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The complex history of Lebanese Shi'ites has traditionally been portrayed as rooted in religious and sectarian forces. The Abisaabs uncover a more nuanced account in which colonialism, the modern state, social class, and provincial politics profoundly shaped Shi'i society.
The authors trace the sociopolitical, economic, and intellectual transformation of the Shi'ites of Lebanon from 1920 during the French colonial period until the late twentieth...
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"Winner of the 2017 M. Fuat Köprülü Book Prize, Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association" Stefan Winter is associate professor of history at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM). He is the author of The Shiites of Lebanon under Ottoman Rule.
The 'Alawis, or Alawites, are a prominent religious minority in northern Syria, Lebanon, and southern Turkey, best known today for enjoying disproportionate political power in war-torn Syria. In...
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The story of the succession to the Prophet Muhammad and the rise of the Rashidun Caliphate (632-661 AD) has been familiar to historians from the political histories of medieval Islam, which lend a factual credibility to scholarly narratives, and the competing perspectives of Sunni and Shi'i Islam, which focus on the legitimacy of their claims. While descriptive and varied, these approaches have long excluded a third reading in which the conflict over...
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"ISIS is on a campaign to destroy the Western world of "infidels." Who is ISIS? What do its leaders believe? And why exactly do they hate us? New York Times bestselling author Robert Spencer, author of "The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran, takes on the Islamic State in The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS"--
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Positioned at the crossroads of the maritime routes linking the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, the Yemeni port of Aden grew to be one of the medieval world's greatest commercial hubs. Approaching Aden's history between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries through the prism of overseas trade and commercial culture, Roxani Eleni Margariti examines the ways in which physical space and urban institutions developed to serve and harness the commercial...
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The Muqaddimah, often translated as "Introduction" or "Prolegomenon," is the most important Islamic history of the premodern world. Written by the great fourteenth-century Arab scholar Ibn Khaldûn (d. 1406), this monumental work established the foundations of several fields of knowledge, including the philosophy of history, sociology, ethnography, and economics. The first complete English translation, by the eminent Islamicist and interpreter of...
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Murtada al-Zabidi was a Humanist scholar and a Muslim, whose twelfth-century writings are here examined in the context of their geographical and historical setting. The period when Zabidi was writing saw a shift in the balance of power from the Muslim empires to the Western world, reflected in the stories he told of his travels from India on to Cairo, across vast distances and coming across an extraordinary range of people. The five chapters in this...
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Mawdudi argues that the true understanding of Islamic civilization is possible only by having access to the soul of that civilization and its underlying fundamental principles--belief in God, the angels, the Prophets, the Revealed Books and the Last Day--rather than to its manifestations in knowledge, literature, fine arts, social life or its system of governance.
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Islam as a cultural, intellectual, and religious venture appears in the popular imagination as a monolithic entity. Orientalists of the traditional ilk have tended to describe it in essentialist terms, whilst many fundamentalist Muslims themselves promote their construction of a pure and unadulterated Islamic past, to which they strive to return by purging foreign or unauthentic elements from their religion. Next to these attempts, another more traditional...
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Bernard Lewis is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, a long-term member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the author of numerous works on the Middle East. Mark R. Cohen is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor Emeritus of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton.
This landmark book probes Muslims' attitudes toward Jews and Judaism as a special case of their view of other...
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2009
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"A masterly and elegantly told story that weaves together the Iraqi past and present."
—New York Times Book Review
"A first-class investigation...that tells the reader more about the tensions of living close to power in Saddam's dictatorship."
—Washington Post
The Weight of a Mustard Seed is an unprecedented and intimate account of Iraqi life under Saddam Hussein's brutal regime,
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From the point of view of economic history, the ideal way to study any institution of commercial law would be to compare the information contained in legal codes and treatises with the material relating to its application in economic life as manifested by actual contracts, letters, and business records found in archives and other repositories. In the case of the early centuries of the Islamic period, available sources unfortunately preclude such a...
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Cultivating the Past, Living the Modern explores how and why heritage has emerged as a prevalent force in building the modern nation state of Oman. Amal Sachedina analyses the relations with the past that undergird the shift in Oman from an Ibadi shari'a Imamate (1913-1958) to a modern nation state from 1970 onwards.
Since its inception as a nation state, material forms in the Sultanate of Oman-such as old mosques and shari'a manuscripts, restored...
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The inside story of political protest in Saudi Arabia-on the ground, in the suburbs, and in the face of increasing state repression.
Graveyard of Clerics takes up two global phenomena intimately linked in Saudi Arabia: urban sprawl and religious activism. Saudi suburbia emerged after World War II as citizens fled crowded inner cities. Developed to encourage a society of docile, isolated citizens, suburbs instead opened new spaces for political action....
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Working and living as an authentic Muslim-comporting oneself in an Islamically appropriate way-in the global economy can be very challenging. How do middle-class Muslims living in the Middle East navigate contemporary economic demands in a distinctly Islamic way? What are the impacts of these efforts on their Islamic piety? To what authority does one turn when questions arise? What happens when the answers vary and there is little or no consensus?...
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"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2006" Yitzhak Nakash is associate professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at Brandeis University. The author of The Shi'is of Iraq (Princeton), he has contributed articles to Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, and the New York Times.
As the world focuses on the conflict in Iraq, the most important political players in that country today are not the Sunni insurgents. Instead, they are Iraq's Shi'I...
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In the summer of 1978, Musa al Sadr, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Shia sect in Lebanon, disappeared mysteriously while on a visit to Libya. As in the Shia myth of the "Hidden Imam," this modern-day Imam left his followers upholding his legacy and awaiting his return. Considered an outsider when he had arrived in Lebanon in 1959 from his native Iran, he gradually assumed the role of charismatic mullah, and was instrumental in transforming the...
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In cities awakening to global exchange under European imperial rule, Muslims encountered all sorts of strange and wonderful new things-synthetic toothbrushes, toilet paper, telegraphs, railways, gramophones, brimmed hats, tailored pants, and lottery tickets. The passage of these goods across cultural frontiers spurred passionate debates. Realizing that these goods were changing religious practices and values, proponents and critics wondered what to...
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Shahrokh Meskoob was, one of Iran's leading intellectuals and a preeminent scholar of Persian literary traditions, language, and cultural identity. In The Ant's Gift, Meskoob applies his insight and considerable analytical skills to the Shahnameh, the national epic of Iran completed in 1010 by the poet Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi. Tracing Iran's history from its first mythical king to the fall of the Sasanian dynasty, the Shahnameh includes myths, romance,...
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On the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, which was also the fiftieth anniversary of the since the Six-day War and the tenth anniversary of the Blockade of Gaza, Justin Butcher-along with ten other companions (and another hundred joining him at points along the way)-walked from London to Jerusalem as an act of solidarity, penance, and hope. Weaving in history of the Holy Land as he moves across Europe, from Balfour and Christian Zionism, to colonialism...
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