Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization

Series · 25

books · 1983-2015

By Guy Burak, Amy Singer, Najam Haider, and more

Books in series

Muslim Tradition

Studies in Chronology, Provenance and Authorship of Early Hadith

1983

In Muslim Tradition G. H. A. Juynboll undertakes a broad-ranging review of the closely linked questions of date, authorship and origin of hadiths, i.e. the traditions of the prophet. Hadiths, which record the sayings and deeds of the prophet Muhammad, are central to Islamic teaching and beliefs and command a respect in the Islamic world second only to the Qur'an. The question of when, how and where particular hadiths came into existence is basic to the understanding of the formative period of Islam. This statement of a sceptical position, which can be visualized as located between, on the one hand, the orthodox Muslim view and, on the other, that of Western scholars, uses all the rich material available and explores the possibilities it opens up. The book faces major issues and reaches conclusions which may provide a basis for future debate in which, it is hoped, both Muslim and Western scholars will participate.

Orta Halli Osmanlılar

1987

'Osmanlı mimarisi' terimi çoğunlukla insanın gözünde 15. ve 16. yüzyıllarda, devrin sultanlarının, sultan ailesi üyelerinin ve yüksek kademelerdeki devlet görevlilerinin girişimleriyle inşa edilen heybetli yapıları canlandırmaktadır. 16., 17., 18., yüzyıllarda kentlerde sıradan insanların yapıp barındığı konutlat ise toplumsal tarihçiler ve iktisat tarihçileri tarafından bile aynı ölçüde dikkate alınmamıştır. Bunun bir nedeni, tarihçilerin çoğunun ilgisinin çok anlaşılır bir şekilde Osmanlı merkezi yönetimine ait inalnılmaz büyüklükteki belge yığını üzerinde toplanmasıdır. Prof. Dr. Suraiya Faroqhi 17. yüzyılda Ankara ve Kayseri'deki mahalleleri evleri, ev sahirlerini ve ev mülkiyeti ilişkilerini kadı sicillerine dayanarak incelerken, hem önemli bir eksikliği gideriyor, hem de Osmanlı tarihi açısından çok önemli bazı soruları spekülasyona değil, somut verilere dayanan bir zemin üzerinde tartışma olanağı buluyor: 17\. yüzyılda 'barış içinde bir arada yaşama' olanakları daha sonraki dönemlerde düşünülmeyecek kadar ok olan bir topluma dayanan Osmanlı İmparatorloğu'nu oluşturan farklı altgruplar ne zaman birbirlerinde kopmaya başladılar? 17. yüzyılda Ankara ve Kayseri kent toplumları ne ölçüde 19. ve 20. yüzyıldaki gerilimleri haber veriyordu? Osmanlı'da farklı dinlere mensup insanların ayrı bir mahallelerde toplandığı görüşü her yerde ve her zaman geçerli miydi? Yoksa bu alanda da çeşitli etkenlerden kaynaklanan tarihsel süreçler mi söz konusuydu? Kent dokularının değişiminde Celali isyanları ne ölçüde etkili olmuştur? Ankara ve Kayseri'deki zengin ve yoksul mahallelerin dar sokaklarında, asırlık konaklarında, güzel evlerinde çıkılmış bir zaman/mekân yolculuğunun ürünü olan bu önemli eseri, yerleşik kalıpları sarsıp tarihe farklı ve yaratıcı bir gözle bakmanın keyfini de okuyucuyla paylaşıyor.

Economic Life in Ottoman Jerusalem

1989

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 makes full use of the rich and hitherto unexplored Arabic and Turkish archives relating to this period to reconstruct a vivid and detailed picture of everyday life in this lively urban centre. His study focuses on the major guilds of sixteenth-century Jerusalem - butchers, soap-producers and dealers, millers and bakers, describing and analysing their production methods, prices and measures, and the services they provided for the local population. In addition, their economic ties with neighbouring villages, as well as their social background and inter-relations are discussed. The author shows how this detailed knowledge can lead to a better understanding of the longer-term changes in the economy of the city and of the Empire as a whole.

