The Making of the Medieval Middle East

The Making of the Medieval Middle East PDF Author: Jack Tannous
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691179093
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 664

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Book Description
A bold new religious history of the late antique and medieval Middle East that places ordinary Christians at the center of the story In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. Jack Tannous argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East’s history. What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, Tannous provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East. This provocative book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.

The Making of the Medieval Middle East

The Making of the Medieval Middle East PDF Author: Jack Tannous
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691179093
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 664

Get Book Here

Book Description
A bold new religious history of the late antique and medieval Middle East that places ordinary Christians at the center of the story In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. Jack Tannous argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East’s history. What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, Tannous provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East. This provocative book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.

East Meets West in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times

East Meets West in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times PDF Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110321513
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 828

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Book Description
This new volume explores the surprisingly intense and complex relationships between East and West during the Middle Ages and the early modern world, combining a large number of critical studies representing such diverse fields as literary (German, French, Italian, English, Spanish, and Arabic) and other subdisciplines of history, religion, anthropology, and linguistics. The differences between Islam and Christianity erected strong barriers separating two global cultures, but, as this volume indicates, despite many attempts to 'Other' the opposing side, the premodern world experienced an astonishing degree of contacts, meetings, exchanges, and influences. Scientists, travelers, authors, medical researchers, chroniclers, diplomats, and merchants criss-crossed the East and the West, or studied the sources produced by the other culture for many different reasons. As much as the theoretical concept of 'Orientalism' has been useful in sensitizing us to the fundamental tensions and conflicts separating both worlds at least since the eighteenth century, the premodern world did not quite yet operate in such an ideological framework. Even though the Crusades had violently pitted Christians against Muslims, there were countless contacts and a palpitable curiosity on both sides both before, during, and after those religious warfares.

A Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages

A Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Eliyahu Ashtor
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description


The Black Death in the Middle East

The Black Death in the Middle East PDF Author: Michael Walters Dols
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691196680
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
In the middle of the fourteenth century a devastating epidemic of plague, commonly known in European history as the "Black Death," swept over the Eurasian continent. This book, based principally on Arabic sources, establishes the means of transmission and the chronology of the plague pandemic's advance through the Middle East. The prolonged reduction of population that began with the Black Death was of fundamental significance to the social and economic history of Egypt and Syria in the later Middle Ages. The epidemic's spread suggests a remarkable destruction of human life in the fourteenth century, and a series of plague recurrences appreciably slowed population growth in the following century and a half, impoverishing Middle Eastern society. Social reactions illustrate the strength of traditional Muslim values and practices, social organization, and cohesiveness. The sudden demographic decline brought about long-term as well as immediate economic adjustments in land values, salaries, and commerce. Michael W. Dols is Assistant Professor of History at California State University, Hayward. Originally published in 1977. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages

Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Houari Touati
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226808777
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
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.

Journeying Along Medieval Routes in Europe and the Middle East

Journeying Along Medieval Routes in Europe and the Middle East PDF Author: Alison L. Gascoigne
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN: 9782503541730
Category : Europe
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Focusing on routes and journeys throughout medieval Europe and the Middle East in the period between Late Antiquity and the thirteenth century, this multi-disciplinary book draws on travel narratives, chronicles, maps, charters, geographies, and material remains in order to shed new light on the experience of travelling in the Middle Ages. The contributions gathered here explore the experiences of travellers moving between Latin Europe and the Holy Land, between southern Italy and Sicily, and across Germany and England, from a range of disciplinary perspectives. In doing so, they offer unique insights into the experience, conditions, conceptualization, and impact of human movement in medieval Europe. Many essays place a strong emphasis on the methodological problems associated with the study of travel and its traces, and the collection is enhanced by the juxtaposition of scholarly work taking different approaches to this challenge. The papers included here engage in cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary dialogue and are supported by a discursive, contextualizing introduction by the editors.

Arab Women in the Middle Ages

Arab Women in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Shirley Guthrie
Publisher: Saqi
ISBN: 0863567649
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Regardless of social rank and religion, whether Christian, Jew, or Muslim, Arab women in the middle ages played an important role in the functioning of society. This book is a journey into their daily lives, their private spaces and public roles. First we are introduced into the women's sanctuaries, their homes, and what occurs within its realm - marriage and contraception, childbirth and childcare, culinary traditions, body and beauty rituals - providing rare insight into the rites and rituals prevalent among the different communities of the time. These women were also much present in the public arena and made important contributions in the fields of scholarship and the affairs of state. A number of them were benefactresses, poets, calligraphers, teachers and sales women. Others were singing girls, professional mourners, bath-attendants and prostitutes. How these women managed their daily affairs, both personal and professional, defined their roles in the wider spheres of society. Drawing from the Islamic traditions, as well as legal documents, historical sources and popular chronicles of the time, Guthrie's book offers an informative study of an area which remaisn relatively unexplored. 'A useful survey on Arab (mostly Muslim) women's lives in past centuries.' RJAS 'Of greatest use to educators and lecturers looking for diverse and entertaining details of various aspects of medieval Near Eastern social life.' International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 'Reveals a broad understanding of the subject' MESA Bulletin

Arabic Literary Salons in the Islamic Middle Ages

Arabic Literary Salons in the Islamic Middle Ages PDF Author: Samer M. Ali
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268074976
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Arabic literary salons emerged in ninth-century Iraq and, by the tenth, were flourishing in Baghdad and other urban centers. In an age before broadcast media and classroom education, salons were the primary source of entertainment and escape for middle- and upper-rank members of society, serving also as a space and means for educating the young. Although salons relied on a culture of oral performance from memory, scholars of Arabic literature have focused almost exclusively on the written dimensions of the tradition. That emphasis, argues Samer Ali, has neglected the interplay of oral and written, as well as of religious and secular knowledge in salon society, and the surprising ways in which these seemingly discrete categories blurred in the lived experience of participants. Looking at the period from 500 to 1250, and using methods from European medieval studies, folklore, and cultural anthropology, Ali interprets Arabic manuscripts in order to answer fundamental questions about literary salons as a social institution. He identifies salons not only as sites for socializing and educating, but as loci for performing literature and oral history; for creating and transmitting cultural identity; and for continually reinterpreting the past. A fascinating recovery of a key element of humanistic culture, Ali’s work will encourage a recasting of our understanding of verbal art, cultural memory, and daily life in medieval Arab culture.

Women in Middle Eastern History

Women in Middle Eastern History PDF Author: Nikki R. Keddie
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300157460
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 543

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Book Description
This history of Middle Eastern women is the first to survey gender relations in the Middle East from the earliest Islamic period to the present. Outstanding scholars analyze a rich array of sources ranging from histories, biographical dictionaries, law books, prescriptive treatises, and archival records, to the Traditions (hadith) of the Prophet and imaginative works like the Thousand and One Nights, to modern writings by Middle Eastern women and by Western writers. They show that gender boundaries in the Middle East have been neither fixed nor immutable: changes in family patterns, religious rituals, socio-economic necessity, myth and ideology—and not least, women’s attitudes—have expanded or circumscribed women’s roles and behavior through the ages.

Under Crescent and Cross

Under Crescent and Cross PDF Author: Mark R. Cohen
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691010823
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
On the Jews in the Middle ages