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"In Imperial Muslims we have a tremendously valuable and highly readable contribution, one that has filled a serious gap in our reading of modern Indian Ocean history, and that has also added significant depth to our understanding of Muslim religious life under colonial rule... It is beautifully written, deeply textured, and eminently accessible." -- Fahad Ahmad Bishara, Die Welt des Islams "In Imperial Muslims, the author's ingenious use of British archival sources and Arabic contemporary publications make 19th and early 20th century Aden come alive in front of the readers' eyes. His assertion that at the turn of the century Britain ruled over forty percent of the global Muslim population is enough to explain why Aden is an important case study in providing a window into the social and spiritual life of a Muslim community within the British Empire." -- THANOS PETOURIS, BYS newsletter.
Struggling with History compares anthropological and historical approaches to the study of the Indian Ocean by focusing on the conflicted nature of cosmopolitanism. Essays contribute to current debates on the nature of cosmopolitanism, the comparative study of Muslim societies, and the examination of colonial and postcolonial contexts. Few books combine a comparable level of interdisciplinary scholarship and regional ethnographic expertise.
This collected volume challenges much of the conventional wisdom regarding the intellectual history of Islamic Africa. In a series of essaays ranging from early modern Africa to the present contributors explore the dynamism of the Muslim learned classes in regard to both purely intellectual pursuits and social concern.
Drawing on locally compiled Arabic language sources, this book offers a comprehensive examination of the role of Muslim scholars as popular intellectuals and reformers in southern Somalia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Ocean of the Soul is one of the great works of the German Orientalist Hellmut Ritter (1892-1971). It presents a comprehensive analysis of the writings of the mystical Persian poet Far d al-D n At t r who is thought to have died at an advanced age in April 1221 when the Mongols destroyed his home city of N sh p r in the north-east of Iran. The book, which resulted from decades of investigation of literary and historical sources, was first published in 1955 and has since remained unsurpassed not only as the definitive study of At t r's world of ideas but as an indispensable guide to understanding pre-modern Islamic literature in general.Quoting at length from At t r and other Islamic sourc...
This work aims to distill the findings of a wide variety of scholarly disciplines into a coherent narrative of the Qur’ān’s history, from the first oral recitation to the four published Variants in active circulation today. In the process of unraveling the complicated relationships between the oral Qur’ān and the written Qur’ān, it becomes clear that there are, in fact, two histories of the Qur’ān and that the overall history of the Qur’ān cannot be appreciated without understanding the interactions between these two occasionally intertwined but often independent component histories. Discrepancies between the four qur’ānic Variants that are in active use today are indexed and analyzed. While most scholarship views the Qur’ān either in relation to its past and its possible origins, or in relation to its contemporary status as a static, fixed text, this work adopts an organic, developmental approach recognizing that the Qur’ān is a living text that continues to evolve.
The experiences of African women in the era before independence remain a woefully understudied facet of African history. This innovative and carefully argued study thus adds tremendously to our understanding of colonial history by focusing on women's education, professionalization, and political mobilization in the East African islands of Zanzibar.
Who speaks for Islam? To whom do Muslims turn when they look for guidance? To what extent do individual scholars and preachers exert religious authority, and how can it be assessed? The upsurge of Islamism has lent new urgency to these questions, but they have deeper roots and a much longer history, and they certainly should not be considered in the light of present concerns only. The present volume – grown out of an international symposium at the Free University, Berlin in 2002 – is not so much concerned with religious authority, but with religious authorities, men and women claiming, projecting and exerting religious authority within a given context. It addresses issues such as the rel...
The present volume is the long-awaited concordance of the Egyptian coffin texts. It forms the sequel to A Hieroglyphic Dictionary of Egyptian Coffin Texts by the same author. In 1961 A. de Buck published his important seven-volume corpus Egyptian Coffin Texts. The importance of these texts is considerable for a variety of reasons; they are one of the most important literary texts of classical Egypt; the many variants greatly enlarge our understanding of grammar and linguistic structures; the coffin texts are magical texts, the effectiveness of which depended upon the exact reproductions of the original spells. In this concordance the various readings of each lemma are provided in transliteration into the Latin alphabet, which makes the concordance easily accessible for those unable to read hieroglyphs. The material is divided into the morphological categories of the verb; within each category the verbs are treated in alphabetical order.