First Published in 2003. This volume explores various aspects of human mobility-both spatial and social-in Muslim societies from the earliest Islamic period to the present times. In general, a high mobility among Muslims has been observed throughout their history, to say nothing of the fact that the pilgrimage to Mecca is one of the five religious duties, or that many Muslim travelers such as Ibn Battuta moved over vast areas. However, the social and political impact of their movement, voluntary or forced, has rarely been analyzed in terms of a multi-disciplinary approach. Researchers specializing in history, anthropology, sociology, psychology and politics from eight countries have contributed their insights on both Muslim and non-Muslim mobility in this multi-faceted volume, which will shed new light on the meaning of mobility and the movement of human beings in the even more globalized world of today.

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.

First Published in 2003. This volume explores various aspects of human mobility-both spatial and social-in Muslim societies from the earliest Islamic period to the present times. In general, a high mobility among Muslims has been observed throughout their history, to say nothing of the fact that the pilgrimage to Mecca is one of the five religious duties, or that many Muslim travelers such as Ibn Battuta moved over vast areas. However, the social and political impact of their movement, voluntary or forced, has rarely been analyzed in terms of a multi-disciplinary approach. Researchers specializing in history, anthropology, sociology, psychology and politics from eight countries have contributed their insights on both Muslim and non-Muslim mobility in this multi-faceted volume, which will shed new light on the meaning of mobility and the movement of human beings in the even more globalized world of today.

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In the late nineteenth century, as a consequence of imperial conquest and a mobility revolution, Russia became a crossroads of the hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. The first book in any language on the hajj under tsarist and Soviet rule, Russian Hajj tells the story of how tsarist officials struggled to control and co-opt Russia's mass hajj traffic, seeing it as not only a liability but also an opportunity. To support the hajj as a matter of state surveillance and control was controversial, given the preeminent position of the Orthodox Church. But nor could the hajj be ignored, or banned, due to Russia's policy of toleration of Islam. As a cross-border, migratory phenomenon, the hajj stoked officials' fears of infectious disease, Islamic revolt, and interethnic conflict, but Eileen Kane innovatively argues that it also generated new thinking within the government about the utility of the empire's Muslims and their global networks.

This first in-depth study of the 'Alids focuses on the crucial formative period from the Abbasid Revolution to the end of the Seljuq period. Exploring their rise from both a religious point of view and as a social phenomenon, Bernheimer investigates how they attained and extended the family's status over the centuries. The 'Alids are the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, the elite family of Islam. The respect and veneration they are accorded is unparalleled in Islamic society, regardless of political or religious affiliation. And they have played a major role Islamic history, from famous early rebels to the founders and eponyms of major Islamic sects, and from 9th-century Moroccan and 10th-century Egyptian rulers to the current King of Jordan, the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Aga Khan.

Scholars from a range of fields tell the story of the Hajj and explain its significance as one of the key events in the Muslim religious calendar. This volume pays attention to the diverse aspects of the Hajj, as lived every year by hundreds of millions of Muslims worldwide.

First published in 2004. When the Ottoman Empire undertook reforms to re-centralise and westernise in the first half of the 19th century, the first task was to introduce a new taxation system. Such a system necessitated the inspection of the population -- For this reason, just after the declaration of Tanzimat, taxpayers in the empire and their income were investigated. This volume examines temettuat defterlen belonging to five cities from Balkan to Anatolia and examines various socio-economic aspects of the period of change.

In Saints hommes de Chiraz et du Fārs. Pouvoir, société et lieux de sacralité (Xe-XVe s.), Denise Aigle studies the spiritual role, but also the political one, played by the Sufi shaykhs. From the tenth century, Fārs was a a land of holiness with Shaykh Kabīr in Shiraz and Murshid al-Dīn Abū Isḥāq in Kāzarūn. This research is based on hagiographic sources, historical chronicles, literary sources and archival documents. The author shows how the pre-Islamic history of Fārs was integrated into spiritual Islam thanks to the mystical speculations of the Sufi shaykhs. The particular interest of this research is its contribution to the history of Lāristān, a region that has long remained terra incognita. Thanks to handwritten hagiographic documents preserved in several private libraries, we discover the existence and the role of spiritual masters until now totally unknown.

The Ottomans ruled much of the Arab World for four centuries. Bruce Masters's work surveys this period, emphasizing the cultural and social changes that occurred against the backdrop of the political realities that Arabs experienced as subjects of the Ottoman sultans. The persistence of Ottoman rule over a vast area for several centuries required that some Arabs collaborate in the imperial enterprise. Masters highlights the role of two social classes that made the empire successful: the Sunni Muslim religious scholars, the ulama, and the urban notables, the acyan. Both groups identified with the Ottoman sultanate and were its firmest backers, although for different reasons. The ulama legitimated the Ottoman state as a righteous Muslim sultanate, while the acyan emerged as the dominant political and economic class in most Arab cities due to their connections to the regime. Together, the two helped to maintain the empire.