Böcker i Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization-serien

This book is an intellectual biography of Muhammad al-Shawkani, one of the founding fathers of Islamic reformism, and a history of the transition from traditional Shiism to Sunni reformism in pre-modern Yemen. The book demonstrates how Shawkani's ideas remain of central importance to modern Islamic thinking.

By examining a wide range of Arabic and Persian literature from the eighth to the thirteenth century, this 1997 book shows the tension that existed between the traditional egalitarian ideal of early Islam, and the hierarchical impulses of the classical period.

Yossef Rapoport explores the prevalence of divorce in medieval Islamic society. In so doing, he reveals that women possessed a surprising level of economic independence which they manipulated to initiate divorce as often as men. The book makes a significant contribution to the social history of an understudied period.

This is the first book-length study of popular culture in Islamic society, drawing together a wealth of Arabic sources to explore literature, religious celebrations and annual festivities in medieval Cairo and addressing questions of relevance throughout the Islamic world and beyond.

This 1994 book analyses the economic significance of the Indian, mercantile communities trading in Iran, Central Asia and Russia in the early modern era. It demonstrates the vitality of Indian mercantile capitalism and offers unique insight into the social characteristics of an Indian trading community in the Volga-Caspian port of Astrakhan.

Jerusalem was never just another Ottoman town, but in the heyday of the Ottoman Empire it displayed many of the characteristics of a Muslim traditional society. Professor Cohen uses the Arabic and Turkish archives to reconstruct a vivid and detailed picture of everyday life in this lively urban centre.

This study of two contrasting towns in Anatolia focuses on their domestic environment. Through her use of documents from the kadi registers of Ankara and Kayseri, Dr Faroqui follows changes in patterns of house ownership over approximately a century. The urban society thus revealed differs from the patterns generally associated with the 'Islamic city' model.

Yohanan Friedmann uses the Qur'anic and classical sources to explain Islamic attittudes to interfaith relations. While they were usually tolerant, coercion was employed occasionally against marginal elements. Friedmann's erudite study sheds light not only on medieval attitudes, but also on the approach of some radical Islamic movements today.

Adam Sabra explores poverty and charity in medieval Islamic society. Thus he sheds light on a world far removed from elite society, hitherto the province of Mamluk studies. This trend, in conjunction with comparisons between the Islamic world, Europe and China, will entice scholars from within the field and beyond.

The author applies an alternative literary-critical reading of the early Islamic sources to demonstrate how medieval narrators devised elusive ways of shedding light on the political, social and religious debates of the 'Abbasid' period. This book represents a landmark in the field of early Islamic historiography.

In a pioneering reinterpretation, the authors challenge the orientalist perception of the Islamic city. Considering the histories of three Ottoman cities, they emphasize their essentially Ottoman character. The authors exploration of the sources and the agendas of those who have conditioned our response to these cities will make this book essential reading.

In this 2002 book, David Powers analyses the application of Islamic law through cases which took place in the medieval Maghrib. The source for these disputes are fatwas issued by the muftis, which the author uses to situate each case in its historical context and to interpret the legal principles.

By focusing on the trading partnership between the Genoese and the Turks, the author demonstates how this interaction contributed to the economic development of the early Ottoman state. The book considers the economic aspirations of the early Ottomans and their integration into the economy of the Mediterranean basin.

Spanning three centuries of Ottoman history, this book offers an interpretation of relations between the central Ottoman Empire and provincial Iraqi society in the early modern period.

In a fascinating account, the author considers the significance of cloth and colour in the political and cultural life of the Mongols. Situated within the broader context of the history of the Silk Road, the book will interest not only historians of the Middle East and Asia, but also art historians and textile specialists.

The book traces the history of the Delhi Sultanate, the first Islamic state established in India. This represents the first comprehensive treatment of the period and it will make a significant contribution to medieval Indo-Muslim history. Students of Islamic and Indian history will find it a valuable resource.

By focusing on the works and intellectual network of the Timurid historian Sharaf al Din 'Ali Yazdi (d.1454), this book presents a holistic view of intellectual life in fifteenth century Iran. Ilker Evrim Binbas argues that the intellectuals in this period formed informal networks which transcended political and linguistic boundaries, and spanned an area from the western fringes of the Ottoman State to bustling late medieval metropolises such as Cairo, Shiraz, and Samarkand. The network included an Ottoman revolutionary, a Mamluk prophet, and a Timurid occultist, as well as physicians, astronomers, devotees of the secret sciences, and those political figures who believed that the network was a force to be taken seriously. Also discussing the formation of an early modern Islamicate republic of letters, this book offers fresh insights on the study of intellectual history beyond the limitations imposed by nationalist methodologies, established genres, and recognized literary traditions.

Oratory and sermons had a fixed place in the religious and civic rituals of pre-modern Muslim societies and were indispensable for transmitting religious knowledge, legitimising or challenging rulers and inculcating the moral values associated with being part of the Muslim community. While there has been abundant scholarship on medieval Christian and Jewish preaching, Linda G. Jones's book is the first to consider the significance of the tradition of pulpit oratory in the medieval Islamic world. Traversing Iberia and North Africa from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, the book analyses the power of oratory, the ritual juridical and rhetorical features of pre-modern sermons and the social profiles of the preachers and orators who delivered them. The biographical and historical sources, which form the basis of this remarkable study, shed light on different regional practices and the juridical debates between individual preachers around correct performance.

