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The Fatimids’ apocalyptic vision of their central place in an imminent utopia played a critical role in transfiguring the intellectual and political terrains of North Africa in the early tenth century. Yet the realities that they faced on the ground often challenged their status as the custodians of a pristine Islam at the end of time. Through an examination of a variety of sources including works of taʾwīl or symbolic interpretation, this book illustrates some of the specific structures and functions of Fatimid apocalypticism. It then examines how various components of the apocalyptic myth—especially the utopia that it promised—evolved in response to shifting historical circumstances. The book also focuses on how the evolution of apocalyptic symbolism was related to the Fatimids’ consolidation of authority. The book ends with an extensive analysis of both the ritual and textual dimensions of another apocalyptic event linked to a Fatimid lineage: the Nizari Ismaili declaration of the end of time on August 8, 1164.

Examining a single broad tribal identity - al-Azd - from pre-Islamic Arabia through the Umayyad and into the early Abbasid era, this book notes the ways it was continually refashioned over that time. It explores the ways in which the rise of the early Islamic empire influenced the peoples of the Arabian Peninsula who became a core part of it, and examines the connections between the kinship societies and the developing state of the early caliphate. This helps us to understand how what are often called 'tribal' forms of social organisation identity conditioned its growth and helped shape what became its common elite culture. Studying the relationship between tribe and state during the first two centuries of the caliphate, the focus is on understanding the survival and transformation of tribal identity until it became part of the literate high culture of the Abbasid caliphate and a component of a larger Arab ethnic identity. The book argues that, from pre-Islamic Arabia to the caliphate, greater continuity existed between tribal identity and social practice than is generally portrayed.

Some of the world’s most exquisite medieval paintings, from late fifteenth-century Herat and the early Safavid workshops, illustrate well-known episodes of popular romances––like Leyla & Majnun––that give prominence to depictions of unrelated figures such as a milkmaid or a spinner at the scene of the hero Majnun’s death. This interdisciplinary study aims to uncover the significance of this enigmatic, century-long trend from its genesis at the Timurid court to its continued development into the Safavid era. The analysis of iconography in several luxury manuscript paintings within the context of contemporary cultural trends, especially the ubiquitous mystical and messianic movements in the post-Mongol Turco-Persian world, reveals the meaning of many of these obscure figures and scenes and links this extraordinary innovation in the iconography of Persian painting to one of the most significant events in the history of Islam: the takeover of Iran by the Safavids in 1501. The apparently inscrutable figures, which initially appeared in illustrations of didactic Sufi narrative poetry, allude to metaphors and verbal expressions of Sufi discourse going back to the twelfth century. These “emblematic” figure-types served to emphasize the moral lessons of the narrative subject of the illustrated text by deploying familiar tropes from an intertextual Sufi literary discourse conveyed through verses by poets like Rumi, Attar and Jami, and ended up complementing and expressing Safavid political power at its greatest extent: the conversion of Iran to Shiism.

Six years before the Egyptian revolution of January 2011, many young Egyptians had resorted to blogging as a means of self-expression and literary creativity. Some of these bloggers have not only received big popularity within the online community, but have also attracted the interest of independent and mainstream publishing houses, and have made their way into the Arab cultural field. Previous research on the impact of the Internet in the Middle East has been dominated by a focus on politics and the public sphere, while its influence on cultural domains remains very little explored. Blogging From Egypt aims at filling this gap by exploring young Egyptians’ blogs as forms of digital literature. It studies a corpus of 40 personal blogs written and distributed online between 2005 and 2016, combining literary analysis with interviews with the authors. The study reveals that the experimentation with blogging resulted in the emergence of a new literary genre: the autofictional blog. The book explores the aesthetic features of this genre, as well as its relation to the events of the “Arab Spring”. Finally, it discusses how blogs have evolved in the last years after 2011 and what is left of the blog in Arabic literary production. The book includes original extracts and translation from blogs, made available for the first time to an English-speaking audience.

Bathhouses (hamams) play a prominent role in Turkish culture, because of their architectural value and social function as places of hygiene, relaxation and interaction. As architectural spaces, hamams have been continuously shaped by social and historical change at many scales. The life story of Mimar Sinan’s Çemberlitaş Hamamı in Istanbul provides an important example: established in 1583/4, it was modernized in the Turkish Republic (since 1923) and now is a tourist attraction. As a social space shared between tourists and Turks, it is a critical site through which to investigate how global tourism affects local traditions and how places provide a nucleus of cultural belonging in a globalized world. This book constitutes the first in-depth, monographic study of a single hamam, espousing an original and experimental biographical approach.

