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This book delves into the political and cultural developments of pre-Islamic Arabia, focusing on the religious attitudes of the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula and its northern extension into the Syrian desert. Between the third and the seventh century, Arabia was on the edge of three great empires (Iran, Rome and AksuÌ"m) and at the centre of a lucrative network of trade routes. Valentina Grasso offers an interpretative framework which contextualizes the choice of Arabian elites to become Jewish sympathisers and/or convert to Christianity and Islam by probing the mobilization of faith in the shaping of Arabian identities. For the first time the Arabians of the period are granted autonomy from marginalizing (mostly Western) narratives framing them as 'barbarians' inhabiting the fringes of Rome and Iran and/or deterministic analyses in which they are depicted retrospectively as exemplified by the Muslims' definition of the period as JaÌ"hiliÌ"yah, 'ignorance'.
Explores the composite cultural and political milieu of pre-Islamic Arabia, situating its history within the broader late antique context.
The study of Islam’s origins from a rigorous historical and social science perspective is still wanting. At the same time, a renewed attention is being paid to the very plausible pre-canonical redactional and editorial stages of the Qur'an, a book whose core many contemporary scholars agree to be formed by various independent writings in which encrypted passages from the OT Pseudepigrapha, the NT Apocrypha, and other ancient writings of Jewish, Christian, and Manichaean provenance may be found. Likewise, the earliest Islamic community is presently regarded by many scholars as a somewhat undetermined monotheistic group that evolved from an original Jewish-Christian milieu into a distinct Mu...
An edited collection on the historical, religious, and cultural contexts of the origins of the Qur'an.
Travel and pilgrimage have become central research topics in recent years. Some archaeologists and historians have applied globalization theories to ancient intercultural connections. Classicists have rediscovered travel as a literary topic in Greek and Roman writing. Scholars of early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have been rethinking long-familiar pilgrimage practices in new interdisciplinary contexts. This volume contributes to this flourishing field of study in two ways. First, the focus of its contributions is on experiences of travel. Our main question is: How did travelers in the ancient world experience and make sense of their journeys, real or imaginary, and of the places they visited? Second, by treating Jewish, Christian, and Islamic experiences together, this volume develops a longue durée perspective on the ways in which travel experiences across these three traditions resembled each other. By focusing on "experiences of travel," we hope to foster interaction between the study of ancient travel in the humanities and that of broader human experience in the social sciences.
Reconsidering the Mediterranean, appreciating and demarginalizing the peoples and cultures of this vast region, while considering the affinities and differences, is a valuable part of the process of unframing and reframing the concept of the Mediterranean. The authors of this volume follow Franco Cassano’s refusal of a sort of prêt-à-porter reality of cohabitation of cultures, introducing instead un’alternativa mediterranea, a world of multiple cultures that entails an ongoing learning and experiencing. The volume’s contributors use an interdisciplinary approach that mirrors the hybridity of the area and of the discipline, that is much more introspective and humanistic, more contemporary and inclusive.
The book collects the keynote contributions and the papers presented at the “8th Italian Conference of Researchers in Geotechnical Engineering 2023, CNRIG’23”. The conference was held on July 5–7, 2023, at the University of Palermo (Italy), and it was organized under the auspices of the National Group of Geotechnical Engineering (GNIG). The event has been organized to promote interaction among geotechnical engineering and applied sciences, with special focus on technological and digital innovations. The book covers a wide range of classical and emerging topics in geotechnics, including innovation in laboratory testing and in situ monitoring, thermo-hydro-chemo-mechanical behavior of geo-materials, computational geomechanics, analyses of instability processes in seismic conditions, probabilistic approaches, resilience of critical infrastructures and advances in risk mitigation strategies, and eco-friendly solutions for soils and rocks stabilization. This book is intended for postgraduate students, researchers, and practitioners working on geotechnical engineering and related areas.
This book set provides a new, global, updated, thorough, clear, and practical risk-based approach to tunnelling design and construction methods, and discusses detailed examples of solutions applied to relevant case histories. It is organized in three sequential and integrated volumes: Volume 1: Concept – Basic Principles of Design Volume 2: Construction – Methods, Equipment, Tools and Materials Volume 3: Case Histories and Best Practices The book covers all aspects of tunnelling, giving useful and practical information about design (Vol. 1), construction (Vol. 2), and best practices (Vol. 3). It provides the following features and benefits: updated vision on tunnelling design, tools, mat...
Paul L. Heck’s Political Theology and Islam offers a sophisticated and comprehensive analysis of sovereignty in Islamic society, beginning with the origins of Islam and extending to the present. This wide-ranging study sets out to answer an unassumingly tricky question: What is politics in Islam? Paul L. Heck’s answer takes the form of a close analysis of sovereignty across Islamic history, approaching this concept from the perspective of political theology. As he illustrates, the history of politics in Islam is best understood as an ongoing struggle for a moral order between those who occupy positions of rulership and religious voices that communicate the ethics of Islam and educate the...
This book introduces the Age of Justinian, the last Roman century and the first flowering of Byzantine culture. Dominated by the policies and personality of emperor Justinian I (527–565), this period of grand achievements and far-reaching failures witnessed the transformation of the Mediterranean world. In this volume, twenty specialists explore the most important aspects of the age including the mechanics and theory of empire, warfare, urbanism, and economy. It also discusses the impact of the great plague, the codification of Roman law, and the many religious upheavals taking place at the time. Consideration is given to imperial relations with the papacy, northern barbarians, the Persians, and other eastern peoples, shedding new light on a dramatic and highly significant historical period.