Popular Culture in Medieval Cairo

1993

This is the first book-length study of popular culture in a medieval Islamic city. Dr. Shoshan draws together a wealth of Arabic sources to explore popular religion against the background of the growing influence of Sufism, an important biography of Muhammad that was suppressed by the learned, and the origins and popular practices of the annual Nawruz festival. He also assesses the political beliefs and economic expectations of the Carene commoners and the complex relationship between the culture of the elite and that of the people of Cairo.

Kadılar, Kullar, Kudüslü Köylüler

1994

Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda nüfusun büyük çoğunluğunu oluşturan köylüler, resmi vekayınamelerde en fazla imparatorluk tarihindeki büyük kişilerin ya da olayların arka planı olarak yer alır veya ancak ayaklandıklarında tarih sahnesinin önüne çıkma şansını bulurlar. Osmanlı tarihi boyunca, egemenliğin temellerinden biri ve devlet gücünün ayrılmaz parçası olarak kalan köylü nüfus, resmi belgelerde genellikle tahıl, yağ, et, meyve ya da gümüş miktarlarına dönüşmüş vergi mükellefleri listesi olarak boy gösterir. Hele söz konusu olan payı tahta ve büyük ekonomik merkezlere görece uzakta kalan Filistin’in köylüleriyse, görünürlük kazanmaları iyice zorlaşır. Amy Singer, Kadılar, Kullar, Kudüslü Köylüler’de tapu tahrir defterleri, Kudüs kadı sicilleri ve mühimme defterlerini tek tek tarayarak elde ettiği bilgilerle Filistin köylülerini ete kemiğe büründürüyor,16. yüzyıl Kudüs ve Filistin’ininin bir panaromasını bugüne dek görülmemiş yönlerini de ekleyerek tamamlıyor.

#12

Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190–1350

1995

Michael Chamberlain focuses on medieval Damascus to develop a new approach to the relationship between the society and culture of the Middle East. The author argues that historians have long imposed European strictures onto societies to which they were alien. Western concepts of legitimate order were inappropriate to medieval Muslim society where social advancement was dependent upon the production of knowledge and religious patronage, and it was the household, rather than the state agency or corporation, that held political and social power. A parallel is drawn between the learned elite and the warriors of Damascus who, through similar strategies, acquired status and power and passed them on in their households. By examining material from the Latin West, Sung China and the Sinicized empires of Inner Asia, the author addresses the nature of political power in the period.

#13

The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt

The Rise of the Qazdaglis

1996

In a lucidly argued revisionist study of military society in Ottoman Egypt, Jane Hathaway contends that the basic framework within which this elite operated was the household, a conglomerate of patron-client ties. Using Turkish and Arabic archival sources, the author focuses on the Qazdagli household, a military group that came to dominate Egypt. This pioneering study will have a major impact on the understanding of Egyptian history, and will be essential reading for scholars in the field, and for premodern historians generally.

#14

Reinterpreting Islamic Historiography

Harun al-Rashid and the Narrative of the Abbasid Caliphate

1995

The reigns of the caliph Harun al-Rashid and his successor al-Ma'mun have long been viewed as the golden age of the medieval Islamic caliphate. Yet how did chroniclers represent this crucial period? Tayeb El-Hibri's book applies a new literary-critical reading to the sources to demonstrate how medieval narrators devised various elusive ways of shedding light on controversial religious, political and social issues, while ostensibly presenting a history loyal to the 'Abbasid dynasty. This is an important book that represents a landmark in the field of early Islamic historiography.

#17

Empire and Elites after the Muslim Conquest

The Transformation of Northern Mesopotamia

1996

The study of early Islamic history has flourished in recent years. Chase Robinson's book takes full account of the latest research, interweaving history and historiography to interpret the political, social, and economic transformations in the Mesopotamian region after the Islamic conquests. Using Arabic and Syriac sources, the author focuses on the Muslim and Christian élites, demonstrating that significant social change took place only at the end of the seventh century. This is a sophisticated study at the cutting-edge of a burgeoning field in Islamic studies.

#19

Law, Society and Culture in the Maghrib, 1300–1500

2002

David Powers analyzes the application of Islamic law through six cases which took place during the period 1300 to 1500 in the Maghrib. The source for these disputes are fatwas issued by the muftis, which Powers uses to situate each case in its historical context and to interpret the principles of law. He demonstrates that, contrary to popular stereotypes, muftis were dedicated to reasoned argument. The book represents a ground-breaking approach to a complex subject area for students and scholars.

