The "inquisition" (Mihnah) unleashed by the seventh Abbasid caliph, 'Abdallah al-Ma'mun (r. 813-833), has long attracted the attention of modern scholars of the intellectual, political, and religious history of the early Abbasid era. Because this event, which began in 820 and stretched through the reigns of two of al-Ma'mun's successors, appears at a convergence of prominent currents in systematic theology, rationalist thought, theocratic politics, and nascent trends in Shiism and Sunnism, historians have seen it as the key to a wide array of puzzles and problems in early Islamic history. In...

This volume brings together sixteen of Melchert's articles, including those considered his most important as well as ones that are difficult to access. Originally published between 1997 and 2014, they are arranged chronologically under three rubrics - hadith, piety and law. The material is presented in a new format and updated where appropriate.

Michael G. Carter's Sibawyhi's Principles: Arabic Grammar and Law in Early Islamic Thought is a corrected version, with considerable Addenda, of his 1968 Oxford doctoral thesis, -Sibawayhi's Principles of Grammatical Analysis.- It systematically argues that the science of Arabic grammar owes its origins to a special application of a set of methods and criteria developed independently to form the Islamic legal system, not to Greek or other foreign influence. These methods and criteria were then adapted to create a grammatical system brought to perfection by Sibawayhi in the late second/eighth...

This book remains an invaluable resource for the study of the material culture of Abbasid life in the ninth and tenth centuries. Material is arranged thematically - costume, food, housing, hunting, indoor and outdoor games, and festivities and festivals.

The present volume focuses on aspects of Islamic thought in Iran and Yemen, and other regions of the Middle East, ninth through fifteenth century CE, through a close study of manuscript materials. The book's sixteen chapters are arranged under five rubrics: Mu'tazilism, Zaydism in Iran and in Yemen, Twelver Shi'ism, Mysticism, and Bibliographical Traditions. The material included in the book has been published previously in a different version. The appearance of these studies together in a single volume makes this book a significant and welcome contribution to the field of classical Islamic...

No scholar has contributed as much to the study of Arabic narrative as Roger Allen, from his 1968 Oxford D. Phil thesis, "An annotated translation and study of the third edition of Hadith 'Isa ibn Hisham by Muhammad al-Muwaylihi," to his 2017 "Teaching the Maqamat in Translation." In the intervening fifty years, Roger Allen has authored, edited or translated 45 books, and written more than 200 articles. The books include the pioneering The Arabic Novel: An Historical and Critical Introduction (Syracuse University Press, 1982, rev. 1995), and translations of Ben Salem Himmich, Yusuf Idris,...