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A biography of the remarkable administrator who for thirty years effectively ran Persia's great Seljuk Empire (1037-1194).
In Advice for the Sultan Neguin Yavari excavates multiple, conflicting strands of Islamic political thought from the medieval past to the present, reassessing these ideas and their impact over the longue duree. Her aim is to revise our understanding of the relation- ship between modern history and the current master narratives of both Western and Islamic histories of political thought. She does this by re-examinating Islamic advice literature, bringing it to life in novel ways. Yavari argues that if read laterally and closely, it promotes secular values such as reason and moderation as the most effective safeguard against political instability and divine rebuke. Related questions raised in t...
These essays were written by colleagues and former students of Richard Bulliet, the preeminent Middle East scholar whose "most important contribution remains his extraordinary imagination in the service of history." The hallmark of the book, then, is innovative scholarship in all periods of Islamic history. Its authors share a commitment to asking original historiographical questions, with an overall orientation toward issues in social history.
Global Medieval compares mirrors for princes from varied historical contexts and lineages of political thought in order to determine whether a genuine history of political thought in the premodern period is possible. These texts become a lens for exploring ideals and manners of good rule across political, religious, and cultural divides.
In 1936, Samuel Beckett wrote a letter to the Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein expressing a desire to work in the lost tradition of silent film. The production of Beckett's Film in 1964, on the cusp of his work as a director for stage and screen, coincides with a widespread revival of silent film in the period of cinema's modernist second wave. Drawing on recently published letters, archival material and production notebooks, Samuel Beckett and Cinema is the first book to examine comprehensively the full extent of Beckett's engagement with cinema and its influence on his work for stage and screen. The book situates Beckett within the context of first and second wave modernist filmmakin...
Jāmī in Regional Contexts: The Reception of ʿAbd Al-Raḥmān Jāmī’s Works in the Islamicate World is the first attempt to present in a comprehensive manner how ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (d. 898/1492), a most influential figure in the Persian-speaking world, reshaped the canons of Islamic mysticism, literature and poetry and how, in turn, this new canon prompted the formation of regional traditions. As a result, a renewed geography of intellectual practices emerges as well as questions surrounding authorship and authority in the making of vernacular cultures. Specialists of Persian, Arabic, Chinese, Georgian, Malay, Pashto, Sanskrit, Urdu, Turkish, and Bengali thus provide a unique connected account of the conception and reception of Jāmī’s works throughout the Eurasian continent and maritime Southeast Asia.
This Handbook is a current, comprehensive single-volume history of Iranian civilization. The authors, all leaders in their fields, emphasize the large-scale continuities of Iranian history while also describing the important patterns of transformation that have characterized Iran's past. Each of the chapters focuses on a specific epoch of Iranian history and surveys the general political, social, cultural, and economic issues of that era. The ancient period begins with chapters considering the anthropological evidence of the prehistoric era, through to the early settled civilizations of the Iranian plateau, and continuing to the rise of the ancient Persian empires. The medieval section first...
This book provides a novel approach to the history of medieval Anatolia by analysing political, religious and cultural developments in the region of Kastamonu during the reign of the Chobanid dynasty (c. 1211–1309). During the 13th century, the Chobanids consolidated a local dynasty in western Anatolia – a borderland between Islam and Christianity – becoming cultural actors patronising the production of religious, scientific and administrative works in the Persian language. These works, though surviving today in manuscript form, have received little attention in modern historiography. The book therefore attends to this gap in the research, incorporating a detailed study of texts by lit...
Leading scholars discuss how 'Islam' and 'liberalism' have been entwined historically and politically and how Muslims have thought about this longstanding relationship.
The militant Islam represented by Al-Qaeda is often described as a global movement. Apart from the geographical range of its operations and support, little else is held to define it as 'global'. Landscapes of the Jihad explores the features that Al-Qaeda and other strands of militant Islam share in common with global movements. These include a decentralised organisation and an emphasis on ethical rather than properly political action. Devji brings these and other characteristics of Al-Qaeda together in an analysis of the jihad that locates it squarely within the transformation of political thought after the Cold War. The jihad emerges from the breakdown of traditional as well as modern forms of authority in the Muslim world. It is neither dogmatic in an old-fashioned way nor ideological in the modern sense, and concerned neither with correct doctrinal practice in the present nor with some revolutionary utopia of the future. Instead it is fragmented, dispersed and highly individualistic.