The Mamluk City in the Middle East offers an interdisciplinary study of urban history, urban experience, and the nature of urbanism in the region under the rule of the Mamluk Sultanate (1250-1517). The book focuses on three less-explored but politically significant cities in the Syrian region - Jerusalem, Safad (now in Israel), and Tripoli (now in Lebanon) - and presents a new approach and methodology for understanding historical cities. Drawing on diverse textual sources and intensive field surveys, Nimrod Luz reveals the character of the Mamluk city as well as various aspects of urbanism in the region, establishing the pre-modern city of the Middle East as a valid and useful lens through which to study various themes such as architecture, art history, history, and politics of the built environment. As part of this approach, Luz considers the processes by which Mamluk discourses of urbanism were conceptualized and then inscribed in the urban environment as concrete expressions of architectural design, spatial planning, and public memorialization.

How do converts to a religion come to feel an attachment to it? The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran answers this important question for Iran by focusing on the role of memory and its revision and erasure in the ninth to eleventh centuries. During this period, the descendants of the Persian imperial, religious and historiographical traditions not only wrote themselves into starkly different early Arabic and Islamic accounts of the past but also systematically suppressed much knowledge about pre-Islamic history. The result was both a new 'Persian' ethnic identity and the pairing of Islam with other loyalties and affiliations, including family, locale and sect. This pioneering study examines revisions to memory in a wide range of cases, from Iran's imperial and administrative heritage to the Prophet Muhammad's stalwart Persian companion, Salman al-Farisi, and to memory of Iranian scholars, soldiers and rulers in the mid-seventh century.

Kaya Sahin's book offers a revisionist reading of Ottoman history during the reign of Suleyman the Magnificent (1520-66). By examining the life and works of a bureaucrat, Celalzade Mustafa, Sahin argues that the empire was built as part of the Eurasian momentum of empire building and demonstrates the imperial vision of sixteenth-century Ottomans. This unique study shows that, in contrast with many Eurocentric views, the Ottomans were active players in European politics, with an imperial culture in direct competition with that of the Habsburgs and the Safavids. Indeed, this book explains Ottoman empire building with reference to the larger Eurasian context, from Tudor England to Mughal India, contextualizing such issues as state formation, imperial policy and empire building in the period more generally. Sahin's work also devotes significant attention to the often-ignored religious dimension of the Ottoman-Safavid struggle, showing how the rivalry redefined Sunni and Shiite Islam, laying the foundations for today's religious tensions.

The Sunni-Shi'a schism is often framed as a dispute over the identity of the successor to Muhammad. In reality, however, this fracture only materialized a century later in the important southern Iraqi city of Kufa (present-day Najaf). This book explores the birth and development of Shi'i identity. Through a critical analysis of legal texts, whose provenance has only recently been confirmed, the study shows how the early Shi'a carved out independent religious and social identities through specific ritual practices and within separate sacred spaces. In this way, the book addresses two seminal controversies in the study of early Islam, namely the dating of Kufan Shi'i identity and the means by which the Shi'a differentiated themselves from mainstream Kufan society. This is an important, original and path-breaking book that marks a significant development in the study of early Islamic society.

How was the use of violence against Muslims explained and justified in medieval Islam? What role did state punishment play in delineating the private from the public sphere? What strategies were deployed to cope with the suffering caused by punishment? These questions are explored in Christian Lange's in-depth study of the phenomenon of punishment, both divine and human, in eleventh-to-thirteenth-century Islamic society. The book examines the relationship between state and society in meting out justice, Muslim attitudes to hell and the punishments that were in store in the afterlife, and the legal dimensions of punishment. The cross-disciplinary approach embraced in this study, which is based on a wide variety of Persian and Arabic sources, sheds light on the interplay between theory and practice in Islamic criminal law, and between executive power and the religious imagination of medieval Muslim society at large.

Why and under what circumstances did the religion of Islam emerge in a remote part of Arabia at the beginning of the seventh century? Traditional scholarship maintains that Islam developed in opposition to the idolatrous and polytheistic religion of the Arabs of Mecca and the surrounding regions. In this study of pre-Islamic Arabian religion, G. R. Hawting adopts a comparative religious perspective to suggest an alternative view. By examining the various bodies of evidence which survive from this period, the Koran and the vast resources of the Islamic tradition, the author argues that in fact Islam arose out of conflict with other monotheists whose beliefs and practices were judged to fall short of true monotheism and were, in consequence, attacked polemically as idolatry. The author is adept at unravelling the complexities of the source material, and students and scholars will find his argument both engaging and persuasive.

Examining the Ibadi Muslims of North Africa, this book traces the history of Arabic texts to tell the story of how people and their networks build religious traditions. Combining the study of Arabic manuscripts with digital tools, it explains how this religious community created and maintained a tradition over nearly a millennium.

In this longitudinal history of Islamic child custody law, Ahmed Fekry Ibrahim challenges Euro-American exceptionalism and unveils developments akin to the Euro-American concept of the best interests of the child, enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

Originally published in 1983, this book deals with the precolonial history of the Islamic West African city of Timbuktu. The book traces the fortunes of this fabled city from its origins in the twelfth century, and more especially from around 1400 onwards, to the French conquest in the late nineteenth century.

For over half a millennium the Mamluks wielded power over Egypt. During this time they formed a remarkable political, military and economic elite, ruling as sovereigns from 1250 to 1517. In this book, distinguished scholars provide an accessible introduction to the structure of political power under the Mamluks and its economic foundations.

In the Middle Ages, Damascus was one of the most important cities of Eurasia. Michael Chamberlain focuses on the city to develop a new approach to the relationship between society and culture in the medieval Middle East.

This volume examines the monetary history of the Ottoman empire from the fourteenth century until the end of World War I. It also discusses the implications of monetary developments for social and political history. This is an important book by one of the most distinguished economic historians in the field.