Current popular and academic discussions make certain assumptions regarding Islam and its lack of compatibility with pluralism. Some notable liberal thinkers have even argued that pluralism itself is inherently antithetical to Islam. This volume addresses these assumptions by bringing clarity to some of their key suppositions and conjectures. It seeks to go beyond the parameters of political correctness by engaging in a dialogue that refutes these postulations in a direct, frontal debate. In this volume scholars from around the world explore notions of pluralism, discussing the broad spectrum of its relevance and application to modern-day societies, from secularism and multiculturalism to democracy, globalization, and the pivotal role of civil society.

The temptation to invoke idealised histories of Islamic cosmopolitanism as the antithesis to the militancy associated with contemporary groups, such as the Islamic State (IS), is quite powerful. Many writers have pointed to the flourishing of al-Andalus on the Iberian Peninsula and the mobile societies of the premodern Indian Ocean as paradigmatic examples both of the storied past and the potential future of cosmopolitan forms of religious vitality. However, if one pushes beyond nostalgic images of coexistence, pluralism and mobility, it is also possible to discern more complex stories. The chapters in Challenging Cosmopolitanism, specifically direct attention to the historical experiences of Muslims in China and Southeast Asia to explore such complexities. Marked by considerable inflows of Muslim migrants that further complicated the demographics of already heterogeneous populations, the experiences of Muslim communities in these regions provide insights into contests to define legitimate forms of difference. Spanning from the 16th through 21st centuries, this volume presents case studies of itinerant Sufis who overthrew governments in the Indian Ocean and religious shrines patronized by warlords in early Java; of thinkers who promoted ‘Islamic military cosmopolitanism’ in Qing-era China and Americans who supported US-Ottoman cooperation in the pacification of the Philippines; of Muslim rebels in early 20^th-century Malaya who resisted borders and Afghan refugees in China whose experience reflects contemporary dynamics of ‘armoured’ forms of 21^st century cosmopolitanism. Through such explorations, this volume illuminates the fraught relationships between mobility, coercion and border-crossing, thereby contributing to more nuanced frameworks of analysis for Islamic cosmopolitanism.

The resurgence of Islam, geopolitical crises involving Muslim nations, violence associated with Islam and the immigration of millions of Muslims to Western countries have generated a strong interest in understanding Islamic law. The challenges of these new realities have impressed upon Muslims the need to rethink classical jurisprudence, and a powerful contemporary ihad – the process of making a legal decision by independent interpretation of the legal sources – has unleashed a tremendous intellectual energy that is transforming legal systems across the Muslim world. This book explores the limits and controversies of this development in the context of the diverse needs of Muslim cultures and communities living in Muslim and non-Muslim nations and continents including Europe and North America. It explains diverse bodies of Islamic law, including fiqh, qanun and siyar; supplements Arabic terms from the Basic Code with English substitutes; and analyses the forces shaping contemporary ijtihad.

Writing letters was an important component of intellectual life in the Middle Islamic period, telling us much about the cultural history of pre-modern Islamic society. This book offers an analysis of letter-writing, focusing on the notion of the power of the pen. The author looks at the wider context of epistolography, relating it to the power structures of Islamic society in that period, and also attempts to identify some of the similarities and differences between Muslim modes of letter-writing and those of western cultures. One of the strengths of the book is that it is based on a wide range of primary Arabic sources, thus reflecting the broader epistemological importance of letter-writing in Islamic society. The book evaluates the background to letter-writing as the principal representation of state documents and communication; takes a close look at the literary principles employed in that process; considers the important social and intellectual role of the secretary and how he fitted into the power structure of Islamic society during this period; argues that the voluminous collections of letters, written mainly in artistic prose, can be classified as an epistolary genre in their own right; and shows that Islamic letter-writing was very culture specific.

The book offers fresh insight into the recent political development and contrasting experiences of four Maghreb countries: Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania. The Arab Spring affected them in different ways. Tunisia underwent profound change as Ben Ali was overthrown in a fortnight. Yet in Algeria, President Bouteflika won an unprecedented fourth term in office despite being too ill to campaign. What explains these variations? Why did Ben Ali’s regime fall and Bouteflika’s survive? Why has Morocco not gone the same way as Tunisia? And what of Mauritania, the often forgotten other Maghreb country? This book addresses these and other questions by using Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way’s celebrated model for examining political transitions to analyse and compare the political development of Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania over the last ten years.

