Islamic popular preachers and storytellers had enormous influence in defining common religious knowledge and faith in the medieval Near East. Jonathan Berkey's book illuminates the popular culture of religious storytelling. It draws on chronicles, biographical dictionaries, sermons, and tales -- but especially on a number of medieval treatises critical of popular preachers, and also a vigorous defense of them which emerged in fourteenth-century Egyptian Sufi circles.
Popular preachers drew inspiration and legitimacy from the rise of Sufi mysticism, with its emphasis on internal...
Islamic popular preachers and storytellers had enormous influence in defining common religious knowledge and faith in the medieval Near East. Jonat...
In rich detail Jonathan Berkey interprets the social and cultural consequences of Islam's regard for knowledge, showing how education in the Middle Ages played a central part in the religious experience of nearly all Muslims. Focusing on Cairo, which under Mamluk rule (1250-1517) was a vital intellectual center with a complex social system, the author describes the transmission of religious knowledge there as a highly personal process, one dependent on the relationships between individual scholars and students. The great variety of institutional structures, he argues, supported educational...
In rich detail Jonathan Berkey interprets the social and cultural consequences of Islam's regard for knowledge, showing how education in the Middle...
