You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A history of 600 years - an epic story of a dynasty that started as a small group of cavalry mercenaries to become the absolute rulers of the greatest and longest lasting Islamic empire in history.
The book covers a period from the beginning of Islam, up to the beginning of the sixteenth century, and deals mainly with the eunuchs in the major centres of Islam in the East (Umayyads, 'Abbasids, Seljuks, Zengids, Ayyubids and Mamluks and to some extent, the Fatimids of Egypt). It is not a history of the eunuchs in that wide area but rather is mainly concerned with the power accumulated by the eunuchs, military, socially and even economically (especially as trustees of financial affairs and property). The ultimate aim of the study is to being out the close ties connecting it to the harem, the eunuchs and the Mamlkus. In all of these three areas, the dominant element had been slaves (Islami...
The Arabic culinary tradition burst onto the scene in the middle of the tenth century, when al-Warrāq compiled a culinary treatise titled al-Kitab al-Tabikh (The Book of Dishes) containing over 600 recipes. It would take another three and half centuries for cookery books to be produced in the European continent. Until then, gastronomic writing remained the sole preserve of the Arab-Muslim world, with cooking manuals and recipe books being written from Baghdad, Aleppo and Egypt in the East, to Muslim Spain, Morocco and Tunisia in the West. A total of nine complete cookery books have survived from this time, containing nearly three thousand recipes. First published in the fifteenth century, The Sultan's Feast by the Egyptian Ibn Mubārak Shāh features more than 330 recipes, from bread-making and savoury stews, to sweets, pickling and aromatics, as well as tips on a range of topics. This culinary treatise reveals the history of gastronomy in Arab culture. Available in English for the first time, this critical bilingual volume offers a unique insight into the world of medieval Arabic gastronomic writing.
The subject of this vast, astonishing and brilliantly readable work of history is the bizarre story of the Ottoman Empire, seen through the lives and actions of its sultans, with their absolute power and terrifying cruelty, their love of pomp and magnificence and their overwhelming venality and corruption. The author describes the men, the events, the daily life, the strange customs of Turkey's court, from her emergence as a great power in the sixteenth century to the death of Kemal Ataturk, who overthrew the Sultanate to establish a new and more modern form of tyranny. This book is a unique and fascinating record of four centuries of glory, debauchery, splendor and cruelty. --from inside jacket flap.
First published in 1992 to wide critical acclaim, Pictures From Home is Larry Sultan's pendant to his parents. Sultan returned home to Southern California periodically in the 1980s and the decade-long sequence moves between registers, combining contemporary photographs with film stills from home movies, fragments of conversation, Sultan's own writings and other memorabilia. The result is a narrative collage in which the boundary between the documentary and the staged becomes increasingly ambiguous. Simultaneously the distance usually maintained between the photographer and his subjects also slips in an exchange of dialogue and emotion that is unique to this work. Significantly increasing the page count of the original book, this MACK design of Pictures From Home clarifies the multiplicity of voices - both textual and pictorial - in order to afford a fresh perspective of this seminal body of work -- Provided by the publisher.
This is an English translation of a critical portrait of the Ottoman capital of Istanbul during the days of the Sultan Abd al-Hamid.
This book examines the Jewish community of Morocco in the late 18th and early 19th centuries through the life of a merchant who was the chief intermediary between the Moroccan sultans and Europe .
Title on cover: The sultan's organ: the diary of Thomas Dallam, 1599: London to Constantinople and adverntures on the way.
A survey of Western accounts of "Oriental despotism" in the 17th and 18th centuries, focusing particularly on portrayals of the Ottoman empire and the supposedly enigmatic structure of the despot's court - the seraglio - with its viziers, dwarfs, mutes, eunuchs and countless wives.
"There is only one known copy of the Sultan's Book of Delights in existence and it is held in the Oriental and India Office Collections of the British Library (BL. Persian 149). The manuscript is illustrated with fifty elegant miniature paintings, most of which show the Sultan, Ghiyath Shahi, observing the women of his court as they prepare and serve him various dishes. The book is fascinating in that the text documents a remarkable stage in the history of Indian cookery whilst the miniatures demonstrate the influence of imported Persian artists on the style of the Indian artists employed in Ghiyath Shahi's academy."--Jacket.