Kategoria BISAC: Religion >> Islam - History

Despite President George W. Bush's assurances that Islam is a peaceful religion and that all good Muslims hunger for democracy, confusion persists and far too many Westerners remain convinced that Muslims and terrorists are synonymous. In the aftermath of the attacks of 9/11, the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the recent bombings in London, an unprecedented amount of attention has been directed toward Islam and the Muslim world. Yet, even with this increased scrutiny, most of the public discourse regarding Islam revolves around the actions of extremist factions such as the...

Attitudes toward homosexuality in the pre-modern Arab-Islamic world are commonly depicted as schizophrenic visible and tolerated on one hand, prohibited by Islam on the other. Khaled El-Rouayheb argues that this apparent paradox is based on the anachronistic assumption that homosexuality is a timeless, self-evident fact to which a particular culture reacts with some degree of tolerance or intolerance. Drawing on poetry, biographical literature, medicine, dream interpretation, and Islamic texts, he shows that the culture of the period lacked the concept of homosexuality."

This book is the first substantial study of Islamization in any part of Inner Asia from any perspective and the first to emphasize conversion narratives as important sources for understanding the dynamics of Islamization. Challenging the prevailing notions of the nature of Islam in Inner Asia, it explores how conversion to Islam was woven together with indigenous Inner Asian religious values and thereby incorporated as a central and defining element in popular discourse about communal origins and identity. The book traces the many echoes of a single conversion narrative through six...

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...

The birth of Islam in the 7th century and its subsequent outward expansion from the Arab world has been one of the most influential occurrences in world history. During its first few decades, the new faith inspired conquests from Spain to northern India. In this illuminating study, the author tracks the rise of Islam from it 7th century beginnings with the life of the Prophet Muhammad to the collapse of the Islamic empire in the early 10th century. He demonstrates how a sophisticated, new religion and society emerged to become one of the world's most vital and sustained cultures.

The...

The past thirty years have witnessed the rise of political parties and other formal groups in the Middle East and elsewhere with Islamic agendas, a phenomenon that has both surprised and frightened many in the West. Events from the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 to the attacks of September 11, 2001, have led some to conclude that the United States is on a collision course with Islam, the religion of one-fifth of the world's population. The sourcebook aims to enhance our understanding of the Islamist phenomenon by presenting some forty documents, written by Islamists themselves, which shed...