Download or read book The Making of the Medieval Middle East written by Jack Tannous and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold new religious history of the late antique and medieval Middle East that places ordinary Christians at the center of the story In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. Jack Tannous argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East’s history. What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, Tannous provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East. This provocative book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.
Download or read book The Making of the Medieval Middle East written by Jack Tannous and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. Largely agrarian and illiterate, Christians often called “the simple” outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East's history
Download or read book The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World written by Cyrus Schayegh and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-28 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World, Cyrus Schayegh takes up a fundamental problem historians face: how to make sense of the spatial layeredness of the past. He argues that the modern world’s ultimate socio-spatial feature was not the oft-studied processes of globalization or state formation or urbanization. Rather, it was fast-paced, mutually transformative intertwinements of cities, regions, states, and global circuits, a bundle of processes he calls transpatialization. To make this case, Schayegh’s study pivots around Greater Syria (Bilad al-Sham in Arabic), which is roughly coextensive with present-day Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine. From this region, Schayegh looks beyond, to imperial and global connections, diaspora communities, and neighboring Egypt, Iraq, and Turkey. And he peers deeply into Bilad al-Sham: at cities and their ties, and at global economic forces, the Ottoman and European empire-states, and the post-Ottoman nation-states at work within the region. He shows how diverse socio-spatial intertwinements unfolded in tandem during a transformative stretch of time, the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, and concludes with a postscript covering the 1940s to 2010s.
Download or read book State Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East written by Roger Owen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-04-12 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book continues to serve as an excellent introduction for new-comers to the modern history and politics of a region that is usually portrayed as mysterious, unpredictable and violent.
Download or read book Notes on a Century written by Bernard Lewis and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-05-10 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The #1 New York Times bestselling author of What Went Wrong? tells the story of his extraordinary life After September 11, Americans who had never given much thought to the Middle East turned to Bernard Lewis for an explanation, catapulting What Went Wrong? and later Crisis of Islam to become number one bestsellers. He was the first to warn of a coming "clash of civilizations," a term he coined in 1957, and has led an amazing life, as much a political actor as a scholar of the Middle East. In this witty memoir he reflects on the events that have transformed the region since World War II, up through the Arab Spring. A pathbreaking scholar with command of a dozen languages, Lewis has advised American presidents and dined with politicians from the shah of Iran to the pope. Over the years, he had tea at Buckingham Palace, befriended Golda Meir, and briefed politicians from Ted Kennedy to Dick Cheney. No stranger to controversy, he pulls no punches in his blunt criticism of those who see him as the intellectual progenitor of the Iraq war. Like America’s other great historian-statesmen Arthur Schlesinger and Henry Kissinger, he is a figure of towering intellect and a world-class raconteur, which makes Notes on a Century essential reading for anyone who cares about the fate of the Middle East.
Download or read book The History of the Book in the Middle East written by Geoffrey Roper and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 639 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This selection of papers by scholarly specialists offers an introduction to the history of the book and book culture in West Asia and North Africa from antiquity to the 20th century. The flourishing and long-lived manuscript tradition is discussed in its various aspects - social and economic as well as technical and aesthetic. The very early but abortive introduction of printing - long before Gutenberg - and the eventual, belated acceptance of the printed book and the development of print culture are explored in further groups of papers. Cultural, aesthetic, technological, religious, social, political and economic factors are all considered throughout the volume. Although the articles reflect the predominance in the area of Muslim books - Arabic, Persian and Turkish - the Hebrew, Syriac and Armenian contributions are also discussed. The editor’s introduction provides a survey of the field from the origins of writing to the modern literary and intellectual revivals.
Download or read book Music and Musicians in the Medieval Islamicate World written by Lisa Nielson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-04-22 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the early medieval Islamicate period (800–1400 CE), discourses concerned with music and musicians were wide-ranging and contentious, and expressed in works on music theory and philosophy as well as literature and poetry. But in spite of attempts by influential scholars and political leaders to limit or control musical expression, music and sound permeated all layers of the social structure. Lisa Nielson here presents a rich social history of music, musicianship and the role of musicians in the early Islamicate era. Focusing primarily on Damascus, Baghdad and Jerusalem, Lisa Nielson draws on a wide variety of textual sources written for and about musicians and their professional/private environments – including chronicles, literary sources, memoirs and musical treatises – as well as the disciplinary approaches of musicology to offer insights into musical performances and the lives of musicians. In the process, the book sheds light onto the dynamics of medieval Islamicate courts, as well as how slavery, gender, status and religion intersected with music in courtly life. It will appeal to scholars of the Islamicate world and historical musicologists.
