Author: Michael ChamberlainPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521525947
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220
Book Description
A reconceptualisation of the relationship between the society and culture of the Middle East.
Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190-1350
Author: Michael ChamberlainPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521525947
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220
Book Description
A reconceptualisation of the relationship between the society and culture of the Middle East.
Knowledge and Its Uses in Medieval Damascus
Author: Michael ChamberlainPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Damascus (Syria)
Languages : en
Pages : 353
Book Description
This dissertation is a study of relationships between the production of knowledg e and the social reproduction of elites in high medieval Damascus (1190-1350). I t advances several related arguments intended to reassess relations between soci ety and culture in the pre-Ottoman Middle East. First, it argues that because of the peculiarities of political power in the medieval Middle East, the social hi story of the region cannot be compared to that of others through analysis of ins titutions, social bodies, or social structures. The most productive level of com parison is practices of social reproduction, rather than the institutions that i n other societies were the forms such practices took. Second, it argues that the best evidence for elite political and social strategies is to be found not in o riginal documents stored in archives, but rather in the biographical dictionarie s, which constituted a written repository for the critical practices of the soci ety. Third, it suggests that as medieval Damascus was a city without strong lega l, state, or corporate institutions, all status, wealth, and power were prizes w on and held through constant competition. To the civilian elite, control over th e production of knowledge was both the object of such competition and the instru ment by which it was carried out. An introduction examines approaches to relatio nships between society and culture in the pre-Ottoman Middle East. Chapter one e xamines how a changing form of domination in twelfth and thirteenth century Dama scus transformed the recruitment, relations to state power, and social reproduct ion of the civilian elite. Chapter two looks at madrasas to understand whether t hey constituted the form of specialized higher education scholars have thought t hey did. It argues that madrasas did not transform the nature of education in Da mascus, but had their greatest effect in establishing a set of prizes for social competition among elites. Chapter three examines how elites acquired their soci al and cultural capital through the cultivation of knowledge. It is especially i nterested in the ritual and performative aspects of the production of knowledge. Chapter four examines how the civilian elite made use of their control over the production of knowledge in social competition.
Cosmopolitan Civility
Author: Ruth AbbeyPublisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438477376
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216
Book Description
Essays reflecting on the prolific, pioneering, and wide-ranging scholarship of Fred Dallmayr. Prolific and pioneering, Fred Dallmayr has been an active scholar for over fifty years. His research interests include modern and contemporary political theory, hermeneutics, phenomenology, the Frankfurt School, continental political thought, democratic theory, multiculturalism, environmentalism, and cosmopolitanism. Dallmayr is also one of the founders of comparative political thought and his interest in non-Western political theory spans Chinese, Islamic, Indian, Buddhist, and Latin American traditions. In emulation of the vast interdisciplinary and international character of Dallmayr’s work, this book draws upon senior and emerging scholars from an array of disciplines and countries, with essays that are philosophical (in the Western and non-Western traditions), cultural and/or political, and international. Dallmayr himself responds to the essays in a concluding chapter. “This book is both unique and outstanding. In very few other volumes have I come across such cross-cultural, diverse, and high quality responses to an author’s work. It is truly rare to find a volume that is so broad ranging and at the same time clearly and coherently organized, just as it is rare to find a scholar of Dallmayr’s range and depth. He counts as one of the great humanists of our time, and this book is a richly merited tribute to him.” — Joseph Prabhu, editor of The Intercultural Challenge of Raimon Panikkar
Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages
Author: Houari TouatiPublisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226808777
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Book Description
In the Middle Ages, Muslim travelers embarked on a rihla, or world tour, as surveyors, emissaries, and educators. On these journeys, voyagers not only interacted with foreign cultures—touring Greek civilization, exploring the Middle East and North Africa, and seeing parts of Europe—they also established both philosophical and geographic boundaries between the faithful and the heathen. These voyages thus gave the Islamic world, which at the time extended from the Maghreb to the Indus Valley, a coherent identity. Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages assesses both the religious and philosophical aspects of travel, as well as the economic and cultural conditions that made the rihla possible. Houari Touati tracks the compilers of the hadith who culled oral traditions linked to the prophet, the linguists and lexicologists who journeyed to the desert to learn Bedouin Arabic, the geographers who mapped the Muslim world, and the students who ventured to study with holy men and scholars. Travel, with its costs, discomforts, and dangers, emerges in this study as both a means of spiritual growth and a metaphor for progress. Touati’s book will interest a broad range of scholars in history, literature, and anthropology.
