Made up of a number of seminal articles that are translated for the first time in English, this prestigious book from Gregor Schoeler gives a reasoned, informed and comprehensive overflow of how the written and the spoken interacted, diverged and received cultural articulation among the Muslim societies of the first two centuries of the Hijra.

Studies in the History and Culture of the Middle East are published as supplement to Der Islam founded in 1910 by Carl Heinrich Becker, an early practitioner of the modern study of Islam. Following Becker's lead, the mission of the series is the study of past societies of the Middle East, their belief systems, and their underlying social and economic relations, from the Iberian Peninsula to Central Asia, and from the Ukrainian steppes to the highlands of Yemen. Publications in the series draw on the philological groundwork generated by the literary tradition, but in their...