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12 books match the query 'Islamic Empire'

cover of Archaeology of Medieval Islamic Frontiers: From the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea

Archaeology of Medieval Islamic Frontiers

From the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea

A. Asa Eger

University Press of Colorado, 2019

The Archaeology of Medieval Islamic Frontiers demonstrates that different areas of the Islamic polity previously understood as “minor frontiers” were, in fact, of substantial importance to state formation. Contributors explore different conceptualizations of “border,” the importance of which previously went unrecognized, examining frontiers in regions including the Magreb, the Mediterranean, Egypt, Nubia, and the Caucasus through a combination of archaeological and documentary evidence.
 
Chapters highlight the significance of these respective regions to the emergence of new sociopolitical, cultural, and economic practices within the Islamic world. These studies successfully overcome the dichotomy of civilization’s center and peripheries in academic discourse by presenting the actual dynamics of identity formation and the definition, both spatial and cultural, of boundaries. The Archaeology of Medieval Islamic Frontiers is a rare combination of a new reading of written evidence with results from archaeological studies that will modify established opinions on the character of the Islamic frontiers and stimulate similar studies for other regions. The book will be relevant to medieval Islamic studies as well as to research in the medieval world in general.
 
Contributors:
Karim Alizadeh, Jana Eger, Kathryn J. Franklin, Renata Holod, Tarek Kahlaoui, Anthony J. Lauricella, Ian Randall, Giovanni R. Ruffini, Tasha Vorderstrasse
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cover of Captives and Their Saviors in the Medieval Crown of Aragon

Captives and Their Saviors in the Medieval Crown of Aragon

Jarbel Rodriguez

Catholic University of America Press, 2007

Captives and Their Saviors in the Medieval Crown of Aragon argues that by this time the ransoming efforts were on a kingdom-wide scale engaging not only professional ransomers, merchants, and officials of the crown but the population at large.
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cover of Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages

Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages

Houari Touati

University of Chicago Press, 2010

In the Middle Ages, Muslim travelers embarked on a rihla, or world tour, as surveyors, emissaries, and educators. On these journeys, voyagers not only interacted with foreign cultures—touring Greek civilization, exploring the Middle East and North Africa, and seeing parts of Europe—they also established both philosophical and geographic boundaries between the faithful and the heathen. These voyages thus gave the Islamic world, which at the time extended from the Maghreb to the Indus Valley, a coherent identity.

Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages assesses both the religious and philosophical aspects of travel, as well as the economic and cultural conditions that made the rihla possible. Houari Touati tracks the compilers of the hadith who culled oral traditions linked to the prophet, the linguists and lexicologists who journeyed to the desert to learn Bedouin Arabic, the geographers who mapped the Muslim world, and the students who ventured to study with holy men and scholars. Travel, with its costs, discomforts, and dangers, emerges in this study as both a means of spiritual growth and a metaphor for progress. Touati’s book will interest a broad range of scholars in history, literature, and anthropology.

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cover of Islam: Origin and Belief

Islam

Origin and Belief

By Emory C. Bogle

University of Texas Press, 1998

Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world today. An understanding of its beliefs and practices has become essential knowledge not only for religious and political leaders but also for ordinary citizens who increasingly interact with Muslims as neighbors, coworkers, and schoolmates.

This book is designed to offer the general public a concise overview of the origins, basic beliefs, and common practices of Islam, as well as the reasons for its dramatic resurgence in recent times. Emory Bogle details the life mission of the prophet Muhammad and describes the spread of Islam after his death. He accounts for the rise and contemporary influence of Shi'i Islam, a topic of particular interest to Western readers. Bogle also explains the basic beliefs ("The Five Pillars") of Islam, as well as the role played by the Qur'an (Islam's scriptures), the hadith (the words and behavior of Muhammad), and the shari'a (Islamic law).

