This laudable work offers a study, translation and partial edition of one of the most important early Mamluk sources and its author. In addition to the work's contribution to Mamluk history, it also makes a significant contribution towards the ultimate goal of having the key texts of early Mamluk historiography accessible to scholars. Volume II is an edition of the years 1297-1302 (697-701 AH) of al-Yūnīnī's Chronicle, collated with the extant fragments of al-Jazarī's (d. 1338) ḥawādith al-zamān.

This first in-depth scholarly study of the institution of ziyāra (visiting tombs), and its central role in the cult of Muslim saints in late medieval Egypt (1200-1500 A.D.), makes an original contribution to the social history of religion. It explores the range of meanings that saints held for the contemporary imagination through richly textured descriptions and analysis of the great cemetery of al-Qarāfa, the rituals of the ziyāra, and the entertaining stories told to pious visitors about the saints. It thus provides a vivid sense of this vital expression of...

Islamic mysticism was contested from the formative period of Islam till the present. Criticism of and opposition to mystical conceptions of Islam and their adherents constitute an integral part of an ongoing debate inside the Islamic tradition. Controversies and polemics concerning Islamic mysticism often shaped and coincided with socio-political configurations.
This volume results from a collective effort by a group of Islamicists and area specialists with a variety of disciplinary orientations to arrive at a comprehensive view of these controversies and polemics wherever and whenever...

This volume is a translation from Chaghatay (medieval Turkic literary language of Central Asia) of a work written by Uzbek historians Mūnis and Āgahī in the early 19th century. It contains the history of Khorezm, especially detailed for the 18th and early 19th centuries, and it is an outstanding example of Central Asian historiography. The book is the first Western translation of this historical work and the first such translation of a major Chaghatay source for the history of Central Asia in the 18th-19th centuries. Besides the translation, the book includes extensive...

The Moroccan mystic and theologian Aḥmad b. Idrīs (1749-1837) was one of the most dynamic personalities in the Islamic world of the 19th century. Through his teachings and the activity of his students important Sufi orders were founded which exerted wide-ranging social and political influence, orders such as the Sanūsiyya in Libya and the Khatmiyya in the Sudan. To date, publications dealing with him have especially focused on his biography and particular aspects of his mystical doctrines. In the present work an Arabic edition and translation with commentary of two texts are...

This book deals with the controversial value of the sources on which the biography of Muhammad, the founder of Islam, is based. Discussions on this topic have been going on for more than a century but it has become especially debated during the last two decades.
This volume contains ten articles which are the outcome of an international colloquium on the issue. Part one of the book examines the development of the Muslim tradition concerning the life of Muhammad while the other part focuses on the historical reliability of the source material.
The volume reflects not only the most recent...

Modernization in the Muslim world was determined by the two interrelated processes of indigenous state formation and European economic penetration. These drove governments to enlist the orthodox and the masses in support of the consolidation of their central authority, and religious reformers to seek, partly through Western devices, checks on their autocracy. Concentrating on late-Ottoman Damascus, a focal point in the modernization of Islam in the Arab world, this study analyses the conceptual and social evolution among the three consecutive reform trends of the period: the Khālidī...

Russia's Muslim religious institutions on the steppe frontier, during the imperial period, are examined in detail in this book. This study is based on a Turkic manuscript history entitled the Tavarikh-i Alti Ata, compiled in 1910.
It examines the mosques, madrasas, imams, mu'adhdhins, and Sufis of a single district and in adjoining regions of the Kazakh steppe, areas that were inhabited by several Muslim communities, including Tatar peasants and merchants, Bashkir and Kazakh nomads, and Muslim Cossacks.
The study compares the information from the manuscript with published sources on...

This volume focuses primarily on the question of the compatibility of Islam and democracy. It highlights the contribution of seven prominent pre- and post-revolutionary Iranian religious thinkers on the subject. Situating the discussion in its specific religious context, the book critically examines those elements that are usually referred to as democratic norms in Islamic tradition. It also provides, for the first time, an exposition of the emergence of religious intellectualism in post-revolutionary Iran, focusing on the ideas of its leading figure, Abdolkarim Soroush. His discussion of...

This volume focuses on how legitimate leadership came to be defined in the formative period of Islam in terms of two key Qur'anic concepts: moral excellence (faḍl/faḍīla) and precedence (sābiqa). These two concepts undergirded a specific discourse on leadership which developed in the first century of Islam. This discourse is reconstructed through careful scrutiny of the manāqib literature in particular, which contains detailed accounts of the excellences attributed to the Rāshidūn caliphs. This book stresses that all early factions,...