Download or read book Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands written by Konrad Hirschler and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-20 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2012 BRISMES book prize. How the written text became accessible to wider audiences in medieval Egypt and Syria. Medieval Islamic societies belonged to the most bookish cultures of their period. Using a wide variety of documentary, narrative and normative sources, Konrad Hirschler explores the growth of reading audiences in a pre-print culture.The uses of the written word grew significantly in Egypt and Syria between the 11th and the 15th centuries, and more groups within society started to participate in individual and communal reading acts. New audiences in reading sessions, school curricula, increasing numbers of endowed libraries and the appearance of popular written literature all bear witness to the profound transformation of cultural practices and their social contexts.

Download or read book The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters written by Muhsin J. al-Musawi and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2015-04-15 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Arabic Knowledge Construction, Muhsin J. al-Musawi offers a groundbreaking study of literary heritage in the medieval and premodern Islamic period. Al-Musawi challenges the paradigm that considers the period from the fall of Baghdad in 1258 to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1919 as an "Age of Decay" followed by an "Awakening" (al-nahdah). His sweeping synthesis debunks this view by carefully documenting a "republic of letters" in the Islamic Near East and South Asia that was vibrant and dynamic, one varying considerably from the generally accepted image of a centuries-long period of intellectual and literary stagnation. Al-Musawi argues that the massive cultural production of the period was not a random enterprise: instead, it arose due to an emerging and growing body of readers across Islamic lands who needed compendiums, lexicons, and commentaries to engage with scholars and writers. Scholars, too, developed their own networks to respond to each other and to their readers. Rather than addressing only the elite, this culture industry supported a common readership that enlarged the creative space and audience for prose and poetry in standard and colloquial Arabic. Works by craftsmen, artisans, and women appeared side by side with those by distinguished scholars and poets. Through careful exploration of these networks, The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters makes use of relevant theoretical frameworks to situate this culture in the ongoing discussion of non-Islamic and European efforts. Thorough, theoretically rigorous, and nuanced, al-Musawi's book is an original contribution to a range of fields in Arabic and Islamic cultural history of the twelfth to eighteenth centuries.

Download or read book History of the Arab Invasions The Conquest of the Lands written by Ahmad b. Yahya al-Baladhuri and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-11-17 with total page 597 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ahmad bin Yahuya al-Baladhuri's History of the Arab Invasions is perhaps the most important single source for the history of the great Arab conquests of the Middle East in the sixth and early seventh centuries. The author, who died in 892, was a historian working at court of the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad. He had access to a wide variety of earlier writings on the conquests and has preserved accounts that are not found anywhere else. But the book is much more than a series of accounts of battles. Baladhuri was very interested in the origins of the Islamic state and its institutions. His work contains a wealth of information about government, land-holding and economic developments. It is, in short, a key text for anyone interested in the formation of the Islamic world. In this new modern translation, fully annotated with a scholarly apparatus and commentary on the places, events and individuals mentioned, a key source on the Arab conquests is made available in English. It will be essential reading for scholars and students of Islamic Studies and Middle East history.

Download or read book India and the Islamic Heartlands written by Gagan Sood and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gagan D. S. Sood recaptures a vanished and forgotten world that spanned India and the Islamic heartlands in the eighteenth century.

Download or read book The Mamluk Sultanate written by Carl F. Petry and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-26 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engaging and accessible survey of the Mamluk Sultanate which positions the realm within the development of comparative political systems from a global perspective.

Download or read book Authority and Identity in Medieval Islamic Historiography written by Mimi Hanaoka and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-09 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intriguing dreams, improbable myths, fanciful genealogies, and suspect etymologies. These were all key elements of the historical texts composed by scholars and bureaucrats on the peripheries of Islamic empires between the tenth and fifteenth centuries. But how are historians to interpret such narratives? And what can these more literary histories tell us about the people who wrote them and the times in which they lived? In this book, Mimi Hanaoka offers an innovative, interdisciplinary method of approaching these sorts of local histories from the Persianate world. By paying attention to the purpose and intention behind a text's creation, her book highlights the preoccupation with authority to rule and legitimacy within disparate regional, provincial, ethnic, sectarian, ideological and professional communities. By reading these texts in such a way, Hanaoka transforms the literary patterns of these fantastic histories into rich sources of information about identity, rhetoric, authority, legitimacy, and centre-periphery relations.