Recent discussions of the‘Chinese economic development model’, the emergence of an alternative ‘Muslim model’ over the past quarter century, and the faltering globalisation of the ‘Washington Consensus’ all point to the need to investigate more systematically the nature of these models and their competitive attractions. This is especially the case in the Muslim world, which both spans different economic and geographic categories and is itself the progenitor of a development model. The ‘Chinese model’ has attracted the greatest attention in step with that country's phenomenal growth and therefore provides the primary focus for this book. This volume examines the characteristics of this model and its reception in two major regions of the world — Africa and Latin America. It also investigates the current competition over development models across Muslim contexts. The question of which model or models, if any, will guide development in Muslim majority countries is vital not only for them, but for the world as a whole. This political economy study addresses this vital question as well as the closely related issue of the centrality of governance to development.

Discussions of Turkish Islam are still frequently dominated by political considerations and dualistic paradigms: modern vs. traditional, secular vs. religious. Yet there exists a body of Muslim institutions in Turkey, Turkish theology faculties, or ilahiyat faculties, whose work cannot always be so easily reduced to political considerations or black and white paradigms. By taking Turkish theology up on its theological rather than political concerns, this book sheds light on complex Muslim theological voices already entangled in encounters with a largely Western and Christian modernity. Rather than ask whether or not Turkish Muslim theology is “modern,” this book aims to re-frame the binary implied in such a question by delving into the conceptual worlds of Turkish Muslim theologians. As part of this reframing, this book examines how Turkish theology dialectically mediates multiple intellectual traditions, lending particular focus to Turkish Muslim engagement with Western Christian thought. Featuring the work of RecepAlpyağıl (Istanbul University) and Şaban Ali Düzgün (Ankara University), this study provides a concise survey of Turkish Muslim positions on religious pluralism and atheism as well as detailed treatments of both critical and appreciative Turkish Muslim perspectives on Western Christianity. The result is a critical reframing of the category of modernity through responses of Turkish theologians to the Western intellectual tradition alongside a detailed exploration of an ongoing chapter in Muslim-Christian relations.

Why, in the years around 1920, did the concept of ‘minority’ suddenly spring to prominence in public affairs worldwide? Within a decade of World War One, the term became fundamental to public and academic understandings of national and international politics, law and society: ‘minorities’, and ‘majorities’ with them, were taken to be an objective reality, both in the present and the past. This book uses a study of Syria under the French mandate to show what historical developments led people to start describing themselves and others as ‘minorities’. Despite French attempts to create territorial, political and legal divisions, the mandate period saw the consolidation of the nation-state form in Syria: a trend towards a coherent national territory with fixed borders, uniform state authority within them and the struggle to control that state played out in the language of nationalism – developments in the post-Ottoman Levant which closely paralleled those in contemporary Europe, after the demise of the Austro-Hungarian and tsarist empires. Through close attention to what changed in French mandate Syria, and what those changes meant, the book argues for a careful rethinking of a term too often used as an objective description of reality.

The character and range of Arab folk literature are investigated in this collection. Arranged into three sections, the book looks first at historical developments in the relationship between Arab folk literature and that of the elite, the gradual elaboration of certain genres, and the producers of folk literature. It then devotes a substantial section to the consideration of single or related texts. Finally, the book searches for evidence of social and cultural implications and for differences of attitudes of folk and elite towards sensitive issues. The book features a standardised transcription system based on pronunciation of the language — far more suited for oral forms of literature.

Does political Islam have a specific vision of global politics? How has the foreign policy of Islamist forces developed in order to impose their ideas onto the diplomatic agenda of other countries? How do these actors perceive the world, international affairs, and the way Islamic countries should engage with the international system? Eager to break with the dominant grammar of international relations, and instead to fuse Muslim states in a unique religious and political entity, Muslim actors have had to face up to the realities that they had promised to transform. Drawing on a series of case studies, this collective work sheds light on six national trajectories of Islamism: in Morocco (the Party of Justice and Development), Tunisia (Ennhada), Egypt (the Muslim Brotherhood), Palestine (Hamas), Lebanon (Hizbullah) and Turkey (AKP). It looks at what has been produced by the representatives of political Islam in each case, and the way these representatives have put their words and their ideological aspirations into action within their foreign policies.

