Winner of the 2022 Haskins Medal awarded by The Medieval Academy of America.
The lost archive of the Fatimid caliphate (909–1171) survived in an unexpected place: the storage room, or geniza, of a synagogue in Cairo, recycled as scrap paper and deposited there by…
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…
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…
Celene Ibrahim, B.A. 2008
First book to explore the entire cast of Qur'anic female figures Provides structural analysis of select Qur'anic surahs involving women figures Offers extensive analysis of sex and sexuality as depicted in the Qur'an Conducts the first comprehensive study of female…
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,…
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…
Najam Haider, Ph.D. 2007.
Engaging with contemporary debates about the sources that shape our understanding of the early Muslim world, Najam Haider proposes a new model for Muslim historical writing that draws on Late Antique historiography to challenge the imposition of modern notions of history on a pre-modern society. Haider…
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 Khaled Abou El Fadl, Ph.D. 1999.
This handbook is a detailed reference source comprising original articles covering the origins, history, theory and practice of Islamic law. The handbook starts out by dealing with the question of what type of law is Islamic law and includes a critical analysis of the pedagogical approaches…
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…
Yossef Rapoprt, Ph.D. 2002.
Spanning the Islamic world, from ninth-century Baghdad to nineteenth-century Iran, this book tells the story of Islamic cartography and the key Muslim map-makers who shaped the art over the centuries. Muslim geographers like al-Khwārazmī and al-Idrīsī developed distinctive styles, often based on geometrical…
Edited by Luke Yarbrough, Ph.D. 2012.
Tajrid sayf al-himmah li-stikhraj ma fi dhimmat al-dhimmah is a scholarly, Arabic-only edition of a text by 'Uthmān ibn Ibrāhīm al-Nābulusī, which is also available in English translation from the Library of Arabic Literature as The Sword of Ambition. In this work addressed to…
Edited by Mustafa Aksakal, Ph.D. 2003.
In a world grappling with refugee crisis, political unrest and economies on the verge of collapse, temporary migration has become an increasingly common phenomenon.
This volume presents a comprehensive picture of the transformative and development potential of temporary transnational…
Translated by Alan Verskin, Ph.D. 2010.
In 1869, Hayyim Habshush, a Yemeni Jew, accompanied the European orientalist Joseph Halévy on his archaeological tour of Yemen. Twenty years later, Habshush wrote A Vision of Yemen, a memoir of their travels, that provides a vivid account of daily life, religion, and politics. More than…
Edited by Celene Ibrahim, B.A. 2008.
Comprised of the wisdom of over fifty scholars, preachers, poets, and artists, this anthology is born of the conviction that open-hearted engagement across our differences is a prerequisite for healthy civic life today. The collection offers…
Jane Hathaway, Ph.D. 1992
The Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule assesses the effects of Ottoman rule on the Arab Lands of Egypt, Greater Syria, Iraq, and Yemen between 1516 and 1800.
Drawing attention to the important history of these regions, the book challenges outmoded perceptions of this period as a demoralizing…
Edited by Cornell H. Fleischer, Ph.D. 1982
The subject of this two-volume publication is an inventory of manuscripts in the book treasury of the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, commissioned by the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II from his royal librarian ʿAtufi in the year 908 (1502–3) and transcribed in a clean copy in 909 (1503–4). This unicum…
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…
Translated from the German and annotated by Eric Ormsby, Ph.D. 1981
In 1814, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe read the poems of the great fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz in a newly published translation by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. For Goethe, the book was a revelation. He felt a deep connection with Hafiz and Persian poetic…
Leor Halevi, B.A. 1994
In cities awakening to global exchange under European imperial rule, Muslims encountered all sorts of strange and wonderful new things—synthetic toothbrushes, toilet paper, telegraphs, railways, gramophones, brimmed hats, tailored pants, and lottery tickets. The passage of these goods across cultural frontiers…
Jocelyn Sharlet, Ph.D. 2002
Arabic literature is always an expression of its continued literary heritage. This volume, edited by Margaret Larkin and Jocelyn Sharlet, investigates innovative ways in which poets and writers challenge our understanding of the Arabic tradition in the global humanities.
