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Christians in British Mandate Palestine (1917-1948) comprised a significant minority of the Arab population, but it is commonly assumed that they were junior partners in the Palestinian nationalist movement, or perhaps even wary of the movement altogether. The period was tense, and Arab Christians did struggle to define their community in the face of Zionist immigration, British colonial policies, and the rise of both regional pan-Islamic ideologies and Palestinian nationalism. This book focuses on the relationship between Arab Christians and the nationalist movement as the British Mandate unfolded throughout the first half of the twentieth century. It also looks at the nature of interreligious religious relations between Christians and Muslims. The book uses major events of the period as a lens through which to examine Christian efforts to define their place in Palestinian society while being conscious of variations (denominational, socioeconomic and geographical, for instance) and debates within the diverse Arab Christian community. Despite such variations, trends among individual Christian behaviours and beliefs, as well as those of Christian organizations (both religious and social in nature), challenge the prevailing assumption that Arabs were prone to communalism or sectarianism. Instead, they were as likely as their Muslim compatriots to support nationalism. When social pressure led Christians to identify along communal lines, they did so in conjunction with a stronger dedication to nationalism.

For more than one thousand years Arab medicine held sway in the ancient world, from the shores of Spain in the West to China, India and Sri Lanka (Ceylon) in the East. This book explores the impact of Greek (as well as Indian and Persian) medical heritage on the evolution of Arab medicine and pharmacology, investigating it from the perspective of materia medica — a reliable indication of the contribution of this medical legacy. Focusing on the main substances introduced and traded by the Arabs in the medieval Mediterranean — including Ambergris, camphor, musk, myrobalan, nutmeg, sandalwood, and turmeric — the chapters show how they enriched the existing inventory of drugs influenced by Galenic-Arab pharmacology. Further, they look at how these substances merged with the development and distribution of new technologies and industries that evolved in the Middle Ages such as textiles, paper, dyeing, and tanning, and with the new trends, demands, and fashions regarding spices, perfumes, ornaments (gemstones), and foodstuffs some of which can be found in our modern-day food basket.

A study of Islamic law and political power in the Ottoman Empire’s richest provincial city What did Islamic law mean in the early modern period, a world of great Muslim empires? Often portrayed as the quintessential jurists’ law, to a large extent it was developed by scholars outside the purview of the state. However, for the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire, justice was the ultimate duty of the monarch, and Islamic law was a tool of legitimation and governance. James E. Baldwin examines how the interplay of these two conceptions of Islamic law – religious scholarship and royal justice – undergirded legal practice in Cairo, the largest and richest city in the Ottoman provinces. Through detailed studies of the various formal and informal dispute resolution institutions and practices that formed the fabric of law in Ottoman Cairo, his book contributes to key questions concerning the relationship between the shari‘a and political power, the plurality of Islamic legal practice, and the nature of centre-periphery relations in the Ottoman Empire. Key features Offers a new interpretation of the relationship between Islamic law and political power Presents law as the key nexus connecting Egypt with the imperial capital Istanbul during the period of Ottoman decentralization Studies judicial institutions such as the governor’s Diwan and the imperial council that have received little attention in previous scholarship Integrates the study of legal records with an analysis of how legal practice was represented in contemporary chronicles Provides transcriptions and translations of a range of Ottoman legal documents

This book traces the origins, history, and memory of the Jalayirid dynasty, a family that succeeded the Mongol rulers in Iran and Iraq in the 14^th and early 15^th centuries. The story of how the Jalayirids came to power is illustrative of the political dynamics that shaped much of the Mongol and post-Mongol period in the Middle East. The Jalayirid sultans sought to preserve the social and political order of the Mongol Ilkhanate, while claiming that they were the rightful heirs to the rulership of that order. Central to the Jalayirids’ claims to the legacy of the Ilkhanate was their attempt to control the Ilkhanid heartland of Azarbayjan and its major city, Tabriz. Control of Azarbayjan meant control of a network of long-distance trade between China and the Latin West, which continued to be a source of economic prosperity through the 8^th/14^th century. Azarbayjan also represented the center of Ilkhanid court life, whether in the migration of the mobile court-camp of the ruler, or in the complexes of palatial, religious and civic buildings constructed around the city of Tabriz by members of the Ilkhanid royal family, as well as by members of the military and administrative elite.

The Khārijites are perhaps the most notorious rebels of early Islamic history. The Islamic tradition portrays them as a heretical movement of militant zealots, a notion largely reiterated by modern scholarship on this phenomenon, which is both surprisingly scarce and largely concerned with historical Khārijism ‘as it really was’. In contrast, this book provides the first comprehensive literary analysis of the early years of Khārijite history (c657-705 CE) as depicted in 9^th- and 10^th-century CE Islamic historiography. It purposefully moves away from positivist reconstructions and instead examines the narrative role and function of Khārijism in early Islamic historical writing. Two main arguments are advanced: first, that there is little narrative substance to the Khārijites as they are described in the selected sources; and second, that Islamic historiography does not approach Khārijism as an end in itself, but as a tool with which to discuss other issues. By exploring the manifold purposes of telling stories about these so-called heretics and rebels, the book thus provides a fresh perspective on early Khārijism and contributes to the study of how historical memory was created in the early Islamic period. Above all, the analysis highlights the need for a serious reassessment of the historical phenomenon of Khārijism as it is currently understood in scholarship.