This book investigates how Turkish nationalism was constructed by two closely related groups: Ottoman-Turkish prisoners of war in Russia and Egypt during the First World War, and Ottoman-Turkish psychiatrists who examined and diagnosed the prisoners following their post-war repatriation. The book first explores what the prisoners understood of nation, tradition, and Islam in the confines of prison camps as they attempted to identify the ills of their nation and empire. As the problems were identified and various solutions proposed, some of these views came to clash and sometimes converge. Second, turning to the doctors, it examines the role science played in the nation they wanted to build after the war. The prisoners’ and other soldiers’ shattered nerves became grounding points of profound social anxieties about the present and future of the Turkish nation. During the interwar years, when the military’s health was still taken to be a reflection of the nation’s health, the psychiatrists projected this worrisome picture, which they viewed as signs of national degeneration, onto the nation at large. Much like the officer prisoners in the camps discursively excluded the ignorant peasants from the nation, the psychiatrists wanted to reject those they deemed as a biological threat to the nation’s body. This book aims to broaden the discussion of nationalism to include both ideological and biological factors to consider how each influenced the other.

Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) is one of the most influential and important Muslim thinkers in history. Ibn Khaldun has inspired at least as much interest among modern scholars as his immediate contemporaries. Legions of sociologists, anthropologists and historians have studied his philosophy of history, treating the Muqaddimah as a timeless piece of philosophy. Most studies of Ibn Khaldun ignore the fascinating story of his own life and times. Rejecting portrayals of Ibn Khaldun as a modern mind lost in medieval obscurity, this book demonstrates how Ibn Khaldun's ideas were shaped by his historical context and personal motivations. Relying on original Arabic sources, most importantly Ibn Khaldun's unique autobiography, this is the first complete, scholarly biography of Ibn Khaldun in English. Demonstrating the rich and complex nature of Ibn Khaldun's memoirs, the book not only tells the life story of Ibn Khaldun, but also introduces readers to the fourteenth-century Mediterranean world. Seen in the context of a politically tumultuous and religiously contentious fourteenth-century Mediterranean, Ibn Khaldun's ideas about tribalism, identity, religion and history are even more relevant to pressing, modern concerns.

This book situates the evolution of citizenship at the centre of state formation under the quasi-colonial mandate administration in Palestine. The book presents a new understanding of the Arabs' reactions to colonialism and Jewish immigration into Palestine by framing resistance to mandate policies and the early stages of the development of the political project of Palestinian nationalism through the articulated appeals, discussions, ideologies and demands for a political, as opposed to simply legal, identity. It traces how, and to what extent, citizenship became politically linked to nationality and civic identity as a reaction to the legal parameters of the British-created citizenship status in the post-1918 period.

This book could easily be called ‘A Guide for the Modern Muslim’. The author spells out what, for him, is the essential message of Islam, followed by a history of its unfolding through the person of the Prophet Muhammad, who was a visionary seeking to change the ideals, attitudes, and behaviour of the society in which he lived. The message and its history are delineated as two separate things, conflated by tradition. The author confronts those difficult questions with which Muslims are struggling, attempting to reconsider them from a moral and political perspective that is independent of the framework produced by tradition.

This comparison of Islamic and Christian mysticism focuses on the mystic journey in the two faith traditions — the journey that every believer must make and which leads to the Divine. The author clears away misconceptions and highlights similarities and differences in the thought and lives of six key mystics, three Islamic — Al-Kalabadhi, Al-Daylami, Al-Qushayri — and three Christian: Julian of Norwich, Thomas A. Kempis, and Teresa of Avila. He considers the ways of Perfection on the Mystic Path and asks in what ways these authors have embarked on the mystic journey. The author looks at the themes they have in common, as well as their differences, and asks how they envisage the concept of ‘union’ with the Deity. Readers will gain a broad understanding of the interdisciplinary and intertextual nature of the subject, as well as its diverse intellectual and historical contexts. The book surveys themes as diverse as secular chivalry and union with the Divine; examines the role of al-Khidr/al-Khadir/Elijah/Elias/St George in both the Islamic and Christian mystical traditions; and considers the negative and positive articulations of each tradition. It is a companion volume to Islam, Christianity and Tradition: A Comparative Exploration by Ian R. Netton.