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This book discusses how justice was administrated and applied in medieval Egypt. The model that evolved during the early middle ages involved four judicial institutions: the cadi, the court of complaints (mazalim), the police (shurta), responsible for criminal justice, and the Islamised market law (hisba), administrated by the market supervisor (the muhtasib). Literary and non-literary sources are used to highlight how these institutions worked in real-time situations such as the famine of 1024-1025, which posed tremendous challenges to both the market supervisor and the ruling establishment. The inner workings of the court of complaint during the Fatimid period (10^th-12^th century) are also extensively discussed. The discussion is extended to include the way the courts of non-Muslim communities were perceived and functioned during the Fatimid period. The discussion also provides insights into the scope of non-Muslim self-rule/judicial autonomy in medieval Islam.

There are more than 15 million people over age 65 currently living in the Arab world, yet little attention has been paid to the cultural significance of growing old. The book recognizes the widespread silence by countering the critical corpus that reads the modern Arabic novel as a political discourse with an emphasis on youth achievement. By offering close readings of 16 fictional works from different parts of the Arab world such as novels by Alia Mamdouh, Sahar Khalifah, Iman Kachachi, Rashid al-Daif and Alaa al-Aswany, the study utilizes biological and cultural theories of ageing- particularly from the perspective of gender and feminism- that shed light on the representation of ageing in the Arabic novel. The study makes use of feminist theories of ageing and gerontology that focus on sexism and ageism, including works by Simone de Beauvoir and Margaret Marganroth Gullette to present aging as a relational formation between men and women, and their idiosyncratic experiences of the process of ageing, revealing that there is no prototype of oldness in the Arabic novel and that older men and women manifest a multiplicity of identities, concerns and experiences. The study challenges the ungendered image generally attributed to older persons and examines how they navigate old age and subvert it. As they grow older men and women manifest a multiplicity of identities, concerns, and experiences revealing that the ageing process is an ongoing inherently unstable project.

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.

A socio-political and cultural history of the Armenians in Cold War Lebanon, this book argues that Armenians around the world – in the face of the Genocide, and despite the absence of an independent nation-state after World War I – developed dynamic socio-political, cultural, ideological and ecclesiastical centres. And it focuses on one such centre, Beirut, in the postcolonial 1940s and 1950s. Tsolin Nalbantian explores Armenians’ discursive re-positioning within the newly independent Lebanese nation-state; the political-cultural impact (in Lebanon as well as Syria) of the 1946–8 repatriation initiative to Soviet Armenia; the 1956 Catholicos election; and the 1957 Lebanese elections and 1958 mini-civil war. What emerges is a post-Genocide Armenian history of – principally – power, renewal and presence, rather than one of loss and absence. Armenians Beyond Diaspora: Making Lebanon Their Own investigates Lebanese Armenians’ changing views of their place in the making of the Lebanese state and its wider Arab environment, and in relation to the Armenian Socialist Soviet Republic. It challenges the dominant Armenian historiography, which treats Lebanese Armenians as a subsidiary of an Armenian global diaspora, and contributes to an understanding of the development of class and sectarian cleavages that led to the breakdown of civil society in Lebanon from 1975. In highlighting the role of societal actors in the US–Soviet Cold War in the Middle East, it also questions the tendency to read Middle East history through the lens of dominant (Arab) nationalisms.

The idea of the museum as a space committed to dialogue and inclusive representation which is paramount to museology in the Global North has had trouble finding ground in the Middle East and North Africa where museums remain—and have mostly been depicted as—the carriers of homogenous national identities, at the expense of cultural and social difference. Research recently undertaken by anthropologists, museum specialists and historians reveal that this monolithic museographic conception of culture is in the process of being challenged. Whilst some public museums in the region have engaged in the reconsideration of the narratives underpinning their collections, the past two decades have also seen a boom in private museum initiatives led by social and cultural minority groups whose experiences have until now been marginalised within, or absent from, state-led exhibitionary practices. This volume discusses the contradictions and opportunities museums have created for minority groups across the Mediterranean basin, from the early twentieth century to the contemporary period. It explores whether museums can provide a suitable canvas for minorities to express their voice, what kind of narratives is articulated, and whether these can challenge cultural and social stereotypes and deploy new kinds of identities.

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.

Bayana in Rajasthan and its monuments challenge the perceived but established view of the development of Indo-Muslim architecture and urban form. At the end of the 12th century the Ghurid conquerors took the mighty Hindu fort, building the first Muslim city below on virgin ground. It was the centre of an autonomous region during the 15th and 16th centuries and was even considered by Sikandar Lodī for the capital of his sultanate before he decided on Agra, then a mere village of Bayana. A peculiarity of historic sites in India is that whole towns with outstanding remains can, through political change or climatic events, be either built over by modern developments or fall into obscurity. The latter is the case with Bayana, abandoned following an earthquake in 1505. Going beyond a simple study of the historic, architectural and archaeological remains ‒ surveyed and illustrated in detail ‒ the book takes on the wider issues of how far the artistic traditions of Bayana, which developed independently from those of Delhi, later influenced North Indian architecture and were the forerunners of the Mughal architectural style, which draw many of its features from innovations developed first in Bayana.

Is it lawful to shed the blood of a man or a woman who insults the Prophet Muhammad? Does the Qur’an stipulate a worldly punishment for apostates? Beginning with a genealogy of religious freedom in contemporary Islam, this book tells the gripping story of Rafiq Taqi, an Azerbaijani journalist and writer, who was condemned to death by an Iranian cleric for a blasphemous news article in 2006. Delving into the most sacred sources for all Muslims – the Qur’an and Hadith – Mohsen Kadivar explores the subject of blasphemy and apostasy from the perspective of Shi’a jurisprudence to articulate a polarisation between secularism and extremist religious orthodoxy. In a series of online exchanges, he debates the case with Muhammad Jawad Fazel, the son of Grand Ayatollah Fazel Lankarani who issued the fatwa pronouncing death penalty on Taqi. While disapproving of the journalist’s writings, Kadivar takes a defensive stance against vigilante murders and asks whether death for apostasy reflects the true spirit of Islam. This book presents a back-and-forth debate between modern two Shi’a jurists (one conservative, one reformist) that locates the exact points of controversy surrounding apostasy and blasphemy. It engages with the broader subjects of religious freedom and human rights, addressing both secular and religious interests. The author’s extensive new introduction and annotations throughout the text brings the work up-to-date and place it in its academic and public contexts. Finally, the book takes a front-row seat to the debate on blasphemy and apostasy in Islam.

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.

This edited volume addresses the ways in which the city has been explored in works of literature by classical and modern ‘Arab’ authors from different theosophical and ideological backgrounds. Crucial to its organizing theoretical paradigm is its rejection of the stark rupture that most often separates the pre-modern and modern Arabic literary traditions. Instead, we view the entirety of the tradition as an evolving continuum, making our collection relevant to scholars of both classical and modern Arabic literature.

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.