The present edited volume offers a collection of new concepts and approaches to the study of mobility in pre-modern Islamic societies. It includes nine remarkable case studies from different parts of the Islamic world that examine the professional mobility within the literati and, especially, the social-cum-cultural group of Muslim scholars (ʿulamāʾ) between the eighth and the eighteenth centuries. Based on individual case studies and quantitative mining of biographical dictionaries and other primary sources from Islamic Iberia, North and West Africa, Umayyad Damascus and the Hejaz, Abbasid Baghdad, Ayyubid and Mamluk Syria and Egypt, various parts of the Seljuq Empire, and Hotakid Iran, this edited volume presents professional mobility as a defining characteristic of pre-modern Islamic societies. Contributors Mehmetcan Akpinar, Amal Belkamel, Mehdi Berriah, Nadia Maria El Cheikh, Adday Hernández López, Konrad Hirschler, Mohamad El-Merheb, Marta G. Novo, M. A. H. Parsa, M. Syifa A. Widigdo.

Crusades covers the seven hundred years from the First Crusade (1095-1102) to the fall of Malta (1798) and draws together scholars working on theatres of war, their home fronts and settlements from the Baltic to Africa and from Spain to the Near East and on theology, law, literature, art, numismatics and economic, social, political and military history. Routledge publishes this journal for The Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East. Particular attention is given to the publication of historical sources - narrative, homiletic and documentary - but studies and interpretative essays are welcomed too. Crusades also incorporates the Society's Bulletin. The editors are Professor Jonathan Phillips, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK; Iris Shagrir, The Open University of Israel; Professor Benjamin Z. Kedar, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel; and Nikolaos G. Chrissis, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece.

Covers the political thought produced by legal theorists, jurists, judges and administrators of the late Ayyubid and early Mamluk period as they tackled a central question: how best to govern their communities.

In Exercising Authority and Representing Rule, András Barati examines twenty-two hitherto unpublished Persian royal decrees issued by various rulers of eighteenth-century Iran and Afghanistan kept at the Āstān-i Quds-i Rażawī in Mashhad. Considering the paucity of primary sources from this period due to relatively frequent political turmoils, he aims to improve this situation by offering the transcription and translation of these original documents as well as a commentary concerning the textual elements, external aspects, and content of the decrees. Making use of previously published documents, András Barati presents the first substantial study on post-Safavid eighteenth-century diplomatics and addresses several issues related to the political, economic, and administrative history of the region in the early modern period.

The studies published in this book focus on representations and symbolics of war and peace in the Arab World over the long term. The authors are specialists in various disciplines (sociology, anthropology, history, linguistic and literary studies). They pay particular attention to the language of their corpus, from the founding texts, Koran or hadiths, through the historian's classical sources (texts by authors of the classical Arab heritage), up to contemporary productions, from militant texts to works of fiction.

The Islamic qāṣṣ (preacher/storyteller) has been viewed most commonly as a teller of stories, primarily religious in nature and often unreliable. Building on material of over a hundred quṣṣāṣ from the rise of Islam through the end of the Umayyad period, this book offers the most comprehensive study of the early Islamic qāṣṣ to-date. By constructing profiles of these preachers/ storytellers and examining statements attributed to them, it argues that they were not merely storytellers but were in fact a complex group with diverse religious interests. The book demonstrates how the style and conduct of their teaching sessions distinguished them from other teachers and preachers and also explores their relationship with early religio-political movements, as well as with the Umayyad administration.

Analyzes Muslim countries' contemporary problems, particularly violence, authoritarianism, and underdevelopment, comparing their historical levels of development with Western Europe.

Friedman offers new and updated research on the Nusayr - Alaw sect, today a leading group in Syria, covering a variety of aspects and focusing on the Middle Ages. A century after Dussaud's "Histoire et religion des Nosair s" (1900), he reviews the history and religion of the sect in the light of old documents used by orientalists in the nineteenth century, documents that became available in the twentieth century, and later sources of the Nu ayr - Alaw sect published most recently in Lebanon. Also studied in depth for the first time is the question of the identity of the sect through the Alaw -Sunn -Sh triangle.

This book argues that we are undergoing a transition from industrial capitalism to a new form of capitalism - what the author calls & lsquo; cognitive capitalism & rsquo;