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It was long believed that evolutionary theories received an almost universally cold reception in British natural history circles in the first half of the nineteenth century. But recently serious doubt has been cast on this assumption. This book will be the first major study of what was the most important centre or pre-Darwinian evolutionary thought in the British Isles. It shows that Edinburgh in the late 1820s and early 1830s was witness to a veritable ferment of radical new ideas on the natural world, including speculation on the origin and evolution of life, at just the time when Charles Darwin was studying medicine in the city. Those who were students in Edinburgh at the time could have hardly avoided coming into contact with these new ideas, espoused as they were by many of professors, fellow students and acquaintances in Edinburgh. This book sheds new light on the genesis and development of one of the most important scientific theories in the history of western thought.

This book analyses the religious aspects of Jewish acculturation to Scotland through a transnational perspective on migration, focused through an examination of Jewish religious leadership and authority in the international context of Anglophone Jewish history in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on British Jewish history in the first half of the twentieth century, and on the biography of one significant actor in a so-called ‘provincial’ Jewish community, this monograph explores the development of a central feature of British Jewish religious history: power relations within Jewish religious institutions, and particularly relations between the assumed centre (London) and the ‘provinces’ at a time of massive demographic and cultural change. With immigration stagnating and immigrants now poised to stay rather than seeing Britain as a staging post in their journey west, Jewish communities had to come to terms with the majority of their congregants being first generation immigrants, and to deal with the resulting cultural conflicts amongst the migrants and with those resident Jews whose families had acculturated and anglicised one or more generations previously. Salis Daiches’s life journey (1880-1945) highlights central aspects of the processes of adjustment in communities across the United Kingdom from the perspective of the ‘provincial periphery’. Competing religious ideologies in the early twentieth century are a crucial element in the history of British Jewry, rather than a transient social phenomenon. Religion as performed, taught, and thought about at a local level by ‘religious professionals’ is a vehicle for the exploration of the migration.

Focusing on apocalyptic manifestations found in ISIS propaganda, this book situates the group’s agenda in the broader framework of contemporary Muslim thought and elucidates key topics in millennial thinking within the spiritual context of modern Islamic apocalypticism. Based on the group’s primary sources as well as medieval Muslim apocalyptic literature and its modern interpretations, the book analyses the ways ISIS presents its message concerning the Last Days as a meaningful, inventive and frightening expression of collectively shared expectations relating to the supposedly approaching the End Times. Key features The first comprehensive study of ISIS primary sources, previously only discussed as part of the background to broader interpretations of the ISIS campaign Introduces and analyses the key topics of ISIS propaganda Places particular manifestations of ISIS apocalypticism in a consistent and meaningful framework Based on a coherent critical approach to the primary sources, both in Arabic and Western languages, including new media and social network sources Interpretations are interspersed with extensive quotations from ISIS sources, providing the reader with the specifics of the Jihadist approach to apocalyptic rhetoric. Includes an appendix containing an ISIS ‘apocalyptic reader’ of primary source material

This book explores the history of juvenile justice and the day industrial school movement in 19th-century Scotland. How did Scotland’s criminal justice system respond to marginalised street children who found themselves on the wrong side of the law, often for simple vagrancy or other minor offences? The book examines the historical criminalisation of Scotland’s Victorian children, as well as revealing the history and early success of the Scottish day industrial school movement - a philanthropic response to juvenile offending hailed as 'magic' in Charles Dickens’s Household Words. With case studies ranging from police courts to the High Court of Justiciary, the book offers a lively account of the way children experienced Scotland’s early juvenile justice system.

Making Mongol History examines the life and work of Rashid al-Din Tabib (d. 1318), the most powerful statesman working for the Mongol Ilkhans in the Middle East. It seeks to integrate his most famous work, the historical compendium, the Collected Histories (Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh), into two contexts: a developing genre of Persian historical writing and Rashid al-Din’s broader political and intellectual projects. Opening chapters offer an overview of administrative history and historiography in the early Ilkhanate, culminating with Rashid al-Din’s Blessed History of Ghazan, the indispensable source for Mongol and Ilkhanid history. Later chapters lay out the results of the most comprehensive study to date of the manuscripts of Rashid al-Din’s historical writing. Also explored is the complicated relationship between Rashid al-Din’s historical and theological writings, as well as his appropriation of the work of his contemporary historian, ʿAbd Allah Qashani. Their rivalry, as well as other personal alliances and conflicts at the court of the Ilkhans, continue to shape our understanding of Mongol history.

This book examines questions of identity, nationalism, and marginalization in the contemporary Egyptian novel from a postcolonial lens. Under colonial rule, the Egyptian novel invoked a sovereign nation-state by basking in its perceived unity. After independence, the novel professed disenchantment with state practices and unequal class and gender relations, without disrupting the nation’s imagined racial and ethno-religious homogeneity. This book identifies a trend in the twenty-first-century Egyptian novel that shatters this singular view, with the rise of a new consciousness that presents Egypt as fundamentally heterogeneous. Through a robust analysis of “new-consciousness” novels by authors like Idris ᶜAli, Bahaᵓ Tahir, Miral al-Tahawi, and Yusuf Zaydan, the author argues that this new consciousness does not only respond to predominant discourses of difference and practices of differentiation along the axes of race, ethno-religion, class, and gender by bringing the experiences of Nubian, Amazigh, Bedouin, Coptic, Jewish, and women minorities to the fore of Egypt’s literary imaginary, but also heralds the cacophony of voices that collectively cried for social justice from Tahrir Square in Egypt’s 2011-uprising. This study responds to the changing iconographic, semiotic, and formal features of the Egyptian novel. It fulfills the critical task of identifying an emergent novelistic genre and develops historically reflexive methodologies that interpret new-consciousness novels and their mediatory role in formalizing and articulating their historical moment. By adopting this context-specific approach to studying novelistic evolution, this book locates some of the strands that have been missing from the complex whole of Egypt’s culture and literary history.

