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Scholars have long thought that, following the Muslim Golden Age of the medieval era, the Ottoman Empire grew culturally and technologically isolated, losing interest in innovation and placing the empire on a path toward stagnation and decline. Science among the Ottomans challenges this widely accepted Western image of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottomans as backward and impoverished. In the first book on this topic in English in over sixty years, Miri Shefer-Mossensohn contends that Ottoman society and culture created a fertile environment that fostered diverse scientific activity. She demonstrates that the Ottomans excelled in adapting the inventions of others to their own ...
The social history of medicine in the Ottoman Empire and the historic Middle East is told in rich detail for the first time in English. Accessible and engaging, Ottoman Medicine sheds light on the work and power of medical practitioners in the Ottoman world. The enduring significance and fascinating history of Ottoman medicine emerge through a consideration of its medical ethics, troubled relationship with religion, standards of professionalism, bureaucratization and health systems management, and the extent of state control. Of interest to healthcare providers, healers, and patients, this book helps us better understand and appreciate the medical practices of non-Western societies.
Medieval Arab notions of physical difference can feel singularly arresting for modern audiences. Did you know that blue eyes, baldness, bad breath and boils were all considered bodily 'blights', as were cross eyes, lameness and deafness? What assumptions about bodies influenced this particular vision of physical difference? How did blighted people view their own bodies? Through close analyses of anecdotes, personal letters, (auto)biographies, erotic poetry, non-binding legal opinions, diaristic chronicles and theological tracts, the cultural views and experiences of disability and difference in the medieval Islamic world are brought to life.
Based on Islamist writings, political tracts, and interviews with Islamists, this book examines Muslim-Christian relations in Egypt from the perspective of Islamic conceptions of citizenship, and provides non-Muslim responses to those views.
A millennium ago, Baghdad was the capital of one of history’s greatest civilizations. A new Islamic era was under way. Yet despite the profound cultural achievements, many Muslims felt their society had gone astray. ShiË€a Muslims challenged the dominant narrative of Islamic success with stories of loss. Faithful Muslims have long debated whether Sunni caliphs or ShiË€a imams were the true heirs of the Prophet Muhammad. More influential has been the way Muslim communities remembered those disputes through stories that influenced how to think and feel about them, Matthew Pierce argues. Twelve Infallible Men focuses on the role of narratives of the imams in the development of a distinct ShiË...
The first comprehensive volume of articles on plague and other diseases that afflicted humans and animals in the Ottoman Empire--from the Black Death to the fall of the empire.
This is the first systematic scholarly study of the Ottoman experience of plague during the Black Death pandemic and the centuries that followed. Using a wealth of archival and narrative sources, including medical treatises, hagiographies, and travelers' accounts, as well as recent scientific research, Nükhet Varlik demonstrates how plague interacted with the environmental, social, and political structures of the Ottoman Empire from the late medieval through the early modern era. The book argues that the empire's growth transformed the epidemiological patterns of plague by bringing diverse ecological zones into interaction and by intensifying the mobilities of exchange among both human and non-human agents. Varlik maintains that persistent plagues elicited new forms of cultural imagination and expression, as well as a new body of knowledge about the disease. In turn, this new consciousness sharpened the Ottoman administrative response to the plague, while contributing to the makings of an early modern state.
This book reflects on debates among historians of science, medicine and technology as well as Islamicate societies about fundamental questions of how we think and write about the intellec-tual and technological past in cultures to which we do not belong any longer or never were a member of. These debates are occasioned by the manner in which amateurs have taken bits and pieces from our academic narratives and those of our predecessors, stripped them of their richness in detail and their often agonizing efforts to interpret these details, and rearranged them in simplifying and often misguided fashion as outdated stories about glory, success, pri-ority and progress. Our texts are accompanied b...
This work presents a significant panorama of studies on the history and role of hospitals in the Indo-Iranian world during the early modern and the modern periods when both traditional Avicennian medicine as well as Western medicine were practiced.
Reading Clocks, Alla Turca explores the technological and social aspects of Ottoman temporal culture, where religious and secular powers competed and colluded for authority, the army tried to rationalize its systems of training and communication, and schoolboys complained about how long classes were. The conflicts that played out on the field of temporal systems were not along the axes one might expect, with secular, urban, rationalist, modernizing, and Europeanizing forces arrayed against rural, traditional, religious, and nationalist people and parties. Rather, religious institutions saw the rationalization of temporal culture as a way to extend their authority (the muezzin s call to praye...