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 Coffee and Coffeehouses written by Ralph S. Hattox and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2014-07-09 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the accounts of early European travelers, original Arabic sources on jurisprudence and etiquette, and treatises on coffee from the period, the author recounts the colorful early history of the spread of coffee and the influence of coffeehouses in the medieval Near East. Detailed descriptions of the design, atmosphere, management, and patrons of early coffeehouses make fascinating reading for anyone interested in the history of coffee and the unique institution of the coffeehouse in urban Muslim society
Download or read book Popular Preaching and Religious Authority in the Medieval Islamic Near East written by Jonathan P. Berkey and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Islamic popular preachers and storytellers had enormous influence in defining common religious knowledge and faith in the medieval Near East. Jonathan Berkey’s book illuminates the popular culture of religious storytelling. It draws on chronicles, biographical dictionaries, sermons, and tales — but especially on a number of medieval treatises critical of popular preachers, and also a vigorous defense of them which emerged in fourteenth-century Egyptian Sufi circles. Popular preachers drew inspiration and legitimacy from the rise of Sufi mysticism, with its emphasis on internal spiritual activity and direct enlightenment, enabling them to challenge or reinforce social and political hierarchies as they entertained the masses with tales of moral edification. As these charismatic figures developed a popular following, they often aroused the wrath of scholars and elites, who resented innovative interpretations of Islam that undermined orthodox religious authority and blurred social and gender barriers. Critics of popular preachers and storytellers worried that they would corrupt their audiences’ understanding of Islam. Their defenders argued that preachers and storytellers could contribute to the consensus of the Islamic community as to what constituted acceptable religious knowledge. In the end, religious knowledge, and the definition of Islam as it was commonly understood, remained porous and flexible throughout the Middle Period, thanks in part to the activities of popular preachers and storytellers.
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 Empires of the Near East and India written by Hani Khafipour and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 1103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early modern world, the Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal empires sprawled across a vast swath of the earth, stretching from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. The diverse and overlapping literate communities that flourished in these three empires left a lasting legacy on the political, religious, and cultural landscape of the Near East and India. This volume is a comprehensive sourcebook of newly translated texts that shed light on the intertwined histories and cultures of these communities, presenting a wide range of source material spanning literature, philosophy, religion, politics, mysticism, and visual art in thematically organized chapters. Scholarly essays by leading researchers provide historical context for closer analyses of a lesser-known era and a framework for further research and debate. The volume aims to provide a new model for the study and teaching of the region’s early modern history that stands in contrast to the prevailing trend of examining this interconnected past in isolation.
Download or read book Sacred Place and Sacred Time in the Medieval Islamic Middle East written by Talmon-Heller Daniella Talmon-Heller and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-18 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a fresh perspective on religious culture in the medieval Middle East. It investigates the ways Muslims thought about and practiced at sacred spaces and in sacred times through two detailed case studies: the shrines in honour of the head of al-Husayn (the martyred grandson of the Prophet), and the holy month of Rajab. The changing expressions of the veneration of the shrine and month are followed from the formative period of Islam until the late Mamluk period, paying attention to historical contexts and power relations. Readers will find interest in the attempt to integrate the two perspectives synchronically and diachronically, in a discussion of the relationship between the sanctification of space and time in individual and communal piety, and in the religious literature of the period.
Download or read book East Meets West in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-09-03 with total page 828 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new volume explores the surprisingly intense and complex relationships between East and West during the Middle Ages and the early modern world, combining a large number of critical studies representing such diverse fields as literary (German, French, Italian, English, Spanish, and Arabic) and other subdisciplines of history, religion, anthropology, and linguistics. The differences between Islam and Christianity erected strong barriers separating two global cultures, but, as this volume indicates, despite many attempts to 'Other' the opposing side, the premodern world experienced an astonishing degree of contacts, meetings, exchanges, and influences. Scientists, travelers, authors, medical researchers, chroniclers, diplomats, and merchants criss-crossed the East and the West, or studied the sources produced by the other culture for many different reasons. As much as the theoretical concept of 'Orientalism' has been useful in sensitizing us to the fundamental tensions and conflicts separating both worlds at least since the eighteenth century, the premodern world did not quite yet operate in such an ideological framework. Even though the Crusades had violently pitted Christians against Muslims, there were countless contacts and a palpitable curiosity on both sides both before, during, and after those religious warfares.
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 The Roman Near East 31 B C A D 337 written by Fergus Millar and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 634 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Augustus to Constantine, the Roman Empire in the Near East expanded step by step, southward to the Red Sea and eastward across the Euphrates to the Tigris. In a remarkable work of interpretive history, Fergus Millar shows us this world as it was forged into the Roman provinces of Syria, Judaea, Arabia, and Mesopotamia. His book conveys the magnificent sweep of history as well as the rich diversity of peoples, religions, and languages that intermingle in the Roman Near East. Against this complex backdrop, Millar explores questions of cultural and religious identity and ethnicity--as aspects of daily life in the classical world and as part of the larger issues they raise. As Millar traces the advance of Roman control, he gives a lucid picture of Rome's policies and governance over its far-flung empire. He introduces us to major regions of the area and their contrasting communities, bringing out the different strands of culture, communal identity, language, and religious belief in each. The Roman Near East makes it possible to see rabbinic Judaism, early Christianity, and eventually the origins of Islam against the matrix of societies in which they were formed. Millar's evidence permits us to assess whether the Near East is best seen as a regional variant of Graeco-Roman culture or as in some true sense oriental. A masterful treatment of a complex period and world, distilling a vast amount of literary, documentary, artistic, and archaeological evidence--always reflecting new findings--this book is sure to become the standard source for anyone interested in the Roman Empire or the history of the Near East.
