Oratory and sermons had a fixed place in the religious and civic rituals of pre-modern Muslim societies and were indispensable for transmitting religious knowledge, legitimising or challenging rulers and inculcating the moral values associated with being part of the Muslim community. While there has been abundant scholarship on medieval Christian and Jewish preaching, Linda G. Jones's book is the first to consider the significance of the tradition of pulpit oratory in the medieval Islamic world. Traversing Iberia and North Africa from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, the book analyses the power of oratory, the ritual juridical and rhetorical features of pre-modern sermons and the social profiles of the preachers and orators who delivered them. The biographical and historical sources, which form the basis of this remarkable study, shed light on different regional practices and the juridical debates between individual preachers around correct performance.

A remarkable book analysing the importance of oratory for transmitting religious knowledge, legitimising rulers and inculcating moral values in the medieval Islamic world.

This book offers a fresh perspective on religious culture in the medieval Middle East. It investigates the ways Muslims thought about and practiced at sacred spaces and in sacred times through two detailed case studies: the shrines in honour of the head of al-Husayn (the martyred grandson of the Prophet), and the holy month of Rajab. The changing expressions of the veneration of the shrine and month are followed from the formative period of Islam until the late Mamluk period, paying attention to historical contexts and power relations. Readers will find interest in the attempt to integrate the two perspectives synchronically and diachronically, in a discussion of the relationship between the sanctification of space and time in individual and communal piety, and in the religious literature of the period.

An innovative exploration of the local histories of the Persianate world and its preoccupation with identity, authority, and legitimacy.

Arguing Islam after the Revival of Arab Politics analyzes the politics of religion in the Arab world after the emergence of new public spheres over the past few decades. The book examines those spheres as they really are, not measuring them against any ideal of democratic deliberation.

In Reinventing Jihād, Kenneth A. Goudie provides a detailed examination of the development of jihād ideology from the Conquest of Jerusalem to the end of the Ayyūbids (c. 492/1099–647/1249). By analysing the writings of three scholars - Abū al Ḥasan al Sulamī (d. 500/1106), Ibn ʿAsākir (d. 571/1176), and ʿIzz al-Dīn al-Sulamī (d. 660/1262) - Reinventing Jihād demonstrates that the discourse on jihād was much broader than previously thought, and that authors interwove a range of different understandings of jihād in their attempts to encourage jihād against the Franks. More importantly, Reinventing Jihad demonstrates that whilst the practice of jihād did not begin in earnest until the middle of the twelfth century, the same cannot be said about jihād ideology: interest in jihād ideology was reinvigorated almost from the moment of the arrival of the Franks.

This book considers the rarely studied but pervasive concepts of doubt that medieval Muslim jurists used to resolve problematic criminal cases.

Preaching, a practice composed of and accompanied by a myriad of different activities, is an essential element of Muslim religious life both within and beyond mosques. As such, Islamic preaching is a common means of religious promulgation and knowledge transfer, of pastoral guidance and uplift, but also of communication between believers, and as a source of negotiating religious normativity, power relations, and societal topics. Given the centrality of preaching in Muslims' religious life, this collective volume presents contributions on various aspects of performance, text, space, and materiality of Islamic preaching in history and present. The interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary framework captures Islamic preaching as it unfolds in its social setting. The volume aims at representing the inner-Islamic diversity by depicting the practice of preaching as it came about in different times and geographical locations, shedding light onto Friday gatherings and sermons (ḫutba), and other forms of preaching (e. g. waʿẓ), be it during Ramadan, at religious feasts and commemorations, or on personal occasions such as weddings and funerals. Therefore, each chapter offers a different insight into the interwoven character of sermons' contents, the preacher him/herself, and the audience by emphasising the role of their bodily performance, of the temporality and spatiality of preaching, and of the objects and items involved.

The modern state of Lebanon, created after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, is home to eighteen officially recognised different religious communities (or sects). Crucially, political office and representation came to be formally shared along confessional lines, and the privileges of power are distributed accordingly. One such key prerogative is exclusivity when it comes to personal status laws: the family legal affairs of each community. In this book, Morgan Clarke offers an authoritative and dynamic account of how the sharia is invoked both with Lebanon's state legal system, as Muslim family law, and outside it, as a framework for an Islamic life and society. By bringing together an in-depth analysis of Lebanon's state-sponsored sharia courts with a look at the wider world of religious instruction, this book highlights the breadth of the sharia and the complexity of the contexts within which it is embedded.

The eleven essays included in this collective volume examine a range of textual genres produced by Christians and Muslims throughout the Mediterranean, including materials from the Corpus Islamolatinum, Christian propaganda and polemical works targeting Muslims and Jews, Inquisition records, and Christian and Muslim sermons. Despite the diversity of the works under consideration and the variety of methodological and disciplinary approaches employed in their analysis, the volume is bound together by the common goals of exploring the propaganda strategies premodern authors deployed for specific aims, be it the unification of religious, cultural, and political groups through discourses of self-representation, or the invention of the political, cultural, religious, or gendered other. Many of the essays offer critical re-readings of works that are obscure or have never been studied, while others shed new light on the cultural and textual interactions between Christians, Muslims and Jews. The volume is divided into four sections, the first of which is comprised of three chapters on the Corpus Islamolatinum that furnish new evidence showing the important role this “encyclopedia” played in spreading knowledge about Islam and contributing to the creation of propaganda and polemics against Islam among European intellectual circles. The chapters in section two offer novel interpretations of the hermeneutical strategies underlying the composition of polemical works such as the lives of Muhammad and Pedro de la Cavalleria’s Zelus Christi. The essays in section three identify some common hermeneutical strategies in the use of anti-Jewish and anti-Islamic arguments to polemicize against religious others or edify Christians and illuminate intertextual relations between authors and genres (disputatio and praedicatio). Finally, section four introduces the gender perspective: the genered nature of the accusations of Judaizing in the analysis of the transcripts of the inquisitorial court of three sisters who were tried in Barcelona in 1496, on the one hand, and two studies that explore the constructions of identities and gender relations reflected in various Islamic sources from opposite ends of the Mediterranean. They offer glimpses of women as subject (s) and as object (s) of preaching and show how such texts can reify or subvert traditional binary gender roles.