Download or read book Marriage Money and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society written by Yossef Rapoport and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-04-21 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: High rates of divorce, often taken to be a modern and western phenomenon, were also typical of medieval Islamic societies. By pitting these high rates of divorce against the Islamic ideal of marriage,Yossef Rapoport radically challenges usual assumptions about the legal inferiority of Muslim women and their economic dependence on men. He argues that marriages in late medieval Cairo, Damascus and Jerusalem had little in common with the patriarchal models advocated by jurists and moralists. The transmission of dowries, women's access to waged labour, and the strict separation of property between spouses made divorce easy and normative, initiated by wives as often as by their husbands. This carefully researched work of social history is interwoven with intimate accounts of individual medieval lives, making for a truly compelling read. It will be of interest to scholars of all disciplines concerned with the history of women and gender in Islam.
Download or read book Journeying Along Medieval Routes in Europe and the Middle East written by Alison L. Gascoigne and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on routes and journeys throughout medieval Europe and the Middle East in the period between Late Antiquity and the thirteenth century, this multi-disciplinary book draws on travel narratives, chronicles, maps, charters, geographies, and material remains in order to shed new light on the experience of travelling in the Middle Ages. The contributions gathered here explore the experiences of travellers moving between Latin Europe and the Holy Land, between southern Italy and Sicily, and across Germany and England, from a range of disciplinary perspectives. In doing so, they offer unique insights into the experience, conditions, conceptualization, and impact of human movement in medieval Europe. Many essays place a strong emphasis on the methodological problems associated with the study of travel and its traces, and the collection is enhanced by the juxtaposition of scholarly work taking different approaches to this challenge. The papers included here engage in cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary dialogue and are supported by a discursive, contextualizing introduction by the editors.
Download or read book The Ornament of the World written by Maria Rosa Menocal and published by Back Bay Books. This book was released on 2009-11-29 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic bestseller — the inspiration for the PBS series — is an "illuminating and even inspiring" portrait of medieval Spain that explores the golden age when Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together in an atmosphere of tolerance (Los Angeles Times). This enthralling history, widely hailed as a revelation of a "lost" golden age, brings to vivid life the rich and thriving culture of medieval Spain, where for more than seven centuries Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together in an atmosphere of tolerance, and where literature, science, and the arts flourished. "It is no exaggeration to say that what we presumptuously call 'Western' culture is owed in large measure to the Andalusian enlightenment...This book partly restores a world we have lost." —Christopher Hitchens, The Nation
Download or read book Rulers Religion and Riches written by Jared Rubin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-16 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book seeks to explain the political and religious factors leading to the economic reversal of fortunes between Europe and the Middle East.
Download or read book The Making of Salafism written by Henri Lauzière and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some Islamic scholars hold that Salafism is an innovative and rationalist effort at Islamic reform that emerged in the late nineteenth century but gradually disappeared in the mid twentieth. Others argue Salafism is an anti-innovative and antirationalist movement of Islamic purism that dates back to the medieval period yet persists today. Though they contradict each other, both narratives are considered authoritative, making it hard for outsiders to grasp the history of the ideology and its core beliefs. Introducing a third, empirically based genealogy, The Making of Salafism understands the concept as a recent phenomenon projected back onto the past, and it sees its purist evolution as a direct result of decolonization. Henri Lauzière builds his history on the transnational networks of Taqi al-Din al-Hilali (1894–1987), a Moroccan Salafi who, with his associates, participated in the development of Salafism as both a term and a movement. Traveling from Rabat to Mecca, from Calcutta to Berlin, al-Hilali interacted with high-profile Salafi scholars and activists who eventually abandoned Islamic modernism in favor of a more purist approach to Islam. Today, Salafis tend to claim a monopoly on religious truth and freely confront other Muslims on theological and legal issues. Lauzière's pathbreaking history recognizes the social forces behind this purist turn, uncovering the popular origins of what has become a global phenomenon.
