The New Cambridge History of Islam: Volume 4, Islamic Cultures and Societies to the End of the Eighteenth Century

The New Cambridge History of Islam: Volume 4, Islamic Cultures and Societies to the End of the Eighteenth Century
Author: Robert Irwin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 1104
Release: 2010-11-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316184315

Robert Irwin's authoritative introduction to the fourth volume of The New Cambridge History of Islam offers a panoramic vision of Islamic culture from its origins to around 1800. The introductory chapter, which highlights key developments and introduces some of Islam's most famous protagonists, paves the way for an extraordinarily varied collection of essays. The themes treated include religion and law, conversion, Islam's relationship with the natural world, governance and politics, caliphs and kings, philosophy, science, medicine, language, art, architecture, literature, music and even cookery. What emerges from this rich collection, written by an international team of experts, is the diversity and dynamism of the societies which created this flourishing civilization. Volume four of The New Cambridge History of Islam serves as a thematic companion to the three preceding, politically oriented volumes, and in coverage extends across the pre-modern Islamic world.

The New Cambridge History of Islam: Volume 6, Muslims and Modernity: Culture and Society since 1800

The New Cambridge History of Islam: Volume 6, Muslims and Modernity: Culture and Society since 1800
Author: Robert W. Hefner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 860
Release: 2010-11-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316175804

Unparalleled in its range of topics and geographical scope, the sixth and final volume of The New Cambridge History of Islam provides a comprehensive overview of Muslim culture and society since 1800. Robert Hefner's thought-provoking account of the political and intellectual transformation of the Muslim world introduces the volume, which proceeds with twenty-five essays by luminaries in their fields through a broad range of topics. These include developments in society and population, religious thought and Islamic law, Muslim views of modern politics and economics, education and the arts, cinema and new media. The essays, which highlight the diversity and richness of Islamic civilization, engage with regions outside the Middle East as well as within Islam's historic heartland. Narratives are clear and absorbing and will fascinate all those curious about the momentous changes that have taken place among the world's 1.4 billion Muslims in the last two centuries.

The New Cambridge History of Islam

The New Cambridge History of Islam
Author: Chase F. Robinson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 870
Release: 2010-11-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521838238

Volume One of The New Cambridge History of Islam, which surveys the political and cultural history of Islam from its Late Antique origins until the eleventh century, brings together contributions from leading scholars in the field. The book is divided into four parts. The first provides an overview of the physical and political geography of the Late Antique Middle East. The second charts the rise of Islam and the emergence of the Islamic political order under the Umayyad and the Abbasid caliphs of the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, followed by the dissolution of the empire in the tenth and eleventh. 'Regionalism', the overlapping histories of the empire's provinces, is the focus of Part Three, while Part Four provides a cutting-edge discussion of the sources and controversies of early Islamic history, including a survey of numismatics, archaeology and material culture.

A History of Diplomacy, Spatiality, and Islamic Ideals

A History of Diplomacy, Spatiality, and Islamic Ideals
Author: Malika Dekkiche
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2024-08-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1040090095

Inspired by the “spatial turn,” this volume links for the first time the study of diplomacy and spatiality in the premodern Islamicate world to understand practices and meanings ascribed to territory and realms. Debates on the nature of the sovereign state as a territorially defined political entity are closely linked to discussions of “modernity” and to the development of the field of international relations. While scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds have long questioned the existence of such a concept as a “territorial state,” rarely have they ventured outside the European context. A closer look at the premodern Islamicate world, however, shows that “space” and “territoriality” highly mattered in the conception of interstate contacts and in the conduct and evolution of diplomacy. This volume addresses these issues over the longue durée (thirteenth to nineteenth centuries) and from various approaches and sources, including letters, chancery manuals, notarial records, travelogues, chronicles, and fatwas. The contributors also explore the various diplomatic practices and understandings of spatiality that were present throughout the Islamicate world, from Al-Andalus to the Ottoman realms. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in a range of disciplines, including international relations, diplomatic history, and Islamic studies.

The Rise of the Arabic Book

The Rise of the Arabic Book
Author: Beatrice Gruendler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2020-10-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0674250265

The little-known story of the sophisticated and vibrant Arabic book culture that flourished during the Middle Ages. During the thirteenth century, Europe’s largest library owned fewer than 2,000 volumes. Libraries in the Arab world at the time had exponentially larger collections. Five libraries in Baghdad alone held between 200,000 and 1,000,000 books each, including multiple copies of standard works so that their many patrons could enjoy simultaneous access. How did the Arabic codex become so popular during the Middle Ages, even as the well-established form languished in Europe? Beatrice Gruendler’s The Rise of the Arabic Book answers this question through in-depth stories of bookmakers and book collectors, stationers and librarians, scholars and poets of the ninth century. The history of the book has been written with an outsize focus on Europe. The role books played in shaping the great literary cultures of the world beyond the West has been less known—until now. An internationally renowned expert in classical Arabic literature, Gruendler corrects this oversight and takes us into the rich literary milieu of early Arabic letters.