How is language used in Egyptian public discourse to illuminate the collective identity of Egyptians? How does this identity relate to language form and content? This book explores these questions by drawing on sources including newspaper articles, caricatures, blogs, patriotic songs, films, school textbooks, TV talk-shows, poetry, and novels. As well as furthering our understanding of the relationship between identity and language, it yields insights about the intricate ways in which media and public discourse help shape and outline identity through linguistic processes. The book offers an in-depth study of identity in modern Egyptian public discourse; focuses on nationalist discourse before, during, and after the Egyptian revolution of 2011; is based on a broad and representative selection of data; and helps us to decode and understand the messages put forward by the competing factions in Egyptian politics.

Thirteen chapters on fin-de-siecle Egypt tackle an important but relatively neglected decade in its history, as the editors’ introduction argues through an assessment of previous scholarship. Chapters consider the overarching impact of a British colonial administration through policies and practices such as statistics-gathering and infrastructure building as well as attempts to control prostitution. Institutions and ideologies of modernity and reform are represented in chapters on education, fiction-writing, history writing and its translation, the press as a vehicle of historical consciousness, and political memoirs of a rising class of professionals. How Egyptians drew from and critiqued European institutions is a concern of several chapters, as well as concerns with gender issues, minority rights and the role of historic minorities such as Jews. Egypt’s heterogeneous population is also seen through chapters on its Greek community, Coptic activism and reform, anarchism, and the different agendas of local actors in the country’s far west. Together these scholarly studies show the decade as one of enormous though often quiet intellectual, political and institutional activity.

The written text was a pervasive feature of cultural practices in the medieval Middle East. At the heart of book circulation stood libraries that experienced a rapid expansion from the twelfth century onwards. While the existence of these libraries is well known our knowledge of their content and structure has been very limited as hardly any medieval Arabic catalogues have been preserved. This book discusses the largest and earliest medieval library of the Middle East for which we have documentation – the Ashrafiya library in the very centre of Damascus – and edits its catalogue. This catalogue shows that even book collections attached to Sunni religious institutions could hold rather unexpected titles, such as stories from the 1001 Nights, manuals for traders, medical handbooks, Shiite prayers, love poetry and texts extolling wine consumption. At the same time this library catalogue decisively expands our knowledge of how the books were spatially organised on the bookshelves of such a large medieval library. With over 2,000 entries this catalogue is essential reading for anybody interested in the cultural and intellectual history of Arabic societies. Setting the Ashrafiya catalogue into a comparative perspective with contemporaneous libraries on the British Isles this book opens new perspectives for the study of medieval libraries.

Medieval Empires and the Culture of Competition shows how the interactive, confrontational practice of courtly arts helped shape imperial thought in the Middle Ages. Its analysis covers Classical Arabic poetry and official prose, Spanish court documents, Galician Portuguese lyric, and Italian narrative works. The historical span is 950-1350 CE. Scholars of premodern cultures have struggled to reconcile the political violence of the late Middle Ages with the cosmopolitanism of that era’s Islamic and Christian empires. This book argues that medieval thinkers’ most pressing cultural challenge was neither to demonize the foreign, “heathen” other, nor to reverse that trend with an ethos of tolerance. Instead it was to make the court appear as robust as possible in the face of major demographic change and regional war. The ritual of artistic contest allowed elites to come to terms with religious and ethnic groups’ rival claims to legitimacy, and to subsume those claims into an overarching courtly ideal.

This book tells stories of interaction, conflict, and common exchange between Berbers, Arabs, Latins, Muslims, Christians, and Jews in North Africa and Latin Europe. Examining shared commerce, slavery, mercenary activity, art, and intellectual and religious debates, this book argues that North Africa was an integral part of western Medieval history. It argues that North Africa and Europe together experienced the Twelfth Century Renaissance and the Commercial Revolution. When Europe was highly divided during twelfth century, North Africa was enjoying the peak of its power, united under the Berber Almohad Empire. In the midst of a common commercial growth throughout the medieval period, North Africa and Europe also shared in a burst of spirituality and mysticism. This growth of spirituality occurred even as representatives of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam debated and defended their faiths, dreaming of conversion even as they shared the same rational methods. The growth of spirituality instigated a Second Axial Age in the history of religion. Challenging the idea of a Mediterranean split between Islam and Christianity, the book shows how the Maghrib (North Africa) was not a Muslim, Arab monolith or as an extension of the exotic Orient. North Africa, not the Holy Land to the Far East, was the first place where Latin Europeans encountered the Muslim other and vice versa. Medieval North Africa was as diverse and complex as Latin Europe. North Africa should not be dismissed as a side show of European history. North Africa was, in fact, an integral part of the story.

Who are the Assyrians and what role did they play in shaping modern Iraq? Were they simply bystanders, victims of collateral damage who played a passive role in the history of the country? How have they negotiated their position throughout various periods of Iraq's state-building processes? This book details the narrative and history of Iraq in the 20th century and reinserts the Assyrian experience as an integral part of Iraq's broader contemporary historiography. It is the first comprehensive account to contextualize this native people's experience alongside the developmental processes of the modern Iraqi state. Using primary and secondary data, this book offers a nuanced exploration of the dynamics that have affected and determined the trajectory of the Assyrians' experience in 20th century Iraq.