By focusing on Mamluk Cairo, Adam Sabra explores the attitude of medieval Muslims to poverty and the experience of being poor in an Islamic society. He also considers the role of pious endowments (waqfs) in sustaining the poor. In this way the book affords fascinating insights into a world far removed from elite society, hitherto the focus of…
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…
Nadav Samin, Ph.D. 2013.
Why do tribal genealogies matter in modern-day Saudi Arabia? What compels the strivers and climbers of the new Saudi Arabia to want to prove their authentic descent from one or another prestigious Arabian tribe? Of Sand or Soil looks at how genealogy and tribal belonging have informed the lives of…
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…
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,…
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…
David Selim Sayers, Ph.D. 2014.
The “wiles of women” are a timeless literary theme, treated from ancient Egyptian narratives to 21st-century TV series. The theme reaches its greatest flowering in the Islamic world, beginning with the Qur’an and inspiring entire literary traditions in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. The Wiles of Women as…
Translated by Robert D. McChesney, B. A. 1967, Ph.D. 1973.
Through years of neglect, deliberate modernization, and the effect of decades of war, Kabul’s architectural history has virtually disappeared. By meticulous use of all available records including written works, photographs,…
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…
Edited and introduced by Adam Sabra, Ph.D. 1998.
This guide to political behavior and expediency offers advice to Sufi shaykhs, or spiritual guides, on how to interact and negotiate with powerful secular officials, judges, and treasurers, or emirs.
Translated by Adam Sabra, Ph.D. 1998.
This mirror for princes sheds light on the relationship between spiritual and political authority in early modern Egypt
This guide to political behavior and expediency offers advice to Sufi shaykhs, or spiritual guides, on how to interact and negotiate with powerful secular officials,…
Ali S. Shihabi, B.A. Politics, Certificate in Near Eastern Studies, 1981.
"The Saudi Kingdom presents a candid and insightful analysis of Saudi Arabia’s political instability in light of the mounting domestic and international challenges facing the country today. Directly addressing Saudi Arabia’s inert monarchical ruling system, its…
Boaz Shoshan, Ph.D. 1978
In Damascus Life 1480-1500: A Report of a Local Notary Boaz Shoshan offers a microhistory of the largest Syrian city at the end of the Mamluk period and on the eve of the Ottoman conquest. Mainly based on a partly preserved diary, the earliest available of its kind and written by Ibn Ṭawq, a local…
Boaz Shoshan, Ph.D. 1978
The early Arab conquests pose a considerable challenge to modern-day historians. The earliest historical written tradition emerges only after the second half of the eighth century- over one hundred years removed from the events it contends to describe, and was undoubtedly influenced by the motives and…
Boaz Shoshan, Ph.D. 1978
Boaz Shoshan, Ph.D. 1978
Offering a new approach to the study of Ṭabarī's History, the most comprehensive historical work written by a classical Muslim historian, this book applies concepts developed by critical theorists and suggests a reading of historiographical material that is not primarily concerned with reconstructing…
Boaz Shoshan, Ph.D. 1978
In this book, Shoshan asserts that in contemporary Middle Eastern countries the field of struggle that cultures constitute provides the ground for contesting and transforming the hegemonic patriarchal discourse and recently began to give voice, especially in women's literature, to feminist critique. Examining…
Boaz Shoshan, Ph.D. 1978
This is the first book-length study of popular culture in a medieval Islamic city. Dr. Shoshan draws together a wealth of Arabic sources to explore popular religion against the background of the growing influence of Sufism, an important biography of Muhammad that was suppressed by the learned, and the origins…
Petra Sijpesteijn, Ph.D. 2004.
Islam at 250: Studies in Memory of G.H.A. Juynboll is a collection of original articles on the state of Islamic sciences and Arabic culture in the early phases of their crystallization. It covers a wide range of intellectual activity in the first…
Co-editor Petra M. Sijpesteijn, Ph.D. 2004.
During the period 500–1000 CE Egypt was successively part of the Byzantine, Persian and Islamic empires. All kinds of events, developments and processes occurred that would greatly affect its history and that of the eastern Mediterranean in general. This is the first volume to map Egypt's…
Recently, Arabic writings in the form of slogans on banners and bill boards carried by protestors or sprayed on walls have acquired even more loaded associations for those watching the political developments around the world – from hopes for democratic change to fears of an incipient Islamic extremist takeover. The sheer quantity of baggage…
Co-author Petra Sijpesteijn, Ph.D. 2004.