#20

Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily

The Royal Diwan

2002

Jeremy Johns' unique study is the first comprehensive account of the Arabic administration of Norman Sicily. While it is generally assumed that the Normans inherited their administration from the Muslim governors of the island, Johns demonstrates that the Norman kings actually restructured their administration to the model of Fatimid Egypt. Controversially, he suggests that their intention was not administrative efficiency, but the projection of their royal image. This accessible account of the Norman rulers reveals how they related to their counterparts in the Muslim Mediterranean.

#26

The Shiites of Lebanon under Ottoman Rule, 1516–1788

2010

The Shiites of Lebanon under Ottoman Rule provides an original perspective on the history of the Shiites as a constituent of Lebanese society. Winter presents a history of the community before the 19th century, based primarily on Ottoman Turkish documents. From these, he examines how local Shiites were well integrated in the Ottoman system of rule, and that Lebanon as an autonomous entity only developed in the course of the 18th century through the marginalization and then violent elimination of the indigenous Shiite leaderships by an increasingly powerful Druze-Maronite emirate. As such the book recovers the Ottoman-era history of a group which has always been neglected in chronicle-based works, and in doing so, fundamentally calls into question the historic place within 'Lebanon' of what has today become the country's largest and most activist sectarian community.

#27

The Legendary Biographies of Tamerlane

Islam and Heroic Apocrypha in Central Asia

2011

Timur (or Tamerlane) is famous as the fourteenth-century conqueror of much of Central Eurasia and the founder of the Timurid dynasty. His reputation lived on in his native lands and reappeared some three centuries after his death in the form of fictional biographies, authored anonymously in Persian and Turkic. These biographies have become part of popular culture. Despite a direct continuity in their production from the eighteenth century to the present, they remain virtually unknown to people outside the region. This remarkable and rigorous scholarly appraisal of the legendary biographies of Tamerlane is the first of its kind in any language. The book sheds light not only on the character of Tamerlane and how he was remembered and championed by many generations after his demise, but also on the era in which the biographies were written, and how they were conceived and received by the local populace during an age of crisis in their own history.

#28

The Origins of the Shi'a

Identity, Ritual, and Sacred Space in Eighth-Century K?fa

2011

The Sunnī-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 Kūfa (present-day Najaf). This book explores the birth and development of Shī'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.

#31

The Power of Oratory in the Medieval Muslim World

2012

Oratory and sermons had a fixed place in the religious and civic rituals of pre-modern Muslim societies and were indispensible for transmitting religious knowledge, legitimizing 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' 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 analyzes 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, offer abundant proof of cultural exchange between al-Andalus and the eastern regions of the Islamic empires, as preachers traveled back and forth between the great cities of Cordoba, Qayrawan, Baghdad, and Cairo. In this way, the book sheds light on different regional practices and the juridical debates between individual preachers around correct performance.

#35

Law and Piety in Medieval Islam

2012

The Ayyubid and Mamluk periods were some of the most intellectually fecund in Islamic history. Megan H. Reid's book, which traverses three centuries from 1170 to 1500, recovers the stories of medieval men and women who were renowned not only for their intellectual prowess but also for their devotional piety. Through these stories, the book examines trends in voluntary religious practice that have been largely overlooked in modern scholarship. This type of piety was distinguished by the pursuit of God's favor through additional rituals, which emphasized the body as an instrument of worship and the rejection of the temptation of worldly pleasures and even society itself. Using an array of sources including manuals of law, fatwa collections, chronicles and obituaries, the book shows what it meant to be a good Muslim in the medieval period and how Islamic law defined holy behavior. In its concentration on personal piety, ritual and religious practice the book offers an intimate perspective on early Islamic society.

#37

The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran

Tradition, Memory, and Conversion

2013

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. Through these renegotiations, Iranians developed a sense of Islam as an authentically Iranian religion, as they simultaneously shaped the broader historiographic tradition in Arabic and Persian."

#38

The Mamluk City in the Middle East

History, Culture, and the Urban Landscape

2014

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 adroitly 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.

