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The Legacy of Muslim Spain
The civilisation of medieval Muslim Spain is perhaps the most brilliant and prosperous of its age and has been essential to the direction which civilisation in medieval Europe took. This volume is the first ever in any language to deal in a really comprehensive manner with all major aspects of Islamic civilisation in medieval Spain.
The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise
A finalist for World Magazine's Book of the Year! Scholars, journalists, and even politicians uphold Muslim-ruled medieval Spain—"al-Andalus"—as a multicultural paradise, a place where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in harmony. There is only one problem with this widely accepted account: it is a myth. In this groundbreaking book, Northwestern University scholar Darío Fernández-Morera tells the full story of Islamic Spain. The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise shines light on hidden history by drawing on an abundance of primary sources that scholars have ignored, as well as archaeological evidence only recently unearthed. This supposed beacon of peaceful coexistence began, of course,...
'Abd al-Mu'min
‘Abd al-Mu’min (c.1094–1163) did not establish the first caliphate in the Islamic West, but his encompassed more territory than any that had preceded it. As leader of the Almohads, a politico-religious movement grounded in an uncompromising belief in the unity of God, he unified for the first time the whole of North Africa west of Egypt, and conquered much of southern Spain. Studying every facet of ‘Abd al-Mu’min’s rule, from his violent repression of opposition to the flourishing of scholarship during his reign, Maribel Fierro reveals an intelligent leader and a skilled military commander who sought to build a lasting caliphate across disparate and diverse societies.
Christian Identity amid Islam in Medieval Spain
In Christian Identity amid Islam in Medieval Spain Charles L. Tieszen explores a small corpus of texts from medieval Spain in an effort to deduce how their authors defined their religious identity in light of Islam, and in turn, how they hoped their readers would distinguish themselves from the Muslims in their midst. It is argued that the use of reflected self-image as a tool for interpreting Christian anti-Muslim polemic allows such texts to be read for the self-image of their authors instead of the image of just those they attacked. As such, polemic becomes a set of borders authors offered to their communities, helping them to successfully navigate inter-religious living.
Al-Maqāmāt al-luzūmīya by Abū l-Ṭāhir Muḥammad ibn Yūsuf al-Tamīmī al-Saraqusṭī, ibn al-Aštarkūwī (d. 538/1143)
Although the Arabic maqāmah, a branch of the picaresque genre, was much cultivated in the Middle Ages, little is known about it aside from the works of al-Hamadhānī and al-ḥarīrī, its first two cultivators. This translation of the Maqāmāt al-luzūmīyah by the twelfth-century Andalusi author al-Saraqustī makes available to Western scholars of narrative prose a hitherto little-known but important collection of Arabic maqāmāt. The "Preliminary Study" places this specific collection in the context of the overall maqama genre, it further places that genre in the contexts both of Arabic and of world literature, exploring the differences between the picaresque genre and the modern novel. It discusses the meaning of the work, shows the way in which it is original within its genre, and establishes its organic unity. Finally, it shows that late and post-classical Arabic literary works such as that of al-Saraqustī, which were composed during the so-called "period of decadence," are not decadent at all, contrary to the opinion prevalent among scholars in the field.
Military Diasporas
Military Diasporas proposes a new research approach to analyse the role of foreign military personnel as composite and partly imagined para-ethnic groups. These groups not only buttressed a state or empire’s military might but crucially connected, policed, and administered (parts of) realms as a transcultural and transimperial class while representing the polity’s universal or at least cosmopolitan aspirations at court or on diplomatic and military missions. Case studies of foreign militaries with a focus on their diasporic elements include the Achaemenid Empire, Ptolemaic Egypt, and the Roman Empire in the ancient world. These are followed by chapters on the Sassanid and Islamic occupat...
Negotiating Cultures
James I "the Conqueror", king of Arago-Catalonia, conquered Mediterranean Spain from Islam during fifty crusading years (1225-1276). From his many surrender treaties, only two survive in their interlinear bilingual originals, both presented here. Each reflects the fragmentation of post-Almohad Islam, the warrior heroes of Islam carving recalcitrant principalities out of the confusion, the hard-fought local negotiations and the confrontation between two radically opposed mentalities. The full meaning of these battered and deteriorated bits of parchment emerges only from minute reconstruction of the Arabic and Latinate texts and especially from ever-widening circles of changing contexts in each world, an historical kaleidoscope. Many surprises here await students of medieval Europe, the Islamic West, Spain, the Crusades, diplomacy, Mudejars/Moriscos, and cultural conflict and interchange.
Maqamat Al-luzumiyah,al-
This translation and study extend our knowlege of the Arabic genre of the maq?ma by some years. If translations of the genre are lacking, literary critical studies of it are even rarer. Therefore, the work will be of interest to scholars of Arabic, Spanish, and other literatures, to comparativists, literary historians, critics, and theoreticians.
Early Islamic Spain
Including maps, an extensive introduction and notes and commentary by the translator, Early Islamic Spain is the first English language translation of the important history of Islamic Spain by Ibn al-Qutiyyah, one of the earliest and significant histories of Muslim Spain and an important source for scholars.