Download or read book Female Power and Religious Change in the Medieval Near East written by Uriel Simonsohn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-21 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Female Power and Religious Change in the Medieval Near East engages with two levels of scholarly discussion that are all too often dealt with separately in modern scholarship: the Islamization of the Near East and the place of women in pre-modern Near Eastern societies. It outlines how these two lines of inquiry can and should be read in an integrative manner. Major historical themes such as conversion to Islam, Islamization, religious violence, and the regulation of Muslim/non-Muslim ties are addressed and reframed by attending to the relatively hidden, yet highly meaningful, role that women played throughout this period. This book is about the history of Islam from the perspective of female social agents. It argues that irrespective of their religious affiliation, women possessed crucial means for affecting or hindering religious changes, not only in the form of religious conversion, but also in the adoption of practices and the delineation of communal boundaries. Its focus on the role and significance of female power in moments of religious change within family households offers a historical angle that has hitherto been relatively absent from modern scholarship. Rather than locating signs of female autonomy or authority in the political, intellectual, religious, or economic spheres, Female Power and Religious Change in the Medieval Near East is concerned with the capacity of women to affect religious communal affiliations thanks to their kinship ties.

Download or read book Writing History in the Medieval Islamic World written by Fozia Bora and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-06-13 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 'encyclopaedic' fourteenth century, Arabic chronicles produced in Mamluk cities bore textual witness to both recent and bygone history, including that of the Fatimids (969–1171CE). For in two centuries of rule over Egypt and North Africa, the Isma'ili Fatimids had left few self-generated historiographical records. Instead, it fell to Ayyubid and Mamluk historians to represent the dynasty to posterity. This monograph sets out to explain how later historians preserved, interpreted and re-organised earlier textual sources. Mamluk historians engaged in a sophisticated archival practice within historiography, rather than uncritically reproducing earlier reports. In a new diplomatic edition, translation and analysis of Mamluk historian Ibn al-Furat's account of late Fatimid rule in The History of Dynasties and Kings, a widely known but barely copied universal chronicle of Islamic history, Fozia Bora traces the survival of historiographical narratives from Fatimid Egypt. Through Ibn al-Furat's text, Bora demonstrates archivality as the heuristic key to Mamluk historical writing. This book is essential for all scholars working on the written culture and history of the medieval Islamic world, and paves the way for a more nuanced reading of pre-modern Arabic chronicles and of the epistemic environment in which they were produced.

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 375 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 Sufis in Medieval Baghdad written by Atta Muhammad and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-10-19 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the political and social activities of Sufis in Baghdad in the period 1000-1258. It argues that Sufis played an important role in creating a public sphere that existed between ordinary subjects and the government. Drawing on Arabic sources and secondary literature, it explores the role of Sufis and their institutions including their ribats or lodge houses, from the use of Sufis as political ambassadors to their role in redistributing charity to the poor. The book reveals the role of Sufism in structuring a wide range of social and political arrangements in this period. It also reveals the role of ordinary, non-elite actors who, by taking part in Sufi-affiliated religious or professional associations, were able take part in public life in late-Abbasid Baghdad.

Download or read book Discovering the Riches of the Word written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributions to Discovering the Riches of the Word. Religious Reading in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe offer an innovative approach to the study of religious reading from a long term and geographically broad perspective, covering the period from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century and with a specific focus on the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. Challenging traditional research paradigms, the contributions argue that religious reading in this “long fifteenth century” should be described in terms of continuity. They make clear that in spite of confessional divides, numerous reading practices continued to exist among medieval and early modern readers, as well as among Catholics and Protestants, and that the two groups in certain cases even shared the same religious texts. Contributors include: Elise Boillet, Sabrina Corbellini, Suzan Folkerts, Éléonore Fournié, Wim François, Margriet Hoogvliet, Ian Johnson, Hubert Meeus, Matti Peikola, Bart Ramakers, Elisabeth Salter, Lucy Wooding, and Federico Zuliani.

Download or read book Islam Literature and Society in Mongol Anatolia written by A. C. S. Peacock and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-17 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new understanding of the transformation of Anatolia to a Muslim society in the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries based on previously unpublished sources.

Download or read book Law and Legality in the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey written by Kent F. Schull and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-07 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The editors of this volume have gathered leading scholars on the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey to chronologically examine the sweep and variety of sociolegal projects being carried in the region. These efforts intersect issues of property, gender, legal literacy, the demarcation of village boundaries, the codification of Islamic law, economic liberalism, crime and punishment, and refugee rights across the empire and the Aegean region of the Turkish Republic.