…
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…
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…
Edited by George Hatke, Ph.D. 2011.
South Arabia, an area encompassing all of today’s Yemen and neighboring regions in Saudi Arabia and Oman, is one of the least-known parts of the Near East. However, it is primarily due to its remoteness, coupled with the difficulty of…
Keiko Kiyotaki is an Associate Research Scholar in the Department of Near Eastern Studies.
In Ottoman Land Reform in the Province of Baghdad, Keiko Kiyotaki traces the Ottoman reforms of tax farming and land tenure and establishes that their effects were the key ingredients of agricultural progress. These modernizing reforms…
Simon Fuchs, Ph.D. 2015.
Centering Pakistan in a story of transnational Islam stretching from South Asia to the Middle East, Simon Wolfgang Fuchs offers the first in-depth ethnographic history of the intellectual production of Shi'is and their religious competitors in this …
Hassan Khalilieh, Ph.D. 1995.
The doctrine of modern law of the sea is commonly believed to have developed from Renaissance Europe. Often ignored though is the role of Islamic law of the sea and customary practices at that time. In this book, Hassan S. Khalilieh highlights Islamic legal doctrine regarding freedom of the seas and its…
Aaron Rock-Singer, Ph.D. 2015
Following the ideological disappointment of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, an Islamic revival arose in Egypt. Yet, far from a mechanical reaction to the decline of secular nationalism, this religious shift was the product of impassioned competition among Muslim Brothers, Salafis and state institutions and…
Co-editor Edmund Burke, III, Ph.D. 1970.
This long-awaited book is a vivid history of Frelimo, the liberation movement that gained power in Mozambique following the sudden collapse of Portuguese rule in 1974. The leading scholar of the liberation struggle in Portuguese Africa, John Marcum completed this work shortly before his death,…
Co-editor Edmund Burke, III, Ph.D. 1970.
Published in 1974, Marshall Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam was a watershed moment in the study of Islam. By locating the history of Islamic societies in a global perspective, Hodgson challenged the orientalist paradigms that had stunted the development of Islamic studies and…
Yossef Rapoport, Ph.D. 2002.
Richly annotated and with a detailed introduction, this volume offers the first academic edition and translation of a first-hand account of the Egyptian countryside, offering a key insight into the rural economy of medieval Islam.
Medieval Islamic society was overwhelmingly a society of peasants,…
Special issue of Iran-Nāmag (vol. 3, no. 2, Summer 2018)
Contents
English Verso
Foucault and Iran Reconsidered: Revolt, Religion, and Neoliberalism -- Michiel Leezenberg
French Secular Thought: Foucault and Political Spirituality -- Brian Turner
…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…
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,…
Jane Hathaway, Ph.D. 1992.
Eunuchs were a common feature of pre- and early modern societies that are now poorly understood. Here, Jane Hathaway offers an in-depth study of the chief of the African eunuchs who guarded the harem of the Ottoman Empire. A wide range of primary sources are used to analyze the Chief Eunuch's origins in East…
The first book to explore the modern history of Islam in South Asia
The first modern state to be founded in the name of Islam, Pakistan was the largest Muslim country in the world at the time of its establishment in 1947. Today it is the second-most populous, after Indonesia. Islam in Pakistan is the…
Samuel Helfont, Ph.D. 2015.
One of the first books to examine Iraqi state and Ba'th Party Archives, and the first book on this subject to use Ba'th Party records Provides a new explanation for Saddam Hussein's instrumentalizing of Islam in the 1990s and 2000s Offers a new explanation for the rise of religious insurgencies in post…
Deniz T. Kılınçoğlu, Ph.D. 2012.
Deniz T. Kılınçoğlu, İslâm, İktisat, Ordu ve Reform isimli bu çalışmasında, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda kaleme alınmış ilk modern iktisat eseri olan Risâle-i Tedbîr-i…
Translated by Eric L. Ormsby, Ph.D. 1981
For the public at large Shi’ism often implies a host of confused representations, suggesting more often than not obscurantism, intolerance, political violence and other ignominies running hot or cold in response to world events. In fact for many people, Shi’ism stands for "radical Islam", or –…
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…