Middle Eastern history Books

Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Table of ContentsFrontmatter -- CONTENTS -- LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS -- LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS OF PERIODICALS AND SOCIETIES -- EDITOR'S NOTE -- I. INTRODUCTION -- 1. DEFINITION AND SCOPE OF ORIENTAL PALEOGRAPHY AND DIPLOMATICS -- 2. HISTORY OF THE STUDY OF ORIENTAL DIPLOMATICS -- 3. COLLECTIONS OF ORIENTAL DOCUMENTS IN TURKEY AND IN OTHER ASIATIC COUNTRIES -- 4. COLLECTIONS OF ORIENTAL DOCUMENTS IN EUROPE -- 5. PUBLICATIONS OF ORIENTAL DOCUMENTS -- II. PALEOGRAPHY -- 1. WHITING MATERIALS -- 2. WRITING IMPLEMENTS -- 3. THE ARABIC SCRIPT AND ITS DEVELOPMENT -- 4. TYPES OF SCRIPT USED TN OTTOMAN DOCUMENTS -- 5. ABBREVIATIONS -- 6. CRYPTOGRAPHIC SYMBOLS -- III. DIPLOMATICS -- 1. TERMINOLOGY OF OTTOMAN DOCUMENTS -- 2. DESCRIPTION OF DOCUMENTS -- 3. METHODS OF FOLDING AND PRESERVING DOCUMENTS -- 4. ARRANGEMENT OF COMPONENTS OF DOCUMENTS -- 5. COPIES AND TRANSCRIPTS OF DOCUMENTS -- 6. FORGERIES OF DOCUMENTS -- 7. TRANSLATIONS OF DOCUMENTS -- 8. DOCUMENTS OF THE CRIMEAN TATARS -- 9. BASIC FACTS OF THE STRUCTURE OF THE OTTOMAN CHANCERY -- 10. SOURCES FOR OTTOMAN HISTORY -- 11. POLAND'S RELATIONS WITH ORIENTAL COUNTRIES -- IV. ANCILLARY DISCIPLINES -- 1. CHRONOLOGY -- 2. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLES OF RULERS -- 3. HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY -- 4. NUMISMATICS -- 5. ELEMENTS OF TURKISH HISTORICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY -- APPENDIX -- INDEX

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Book SynopsisThabit ibn Qurra (826–901) was one of history’s most original thinkers and displayed expertise in the most difficult disciplines of this time: geometry, number theory, and astronomy as well as ontology, physics, and metaphysics. Approximately a dozen of this shorter mathematical and philosophical writings are collected in this volume. Critically edited with accompanying commentary, these writings show how Thabit Ibn Qurra developed and reconceived the intellectual inheritance of ancient Greece in all areas of knowledge.

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Book SynopsisThis volume approaches the topic of mobility in Southeast Europe by offering the first detailed historical study of the land route connecting Istanbul with Belgrade. After this route that diagonally crosses Southeast Europe had been established in Roman times, it was as important for the Byzantines as the Ottomans to rule their Balkan territories. In the nineteenth century, the road was upgraded to a railroad and, most recently, to a motorway. The contributions in this volume focus on the period from the Middle Ages to the present day. They explore the various transformations of the route as well as its transformative role for the cities and regions along its course. This not only concerns the political function of the route to project the power of the successive empires. Also the historical actors such as merchants, travelling diplomats, Turkish guest workers or Middle Eastern refugees together with the various social, economic and cultural effects of their mobility are in the focus of attention. The overall aim is to gain a deeper understanding of Southeast Europe by foregrounding historical continuities and disruptions from a long-term perspective and by bringing into dialogue different national and regional approaches.

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Book SynopsisPresentations of offerings to the emperor-king on anniversaries of his accession became an important imperial ritual in the court of Franz Joseph I. This book explores for the first time the identity constructions of Orthodox Jewish communities in Jerusalem as expressed in their gifts to the Austro-Hungarian Kaisers at the time of dramatic events. It reveals how the beautiful gifts, their dedications, and their narratives, were perceived by gift-givers and recipients as instruments capable of acting upon various social, cultural and political processes. Lily Arad describes in a captivating manner the historical narratives of the creation and presentation of these gifts. She analyzes the iconography of these gifts as having transformative effect on the self-identification of the Jewish communities and examines their reception by the Kaisers and in the Austrian and the Palestinian Jewish press. This groundbreaking book unveils Jewish cultural and political strategies aimed to create local Eretz-Israel identities, demonstrating distinct positive communal identification which at times expressed national sentiments and at the same time preserved European identification.

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Book SynopsisIran is More than Persia: Ethnic Politics in Iran analyses Iranian politics from a unique perspective, one that focuses on the relations between the Persian-dominated Iranian state and the country’s ethnic minorities. The book explores the stability of the ruling regime in light of the challenges that multiethnicity brings. Persians comprise less than half of the population of Iran and more than 40 percent of Iranians lack fluency in the Persian language. An overwhelming majority of non-Persian groups inhabit most of Iran’s border regions; as such the book explores Iran’s foreign policy toward neighboring states that share co-ethnic populations. Iran’s ethnic minorities inhabit the state’s poorest provinces and the country’s growing environmental and water supply challenges hit the ethnic minority provinces harder than the Persian center, adding an ominous ethnic character to what are often presented as purely environmental or economic challenges. The book further examines the potential impact of ethnic based unrest in Khuzestan on Iran’s oil production, Iran’s main oil producing region. Drawing on a rich assortment of primary data and interviews, this book offers unparalled insights into ethnic politics in Iran. It will be of interest to upper-level undergraduates and postgraduates, researchers and professionals interested in the Middle East, international relations, and ethnic studies.

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Book SynopsisHistorical studies on the practice of Islamic law (sharīʿa) tend to focus on practice in a Sunni setting during the Mamluk or Ottoman periods. This book decenters Sunni and Mamluk and Ottoman normativity by investigating the practice of sharīʿa in a Twelver Shiʿi Persian-speaking milieu, in early modern Iran between the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. Drawing on documentary evidence and narrative sources, it reconstructs who the practitioners of Islamic law were, how they authenticated, annulled, and archived legal documents, and how they intervened in the resolution of disputes over religious endowments (waqf). The study demonstrates that following Iran's conversion to Twelver Shiʿism under the Safavids, the dominance of Uṣūlī Shiʿi legal theory, which conferred judicial authority on scholars recognized as Shiʿi jurists (mujathids), affected both the practitioners of Islamic law and the procedures of sharīʿa court practice in Iran. Shiʿi jurists in Iran, as a result, would come to exercise by the end of the nineteenth century a judicial monopoly over valid sharīʿa court practice thus laying the foundation for Ayatollah Khomeini's extension, during the Iranian revolution, of the authority of the Shiʿi jurist over political affairs.

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Book SynopsisThe documents from the Ḥaram al-sharīf in Jerusalem constitute one of the most important corpora from the pre-Ottoman Middle East covering broad areas of social, political, cultural and economic history. The first documents from the Ḥaram al-sharīf in Jerusalem were discovered in the 1970s and described by Donald Little (Catalogue of the Islamic Documents, Beirut/Wiesbaden 1984). In recent years, approximately 100 new documents have been discovered that are described in this catalogue. This catalogue sets the new corpus in relation to the ‘old’ corpus and highlights its potential for future scholarship. The main part is a description of all documents, including size, materiality, summary, editions of beginning/end of document as well as a list of personal names, place names and names of witnesses. The volume also includes the edition of ten fascinating documents (five Persian, five Arabic) with high-quality reproductions of the originals. Finally, the volume includes a list of all Ḥaram al-sharīf documents edited so far.

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