Eric L. Ormsby, Ph.D. 1981
Eric Ormsby is a poet who writes prose that is both graceful and hard-headed. With an outspoken contempt for cant and literary persiflage, Ormsby ranges over a surprising array of writers and literatures. Each essay involves a new and sometimes startling viewpoint, whether on Hart Crane’s homosexuality and…
Martin S. Kramer, Ph.D. 1982
Fatwas of condemnation : Islam and the limits of dissent examines a particularly rich and relatively untapped source for Islamic intellectual history, namely the genre of legal writing represented by the compendia of Islamic legal response to examine the limits of dissent in Islam. Not confining himself to a particular period of history, but…
Edited and translated by Robert McChesney, B.A. 1967 and Ph.D. 1973, and Mohammad Mehdi Khorrami.
This book comprises English translations of Nizhādnāmah-i Afghān (Afghan Genealogy) and Taẕakkur al-Inqilāb (Memoir of the Revolution), the culminating works of Fayż Muḥammad Kātib Hazārah’s monumental history of Afghanistan, Sirāj al…
Imarets have long been recognized as one signature institution of the Ottoman Empire. These public kitchens were typically located in mosque complexes or multi-structured complexes, which included some or all of the following buildings: mosque, medrese, mekteb, tomb, caravansaray, sufi tekke (or tekye) , hospital,…
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…
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…
Zachary Lockman, B.A. 1974.
Field Notes reconstructs the origins and trajectory of area studies in the United States, focusing on Middle East studies from the 1920s to the 1980s. Drawing on extensive archival research, Zachary Lockman shows how the Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford foundations played key roles in conceiving, funding,…
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…
Noah Amir Arjomand, Certificate in Near Eastern Studies 2010.
News 'fixers' are translators and guides who assist foreign journalists. Sometimes key contributors to bold, original reporting and other times key facilitators of homogeneity and groupthink in the news media, they play the difficult but powerful role of broker between…
Ruth A. Miller, Ph.D. 2003.
Insightful reinterpretation of data-gathering, surveillance, cloning, and reproductive tissue and their implications for democratic politics.
Challenging the posthumanist canon that celebrates the preeminence of matter, Ruth Miller, in Flourishing Thought contends that what…
Eric L. Ormsby, Ph.D. 1981
Reviews
Ormsby's work has earned the prestigious Ingraham Merrill Prize and Canada's QSpell Award for poetry. The present work adds to the impressive body of poems available in his earlier Coastlines (ECW, 1992) and Bavarian Shrine and Other Poems (ECW, 1990) and…
Joseph Evan LeBaron, Ph.D. 1980
This study explores the relationship between economic development and political evolution during a decisive period of modern Sudanese history. During the first half of the 20th century, Mahdists competed with nationalists in shaping politics and…
Michael Cook's classic study, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge, 2001), reflected upon the Islamic injunction to forbid wrongdoing. This book is a short, accessible survey of the same material. Using Islamic history to illustrate his argument, Cook unravels the complexities of the subject by…
Edited by Lawrence I. Conrad, Ph.D. 1981
This volume presents a selection of twenty-seven studies by the late Marwan R. Buheiry, whose premature death in 1986 deprived Arab scholarship of one of its most original and stimulating thinkers.
An avid student of political power, economics, and the arts, he was keenly aware of the…
Ahmad Ibn Hanbal (d. 855) was the eponymous founder of a school of law, and an influential intellectual who led the Baghdadi masses during the Inquisition. Owing to his status as a jurist, to the religious ideas he propounded and to his model way of life, he is perceived as one of the pivotal figures in the history of Islam and a revered hero…
A groundbreaking reassessment of Foucault’s writings on one of the greatest political upheavals of our time
Were the thirteen essays Michel Foucault wrote in 1978–1979 endorsing the Iranian Revolution an aberration of his earlier work or an inevitable pitfall of his stance on Enlightenment rationality, as critics have long alleged?…
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,…
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…
Robert D. McChesney, B.A. 1967, Ph.D. 1973.
In Central Asia, Muslim shrines have served as community centers for centuries, particularly the large urban shrines that seem, in many cases, to have served as the inspiration as well for a city’s architectural development. In Four…
Luke Yarbrough, Ph.D. 2012.
A runner-up for the 2020 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize
The caliphs and sultans who once ruled the Muslim world were often assisted by…
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…
Cole Bunzel, Ph.D. 2018.
While the Islamic State dominates headlines through its brutal tactics and pervasive propaganda, there is little awareness of the unique ideology driving the group's strategy. Drawing from private correspondence, statements, speeches, and Islamic theology, Cole Bunzel unpacks the ideology of the Islamic State…
In From Schlemiel to Sabra Philip Hollander examines how masculine ideals and images of the New Hebrew man shaped the Israeli state. In this innovative book, Hollander uncovers the complex relationship that Jews had with masculinity, interrogating narratives depicting masculinity in the new state as a transition from weak,…
Edited by Saiyad Nizamuddin Ahmad, Ph.D. 2000.