Download or read book Mapping the Middle East written by Zayde Antrim and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2018-04-15 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mapping the Middle East explores the many ways people have visualized the vast area lying between the Atlantic Ocean and the Oxus and Indus River Valleys over the past millennium. By analyzing maps produced from the eleventh century on, Zayde Antrim emphasizes the deep roots of mapping in a region too often considered unexamined and unchanging before the modern period. As Antrim argues, better-known maps from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—a period coinciding with European colonialism and the rise of the nation-state—not only obscure this rich past, but also constrain visions for the region’s future. Organized chronologically, Mapping the Middle East addresses the medieval “Realm of Islam;” the sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire; French and British colonialism through World War I; nationalism in modern Turkey, Iran, and Israel/Palestine; and alternative geographies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Vivid color illustrations throughout allow readers to compare the maps themselves with Antrim’s analysis. Much more than a conventional history of cartography, Mapping the Middle East is an incisive critique of the changing relationship between maps and belonging in a dynamic world region over the past thousand years.
Download or read book The Bible and the Ancient Near East written by Cyrus Herzl Gordon and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1997 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the diverse origins of such stories as the creation and the flood in the cultures of the ancient Near East. This up-to-date revision of a classic work draws on the latest archaeological and linguistic research to fill in the historical realities behind the great stories of the Bible. Shows striking parallels in the foundational stories told in the Egyptian, Persian, Greek, and Hebrew cultures of the time.
Download or read book The Black Death in the Middle East written by Michael Walters Dols and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the middle of the fourteenth century a devastating epidemic of plague, commonly known in European history as the "Black Death," swept over the Eurasian continent. This book, based principally on Arabic sources, establishes the means of transmission and the chronology of the plague pandemic's advance through the Middle East. The prolonged reduction of population that began with the Black Death was of fundamental significance to the social and economic history of Egypt and Syria in the later Middle Ages. The epidemic's spread suggests a remarkable destruction of human life in the fourteenth century, and a series of plague recurrences appreciably slowed population growth in the following century and a half, impoverishing Middle Eastern society. Social reactions illustrate the strength of traditional Muslim values and practices, social organization, and cohesiveness. The sudden demographic decline brought about long-term as well as immediate economic adjustments in land values, salaries, and commerce. Michael W. Dols is Assistant Professor of History at California State University, Hayward. Originally published in 1977. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Warfare in the Ancient Near East to 1600 BC written by William J. Hamblin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-09-27 with total page 590 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The only book available that covers this subject, Warfare in the Ancient Near East is a groundbreaking and fascinating study of ancient near Eastern military history from the Neolithic era to the middle Bronze Ages. Drawing on an extensive range of textual, artistic and archaeological data, William J. Hamblin synthesizes current knowledge and offers a detailed analysis of the military technology, ideology and practices of Near Eastern warfare. Paying particular attention to the earliest known examples of holy war ideaology in Mesopotamia and Egypt, Hamblin focuses on: * recruitment and training of the infantry * the logistics and weaponry of warfare * the shift from stone to metal weapons * the role played by magic * narratives of combat and artistic representations of battle * the origins and development of the chariot as military transportation * fortifications and siegecraft *developments in naval warfare. Beautifully illustrated, including maps of the region, this book is essential for experts and non-specialists alike.
Download or read book Islamic Crosspollinations written by Anna Akasoy and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of texts and ideas from ancient Greece passing through a monolithic Islam enroute to Christian Europe is now being reconsidered. In this book, classicists and other scholars point out some of the many paths of transmission of thought. Their topics include Greek myth and Arabic poetry at Qusayr 'Amra, the multi-lingual and multi-confessional maze of Islamic medicine, and memories of Egypt in medieval Venice.
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 Nomads in the Middle East written by Beatrice Forbes Manz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-02 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of pastoral nomads in the Islamic Middle East from the rise of Islam, through the middle periods when Mongols and Turks ruled most of the region, to the decline of nomadism in the twentieth century. Offering a vivid insight into the impact of nomads on the politics, culture, and ideology of the region, Beatrice Forbes Manz examines and challenges existing perceptions of these nomads, including the popular cyclical model of nomad-settled interaction developed by Ibn Khaldun. Looking at both the Arab Bedouin and the nomads from the Eurasian steppe, Manz demonstrates the significance of Bedouin and Turco-Mongolian contributions to cultural production and political ideology in the Middle East, and shows the central role played by pastoral nomads in war, trade, and state-building throughout history. Nomads provided horses and soldiers for war, the livestock and guidance which made long-distance trade possible, and animal products to provision the region's growing cities.
Download or read book The Field of Blood written by Nicholas Morton and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2018-02-20 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of the 1119 Battle of the Field of Blood, which decisively halted the momentum gained during the First Crusade and decided the fate of the Crusader states During the First Crusade, Frankish armies swept across the Middle East, capturing major cities and setting up the Crusader States in the Levant. A sustained Western conquest of the region appeared utterly inevitable. Why, then, did the crusades ultimately fail? To answer this question, historian Nicholas Morton focuses on a period of bitter conflict between the Franks and their Turkish enemies, when both factions were locked in a struggle for supremacy over the city of Aleppo. For the Franks, Aleppo was key to securing dominance over the entire region. For the Turks, this was nothing less than a battle for survival -- without Aleppo they would have little hope of ever repelling the European invaders. This conflict came to a head at the Battle of the Field of Blood in 1199, and the face of the Middle East was forever changed.
