HIST 5360 History of the Islamic World

In this definitive history of the modern Arab world, award-winning historian Eugene Rogan draws extensively on Arab sources and texts to place the Arab experience in its crucial historical context for the first time. Tracing five centuries of Arab history, Rogan reveals that there was an age when the Arabs set the rules for the rest of the world. Today, however, the Arab world’s sense of subjection to external powers carries vast consequences for both the region and Westerners who attempt to control it. Updated with a new epilogue,The Arabsis an invaluable, groundbreaking work of history.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. One of the most hotly debated issues in contemporary Muslim ethics is the status of women in Islamic law. Whereas Muslim conservatives argue that gender-differentiated legal rulings reflect complementary gender roles, Muslim feminists argue that Islamic law has subordinated women and is thus in need of reform. The shared assumption on both sides, however, is that gender fundamentally shapes an individual's legal status. Beyond the Binary explores an expansive cross section of topics in ninth- to twelfth-century Hanafi legal thought, ranging from sexual crimes to consent to marriage, to show that early Muslim jurists imagined a world built not on a binary distinction between male and female but on multiple intersecting hierarchies of gender, age, enslavement, lineage, class, and other social roles. Saadia Yacoob offers a restorative reading of Islamic law, arguing that its intersectional and relational understanding of legal personhood offers a productive space for Muslim feminists to move beyond critique and instead think with and through the Islamic legal tradition.  

The second edition of this well-received two-volume study of Islam updates and adds to its predecessor 40 percent new content. It updates and revises most of the original 500+ entries and adds new topics to reflect changes in the Muslim world since 2004, from the emergence/re-emergence of Islamic regimes to challenges to the rule of religious leaders (Iran), to continuing instability across North Africa and the Middle East. The set will build on the first edition's approach to this still-growing religion: documenting and analyzing its history, as well as its doctrinal, legal,
social, and spiritual tenets, while assessing its influence on all areas of human activity in the regions where it is most established--the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

In this second edition, first published ijn 2002, Ira Lapidus explores the origins and evolution of Muslim societies. The book, revised and updated, is divided into three parts. The first covers the formative era of Islamic civilization. The second traces the diffusion of worldwide Islamic societies, while the third explores their reaction to European imperialism, and emergence as independent states. The concluding chapters consider Islam's recent history, the formation of Islamic revival movements and global Islamic identities. The book is essential reading for students and for those seeking to understand the Muslim peoples.

This compact introduction to Islam encapsulates the essential aspects of Islam as a living religion and social force. The book is organized around seven topics: the life of Muhammad; Islamic political development and territorial expansion; the important groupings of Islamic believers (Sunni, Shi'ite, and Sufi); the Qur'an (the Holy Book of Islam); Sunnah, Hadith (the record of the Prophet's actions and sayings), and Shari'ah (the compilation of Islamic law); the five Articles of Faith and the so-called Five Pillars of Islam that govern faith and action; and other binding religious observances and festivals. The presentation of these seven aspects of Islam strikes a balance between fact, tradition, current interpretation, and commentary. S. A. Nigosian underscores two fundamental points: that to understand Islam properly, it is necessary to see it as a major faith tradition, with Muhammad as the last of a series of messengers sent by God; and that to grasp the spirit of Islam, one must recognize its emphasis on an uncompromising monotheism, with strict adherence to certain social, political, and religious practices, as taught by the Prophet and elaborated by tradition. S. A. Nigosian is Research Associate at the University of Toronto, Victoria College, and author of Judaism: The Way of Holiness; The Zoroastrian Faith: Tradition and Modern Research; Occultism in the Old Testament; and World Religions: A Historical Approach.

Despite the West's growing involvement in Muslim societies, conflicts, and cultures, its inability to understand or analyze the Islamic world threatens to curb any prospect of East-West rapprochement. Impelled by one thousand years of anti-Muslim ideas and images, the West has failed to engage in any meaningful or productive way with the world of Islam. Formulated in the medieval halls of the Roman Curia and courts of the European Crusaders and perfected in the newsrooms of Fox and CNN, this anti-Islamic discourse determines what can and cannot be said about Muslims and their religion, trapping the West in a dangerous, dead-end politics that it cannot afford in a rapidly globalizing world. A critically acclaimed author on the Middle East and its relationship with the West, Jonathan Lyons unpacks Western habits of thinking and writing about Islam, conducting a careful analysis of the West's grand totalizing narrative of Islam across one thousand years of history. He observes the discourse's corrosive effects on the social sciences, including sociology, politics, philosophy, theology, international relations, security studies, and even human rights scholarship. He follows its influence on research, speeches, political strategy, and government policy, preventing the West from responding effectively to its most significant twenty-first-century challenges-the rise of Islamic power, the emergence of religious violence, and the growing tension between established social values and multicultural rights among Muslim immigrant populations. Lyons applies the intellectual "archaeology" of Michel Foucault to reveal the workings of the discourse and its underlying impact on our social, intellectual, and political life. He then addresses issues of deep concern to Western readers-Islam and modernity, Islam and violence, and Islam and women-and proposes new ways of thinking about the Western relationship to the Islamic world.