Download or read book Christian Martyrs Under Islam written by Christian C. Sahner and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at the developing conflicts in Christian-Muslim relations during late antiquity and the early Islamic era How did the medieval Middle East transform from a majority-Christian world to a majority-Muslim world, and what role did violence play in this process? Christian Martyrs under Islam explains how Christians across the early Islamic caliphate slowly converted to the faith of the Arab conquerors and how small groups of individuals rejected this faith through dramatic acts of resistance, including apostasy and blasphemy. Using previously untapped sources in a range of Middle Eastern languages, Christian Sahner introduces an unknown group of martyrs who were executed at the hands of Muslim officials between the seventh and ninth centuries CE. Found in places as diverse as Syria, Spain, Egypt, and Armenia, they include an alleged descendant of Muhammad who converted to Christianity, high-ranking Christian secretaries of the Muslim state who viciously insulted the Prophet, and the children of mixed marriages between Muslims and Christians. Sahner argues that Christians never experienced systematic persecution under the early caliphs, and indeed, they remained the largest portion of the population in the greater Middle East for centuries after the Arab conquest. Still, episodes of ferocious violence contributed to the spread of Islam within Christian societies, and memories of this bloodshed played a key role in shaping Christian identity in the new Islamic empire. Christian Martyrs under Islam examines how violence against Christians ended the age of porous religious boundaries and laid the foundations for more antagonistic Muslim-Christian relations in the centuries to come.
Download or read book Medieval Persia 1040 1797 written by David Morgan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-19 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The medieval period of Persia's remarkably continuous, history began with its conquest by the Muslim Arabs in the seventh century AD and gave way to the modern period at the end of the eighteenth century when the influence of the West became pervasive. Without an understanding of the confused legacy of these centuries, no-one can hope to understand the complexities and dynamism of modern Iran. Concise, clear and colourful, David Morgan's book is the best and most up-to-date short account of its subject in the English language.
Download or read book Women in Middle Eastern History written by Nikki R. Keddie and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This history of Middle Eastern women is the first to survey gender relations in the Middle East from the earliest Islamic period to the present. Outstanding scholars analyze a rich array of sources ranging from histories, biographical dictionaries, law books, prescriptive treatises, and archival records, to the Traditions (hadith) of the Prophet and imaginative works like the Thousand and One Nights, to modern writings by Middle Eastern women and by Western writers. They show that gender boundaries in the Middle East have been neither fixed nor immutable: changes in family patterns, religious rituals, socio-economic necessity, myth and ideology—and not least, women’s attitudes—have expanded or circumscribed women’s roles and behavior through the ages.
Download or read book Making Cairo Medieval written by Nezar AlSayyad and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2005-03-25 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the nineteenth century, Cairo witnessed once of its most dramatic periods of transformation. Well on its way to becoming a modern and cosmopolitan city, by the end of the century, a 'medieval' Cairo had somehow come into being. While many Europeans in the nineteenth century viewed Cairo as a fundamentally dual city—physically and psychically split between East/West and modern/medieval—the contributors to the provocative collection demonstrate that, in fact, this process of inscription was the result of restoration practices, museology, and tourism initiated by colonial occupiers. The first edited volume to address nineteenth-century Cairo both in terms of its history and the perception of its achievements, this book will be an essential text for courses in architectural and art history dealing with the Islamic world.
Download or read book War and Society in the Eastern Mediterranean written by Yaacov Lēv and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1997 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume focusses on the interplay between war and society in the Eastern Mediterranean, in a period which witnessed the Arab conquests, the Seljuk invasion, the Crusades, and the Mongol incursions. The military aspects of these momentous events have not been fully discussed so far. For the first time this book offers a synthesis of trends in military technology and its effect on society in the period from the Arab conquests to the establishment of an Ottoman hegemony. "War and Society in the Eastern Mediterranean" provides for medievalists an Oriental context to the military aspects of the Crusades, and for scholars of both Middle Eastern and military history a coherent treatment of an important topic over a long period and covering many different cultures.
