Caliphate and Kingship in a Fifteenth-Century Literary History of Muslim Leadership and Pilgrimage PDF Download

Author: Jo van Steenbergen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004332367
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 511

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Book Description
In Caliphate and Kingship Jo Van Steenbergen presents a revisionist cultural biography, a critical edition and an annotated translation of al-Ḏahab al-Masbūk, a summary history of the ḥağğ and Muslim rule by Egypt’s leading historian al-Maqrīzī (d. 1442 CE).

Author: Jo Van Steenbergen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004431314
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
The concept, practice, institution and appearance of ‘the state’ have been hotly debated ever since the emergence of history as a discipline within modern scholarship. The field of medieval Islamic history, however, has remained aloof from most of these debates. Rather it tends to take for granted the particularity of dynastic trajectories within slow-changing bureaucratic contexts. Trajectories of State Formation promotes a more critical and connected understanding of state formation in the late medieval Sultanates of Cairo and of the Timurid, Turkmen and Ottoman dynasties. Projecting seven case studies onto a broad canvas of European and West-Asian research, this volume presents a trans-dynastic reconstruction, interpretation and illustration of statist trajectories across fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia. The contributors are: Georg Christ, Kristof D’hulster, Jan Dumolyn, Albrecht Fuess, Dimitri J. Kastritsis, Beatrice Forbes Manz, John L. Meloy, Jo Van Steenbergen, and Patrick Wing.

Author: Gül Şen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004510419
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
In Making Sense of History: Narrativity and Literariness in the Ottoman Chronicle of Naʿīmā, Gül Şen offers the first comprehensive analysis of narrativity in the most prominent official Ottoman court chronicle

Author: Reuven Amitai
Publisher: V&R Unipress
ISBN: 3847004115
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 537

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Book Description
The Mamluk Sultanate represents an extremely interesting case study to examine social, economic and cultural developments in the transition into the rapidly changing modern world. On the one hand, it is the heir of a political and military tradition that goes back hundreds of years, and brought this to a high pitch that enabled astounding victories over serious external threats. On the other hand, as time went on, it was increasingly confronted with "modern" problems that would necessitate fundamental changes in its structure and content. The Mamluk period was one of great religious and social change, and in many ways the modern demographic map was established at this time. This volume shows that the situation of the Mamluk Sultanate was far from that of decadence, and until the end it was a vibrant society (although not without tensions and increasing problems) that did its best to adapt and compete in a rapidly changing world.

Author: Catherine Holmes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009021907
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 706

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Book Description
This comparative study explores three key cultural and political spheres – the Latin west, Byzantium and the Islamic world from Central Asia to the Atlantic – roughly from the emergence of Islam to the fall of Constantinople. These spheres drew on a shared pool of late antique Mediterranean culture, philosophy and science, and they had monotheism and historical antecedents in common. Yet where exactly political and spiritual power lay, and how it was exercised, differed. This book focuses on power dynamics and resource-allocation among ruling elites; the legitimisation of power and property with the aid of religion; and on rulers' interactions with local elites and societies. Offering the reader route-maps towards navigating each sphere and grasping the fundamentals of its political culture, this set of parallel studies offers a timely and much needed framework for comparing the societies surrounding the medieval Mediterranean.

Author: Jo van Steenbergen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004458905
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 521

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Book Description
The present volume contributes to research on historic Arabic texts from late medieval Egypt and Syria. Departing from dominant understandings of these texts through the prisms of authenticity and “literarization,” it engages with questions of textual constructedness and authorial agency. It consists of 13 contributions by a new generation of scholars in three parts. Each part represents a different aspect of their new readings of particular texts. Part one looks at concrete instances of textual interdependencies, part two at the creativity of authorial agencies, and part three at the relationship between texts and social practice. New Readings thus participates in the revaluation of late medieval Arabic historiography as a critical field of inquiry. Contributors: Rasmus Bech Olsen, Víctor de Castro León, Mohammad Gharaibeh, Kenneth A. Goudie, Christian Mauder, Evan Metzger, Zacharie Mochtari de Pierrepont, Clément Onimus, Tarek Sabraa, Iria Santás de Arcos, Gowaart Van Den Bossche, Koby Yosef.

Author: Simon O'Meara
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748699317
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
The most sacred site of Islam, the KaE ba (the granite cuboid structure at the centre of the Great Mosque of Mecca) is here investigated by examining six of its predominantly spatial effects: as the qibla (the direction faced in prayer); as the axis and matrix mundi of the Islamic world; as an architectural principle in the bedrock of this world; as a circumambulated goal of pilgrimage and site of spiritual union for mystics and Sufis; and as a dwelling that is imagined to shelter temporarily an animating force; but which otherwise, as a house, holds a void.

Author: Gowaart Van Den Bossche
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110753022
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
The so-called Mamluk sultans who ruled Egypt and Syria between the late thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries AD have often been portrayed as lacking in legitimacy due to their background as slave soldiers. Sultanic biographies written by chancery officials in the early period of the sultanate have been read as part of an effort of these sultans to legitimise their position on the throne. This book reconsiders the main corpus of six such biographies written by the historians Ibn ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir (d. 1293) and his nephew Shāfiʿ ibn ʿAlī (d. 1330) and argues that these were in fact far more complex texts. An understanding of their discourses of legitimisation needs to be embedded within a broader understanding of the multi-directional discourses operating across the texts. The study proposes to interpret these texts as "spectacles", in which authors emplotted the reign of a sultan in thoroughly literary and rhetorical fashion, making especially extensive use of textual forms prevalent in the chancery. In doing so the authors reimagined the format of the biography as a performative vehicle for displaying their literary credentials and helping them negotiate positions in the chancery and the wider courtly orbit.

Author: Jan Hinrich Hagedorn
Publisher: V&R Unipress
ISBN: 3847010913
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Slavery touched many aspects of Mamluk society. This volume focuses on the role of slaves within the family, from birth to purchase, liberation, and death. It investigates domestic slavery in Syrian and Egyptian society from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. Jan Hagedorn focuses on the agency of slaves in the context of master-slave relationships within households and in wider society. He argues that the ability of slaves to shape the world around them was underpinned by a constant process of negotiation within the master-slave relationship and that intermediaries such as the court system channelled the agency of slaves. The principal sources for this study are purchase contracts, listening certificates, marriage contracts, and estate inventories in combination with scribal, market inspection, and slave purchase manuals as well as chronicles.

Author: Anna Kollatz
Publisher: V&R Unipress
ISBN: 3847014587
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 613

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Book Description
Research on the Mamluk period has so far remained relatively silent about the Mamluk descendants, who are often referred to by the Arabic term awlād al-nās (roughly: children of the elite). After Ulrich Haarmann's fundamental theses, research on this group seems to have paused, in comparison to the study dedicated to other social groups of Mamluk society. This volume brings together the results of an international conference and presents the state of the art in approaching the Mamluk descendants, whose emic perception as a group and social roles were far more differentiated and variable than previously assumed. The contributions shed light on the status of the Mamluk descendants from a variety of viewpoints, including historiographies, archival material, and artifacts produced by Mamluk descendants.