In the late medieval period, manuscripts galore circulated in Middle Eastern libraries. Yet, very few book collections have come down to us as such or have left a documentary trail. This book discusses the largest private book collection of the pre-Ottoman Arabic Middle East for which we have both, a paper trail and a surviving corpus of the manuscripts that once sat on its shelves – the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī Library of Damascus. On this basis, the book suggests that this library was part of the owner’s symbolic strategy to monumentalise a vanishing world of scholarship bound to his life, family, quarter and home city.

This book explores Ottoman local governance during the liberal-capitalist state formation of the long 19^th century (1789-1922) with a particular focus on the administrative and judiciary councils of the Vidin County in the second half of the 19^th century. It explains the structure and procedures of these councils and provides an analysis of their function in local politics and economics in addition to an examination of their correspondence and people who worked in the governmental sphere dominated by these councils. Between 1396 and 1878, Vidin was a town under Ottoman administration and became a county centre in the Danube Province when an imperial reform restructured provincial governance and redefined imperial administrative divisions in 1864. The processes explored here focus mostly on the individuals’ rights to the means of production because a majority of the disputes within and petitions from the provinces during the nineteenth century were concerned with property and taxation. Local agents and groups engaged with each other within the judicio-administrative sphere dominated by these councils and sought to advance their interests by using the language, rules and practices of Ottoman governance. This book argues that in 19^th century Vidin, we do not see a binary opposition between a state that coerces transformation against a society that opposes reforms. Vidiners, including the notables and the less wealthy inhabitants utilized the judicio-administrative sphere as a hegemonic domain to pursue their strategies as they problematized proper governance (debating matters of property, security, market order and population) as part of Ottoman biopolitics.

This book tells the story of Armenian migration to North America in the late Ottoman period, and Istanbul’s efforts to prevent it. It shows how, much like the present, migrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were forced to travel through clandestine smuggling networks, frustrating the enforcement of the ban on migration. Further, migrants who attempted to return home from sojourns in North America risked debarment at the border and deportation, while the return of migrants who had naturalised as US citizens generated friction between the United States and Ottoman governments. The author sheds light on the relationship between the imperial state and its Armenian populations in the decades leading up to the Armenian genocide. He also places the Ottoman Empire squarely in the middle of global debates on migration, border control and restriction in this period, adding to our understanding of the global historical origins of contemporary immigration politics and other issues of relevance in the Middle East region, such as borders and frontiers, migrants and refugees, and ethno-religious minorities.

The book provides a critical and systematic analyses of the role of queens, eunuchs and concubines in medieval Islamic history. Spanning over six centuries. It explores gender and sexual politics and power from the time of the Prophet Muhammad through the Umayyad and Abbasid empires to the Mamluks in the 15^th century. Based on primary sources, documents, the study looks at the role of women, mothers, wives, concubines, and their close political relationship with eunuchs and atabegs to secure their interests. The book examine in details how, despite the male dominated society, women managed to come to power under the Abbasids and their impacts. The creation of the eunuch institution, and its transformation from a body associated with the –Harem- to eunuch rulers under the Abbasids. The book unravel the military-political power of eunuchs and their relations with women under the Abbasids and the appearance of the first sovereign eunuch ruler and army commander. Also the gradual rise of female power under the Fatimids, and the appearance of the first queen in Islamic history. The book also examines the power of the Turkmen women in politics and how and why they introduced the unique post of atabeg. Examines the role of the first Sunni queen in Islam, Dayfa of Aleppo and how she paved the way for another queen, Shajar al-Durr in Egypt in mid 13^th century. This book is the first comprehensive study of sexual politics in medieval Islam. It challenges the traditional Muslim institutions spread in vast area in the Muslim world, which think of women as children of a lesser God according to their patriarchal readings of Islamic laws, and exposes the misogynist doctrine of organizations such as IS, Qaida, Buko Haram.

In 1960s Egypt a group of writers exploded onto the literary scene, transforming the aesthetic landscape. Space in Modern Egyptian Fiction argues that this literary generation presents a marked shift in the representation of rural, urban, and exilic space, reflecting a disappointment in the project of the postcolonial nation-state in post-revolutionary Egypt. If the countryside ceased to be the idealized space of the nation, neither the Cairene metropolis nor the city of Alexandria took its place. Moreover, the transgression of borders to an exilic space served to unsettle categories of national and regional belonging. At the heart of this book is an argument about the disappearance of an idealized nation in the Egyptian novel. It provides a full examination of the emergence and establishment of a group of the most significant writers in modern Egyptian literature across six decades, while also attending to the social, economic, political, and aesthetic changes during a pivotal moment in Egypt’s contemporary history.

The topic of Legitimate and Illegitimate Violence in Islamic Thought (LIVIT) calls for an interdisciplinary, comparative and historical approach. This has been the underlying methodological assumption within the project which bore this name. Amongst the products of that three-year project is a series of collected studies by established and emerging scholars in the field, examining how Muslim thinkers have conceptualised violence and categorised (morally and legally) acts of violence. In this opening chapter, István Kristó-Nagy first explores how violence in Islamic thought can be set against a wider consideration of violence in human history. It is this comparative perspective which contextualises not only this volume, but also the two subsequent volumes in the LIVIT series. In the second half of this chapter, Robert Gleave explains how this volume is structured, addressing the different approaches used by the contributors, and examines the different ways in which violence can be categorised.