The Leiden Lectures on Arabic Language and Culture were initiated in 2013 on the occasion of the 400-year anniversary of the founding of the chair of Arabic at Leiden University. Each year an outstanding scholar in the field is invited to present a lecture on the rich and enjoyable variety of…
Co-edited by Petra Sijpesteijn, Ph.D. 2004.
The success of Islamic imperialism in the period from the conquests to the Ayyubid dynasty has traditionally been explained as purely the result of military might. This book, however, adopts a bottom-up approach which puts social relationships and local power dynamics at the centre of the…
Shaping a Muslim State provides a synthetic study of the political, social, and economic processes which formed early Islamic…
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…
Tens of thousands of documents dating form the late Byzantine and early Islamic periods have been found in Egypt. These texts, written on papyrus and a variety of other materials, in Greek, Coptic Egyptian, and Arabic, offer a unique, but underutilized resource for the study…
Edited by Petra Sijpesteijn, Ph.D. 2004.
Historians have long lamented the lack of contemporary documentary sources for the Islamic middle ages and the inhibiting effect this has had on our understanding of this critically important period. Although the field is richly served by surviving evidence, much of it is hard to locate,…
Co-editor Petra M. Sijpesteijn, Ph.D. 2004
In this volume amulets and talismans are studied within a broader system of meaning that shapes how they were manufactured, activated and used in different networks. Text, material features and the environments in which these artifacts circulated, are studied alongside each other, resulting…
"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…
Uriel Simonsohn, Ph.D. 2008.
Provides the first comprehensive study of female power in the framework of the family during a period that was crucial for the formation of Islamic civilizationGives a comprehensive consideration of the place of women in the Islamization of the early and medieval Near EastAnalyses a broad variety of literary…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…
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…
“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…
Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action Best Book Award 2010
Muslim beliefs have inspired charitable giving for over fourteen centuries, yet Islamic history has rarely been examined from this perspective. In Charity in Islamic Societies, Amy Singer explains the basic…
Presents the political, social, and cultural context behind Ottoman charity.
Ottoman charitable endowments (waqf) constituted an enduring monument to imperial beneficence and were important instruments of policy. One type of endowment, the public soup kitchen (imaret) served travelers, scholars, pious…
In a unique study of rural administration in the Ottoman empire, Amy Singer explores the relationship between Palestinian peasants and Ottoman officials in mid-sixteenth-century Jerusalem. Using court records, the author describes the mechanisms of tax collection and other aspects of local administration. The book emphasizes the interactive…
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,…
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…
Amy Singer, Ph.D. 1989.
This book covers significant themes explaining the practice of Islamic law.
The first essay treats taqiyyah (literally, “caution”), the concealment of one’s religion when to reveal it would incur danger, which is based on a Koranic passage. The author provides not only a legal and…
Translated by Tom Papademetriou, Ph.D. 2001.
A journey in time … a previous refugee crisis in the Mediterranean … the momentous historical events of 1922 seen through the eyes of third and fourth-generation descendants of those who lived and died through them.
This graphic novel dramatically tells the story of Greeks and…
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…
Justin K. Stearns, Ph.D. 2007.
Demonstrating the vibrancy of an Early Modern Muslim society through a study of the natural sciences in seventeenth-century Morocco, Revealed Sciences examines how the natural sciences flourished during this period, without developing in a similar way to the natural sciences in Europe. Offering an…
This work covers a number of significant themes explaining the practice of Islamic law. The first article treats taqiyyah (literally, “caution”), the concealment of one’s religion when to reveal it would incur danger, which is based on a Koranic passage. The author provides not only a legal and religious analysis of taqiyyah,…
The Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World covers an area of Jewish history, religion, and culture which until now has lacked its own cohesive, discrete reference work. The Encyclopedia fills the gap in academic reference literature on the Jews of Muslim lands particularly in the late medieval, early modern and modern periods.
…
Daniel Stolz, Ph.D. 2013.
An observatory and a lighthouse form the nexus of this major new investigation of science, religion, and the state in late Ottoman Egypt. Astronomy, imperial bureaucrats, traditionally educated Muslim scholars, and reformist Islamic publications, such as The Lighthouse, are linked to examine the making of…
Based on an award-winning thesis, this volume is a pioneering study of musical theatre and popular culture and its relation to the production of identity in Lebanon in the second half of the twentieth century.
In the aftermath of the departure of the French from Lebanon and the civil violence of 1958, the Rahbani brothers (Asi and…