This book provides an understanding of the complexities of political legitimacy in Islamic dynasties by examining Fatimid political culture in Egypt reconstructed from court rituals. The author approaches ritual as a dynamic process through which claims to political and religious authority in Islamic societies are articulated, and in which complex negotiations of power have taken place.
This book provides an understanding of the complexities of political legitimacy in Islamic dynasties by examining Fatimid political culture in Egypt r...
The Breaking of a Thousand Swords provides a portrait of the Samarran Turks as members of a community with a specific and complex history in the early medieval Islamic world. It considers: the encounter of the Turks as rough, non-Muslim outsiders, with the sedentary, urbane world of Baghdad; the closely related encounter of the Turks with the Islamic tradition in its urban, scholarly guise; the settlement of the Turks, in Baghdad then in Samarra, through the use of land grants and appointments to office; the impact upon the affairs of the Turkish community of not only a military ranking but...
The Breaking of a Thousand Swords provides a portrait of the Samarran Turks as members of a community with a specific and complex history in the early...