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Ibn Khallikan's Biographical Dictionary, or Deaths of Eminent Men and History of the Sons of the Epoch, was the noted Arabic scholar Ibn Khallikan's most well-known and respected work. The author worked on the tome from 1256 to 1274, compiling names, genealogies, and histories of prominent or conspicuous men in the Islamic world. The final work was translated into English by William Mac Guckin de Slane and is longer than 2,700 pages. It has been quoted by many Arabic rhetoricians and grammarians in other works, as it is considered one of the most important records of Arabic history ever written. Here, separated into four volumes, the Biographical Dictionary is an essential work for any stude...
The Akhbar al-dawla al-saljuqiyya is one of the key primary documents on the history of Western Persia and Iraq in the 11th and 12th centuries. This book provides an accessible English translation and commentary on the text, making available to a new readership this significant work on the pre-modern history of the Middle East and the Turkish peoples. The text is a chronicle of the Seljuq dynasty as it emerged within the Iranian lands in the 11th and 12th centuries, dominating the Middle Eastern lands, from Turkey and Syria to Iran and eastern Afghanistan. During this formative period in the central and eastern Islamic lands, they inaugurated a pattern of Turkish political and military dominance of the Middle East and beyond, from Egypt to India, in some cases well into the 20th century. Shedding light on many otherwise obscure aspects of the political history of the region, the book provides a more detailed context for the political history of the wider area. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars of Middle Eastern history and is an important addition to the existing literature on the Seljuq dynasty.
This book deals with the controversial value of the sources on which the biography of Muhammad, the founder of Islam, is based. Discussions on this topic have been going on for more than a century but it has become especially debated during the last two decades. This volume contains ten articles which are the outcome of an international colloquium on the issue. Part one of the book examines the development of the Muslim tradition concerning the life of Muhammad while the other part focuses on the historical reliability of the source material. The volume reflects not only the most recent methodological developments in the study of the life of Muhammad but also the improvement of its material-basis due to sources which have only recently become available or which have been neglected.
The religious and strategic importance of Western Palestine in the Islamic period is clearly reflected in the hundreds of Arabic inscriptions found, the texts of which cover a variety of topics including construction, dedication, religious endowments, epitaphs, Qur'anic texts, prayers and invocations, all now assembled in this Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum Palaestinae (CIAP). The inscriptions are arranged according to site, and are studied in their respective topographical, historical and cultural contexts. In this way the Corpus offers more than a survey of inscriptions: it represents the epigraphical angle of the geographical history of the Holy Land.
During much of the twelfth century the Crusaders dominated the military scene in the Levant. The unification of Egypt and Syria by Saladin gradually changed the balance of power, which slowly begun to tilt in favour of the Muslims. This book examines the development and role of Muslim fortresses in the Levant at the time of the Crusaders and the Mongol invasion, situating the study within a broad historical, political and military context. Exploring the unification of Egypt with a large part of Syria and its effect on the balance of power in the region, Raphael gives a historical overview of the resulting military strategies and construction of fortresses. A detailed architectural analysis i...
This book exposes the mimetic assumption involved in early Islamic historiography, its literary practice and whatever subverts it as reflected in Ṭabarī's History. Four major events in the history of early Islam are then subject to analysis based on literary criticism and are shown to produce a new meaning.
During his research of the Arabic inscriptions in the Middle East at the end of the 19th century, Max van Berchem collected many squeezes of inscriptions. These squeezes are stored in the archives of the Fondation Max van Berchem in Geneva. The present publication wishes to present a scholarly record of these squeezes, many of which represent inscriptions that do no longer exist. This publication is the first of, hopefully, two addenda which will constitute a full record of one of the few treasures left by the great epigrapher in his archives. For many students of Arabic epigraphy these squeezes afford the only opportunity to have a close glimpse of the originals as possible, and learn about their contents with the aid of the photographs and studies which accompany them in this volume.
The squeezes of the Arabic inscriptions collected by Max van Berchem in the Middle East are presented here in a systematic way accompanied by their studies and photographs. This is the first of hopefully two volumes which will cover all the existing squeezes in the Archives, representing many inscriptions which do no longer exist.