Edited by Lawrence I. Conrad, Ph.D. 1981
A reference work, in French, of saintly figures who played a role in the history and consciousness of the Syriac-speaking church in the East. Details about them are scattered in calendrical,…
Since 2007, five volumes of the collection of Modarressi's early (pre-1979) Persian articles have been published. These include volumes entitled Ijtima'iyat, Qummiyat, Sanadiyat, Kitabiyat, and Tarikhiyat. Having access to these reprints is most welcome given the fact that most of the articles…
İ. Metin Kunt, Ph.D. 1970
The heat of the Negev desert is captured in this collection of three novels by author-diplomat-historian Michael Oren. In House of Bondage, an escaped murderer holds a young woman hostage. “In The Maestro of Yerucham”, a Russian violinist finds a girl he believes to be the heir to his talents. In Sand Devil, the adolescent son of a…
Making sense of Saudi Arabia is crucially important today. The kingdom's western province contains the heart of Islam, and it is the United States' closest Arab ally and the largest producer of oil in the world. However, the country is undergoing rapid change: its aged leadership is ceding power to a new generation, and its society, dominated…
Alison Lerrick, Ph.D. 1984
Alison Lerrick, Ph.D. 1984
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…
Translated by Victoria Rowe Holbrook, Ph.D. 1985.
Scent of the Trace is an expose of an Architect's inner dialogues during the design process. The book contains a detailed and extensive documentation of the internal struggle to conceptually ground and position three different works of architecture; Sancaklar…
Edited by Ralph M. Coury, Ph.D. 1984
Arab debates about the critical relationship between religion and modernity began in the early nineteenth century. Such debates are now integral to the struggle for power between a variety of political groups and their opponents, and are vital to understanding the modern Middle East. This unique…
Since the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996, the public has grappled with the relationship between Islamic education and radical Islam. Media reports tend to paint madrasas — religious schools dedicated to Islamic learning — as medieval institutions opposed to all that is Western and as breeding grounds for terrorists. Others have claimed that…
Fred M. Donner, BA 1968, PhD 1975.
How did Islam’s sacred scripture, the Arabic Qurʾān, emerge from western Arabia at a time when the region was religiously fragmented and lacked a clearly established tradition of writing to render the Arabic language?
The studies in this volume, the proceedings of a scholarly conference,…
Khaled Abou El Fadl is a classically-trained Islamic jurist, an American lawyer and law professor, and one of the most important Islamic thinkers today. In this updated and expanded edition of The Search for Beauty in Islam, Abou El Fadl offers eye-opening and enlightening insights into the contemporary realities of the current state of Islam…
Although scholars have begun to revise the traditional view that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries marked a decline in the fortunes of the Ottoman Empire, Baki Tezcan’s book proposes a radical new approach to this period. While he concurs that decline did take place in certain areas, he constructs a new framework by foregrounding the…
Abdelmajid Hannoum, Ph.D. 1996.
This book considers secularism and its narrative expressions. It shows how secularism is articulated and transmitted ubiquitously within state institutions and outside of them. Abdelmajid Hannoum does this by dissecting, in a series of essays, a variety of narrative forms, interrogating modes of their…
Translated by Joseph Norment Bell, Ph.D. 1971.
Translation of Ayyām al-insān al-sab‘ah.
Treating language as a type of machine code opens new avenues for the study of history and politics.
Ruth A. Miller demonstrates the potential of taking nonhuman linguistic activity—such as the running of machine code—as an analytical model. Via a lively discussion of 19th-century pro- and antisuffragists, Miller tells a new…
Co-editor Abderrahmane El Moudden, Ph.D. 1992
Jessica M. Marglin, Ph.D. 2012
Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, History Category
How a nineteenth-century lawsuit over the estate of a wealthy Tunisian Jew shines new light on the history of belonging.
