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Acclaimed worldwide as the definitive biography of the Prophet Muhammad in the English language, Martin Lings' Muhammad: His Life Based to the Earliest Sources is unlike any other. Based on Arabic sources of the eighth and ninth centuries, of which some important passages are translated here for the first time, it owes the freshness and directness of its approach to the words of men and women who heard Muhammad speak and witnessed the events of his life. Martin Lings has an unusual gift for narrative. He has adopted a style which is at once extremely readable and reflects both the simplicity and grandeur of the story. The result is a book which will be read with equal enjoyment by those already familiar with Muhammad's life and those coming to it for the first time. Muhammad: His Life Based to the Earliest Sources was given an award by the government of Pakistan, and selected as the best biography of the Prophet in English at the National Seerat Conference in Islamabad in 1983.
Originally published: Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Southest Asia Program Publications, 1970.
The Prophet and the Age of Caliphates is an accessible history of the Near East from c.600-1050AD, the period in which Islamic society was formed. Beginning with the life of Muhammad and the birth of Islam, Hugh Kennedy goes on to explore the great Arab conquests of the seventh century and the golden age of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates when the world of Islam was politically and culturally far more developed than the West. The arrival of the Seljuk Turks and the period of political fragmentation which followed shattered this early unity, never to be recovered. This new edition is fully updated to take into account the considerable amount of new research on early Islam, and contains a c...
An author subject index to selected general interest periodicals of reference value in libraries.
Two major events occurred in the early centuries of Islam that determined its historical and spiritual development in the centuries that followed: the formation of the sacred scriptures, namely the Qur'an and the Hadith, and the chronic violence that surrounded the succession of the Prophet, manifesting in repression, revolution, massacre, and civil war. This is the first book to evaluate the writing of Islam's major scriptural sources within the context of these bloody, brutal conflicts. Conducting a philological and historical study of little-known though significant ancient texts, Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi rebuilds a Shi'ite understanding of Islam's early history and the genesis of its holy scriptures. At the same time, he proposes a fresh interpretative framework and a new data set for theorizing the early history of Islam, isolating the contradictions between Shi'ite and Sunni sources and their contribution to the tensions that rile these groups today.
In 1105, six years after the first crusaders from Europe conquered Jerusalem, a Damascene Muslim jurisprudent named ’Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami (d. 1106) publicly dictated an extended call to the military jihad (holy war) against the European invaders. Entitled Kitab al-Jihad (The Book of the Jihad), al-Sulami’s work both summoned his Muslim brethren to the jihad and instructed them in the manner in which it ought to be conducted, covering topics as diverse as who should fight and be fought, treatment of prisoners and plunder, and the need for participants to fight their own inner sinfulness before turning their efforts against the enemy. Al-Sulami’s text is vital for a complete understan...
Describes the dramatic advances in the field during the recent past, focusing on the ways in which molecular tools can be used to study the biology of parasites. Reflects the successful transfection of Leishmania, Trypanosoma, Toxoplasma and Plasmodium—a major breakthrough which allowed investigation into a range of new areas. The role of cytokines in immunity to parasites dominates the work on immunology. Also covers entirely new arenas including RNA editing.
The emergence of Islam has in recent years become a matter of heated debate, mainly because Islamic historiography is a battle-field of contradictory versions of the past. In this second collection of studies, several of which appear here for the first time, Michael Lecker distances himself from the clash of theories, concentrating instead on several basic issues. They all belong to the preparatory work that still remains to be done on the social and economic environment in which Islam emerged. The volume includes the following sections: Arabia on the Eve of Islam; Muhammad and his Companions; and Arabian Tribes in Pre- and Early Islamic Arabia. The third section includes much extended and fully-documented versions of nine Encyclopaedia of Islam articles dealing with Arabian tribes and tribal society.