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cover of Jews, Christians, and the Abode of Islam: Modern Scholarship, Medieval Realities

Jews, Christians, and the Abode of Islam

Modern Scholarship, Medieval Realities

Jacob Lassner

University of Chicago Press, 2012

In Jews, Christians, and the Abode of Islam, Jacob Lassner examines the triangular relationship that during the Middle Ages defined—and continues to define today—the political and cultural interaction among the three Abrahamic faiths. Lassner looks closely at the debates occasioned by modern Western scholarship on Islam to throw new light on the social and political status of medieval Jews and Christians in various Islamic lands from the seventh to the thirteenth century. Utilizing a vast array of primary sources, Lassner balances the rhetoric of literary and legal texts from the Middle Ages with other, newly discovered medieval sources that describe life as it was actually lived among the three faith communities. Lassner shows just what medieval Muslims meant when they spoke of tolerance, and how that abstract concept played out at different times and places in the real world of Christian and Jewish communities under Islamic rule. Finally, he considers what a more informed picture of the relationship among the Abrahamic faiths in the medieval Islamic world might mean for modern scholarship on medieval Islamic civilization and, not the least, for the highly contentious global environment of today.
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cover of On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo

On the Semicivilized

Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo

Julia Elyachar

Duke University Press, 2025

On the Semicivilized by Julia Elyachar is a sweeping analysis of the coloniality that shaped—and blocked—sovereign futures for those dubbed barbarian and semicivilized in the former Ottoman Empire. Drawing on thirty years of ethnographic research in Cairo, family archives from Palestine and Egypt, and research on Ottoman debt and finance to rethink catastrophe and potentiality in Cairo and the world today, Elyachar theorizes a global condition of the “semicivilized” marked by nonsovereign futures, crippling debts, and the constant specter of violence exercised by those who call themselves civilized. Originally used to describe the Ottoman Empire, whose perceived “civilizational differences” rendered it incompatible with a Western-dominated global order, semicivilized came to denote lands where unitary territorial sovereignty was stymied at the end of WWI. Elyachar’s theorizing offers a new analytic vocabulary for thinking beyond territoriality, postcolonialism, and the “civilized"/"primitive” divide. Looking at the world from the perspective of the semicivilized, Elyachar argues, allows us to shift attention to embodied infrastructures, collective lives, and practices of moving and acting in common that bypass lingering assumptions of territorialism and unitary sovereign rule.
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cover of The Middle East Remembered: Forged Identities, Competing Narratives, Contested Spaces

The Middle East Remembered

Forged Identities, Competing Narratives, Contested Spaces

Jacob Lassner

University of Michigan Press, 2000

The Middle East Remembered is the latest work from one of the most productive of Near Eastern historians, Jacob Lassner. The essays and studies that make up this book seek to provide a deep explanation for traditional Muslim and Jewish reactions to events past and present. The volume is in many senses a meditation on the art of history-writing in four crucial eras of the Near East: the founding years of the Muslim community, the generation after the Abbasid overthrow of the early Caliphate, the events leading to collapse of Caliphal governance, and the end of traditional historiographical models on the edge of modernity.
In the first of the book's three parts, Lassner examines what he calls the stratigraphy of the text--he makes sense of the unusual organization of medieval Islamic narrative. The second section investigates issues such as work on city planning and on the creation of imperial centers. The last portion studies the interplay between Jewish and Muslim memory and the trading of themes and ideas between the cultures.
Shorter studies in the volume have been revised, and the author weaves new and complementary essays around them. Earlier work has been transformed and made more available to the general public. The style is accessible, and technical and arcane usages have been kept to a minimum. Throughout there are flashes of the author's wry humor.
Jacob Lassner is Philip M. and Ethel Klutsnick Professor of Jewish Civilization, Northwestern University, and Professor of Middle East History, Tel Aviv University.
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cover of The Odyssey of Ibn Battuta: Uncommon Tales of a Medieval Adventurer

