Kategoria BISAC: Religion >> Islam - History

Die Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur des Vorderen Orients erscheinen als Supplement der Zeitschrift Der Islam, gegrundet 1910 von Carl Heinrich Becker, einem der Vater der modernen Islamwissenschaft. Ganz im Sinne Beckers ist das Ziel der Studien die Erforschung der vergangenen Gesellschaften des Vorderen Orients, ihrer Glaubenssysteme und der zugrundeliegenden sozialen und okonomischen Verhaltnisse, von der Iberischen Halbinsel bis nach Zentralasien, von den ukrainischen Steppen zum Hochland des Jemen.
Uber die grundlegende philologische Arbeit an der...

Jews, Christians, and Muslims supposedly share a common religious heritage in the patriarch Abraham, and the idea that he should serve only as a source of unity among the three traditions has become widespread in both scholarly and popular circles. But in Inheriting Abraham, Jon Levenson reveals how the increasingly conventional notion of the three equally "Abrahamic" religions derives from a dangerous misunderstanding of key biblical and Qur'anic texts, fails to do full justice to any of the traditions, and is often biased against Judaism in subtle and pernicious ways.

Ever since the publication of Orientalism, medievalists have attempted to apply Said's theses on the Western European representation of the Muslim Other to the Middle Ages. Pages examines the sect of the Nizari Isma'ilis (known for its use of political assassination) and its complicated relationship with Western Europe, providing a fascinating case study of such an endeavor.

The representation of the Nizaris, who came to be known in Europe as the Assassins, closely parallels that of Islam in the Middle Ages. However, how the sect was perceived in Latin Christendom is nuanced and...

Between A.D. 800 and 1450, the most important centers for the study of what we now call "the exact sciences" -- including the mathematical sciences of arithmetic, geometry, and trigonometry and their applications in such fields as astronomy, astrology, geography, cartography, and optics -- were not in Europe but in the vast, multinational Islamic world. Research from the last few decades has profoundly changed our understanding of the Islamic scientific tradition. We now know that it was richer and more profound and had more complex relations to other cultures than we had previously...

The identities of Maronite Christians, Twelver Shia Muslims, and Druze, the mountain communities, developed alongside assertions of local chiefs under external powers from the Umayyads to the Ottomans. The chiefs began interacting in a...

Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire recovers the stories of five Indian Muslim scholars who, in the aftermath of the uprising of 1857, were hunted by British authorities, fled their homes in India for such destinations as Cairo, Mecca, and Istanbul, and became active participants in a flourishing pan-Islamic intellectual network at the cusp of the British and Ottoman empires. Seema Alavi traces this network, born in the age of empire, which became the basis of a global Muslim sensibility--a form of political and cultural affiliation that competes with ideas of nationhood...

"Royal power, oil, and puritanical Islam are primary elements in Saudi Arabia's rise to global influence. Oil is the reason for Western interest in the kingdom and the foundation for commercial, diplomatic, and strategic relations. Were it not for oil, the government of Saudi Arabia would lack the resources to construct a modern economy and infrastructure, and to thrust the kingdom into regional prominence. Were it not for oil, Saudi Arabia would not be able to fund institutions that spread its religious doctrine to Muslim and non-Muslim countries. That doctrine, commonly known as...