Product Description: Islam emerged amid flourishing Christian and Jewish cultures, yet students of Antiquity and the Middle Ages mostly ignore it. Despite intensive study of late Antiquity over the last fifty years, even generous definitions of this period have reached only the eighth century, whereas Islam did not mature sufficiently to compare with Christianity or rabbinic Judaism until the tenth century...read more

Product Description: The Arabo-Islamic heritage of the Islam is among the richest, most diverse, and longest-lasting literary traditions in the world. Born from a culture and religion that valued teaching, Arabo-Islamic learning spread from the seventh century and has had a lasting impact until the present...read more

Meddeb wages a war of interpretations in this book demonstrating that Muslims cannot join the concert of nations unless they set aside outmoded notions such as jihad, and realize that the feuding among monotheisms must give way to the more important issue of what it means to be a citizen in today's post-religious global setting. Abdelwahab Meddeb makes an urgent case for an Islamic reformation, located squarely in Western Europe, now home to millions of Muslims, where Christianity and Judaism have come to coexist with secular humanism and positivist law. He is not advocating "moderate" Islam, which he characterizes as thinly disguised Wahabism, but rather an Islam inspired by the great Sufi thinkers, whose practice of religion was not bound by doctrine. To accomplish this, Meddeb returns to the doctrinal question of the text as transcription of the uncreated word of God and calls upon Muslims to distinguish between Islam's spiritual message and the temporal, material, and historically grounded origins of its founding scriptures. He contrasts periods of Islamic history--when philosophers and theologians engaged in lively dialogue with other faiths and civilizations and contributed to transmitting the Hellenistic tradition to early modern Europe--with modern Islam's collective amnesia of this past.

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What made Muslim Spain a unique and successful society? Richard Hitchcock explores the background to its powerful legacy in the formation of modern Spain, using a chronological framework while constantly keeping in view the shifting social patterns caused by the changing balance between town and country, major and minor dynasties, foreign groupings and repeated invasions from North Africa.You'll learn about the main historical developments in depth, such as the self-defeating independence of the Taifas, the so-called 'Party Kings', and the prolonged colonisation of the Muslim subject population under the increasingly severe dominance of the Kingdoms of Aragon and Castile. You'll also find wide-ranging discussion of important topics such as inter-faith relations, multi-ethnic competing groups and how intellectual life was enriched by pluralism and influences from abroad.

Product Description: This book has resulted from the author's response to what she believed to be an assault, about ten years ago, on her Muslim cultural identity. It is important to understand at the very outset that this book cannot encompass the vast diversity of India, or Pakistan, or Bangladesh...read more

Product Description: Religious Tradition and Culture in Eighteenth Century Northern India contends that the 'decline' in the political scenario of eighteenth century India did not imply an all-round decay and stagnation of society, especially in its religious and cultural realms...read more

Product Description: The debate over Islam and modernity tends to be approached from a Eurocentric perspective that presents Western norms as a template for progress - against which Islamic societies can be measured. This misses the historical development of Muslim reformist thought that actively engages with the world around it and seeks to reconfigure Islam within the diverse conditions of modernity...read more

Product Description: In 833 CE, the Abbasid Caliph al-Ma'mun began a period of inquisition (mihna), one which continued until his successor al-Mutawakkil decreed its end, fifteen years later. During this period, the Caliphs in power strove to promote 'correct belief' in the 'createdness' of the Qur'an, thus ordering the interrogation of religious scholars, and disqualifying, punishing or even executing those who answered incorrectly...read more

Product Description: This volume reflects the huge upsurge of interest in the Near East and early Islam currently taking place among historians of late antiquity. At the same time, Islamicists and Qur'anic scholars are also increasingly seeking to place the life of Muhammad and the Qur'an in a late antique background...read more

Product Description: Islamic Culture covers a vast array of subjects on Islamic culture -- from fine arts to ceremonies, from legends to the culture's global influence.

Product Description: While globalization unifies the world, divisions re-emerge within it in the form of a spectacular separation between Islam and the West. How can it be that Huntington’s contested idea of a clash of civilizations became such a powerful political myth through which so many people look at the world? Bottici and Challand disentangle such a process of myth-making both in the West and in Muslim majority countries, and call for a renewed critical attitude towards it...read more

Ancient Empires is a relatively brief yet comprehensive and even-handed overview of the ancient Near East, the Mediterranean, and Europe, including the Greco-Roman world, Late Antiquity, and the early Muslim period. Taking a focused and thematic approach, it aims to provoke a discussion of an explicit set of themes supplemented by the reading of ancient sources. By focusing on empires and imperialism as well as modes of response and resistance, it is relevant to current discussions about order, justice, and freedom. The book concludes that some of the ancient world's most enduring ideas, value systems, and institutions were formulated by peoples who were resisting the great empires. It analyzes the central, if problematic, connection between political and ideological power in both empire formation and resistance. The intricate interrelations among ideological, economic, military, and political power are explored for every empire and resisting group.

This collection of essays by one of the best known contemporary Muslim scholars writing in English covers many facets of Islamic life and thought. The author has brought together studies dealing with the practical as well as intellectual aspects of Islam in both their historical and contemporary reality. The contemporary significance of themes such as religion and secularism, the meaning of freedom, and the tradition of Islamic science and philosophy is given particular attention.