This book brings to life Victorian Britain's conceptions and misconceptions of the Muslim World using a thorough investigation of varied cultural sources of the period. She discovers the prevailing representation of Muslims and Islam in the two major spheres of British influence - India and the Ottoman Empire - was reinforced by reoccurring themes: through literature and entertainment the public saw ""the Mahomedan"" as the ""noble savage,"" a perception reinforced through travel writing and fiction of the ""exotic east"" and the ""Arabian Nights.""

The Safavid dynasty represented the pinnacle of Iran's power and influence in its early modern history. The evidence of this - the creation of a nation state, military expansion and success, economic dynamism, and the exquisite art and architecture of the period - is well-known. What is less understood is the extent to which the Safavid success depended on an elite originating from outside Iran: the slaves of Caucasian descent and the Armenian merchants of Isfahan. This book describes how these elites, following their conversion to Islam, helped to transform Isfahan's urban, artistic and...

The complex relationship between Syria and Lebanon is the political fulcrum of the Middle East, and has dominated headlines since the withdrawal of French colonial forces from the Levant in 1943. One of the great paradoxes of this relationship is how two such very different political systems emerged in what many Syrian and Lebanese people see as one society. At the time of independence, it was assumed that only the divide-and-rule strategies of foreign powers kept the Arab peoples artificially separated. In this major new book, Youssef Chaitani examines how, despite the prevalence of Arab...

Saudi Arabia is generally and justifiably viewed as a country with some of the fewest democratic institutions and the weakest traditions of pluralism. It is therefore surprising to learn that at least in one corner of the Saudi world, there can be found a plurality of opinions and lively debate. Jorg Matthias Determann brings this element to light by analyzing an important field of cultural activity in Saudi Arabia: historical writing. Since the 1920s local, tribal, Shi'i and dynastic histories have contributed to a growing plurality of narratives. Paradoxically, this happened because of the...

The Umayyad caliphate, ruling over much of what is now the modern Middle East after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, governed from Damascus from 661 to 750CE, when they were expelled by the Abbasids. Here, Mohammad Rihan sheds light on the tribal system of this empire, by looking at one of its Syrian tribes: the 'Amila, based around today's Jabal 'Amil in southern Lebanon. Using this tribe as a lens through which to examine the wider Umayyad world, he looks at the political structures and conflicts that prevailed at the time, seeking to nuance the understanding of the relationship between...

The beginning of the twentieth century was a period that saw far-reaching change in the political and geographical landscapes of the Middle East. From the impact of the revolution of the Young Turks in 1908 to the devastation of World War I and the subsequent British and French mandates in the region, Syria was particularly affected. Yaron Harel adds to the understanding of this period by examining an understudied aspect: the rise of Zionist intellectual thought and activity in the Syrian capital of Damascus. Through meticulous research, Harel highlights the fact that, during these difficult...

In tenth-century Baghdad, the Mu'tazila theologians believed good and evil could be distinguished through human reason, while in the Indian subcontinent in the sixteenth century, rationalism served to express both the connections and boundaries of Islam in a sphere of religious pluralism. Universality in Islamic Thought discusses specific applications of rationalism in Islamic thought - from the Mu'tazila of Iraq and the Hanafi school of Islamic Law to the Chishti mystics of Mughal India - to explore the boundaries, morality and utility of the universalist principle as conceived by Islamic...

In tenth-century Iraq, a group of Arab intellectuals and scholars known as the Ikhwan al-Safa began to make their intellectual mark on the society around them. A mysterious organisation, the identities of its members have never been clear. But its contribution to the intellectual thought, philosophy, art and culture of the era - and indeed subsequent ones - is evident. In the visual arts, for example, Hamdouni Alami argues that the theory of human proportions which the Ikwan al-Safa propounded (something very similar to those of da Vinci), helped shape the evolution of the philosophy of...

The history of Morocco cannot effectively be told without the history of its Jewish inhabitants. Their presence in Northwest Africa pre-dates the rise of Islam and continues to the present day, combining elements of Berber (Amazigh), Arab, Sephardi and European culture. Emily Gottreich examines the history of Jews in Morocco from the pre-Islamic period to post-colonial times, drawing on newly acquired evidence from archival materials in Rabat.
Providing an important reassessment of the impact of the French protectorate over Morocco, the author overturns widely accepted views on Jews'...