The Odyssey of Ibn Battuta

Uncommon Tales of a Medieval Adventurer

David Waines

University of Chicago Press, 2010

Ibn Battuta was, without doubt, one of the world’s truly great travelers. Born in fourteenth-century Morocco, and a contemporary of Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta left an account in his own words of his remarkable journeys, punctuated by adventure and peril, throughout the Islamic world and beyond. Whether sojourning in Delhi and the Maldives, wandering through the mazy streets of Cairo and Damascus, or contesting with pirates and shipwreck, the indefatigable Ibn Battuta brought to vivid life a medieval world brimming with marvel and mystery. Carefully observing the great diversity of civilizations that he encountered, Ibn Battuta exhibited an omnivorous interest in such matters as food and drink; religious differences among Christians, Hindus, and Shia Muslims; and ideas about purity and impurity, disease, women, and sex.

David Waines offers here a graceful analysis of Ibn Battuta’s travelogue. This is a gripping treatment of the life and times of one of history’s most daring, and at the same time most human, adventurers.

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cover of The Political Language of Islam

The Political Language of Islam

Bernard Lewis

University of Chicago Press, 1988

A penetrating account, drawing on a wide range of sources in multiple languages, of the development of Islamic political language

What does jihad really mean? What is the Muslim conception of law? What is Islam's stance toward unbelievers? Probing literary and historical sources, Bernard Lewis traces the development of Islamic political language from the time of the Prophet to the present. His analysis of documents written in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish illuminates differences between Muslim political thinking and Western political theory, and clarifies the perception, discussion, and practices of politics in the Islamic world.
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cover of The Venture of Islam, Volume 1: The Classical Age of Islam

The Venture of Islam, Volume 1

The Classical Age of Islam

Marshall G. S. Hodgson

University of Chicago Press, 1974

The Venture of Islam has been honored as a magisterial work of the mind since its publication in early 1975. In this three-volume study, illustrated with charts and maps, Hodgson traces and interprets the historical development of Islamic civilization from before the birth of Muhammad to the middle of the twentieth century. This work grew out of the famous course on Islamic civilization that Hodgson created and taught for many years at the University of Chicago.

"This is a nonpareil work, not only because of its command of its subject but also because it demonstrates how, ideally, history should be written."—The New Yorker

Volume 1, The Classical Age of Islam, analyzes the world before Islam, Muhammad's challenge, and the early Muslim state between 625 and 692. Hodgson then discusses the classical civilization of the High Caliphate. The volume also contains a general introduction to the complete work and a foreword by Reuben Smith, who, as Hodgson's colleague and friend, finished the Venture of Islam after the author's death and saw it through to publication.
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cover of The Venture of Islam, Volume 2: The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods

The Venture of Islam, Volume 2

The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods

Marshall G. S. Hodgson

University of Chicago Press, 1977

A sweeping work of history that the New Yorker says "demonstrates how history should be written"

The Venture of Islam has been honored as a magisterial work of the mind since its publication in early 1975. In this three-volume study, illustrated with charts and maps, Hodgson traces and interprets the historical development of Islamic civilization from before the birth of Muhammad to the middle of the twentieth century. This work grew out of the famous course on Islamic civilization that Hodgson created and taught for many years at the University of Chicago.

In the second work of this three-volume set, Hodgson investigates the establishment of an international Islamic civilization through about 1500. This includes a theoretical discussion of cultural patterning in the Islamic world and the Occident.
 
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cover of Times of History: Universal Topics in Islamic Historiography

Times of History

Universal Topics in Islamic Historiography

Aziz Al-Azmeh

Central European University Press, 2007

This is a collection of essays on current questions of historiography, illustrated with reference to Islamic historiography. The main concerns are conceptions of time and temporality, the uses of the past, historical periodisation, historical categorisation, and the constitution of historical objects, not least those called "civilisation" and "Islam". One of the aims of the book is to apply to Islamic materials the standard conceptual equipment used in historical study, and to exercise a large-scale comparativist outlook.
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