The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform
Author: Adeeb KhalidPublisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520920897
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 364
Book Description
Adeeb Khalid offers the first extended examination of cultural debates in Central Asia during Russian rule. With the Russian conquest in the 1860s and 1870s the region came into contact with modernity. The Jadids, influential Muslim intellectuals, sought to safeguard the indigenous Islamic culture by adapting it to the modern state. Through education, literacy, use of the press and by maintaining close ties with Islamic intellectuals from the Ottoman empire to India, the Jadids established a place for their traditions not only within the changing culture of their own land but also within the larger modern Islamic world. Khalid uses previously untapped literary sources from Uzbek and Tajik as well as archival materials from Uzbekistan, Russia, Britain, and France to explore Russia's role as a colonial power and the politics of Islamic reform movements. He shows how Jadid efforts paralleled developments elsewhere in the world and at the same time provides a social history of the Jadid movement. By including a comparative study of Muslim societies, examining indigenous intellectual life under colonialism, and investigating how knowledge was disseminated in the early modern period, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform does much to remedy the dearth of scholarship on this important period. Interest in Central Asia is growing as a result of the breakup of the former Soviet Union, and Khalid's book will make an important contribution to current debates over political and cultural autonomy in the region.
Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century
Author: Khaled El-RouayhebPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316352021
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 417
Book Description
For much of the twentieth century, the intellectual life of the Ottoman and Arabic-Islamic world in the seventeenth century was ignored or mischaracterized by historians. Ottomanists typically saw the seventeenth century as marking the end of Ottoman cultural florescence, while modern Arab nationalist historians tended to see it as yet another century of intellectual darkness under Ottoman rule. This book is the first sustained effort at investigating some of the intellectual currents among Ottoman and North African scholars of the early modern period. Examining the intellectual production of the ranks of learned ulema (scholars) through close readings of various treatises, commentaries, and marginalia, Khaled El-Rouayheb argues for a more textured - and text-centered - understanding of the vibrant exchange of ideas and transmission of knowledge across a vast expanse of Ottoman-controlled territory.
The Lighthouse and the Observatory
Author: Daniel A. StolzPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107196337
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331
Book Description
This history of astronomy in Egypt reveals how modern science came to play an authoritative role in Islamic religious practice.
Religion and State in Syria
Author: Thomas PierretPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139620061
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293
Book Description
While Syria has been dominated since the 1960s by a determinedly secular regime, the 2011 uprising has raised many questions about the role of Islam in the country's politics. This book demonstrates that with the eradication of the Muslim Brothers after the failed insurrection of 1982, Sunni men of religion became the only voice of the Islamic trend in the country. Through educational programs, charitable foundations and their deft handling of tribal and merchant networks, they took advantage of popular disaffection with secular ideologies to increase their influence over society. In recent years, with the Islamic resurgence, the Alawi-dominated Ba'thist regime was compelled to bring the clergy into the political fold. This relationship was exposed in 2011 by the division of the Sunni clergy between regime supporters, bystanders and opponents. This book affords a new perspective on Syrian society as it stands at the crossroads of political and social fragmentation.
The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Law
Author: Anver M. EmonPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191668257
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 1009
Book Description
This volume provides a comprehensive survey of the contemporary study of Islamic law and a critical analysis of its deficiencies. Written by outstanding senior and emerging scholars in their fields, it offers an innovative historiographical examination of the field of Islamic law and an ideal introduction to key personalities and concepts. While capturing the state of contemporary Islamic legal studies by chronicling how far the field has come, the Handbook also explains why certain debates recur and indicates fundamental gaps in our knowledge. Each chapter presents bold new avenues for research and will help readers appreciate the contested nature of key concepts and topics in Islamic law. This Handbook will be a major reference work for scholars and students of Islam and Islamic law for years to come.
Authority, Conflict, and the Transmission of Diversity in Medieval Islamic Law
Author: Kevin JaquesPublisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047408470
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 327
Book Description
This publication examines how a medieval Syrian Shāfiʿī jurist, Ibn Qāḍī Shuhbah (d. 851/1448), depicted the formation, decline, and the sources for the revival of Islamic law based on his Ṭabaqāt al-fuqahāʾ al-shāfiʿīyah (The Generations of the Shāfiʿī Jurists).