Non-Muslim Provinces under Early Islam

Non-Muslim Provinces under Early Islam
Author: Alison Vacca
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2017-09-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107188512

This book explores the Christian caliphal provinces of Armenia and Caucasian Albania as part of the larger Iranian cultural sphere.

Science and Religion in Mamluk Egypt

Science and Religion in Mamluk Egypt
Author: Nahyan Fancy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2013-06-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1136703683

The discovery of the pulmonary transit of blood was a ground-breaking discovery in the history of the life sciences, and a prerequisite for William Harvey’s fully developed theory of blood circulation three centuries later. This book is the first attempt at understanding Ibn al-Nafīs’s anatomical discovery from within the medical and theological works of this thirteenth century physician-jurist, and his broader social, religious and intellectual contexts. Although Ibn al-Nafīs did not posit a theory of blood circulation, he nevertheless challenged the reigning Galenic and Avicennian physiological theories, and the then prevailing anatomical understandings of the heart. Far from being a happy guess, Ibn al-Nafīs’s anatomical result is rooted in an extensive re-evaluation of the reigning medical theories. Moreover, this book shows that Ibn al-Nafīs’s re-evaluation is itself a result of his engagement with post-Avicennian debates on the relationship between reason and revelation, and the rationality of traditionalist beliefs, such as bodily resurrection. Breaking new ground by showing how medicine, philosophy and theology were intertwined in the intellectual fabric of pre-modern Islamic societies, Science and Religion in Mamluk Egypt will be of interest to students and scholars of the History of Science, the History of Medicine and Islamic Studies.

Christian Martyrs Under Islam

Christian Martyrs Under Islam
Author: Christian C. Sahner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2020-03-31
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 069120313X

A look at the developing conflicts in Christian-Muslim relations during late antiquity and the early Islamic era How did the medieval Middle East transform from a majority-Christian world to a majority-Muslim world, and what role did violence play in this process? Christian Martyrs under Islam explains how Christians across the early Islamic caliphate slowly converted to the faith of the Arab conquerors and how small groups of individuals rejected this faith through dramatic acts of resistance, including apostasy and blasphemy. Using previously untapped sources in a range of Middle Eastern languages, Christian Sahner introduces an unknown group of martyrs who were executed at the hands of Muslim officials between the seventh and ninth centuries CE. Found in places as diverse as Syria, Spain, Egypt, and Armenia, they include an alleged descendant of Muhammad who converted to Christianity, high-ranking Christian secretaries of the Muslim state who viciously insulted the Prophet, and the children of mixed marriages between Muslims and Christians. Sahner argues that Christians never experienced systematic persecution under the early caliphs, and indeed, they remained the largest portion of the population in the greater Middle East for centuries after the Arab conquest. Still, episodes of ferocious violence contributed to the spread of Islam within Christian societies, and memories of this bloodshed played a key role in shaping Christian identity in the new Islamic empire. Christian Martyrs under Islam examines how violence against Christians ended the age of porous religious boundaries and laid the foundations for more antagonistic Muslim-Christian relations in the centuries to come.

The Oxford Illustrated History of Science

The Oxford Illustrated History of Science
Author: Iwan Rhys Morus
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 606
Release: 2017-06-16
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0191640328

The Oxford Illustrated History of Science is the first ever fully illustrated global history of science, from Aristotle to the atom bomb - and beyond. The first part of the book tells the story of science in both East and West from antiquity to the Enlightenment: from the ancient Mediterranean world to ancient China; from the exchanges between Islamic and Christian scholars in the Middle Ages to the Chinese invention of gunpowder, paper, and the printing press; from the Scientific Revolution of sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe to the intellectual ferment of the eighteenth century. The chapters that follow focus on the increasingly specialized story of science since end of the eighteenth century, covering experimental science in the laboratory from Michael Faraday to CERN; the exploration of nature, from intrepid Victorian explorers to twentieth century primatologists; the mapping of the universe, from the discovery of Uranus to Big Bang theory; the impact of evolutionary ideas, from Lamarck, Darwin, and Wallace to DNA; and the story of theoretical physics, from James Clark Maxwell to Quantum Theory and beyond. A concluding chapter reflects on how scientists have communicated their work to a wider public, from the Great Exhibition of 1851 to the internet in the early twenty-first century.