#39

Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, 1500–1800

2014

Physical, sensory, and mental impairments can influence an individual's status in society as much as the more familiar categories of gender, class, religion, race, and ethnicity. This was especially true of the Ottoman Arab world, where being judged able or disabled impacted every aspect of a person's life, including performance of religious ritual, marriage, job opportunities, and the ability to buy and sell property. Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, 1500-1800 is the first book-length historical study of blindness, deafness, intersex, and madness in the Middle East and North Africa from the perspective of disability. Unlike previous scholarly works that examine disability as discussed in religious texts such as the Qur'an and the Hadith, this study focuses on representations and experiences of impairments across a wide range of sources, including chronicles, biographical dictionaries, medicine, and legal texts.

#40

The Holy City of Medina

Sacred Space in Early Islamic Arabia

2014

This is the first book-length study of the emergence of Medina, in modern Saudi Arabia, as a widely venerated sacred space and holy city over the course of the first three Islamic centuries (the seventh to ninth centuries CE). This was a dynamic period that witnessed the evolution of many Islamic political, religious and legal doctrines, and the book situates Medina's emerging sanctity within the appropriate historical contexts. The book focuses on the roles played by the Prophet Muḥammad, by the Umayyad and early Abbasid caliphs and by Muslim legal scholars. It shows that Medina's emergence as a holy city, alongside Mecca and Jerusalem, as well as the development of many of the doctrines associated with its sanctity, was the result of gradual and contested processes and was intimately linked with important contemporary developments concerning the legitimation of political, religious and legal authority in the Islamic world.

#41

Muslim Midwives

The Craft of Birthing in the Premodern Middle East

2014

This book reconstructs the role of midwives in medieval to early modern Islamic history through a careful reading of a wide range of classical and medieval Arabic sources. The author casts the midwife's social status in premodern Islam as a privileged position from which she could mediate between male authority in patriarchal society and female reproductive power within the family. This study also takes a broader historical view of midwifery in the Middle East by examining the tensions between learned medicine (male) and popular, medico-religious practices (female) from early Islam into the Ottoman period and addressing the confrontation between traditional midwifery and Western obstetrics in the first half of the nineteenth century.

#42

Doubt in Islamic Law

A History of Legal Maxims, Interpretation, and Islamic Criminal Law

2014

This book considers an important and largely neglected area of Islamic law by exploring how medieval Muslim jurists resolved criminal cases that could not be proven beyond a doubt. Intisar A. Rabb calls into question a controversial popular notion about Islamic law today, which is that Islamic law is a divine legal tradition that has little room for discretion or doubt, particularly in Islamic criminal law. Despite its contemporary popularity, that notion turns out to have been far outside the mainstream of Islamic law for most of its history. Instead of rejecting doubt, medieval Muslim scholars largely embraced it. In fact, they used doubt to enlarge their own power and to construct Islamic criminal law itself. Through a close examination of legal, historical, and theological sources, and a range of illustrative case studies, this book shows that Muslim jurists developed a highly sophisticated and regulated system for dealing with Islam's unique concept of doubt, which evolved from the seventh to the sixteenth century.

#43

النشأة الثانية للفقه الإسلامي

المذهب الحنفي في فجر الإمبراطورية العثمانية الحديثة

2014

النشأة الثانية للفقه الإسلامي - المذهب الحنفي في فجر الإمبراطورية العثمانية الحديثة

#44

Gender Hierarchy in the Qur'ān

Medieval Interpretations, Modern Responses

2015

This book explores how medieval and modern Muslim religious scholars ('ulam ') interpret gender roles in Qur' nic verses on legal testimony, marriage, and human creation. Citing these verses, medieval scholars developed increasingly complex laws and interpretations upholding a male-dominated gender hierarchy; aspects of their interpretations influence religious norms and state laws in Muslim-majority countries today, yet other aspects have been discarded entirely. Karen Bauer traces the evolution of their interpretations, showing how they have been adopted, adapted, rejected, or replaced over time, by comparing the Qur' n with a wide range of Qur' nic commentaries and interviews with prominent religious scholars from Iran and Syria. At times, tradition is modified in unexpected ways: learned women argue against gender equality, or Grand Ayatollahs reject sayings of the Prophet, citing science instead. This innovative and engaging study highlights the effects of social and intellectual contexts on the formation of tradition, and on modern responses to it."

