of new national and ethnic identities. In 1878, the Ottoman empire…

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 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…

Suleika Jaouad, B.A. 2010

A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission and, ultimately, a road trip of healing and self-discovery.

“A beautiful, elegant, and heartbreaking book that provides a…

Rifa‘at Abou-El-Haj (Ph.D., Princeton, 1963) started teaching at California State University, Long Beach, in 1964, and moved to the State University of New York (SUNY), Binghamton, in 1992. He is the author of numerous articles and book chapters, as well as two books, The 1703 Rebellion and the Structure of Ottoman Politics (1984;…

Ruth Miller, Ph.D. 2003.

Biopolitics and posthumanism have been passé…

İ. Metin Kunt, Ph.D. 1970

“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…

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.

Michael W. Dols, Ph.D. 1971

In the middle of the fourteenth century a devastating epidemic of plague, commonly known in European history as the “Black Death,” swept over the Eurasian continent. This book, based principally on Arabic sources, establishes the means of transmission…

Translated by Robert Finn, Ph.D. 1978.

A novel of magical realism that encompasses love, aging, and the role of memory, The Black Rose of Halfeti takes readers on a journey through the landscapes of Turkey.

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…

A global account of how and why human history unfolded as it did from the rise of agriculture to the fall of the Twin Towers. Why has human history been crowded into the last few thousand years? Why has it happened at all? Could it have happened in a radically different way? What should we make of the disproportionate role of the West in…