Welcome to our book review site www.go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The History of the Seljuq State
The Akhbar al-dawla al-saljuqiyya is one of the key primary documents on the history of Western Persia and Iraq in the 11th and 12th centuries. This book provides an accessible English translation and commentary on the text, making available to a new readership this significant work on the pre-modern history of the Middle East and the Turkish peoples. The text is a chronicle of the Seljuq dynasty as it emerged within the Iranian lands in the 11th and 12th centuries, dominating the Middle Eastern lands, from Turkey and Syria to Iran and eastern Afghanistan. During this formative period in the central and eastern Islamic lands, they inaugurated a pattern of Turkish political and military dominance of the Middle East and beyond, from Egypt to India, in some cases well into the 20th century. Shedding light on many otherwise obscure aspects of the political history of the region, the book provides a more detailed context for the political history of the wider area. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars of Middle Eastern history and is an important addition to the existing literature on the Seljuq dynasty.
Muslim Fortresses in the Levant
During much of the twelfth century the Crusaders dominated the military scene in the Levant. The unification of Egypt and Syria by Saladin gradually changed the balance of power, which slowly begun to tilt in favour of the Muslims. This book examines the development and role of Muslim fortresses in the Levant at the time of the Crusaders and the Mongol invasion, situating the study within a broad historical, political and military context. Exploring the unification of Egypt with a large part of Syria and its effect on the balance of power in the region, Raphael gives a historical overview of the resulting military strategies and construction of fortresses. A detailed architectural analysis i...
Poetics of Islamic Historiography
This book exposes the mimetic assumption involved in early Islamic historiography, its literary practice and whatever subverts it as reflected in Ṭabarī's History. Four major events in the history of early Islam are then subject to analysis based on literary criticism and are shown to produce a new meaning.
The Silent Qur'an and the Speaking Qur'an
Two major events occurred in the early centuries of Islam that determined its historical and spiritual development in the centuries that followed: the formation of the sacred scriptures, namely the Qur'an and the Hadith, and the chronic violence that surrounded the succession of the Prophet, manifesting in repression, revolution, massacre, and civil war. This is the first book to evaluate the writing of Islam's major scriptural sources within the context of these bloody, brutal conflicts. Conducting a philological and historical study of little-known though significant ancient texts, Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi rebuilds a Shi'ite understanding of Islam's early history and the genesis of its holy scriptures. At the same time, he proposes a fresh interpretative framework and a new data set for theorizing the early history of Islam, isolating the contradictions between Shi'ite and Sunni sources and their contribution to the tensions that rile these groups today.
Interpreting al-Tha'labi's Tales of the Prophets
Al-Tha’labi was a renowned Qur’anic scholar of the fifth/eleventh century, and his ‘Ara’is al-majalis is arguably the finest and most widely consulted example of the Islamic qisas al-anbiya’ genre. Drawing on primary Arabic sources, Klar applies modern critical methods in order to explore the nature of al-Tha’labi’s ‘Ara'is al-majalis within its historical and literary context, and thereby produces a compelling examination of the stories of Noah, Job, Saul and David as portrayed in the key historiographical and folkloric texts of the medieval Islamic period. Via a close analysis of the relevant narratives, the book considers a number of universal aspects of the human conditio...
