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A Cultural History of the Sea in the Medieval Age
The cultural history of the sea during the Middle Ages is a young and dynamic field. Born only recently in the literary criticism of European sources, this innovative volume pushes out beyond this European heartland to explore the shape and potential of a cultural history of the sea constructed also from global literatures and oral traditions, and from material things. The chapters in this volume bring together the perspectives and expertise of archaeologists, historians and literary historians with a core focus on Afro-Eurasia and its encircling seas. Topics explored include: the evolving visual representation of the seas in Europe, the Islamic world and the Far East; the development of nav...
Ships and the Development of Maritime Technology on the Indian Ocean
Recognising the fundamental role both of shipping communities and the technologies crafted and shared by them, this book explores the types of ships, methods of navigation and modes of water-borne trade in the Indian Ocean region and the way they affected the development of distinctive settlements against a changing but strong sense of regional consciousness and identity.
Beyond Sunni and Shia
This collection seeks to advance our understanding of intra-Islamic identity conflict during a period of upheaval in the Middle East. Instead of treating distinctions between and within Sunni and Shia Islam as primordial and immutable, it examines how political economy, geopolitics, domestic governance, social media, non- and sub-state groups, and clerical elites have affected the transformation and diffusion of sectarian identities. Particular attention is paid to how conflicts over distribution of political and economic power have taken on a sectarian quality, and how a variety of actors have instrumentalized sectarianism. The volume, covering Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, Iran, and Egypt, includes contributors from a broad array of disciplines including political science, history, sociology, and Islamic studies. Beyond Sunni and Shia draws on extensive fieldwork and primary sources to offer insights that are empirically rich and theoretically grounded, but also accessible for policy audiences and the informed public.
Sectarian Order in Bahrain
Sectarian Order in Bahrain connects the rise of colonial criminal justice in Bahrain and sectarianism, making detailed use of an archival cache of colonial criminal court cases in the British Library, and offering a critical analysis. Using primary and secondary historical documents, including ethnographic and anthropological accounts, the book links major themes in critical and cultural criminology, southern criminology, historical sociology, post-colonialism, and Gulf studies which have not been adequately examined together. It drills down on an important group of surviving criminal court case files, and shows how they can describe the problem of and inform solutions to sectarian discrimin...
Soqotra, Mahra, and Dhofar
For the first time in the history of Semitic studies, this volume is devoted entirely to Modern South Arabian (MSA) as a unified linguistic and cultural entity. The three principal regions inhabited by MSA speakers—Mahra and Dhofar on the Arabian mainland, and the island of Soqotra—are comprehensively represented. The contributions span a broad thematic range, including cultural history, field sociology, and, above all, linguistics (both synchronic and diachronic), alongside the rich oral traditions of MSA-speaking communities.
Monsoon Voyagers
Monsoon Voyagers follows the voyage of a single dhow, the Crooked, along with its captain and crew, from Kuwait to port cities around the Persian Gulf and Western Indian Ocean, from 1924 to 1925. Through his account of the voyage, Fahad Ahmad Bishara unpacks a much broader history of circulation and exchange across the Arabian Sea in the time of empire. From their offices in India, Arabia, and East Africa, Gulf merchants used the technologies of colonial capitalism--banks, steamships, railroads, telegraphs, and more--to remake their own regional bazaar economy. In the process, they remade the Gulf itself. Drawing on the Crooked's first-person logbooks, along with letters, notes, and business accounts from a range of port cities, Monsoon Voyagers narrates the still-untold connected histories of the Gulf and Indian Ocean. The Gulf's past, it suggests, played out across the sea as much as it did the land.
The Crusades
The first multivolume encyclopedia to document the history of one of the most influential religious movements of the Middle Ages—the Crusades. The Crusades: An Encyclopedia surveys all aspects of the crusading movement from its origins in the 11th century to its decline in the 16th century. Unlike other works, which focus on the eastern Mediterranean region, this expansive four-volume encyclopedia also includes the struggle of Christendom against its enemies in Iberia, Eastern Europe, and the Baltic region, and also covers the military orders, crusades against fellow Christians, heretics, and more. This work includes comprehensive entries on personalities such as Godfrey of Bouillon, who refused the title "King of Jerusalem," and St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who tore up his own clothing to make symbols of the cross for crusaders, as well as key events, countries, places, and themes that shed light on everything from the propaganda that inspired crusading warriors to the ways in which they fought. Special coverage of topics such as taxation, pilgrimage, warfare, chivalry, and religious orders give readers an appreciation of the multifaceted nature of these "holy wars."
Dangerous Knowledge
What is Orientalism, who were the Orientalists, and how did Western scholars of Islamic culture come to be vilified as insidious agents of European imperialism? In [this] new history, [the author] answers this question with a detailed ... story of the motley crew of intellectuals and eccentrics who brought an understanding of the Islamic world to the West. In a narrative that ranges from an analysis of Ancient Greek perceptions of the Persians to a portrait of the first Western European translators of Arabic to the contemporary Muslim world's perceptions of the Western study of Islam, Irwin affirms the value of the Orientalists' legacy: not only for the contemporary scholars who have disowned it, but also for anyone committed to fostering the cross-cultural understanding which could bridge the real or imagined gulf between Islamic and Western civilization.-Dust jacket.
