Friedmann's study sheds light on medieval attitudes to religious tolerance.

Ruby Lal explores domestic life and the place of women in the Mughal court of the sixteenth century. Challenging traditional, orientalist interpretations of the haram that have portrayed a domestic world of seclusion and sexual exploitation, she reveals a complex society where noble men and women negotiated their everyday life and public-political affairs. Combining Ottoman and Safavid histories, she demonstrates the richness as well as ambiguity of the Mughal haram, which was pivotal in the transition to institutionalization and imperial excellence.

What were the attitudes to diplomacy and kingship in the medieval Islamic world? Anne Broadbridge examines struggles over ideology in the Middle East and Central Asia from 1260 to 1405. She explores two very different ideological worlds: the Islamic world of the Mamluk Sultans of Egypt and Syria, and the Mongol world inhabited by the Golden Horde in Central Asia, the Ilkhanids in Iran and Anatolia, the Ilkhanids' successors, and Temur. The relationships among these rival rulers were often highly charged, and diplomatic missions were exchanged in an effort to promote each ruler's ideology....

Adam Silverstein's book offers a fascinating account of the official methods of communication employed in the Near East from pre-Islamic times through the Mamluk period. Postal systems were set up by rulers in order to maintain control over vast tracts of land. These systems, invented centuries before steam-engines or cars, enabled the swift circulation of different commodities - from letters, people and horses to exotic fruits and ice. As the correspondence transported often included confidential reports from a ruler's provinces, such postal systems doubled as espionage-networks through...

Beatrice Forbes Manz uses the history of Iran under the Timurid ruler Shahrukh (1409 1447) to analyse the relationship between government and society in the medieval Middle East. She provides a rich portrait of Iranian society over an exceptionally broad spectrum - the dynasty and its servitors, city elite and provincial rulers, and the religious classes, both ulama' and Sufi. The work addresses two issues central to pre-modern Middle Eastern history: how a government without the monopoly of force controlled a heterogeneous society, and how a society with diffuse power structures remained...

This rigorous scholarly appraisal of the legendary biographies of Tamerlane is the first of its kind in any language.

Jeremy Johns' unique study is the first comprehensive account of the Arabic administration of Norman Sicily. While it is generally assumed that the Normans inherited their administration from the Muslim governors of the island, Johns demonstrates that the Norman kings actually restructured their administration to the model of Fatimid Egypt. Controversially, he suggests that their intention was not administrative efficiency, but the projection of their royal image. This accessible account of the Norman rulers reveals how they related to their counterparts in the Muslim Mediterranean.

How do converts to a religion come to feel an attachment to it? The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran answers this important question for Iran by focusing on the role of memory and its revision and erasure in the ninth to eleventh centuries. During this period, the descendants of the Persian imperial, religious, and historiographical traditions not only wrote themselves into starkly different early Arabic and Islamic accounts of the past but also systematically suppressed much knowledge about pre-Islamic history. The result was both a new Persian ethnic identity and the pairing of Islam with...

An interdisciplinary study of urban history, urban experience and the nature of urbanism under the rule of the Mamluk Sultanate (1250-1517).

This book is the first on the history of both physical and mental disabilities in the Middle East and North Africa during Ottoman rule.