#45

Sexual Violation in Islamic Law

Substance, Evidence, and Procedure

2015

This book provides a detailed analysis of Islamic juristic writings on the topic of rape and argues that classical Islamic jurisprudence contained nuanced, substantially divergent doctrines of sexual violation as a punishable crime. The work centers on legal discourses of the first six centuries of Islam, the period during which these discourses reached their classical forms, and chronicles the juristic conflict over whether or not to provide monetary compensations to victims. Along with tracing the emergence and development of this conflict over time, Hina Azam explains evidentiary ramifications of each of the two competing positions, which are examined through debates between the Ḥanafī and Mālikī schools of law. This study examines several critical themes in Islamic law, such as the relationship between sexuality and property, the tension between divine rights and personal rights in sex crimes, and justifications of victim's rights afforded by the two competing doctrines.

Authors

Tayeb El-Hibri is currently professor of Arabic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He obtained his BA in History from Stanford University (1986) and Ph.D. in Islamic history from Columbia University (1994). He has published: Reinterpreting Islamic Historiography: Harun al-Rashid and the Narrative of the Abbasid Caliphate (1999), and Parable and Politics in Early Islamic History: The Rashidun Caliphs (2010), and a range of articles in journals such as: International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Journal of Near Eastern Studies and Der Islam

Suraiya Faroqhi was born in Berlin to a German mother and Indian father in 1941. She studied at Hamburg University and she came to Istanbul through a university exchange program when she was 21. At Istanbul University, she became a student of Ömer Lütfi Barkan. She completed her master's degree in Hamburg and between 1968-1970 she studied English Language Teaching at Indiana University-Bloomington. After her post-doctorate, she worked as English Lecturer at METU. She retired from METU in 1987 and from München Ludwig Maximillan Universität in 2005. A turning point in her life came in 1962-63, when she took the opportunity to go to Istanbul University on a fellowship as an exchange student. Subsequently she became a student of Ömer Lüfti Barkan, one of the founding fathers of Ottoman history and an editor of Annales. When she first read Fernand Braudel at Barkan’s insistence, she “had the feeling that’s the sort of thing I wanted to do.” She wrote her doctoral thesis at Hamburg on a set of documents that a late 16th-century vizier submitted to his sultan discussing Ottoman politics at the time.[1] She is regarded as one of the most important economic and social historians of the Ottoman Empire working today. Professor Faroqhi has written substantially on Ottoman urban history, arts and crafts, and on the hitherto underrepresented world of the ordinary people in the empire. She is well known for her distinctive approach to Ottoman everyday life and public culture. She has published numerous books and articles in the field of pre- modern Ottoman history.

Dr. Karen Bauer (PhD, Princeton) is a Senior Research Associate in the Qur’anic Studies Unit of the Institute of Ismaili Studies, London. She specialises in Islamic social and intellectual history; her specific interests include the Qur’an and Qur’anic exegesis, the history of emotions in early Islam, and gender in Islamic history and thought.

Amnon Cohen

Author · 1 books

Is an Israeli politician and member of the Knesset for Shas. Cohen made aliyah to Israel in 1973. He gained a BA in business administration at the Center for Academic Studies in Kiryat Ono and took a two-year course at the Institute for Local Government in Bar-Ilan University. Cohen served as deputy mayor and acting mayor of Ramla, and chaired the city's Organisation for Prisoner Rehabilitation. He has also been a member of the city union on Secondary Education, the Ayalon Sewage Programme, the Ayalon Fire Department and the board of Amal College. He was first elected to the Knesset on Shas' list in 1999 and chaired the Public Petitions committee. He retained his seat in the 2003 elections, after which he chaired the State Control and Economic Affairs committees. He was re-elected again in 2006, and served as a Deputy Speaker of the Knesset. In 2006 he won the Quality of Government Badge for legislators. He retained his seat in the 2009 elections after being placed fourth on the Shas list. Cohen is married with four children and lives in Ramla.

Chase F Robinson is Distinguished Professor and Provost of the Graduate Center, The City University of New York. A specialist in early Islamic history and historiography, he is the author or editor of several books, most recently The New Cambridge History of Islam, Volume 1: The Formation of the Islamic World, Sixth to Eleventh Centuries (2011, ed).