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Cities as Palimpsests?
The metaphor of the palimpsest has been increasingly invoked to conceptualize cities with deep, living pasts. This volume seeks to think through, and beyond, the logic of the palimpsest, asking whether this fashionable trope slyly forces us to see contradiction where local inhabitants saw (and see) none, to impose distinctions that satisfy our own assumptions about historical periodization and cultural practice, but which bear little relation to the experience of ancient, medieval or early modern persons. Spanning the period from Constantine’s foundation of a New Rome in the fourth century to the contemporary aftermath of the Lebanese civil war, this book integrates perspectives from schol...
Sufism in Ottoman Damascus
Sufism in Ottoman Damascus analyzes thaumaturgical beliefs and practices prevalent among Muslims in eighteenth-century Ottoman Syria. The study focuses on historical beliefs in baraka, which religious authorities often interpreted as Allah's grace, and the alleged Sufi-ulamaic role in distributing it to Ottoman subjects. This book highlights considerable overlaps between Sufis and ʿulamāʾ with state appointments in early modern Province of Damascus, arguing for the possibility of sociologically defining a Muslim priestly sodality, a group of religious authorities and wonder-workers responsible for Sunni orthodoxy in the Ottoman Empire. The Sufi-ʿulamāʾ were integral to Ottoman networks...
Javanmardi
Javanmardi is one of those Persian terms that is frequently mentions in discussions of Persian identity, and yet its precise meaning is difficult to comprehend. A number of equivalents have been offered, including chivalry and manliness, and while these terms are not incorrect, javanmardi transcends them. The concept encompasses character traits of generosity, selflessness, hospitality, bravery, courage, honesty, truthfulness and justice--and yet there are occasions when the exact opposite of these is required for one to be a javanmard. At times it would seem that being a javanmard is about knowing and doing the right thing, although this definition, too, falls short of the term's full meani...
Colonizing Kashmir
The Indian government, touted as the world's largest democracy, often repeats that Jammu and Kashmir—its only Muslim-majority state—is "an integral part of India." The region, which is disputed between India and Pakistan, and is considered the world's most militarized zone, has been occupied by India for over seventy-five years. In this book, Hafsa Kanjwal interrogates how Kashmir was made "integral" to India through a study of the decade long rule (1953-1963) of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, the second Prime Minister of the State of Jammu and Kashmir. Drawing upon a wide array of bureaucratic documents, propaganda materials, memoirs, literary sources, and oral interviews in English, Urdu, and...
Kindred Voices
The fascinating story of how premodern Anatolia's multireligious intersection of cultures shaped its literary languages and poetic masterpieces By the mid-thirteenth century, Anatolia had become a place of stunning cultural diversity. Kindred Voices explores how the region's Muslim and Christian poets grappled with the multilingual and multireligious worlds they inhabited, attempting to impart resonant forms of instruction to their intermingled communities. This convergence produced fresh poetic styles and sensibilities, native to no single people or language, that enabled the period's literature to reach new and wider audiences. This is the first book to study the era's major Persian, Armenian, and Turkish poets, from roughly 1250 to 1340, against the canvas of this broader literary ecosystem.
The Muslim Difference
A sweeping history of Muslim identity from its origins in late antiquity to the present How did Muslims across time and place define the line between themselves and their neighbors? Youshaa Patel explores why the Prophet Muhammad first advised his followers to emulate Christians and Jews, but then allegedly reversed course, urging them to “be different!” He details how subsequent generations of Muslim scholars canonized the Prophet’s admonition into an influential doctrine against imitation that enjoined ordinary believers to embody and display their religious difference in public life. Tracing this Islamic discourse from its origins in Arabia to Mamluk and Ottoman Damascus, colonial Egypt, and beyond, this sweeping intellectual and social history offers a panoramic view of Muslim identity, revealing unexpected intersections between religion and other markers of difference across ethnicity, gender, and status. Patel illustrates that contemporary debates in the West over visible expressions of Islam, from headscarves and beards to minarets and mosques, are just the latest iterations in a long history of how small differences have defined Muslim interreligious encounters.
Saintly Spheres and Islamic Landscapes
Saintly Spheres and Islamic Landscapes explores the creation, expansion, and perpetuation of the material and imaginary spheres of spiritual domination and sanctity that surrounded Sufi saints and became central to religious authority, Islamic piety, and the belief in the miraculous. The cultural and social constructs of Islamic sainthood and the spatial inscription of saintly figures have fascinated and ignited scholars across a range of disciplines. By bringing together a broad scope of perspectives and case studies, this book offers the reader the first comprehensive, albeit variegated, exposition of the evolution of saintly spheres and the emplacements of spiritual power in the Muslim world across time and place. Contributors: Angela Andersen, Irit Back, Devin DeWeese, Daphna Ephrat, Jo-Ann Gross, Nathan Hofer, Ayfer Karakaya-Stump, Sara Kuehn, Bulle Tuil Leonetti, Silvia Montenegro, Alexandre Papas, Paulo G. Pinto, Fatima Quraishi, Eric Ross, Itzchak Weismann, Pnina Werber, and Ethel Sara Wolper.
The Mamluk-Ottoman Transition
While the Ottoman conquest of the Mamluk realm in 1516-17 doubtlessly changed the balance of political power in Egypt and Greater Syria, the changes must be seen as a wide-ranging transition process. The present collection of essays provides several case studies on the changing situation during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and explains how the reconfiguration of political power affected both Egypt and Greater Syria. With reference to the first volume (2017), this second volume continues the debate on key issues of the transition period with contributions by scholars from both Mamluk and Ottoman studies. By combining these perspectives, the authors provide a more comprehensive and nuanced picture of the process of transformation from Mamluk to Ottoman rule.
Along the Silk Roads in Mongol Eurasia
During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Chinggis Khan and his heirs established the largest contiguous empire in the history of the world, extending from Korea to Hungary and from Iraq, Tibet, and Burma to Siberia. Ruling over roughly two thirds of the Old World, the Mongol Empire enabled people, ideas, and objects to traverse immense geographical and cultural boundaries. Along the Silk Roads in Mongol Eurasia reveals the individual stories of three key groups of people—military commanders, merchants, and intellectuals—from across Eurasia. These annotated biographies bring to the fore a compelling picture of the Mongol Empire from a wide range of historical sources in multiple la...
Depicting the Late Ottoman Empire in Turkish Autobiographies
The period between the 1880s and the 1920s was a time of momentous changes in the Ottoman Empire. It was also an age of literary experiments, of which autobiography forms a part. This book analyses Turkish autobiographical narratives describing the part of their authors’ lives that was spent while the Ottoman Empire still existed. The texts studied in this book were written in the cultural context of the Turkish Republic, which went to great lengths to disassociate itself from the empire and its legacy. This process has only been criticised and partially reversed in very recent times, the resurging interest in autobiographical texts dealing with the "old days" by the Turkish reading public...