In the winter of 1873, Nissim Shamama, a wealthy Jew from Tunisia, died suddenly in his palazzo in…
Shaping a Muslim State provides a synthetic study of the political, social, and economic processes which formed early Islamic…
Here Molly Greene moves beyond the hostile “Christian” versus “Muslim” divide that has colored many historical interpretations of the early modern Mediterranean, and reveals a society with a far richer set of cultural and social dynamics. She focuses on Crete, which the Ottoman Empire wrested from Venetian control in 1669. Historians of Europe…
The Shi’is of Iraq provides a comprehensive history of Iraq’s majority group and its turbulent relations with the ruling Sunni minority. Yitzhak Nakash challenges the widely held belief that Shi’i society and politics in Iraq are a reflection of Iranian Shi’ism, pointing to the strong Arab attributes of Iraqi Shi’ism. He contends that behind…
Edited by Martin S. Kramer, Ph.D. 1982
Table of Contents
Preface -- Introduction -- Shi'ism, Islam, and the West -- The Shi'a in Islamic History -- Western Studies of Shi'a Islam -- Iran: Shi'ism and Revolution -- Shi'ism as Interpreted by Khomeini: An Ideology of Revolutionary Violence -- Mahmud Taleqani…
During the formative period of Islam, in the first centuries after Muhammad's death, different ideas and beliefs abounded. It was during this period of roughly three centuries that two particular intellectual traditions emerged, Sunnism and Shi'ism. Sunni Muslims endorsed the historical caliphate, while Shi'i Muslims, supporters of 'Ali, cousin…
“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…
Translated by Eric L. Ormsby, Ph.D. 1981
Two major events occurred in the early centuries of Islam that determined its historical and spiritual development in the centuries that followed: the formation of the sacred scriptures, namely the Qur'an and the Hadith, and the chronic violence that surrounded the succession of the Prophet,…
Winner of the 2003 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History
In Israel and the West it is called the Six Day War. In the Arab world, it is known as the June War, or simply as "the Setback." Never has a conflict so short, unforeseen and largely unwanted by both sides so transformed the world. The Yom Kippur War, the war in…
Slave of Desire explores the medieval Arabic work The Thousand and One Nights, drawing on the ideas of Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Zizek for its literary criticism. While psychoanalytic thought provides an important theoretical frame, the analyses also make reference to the ideas of such thinkers as Hegel,…
Ehud R. Toledano, Ph.D. 1979
In the Ottoman Empire, many members of the ruling elite were legally slaves of the sultan and therefore could, technically, be ordered to surrender their labor, their property, or their lives at any moment. Nevertheless, slavery provided a means of social mobility, conferring status and political power…
Slavery, recognized and regulated by Islamic law, was an integral part of Muslim societies in the Middle East well into modern times. Recruited from the "Abode of War" by means of trade or warfare, slaves began their lives in the Islamic world as deracinated outsiders, described by Muslim jurists as being in a state like death, awaiting…
Co-authored by Kathryn Babayan, Ph.D. 1993.
1860647219
The Safavid dynasty represented the pinnacle of Iran's power and influence in its early modern history. The evidence of this - the creation of a nation state, military expansion and success,…
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…
Edited by Ehud Toledano, Ph.D. 1979.
“Society, Law, and Culture in the Middle East: “Modernities” in the Making is an edited volume that seeks to deepen and broaden our understanding of various forms of change in Middle Eastern and North African societies during the Ottoman period. It offers an in-depth analysis of reforms and…
George Hatke, Ph.D. 2011.
South Arabia is one of the least known parts of the Near East. It is primarily due to its remoteness, coupled with the difficulty of access, that South Arabia remains so under-explored. In pre-Islamic times, however, it was well-connected to the rest of the world. Due to its location at the crossroads of…
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,…
Drawing on both religious and secular sources, this challenging book argues that divinely ordained law is frequently misinterpreted by Muslim authorities at the expense of certain groups, including women. Khaled Abou El Fadl cites a series of injustices in Islamic society and ultimately proposes…
Leslie Peirce, Ph.D. 1988
Without the labor of the captives and slaves, the Ottoman empire could not have attained and maintained its strength in early modern times. With Anatolia as the geographic focus, Leslie Peirce searches for the voices of the unfree, drawing on archives, histories written at the time, and legal texts.
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,…
Ehud R. Toledano, Ph.D. 1979
Previous studies of nineteenth-century Egypt have often been premature in identifying the existence of an independent nation state. In a way which will permanently affect our view of Egyptian history, this book argues that in the mid-nineteenth-century period Egypt was still an Ottoman province, with a…
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…
Maha A. Ghalwash, Ph.D. 1997.
An alternative reading of the relationship between the state and smallholder peasants in mid-nineteenth-century Egypt
This book examines the rural history of Egypt during the middle years of the nineteenth century, a period that is often glossed over, or altogether forgotten. Drawing on a…
Editor Edmund Burke, III, Ph.D. 1970.
Until the 1993 first edition of this book, one thing had been missing in Middle Eastern history—depiction of the lives of ordinary Middle Eastern men and women, peasants, villagers, pastoralists, and urbanites. Now updated and revised, the second edition has added six new portraits of individuals…
Edited by Lawrence I. Conrad. Ph.D. 1981
These essays, plus an important contribution to the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Islam, by one of the foremost scholars and a leading historian of early Islamic times, have now been collected and republished for the benefit of a wider audience. The nine studies here reprinted…
David S. Powers, Ph.D. 1979