Focusing on Near Eastern history in Mamluk and Ottoman times, this book, dedicated to Michael Winter, stresses elements of variety and continuity in the history of the Near East, an area of study which has traditionally attracted little attention from Islamists.

Ranging over the period from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century, the articles in this book look at the area from Istanbul down through Syria and Palestine to Arabia, the Yemen and the Sudan. The articles demonstrate the great wealth of the materials available, in a wide variety of languages, from archival documents to...

A history of the uses and abuses of the Septuagint creation in various cultures around the Mediterranean.

This is a study of the caliphate as a political institution in Islamic Spain, from its inception in 316/939 until the disappearance of the Umayyads in Cordoba in 422/1031. David J. Wasserstein explores the caliphal claims of the Hammudid dynasty in the south of the peninsula, and examines the caliphal practices of two Slav rulers of the eleventh century. He shows that the caliphal insitution was not abolished at any stage, and that it served rulers throughout the eleventh century as, among other things, an important source of legitimacy. Wasserstein's important new interpretation is...