Download or read book History and Development of the Arabic Language written by Muhammad al-Sharkawi and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-11-25 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History and Development of the Arabic Language is a general introduction for students to the history of the Arabic language. It is divided into two parts; the pre-Islamic language up to the emergence of the first well-known works of Classical Arabic. Secondly, the transition from the pre-Islamic situation to the complex Arabic language forms after the emergence of Islam and the Arab conquests, both in Arabia and in the diaspora. The book focuses on the pre-Islamic linguistic situation, where the linguistic geography and relevant demographic aspects of pre-Islamic Arabia will be introduced. In addition, the book will also discuss the communicative contexts and varieties of Modern Arabic. The book includes readings, discussion questions and data sets to provide a complete textbook and resource for teachers and students of the history of Arabic.

Download or read book New Readings in Arabic Historiography from Late Medieval Egypt and Syria written by Jo van Steenbergen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-04-19 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume contributes to research on historic Arabic texts from late medieval Egypt and Syria. Departing from dominant understandings of these texts through the prisms of authenticity and “literarization,” it engages with questions of textual constructedness and authorial agency. It consists of 13 contributions by a new generation of scholars in three parts. Each part represents a different aspect of their new readings of particular texts. Part one looks at concrete instances of textual interdependencies, part two at the creativity of authorial agencies, and part three at the relationship between texts and social practice. New Readings thus participates in the revaluation of late medieval Arabic historiography as a critical field of inquiry. Contributors: Rasmus Bech Olsen, Víctor de Castro León, Mohammad Gharaibeh, Kenneth A. Goudie, Christian Mauder, Evan Metzger, Zacharie Mochtari de Pierrepont, Clément Onimus, Tarek Sabraa, Iria Santás de Arcos, Gowaart Van Den Bossche, Koby Yosef.

Download or read book Roma in the Medieval Islamic World written by Kristina Richardson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-11-18 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2022 Dan David Prize for outstanding scholarship that illuminates the past and seeks to anchor public discourse in a deeper understanding of history In Middle Eastern cities as early as the mid-8th century, the Sons of Sasan begged, trained animals, sold medicinal plants and potions, and told fortunes. They captivated the imagination of Arab writers and playwrights, who immortalized their strange ways in poems, plays, and the Thousand and One Nights. Using a wide range of sources, Richardson investigates the lived experiences of these Sons of Sasan, who changed their name to Ghuraba' (Strangers) by the late 1200s. This name became the Arabic word for the Roma and Roma-affiliated groups also known under the pejorative term 'Gypsies'. This book uses mostly Ghuraba'-authored works to understand their tribal organization and professional niches as well as providing a glossary of their language Sin. It also examines the urban homes, neighborhoods, and cemeteries that they constructed. Within these isolated communities they developed and nurtured a deep literary culture and astrological tradition, broadening our appreciation of the cultural contributions of medieval minority communities. Remarkably, the Ghuraba' began blockprinting textual amulets by the 10th century, centuries before printing on paper arrived in central Europe. When Roma tribes migrated from Ottoman territories into Bavaria and Bohemia in the 1410s, they may have carried this printing technology into the Holy Roman Empire.

Download or read book Medieval Damascus written by Hirschler Konrad Hirschler and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-19 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The written text was a pervasive feature of cultural practices in the medieval Middle East. At the heart of book circulation stood libraries that experienced a rapid expansion from the twelfth century onwards. While the existence of these libraries is well known our knowledge of their content and structure has been very limited as hardly any medieval Arabic catalogues have been preserved. This book discusses the largest and earliest medieval library of the Middle East for which we have documentation - the Ashrafiya library in the very centre of Damascus - and edits its catalogue. This catalogue shows that even book collections attached to Sunni religious institutions could hold rather unexpected titles, such as stories from the 1001 Nights, manuals for traders, medical handbooks, Shiite prayers, love poetry and texts extolling wine consumption. At the same time this library catalogue decisively expands our knowledge of how the books were spatially organised on the bookshelves of such a large medieval library. With over 2,000 entries this catalogue is essential reading for anybody interested in the cultural and intellectual history of Arabic societies. Setting the Ashrafiya catalogue into a comparative perspective with contemporaneous libraries on the British Isles this book opens new perspectives for the study of medieval libraries.