In the last years of the nineteenth century, the Tunisian city of Qayrawān suddenly found itself covered in murals. Concentrated on and around the city’s Great Mosque, these monumental artworks were only visible for about fifty years, from the 1880s through the 1930s. This book investigates the fascinating history of who created these outdoor paintings and why. Using visual archaeological methods, William Gallois reconstructs the visual history of these works and vividly brings them back to life. He locates pictorial records of the murals from the backdrops of photographs, postcards, and other forms of European ephemera. In Qayrawān, he identifies a form of religious painting that transposed traditional aesthetic forms such as house decoration, embroidery, and tattooing—which lay exclusively within the domains of women—onto the body of a conquered city. Gallois argues that these works were created by women as a form of “emergency art,” intended to offer amuletic protection for the community, and demonstrates how they differ markedly from “classical” Islamic antecedents and modern modes of Arab cultural production in the Middle East and North Africa. Based on extensive archival research, this study is both a record of a unique moment in the history of art and a challenge to rethink the spiritual force and agency of a group of anonymous female artists whose paintings aspired to help save the world at a time of great peril. It will be welcomed by scholars of art history, Islamic studies, Middle East studies, and the history of magic.

The poetic memorialization of the Maghribī city illuminates the ways in which exilic Maghribī poets constructed idealized images of their native cities from the ninth to nineteenth centuries CE. The first work of its kind in English, Of Lost Cities explores the poetics and politics of elegiac and nostalgic representations of the Maghribī city and sheds light on the ingeniously indigenous and indigenously ingenious manipulation of the classical Arabic subgenres of city elegy and nostalgia for one’s homeland. Often overlooked, these poems – distinctively Maghribī, both classical and vernacular, and written in Arabic and Tamazight – deserve wider recognition in the broader tradition and canon of (post)classical Arabic poetry. Alongside close readings of Maghribī poets such as Ibn Rashīq, Ibn Sharaf, al-Ḥuṣrī al-Ḍarīr, Ibn Ḥammād al-Ṣanhājī, Ibn Khamīs, Abū al-Fatḥ al-Tūnisī, al-Tuhāmī Amghār, and Ibn al-Shāhid, Nizar Hermes provides a comparative analysis using Western theories of place, memory, and nostalgia. Containing the first translations into English of many poetic gems of premodern and precolonial Maghribī poetry, Of Lost Cities reveals the enduring power of poetry in capturing the essence of lost cities and the complex interplay of loss, remembrance, and longing.

Talya Fishman explores the impact of the textualization process in medieval Europe on the Babylonian Talmud's roles within Jewish culture.

This book contains studies on the Jews in Muslim countries in the early Middle Ages, and is based on an extensive use of both Jewish and Muslim mediaeval sources. "Jews in Islamic Countries in the Middle Ages" has been selected by "Choice" as Outstanding Academic Title (2005).

'Fustat Egypt which sits on the River Nile' - this is how the Jews called their city. Coalition and opposition, power struggles between leaders who were aided by local Jewish pressure groups and abetted by the Muslim authorities - these were a few of the characteristics of the leadership in the Jewish community of Fustat, the largest and liveliest of the Jewish communities in the eleventh century. The author follows the activities of these leaders and analyzes their motives in the light of the complex relationships developing in the community between the different ethnic groups, while in the background the traditional centers of Jewish authority in Palestine and Babylon battle each other for control of the Jewish people. The survey of the dramatic events was made by analysis of documents and letters from the Geniza in Cairo.

The Geonic period from about the late sixth to mid-eleventh centuries is of crucial importance in the history of Judaism. The Geonim, for whom this era is named, were the heads of the ancient talmudic academies of Babylonia. They gained ascendancy over the older Palestinian center of Judaism and were recognized as the leading religious and spiritual authorities by most of the world's Jewish population. The Geonim and their circles enshrined the Babylonian Talmud as the central canonical work of rabbinic literature and the leading guide to religious practice, and it was a predominantly Babylonian version of Judaism that was transplanted to newer centers of Judaism in North Africa and Europe. Robert Brody's book -- the first survey in English of the Geonic period in almost a century -focuses on the cultural milieu of the Geonim and on their intellectual and literary creativity. Brody describes the cultural spheres in which the Geonim were active and the historical and cultural settings within which they functioned. He emphasizes the challenges presented by other Jewish institutions and individuals, ranging from those within the Babylonian Jewish setting -- specially the political leadership represented by the Exilarch -- to the competing Palestinian Jewish center and to sectarian movements and freethinkers who rejected rabbinic authority altogether. He also describes the variety of ways in which the development of Geonic tradition was affected by the surrounding non-Jewish cultures, both Muslim and Christian. "This book is a fresh and thorough examination of the period in question, a masterpiece of scholarship and erudition". -- Neil Danzig, Jewish Theological Seminary