The Muslim conquest of the East in the seventh century entailed the subjugation of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and others. Although much has been written about the status of non-Muslims in the Islamic empire, no previous works have examined how the rules applying to minorities were formulated. Milka Levy-Rubin's remarkable book traces the emergence of these regulations from the first surrender agreements in the immediate aftermath of conquest to the formation of the canonic document called the Pact of 'Umar, which was formalized under the early 'Abbasids, in the first half of the ninth century. The study reveals that the conquered peoples themselves played a major role in the creation of these policies and that they were based on long-standing traditions, customs and institutions from earlier pre-Islamic cultures that originated in the worlds of both the conquerors and the conquered. In its connections to Roman, Byzantine and Sasanian traditions, the book will appeal to historians of Europe as well as Arabia and Persia.

Non-Muslims in the Early Islamic Empire: From Surrender to Coexistence

Acknowledgements Glossary List of abbreviations Introduction 1. Marriage, divorce and the gender division of property 2. Working women, single women and the rise of the female ribat 3. The monetization of marriage 4. Divorce, repudiation and settlement 5. Repudiation as public power Conclusion Bibliography Index.

Marriage, Money and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society: Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization

It is a well-known anachronism of historians to treat areas within the Ottoman Empire (Egypt, Syria) as if they had a meaningful existence of their own in the prenationalist period. There is no question that before the appearance of nationalism in the later part of the 19th century the major political community was Islam, whose actual political manifestation was the Ottoman state. It is assumed that as a consequence, no other form of collective identity could exist at the time. The received wisdom on this issue may be expressed by one study of Arab nationalism which claimed:“None of the [Arab] new states was commensurate with a political community. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Transjordan, Palestine—these names derived from geography or classical history.” Yet it is possible that the debate over these issues is not yet over. One is entitled, for example, to doubt whether we know enough in social psychology to determine that the human mind is so simple that it cannot accommodate multi-faceted phenomena such as double identity, both in terms of regional Egyptian nationalism, for example, and all-inclusive Arab identity. Dichotomization makes for sharper and more impressive arguments, but sometimes it can be pushed too far and thus rendered misleading. In line with this last consideration, the argument of this paper is that though the all-inclusive identity of Middle Eastern Muslims under the Ottomans was Islamic and Ottoman first, territorial identities existed beneath them and that these territorial communities are commensurate with the modern Middle Eastern states.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0020743800052569

“Palestine” and Other Territorial Concepts in the 17th Century

From a single merchant's list of baggage begins a history that explores the dynamic world of medieval Indian Ocean exchanges. This fresh and innovative perspective on Jewish merchant activity shows how this list was a component of broader trade connections that developed between the Islamic Mediterranean and South Asia in the Middle Ages. Drawing on a close reading of this unique twelfth-century document, found in the Cairo Genizah and written in India by North African merchant Abraham Ben Yiju, Lambourn focuses on the domestic material culture and foods that structured the daily life of such India traders, on land and at sea. This is an exploration of the motivations and difficulties of maintaining homes away from home, and the compromises that inevitably ensued. Abraham's Luggage demonstrates the potential for writing challenging new histories in the accidental survival of apparently ordinary ephemera.

Abraham's Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World

PART I: THE CONCEPT OF THE ABRAHAMIC RELIGIONS PART II: COMMUNITIES PART III: SCRIPTURE AND HERMENEUTICS PART IV: RELIGIOUS THOUGHT PART V: RITUALS AND ETHICS PART VI: EPILOGUES

The Oxford Handbook of the Abrahamic Religions

Le mobilier au Proche Orient médiéval

Le tombeau de Moïse à Jéricho et à Damas

Un intellectuel juif au confluent de deux cultures: Yehûda al-Harîzî et sa biographie arabe

Jacques Cazotte (1719-92) was an eighteenth-century French writer who deserves to be ranked among the more distinguished figures of French literature and, according to some critics, even among those occupying the front ranks. He is remembered mainly for his novel Le diable amoureux (The Devil in Love), published in 1772, a work that is known as a "Spanish novella" because of its special blend of fantasy and romance. Among the scholars quoted below who have written about Cazotte and his roman fantastique, Edward Pease Shaw and Georges Decote-the most important scholar specializing in Cazotte-deserve particular mention. These two have described in detail his life, the intellectual and spiritual contexts of his tempestuous historical period, and his numerous literary works. Cazotte is connected to the Arabian Nights through his work called Suite des Mille et une Nuits (Continuation of the Thousand and One Nights), which claimed to be a continuation of the famous Oriental collection of stories. The earlier editions of this work were also called Continuation des Mille et une Nuits, and both titles are given at the beginning of identical volumes, sometimes even on opposite title pages, as if one of them is the work's title and the other its explanation. The work is printed in the congenial small format of many contemporary editions of stories and legends. It was first published-as volumes 38-41 of the famous series Cabinet des fees-in four volumes in Paris and Geneva in 1788-89,1 on the eve of the French Revolution just a short time before the guillotine put an end to the authors life on September 25, 1792, in the square known as the Place du Carrousel. In some library catalogues, one finds the work listed under the heading of "traduction des Mille et une Nuits," as if it were a translation of the Arabian Nights. Whether or not it may be regarded as such depends on the interpretation of the term "continuation/suite" in the work's title. In this regard, two trends can be distinguished: (1) In some parts of the work, Cazotte and his "informant," Dom Denis Chavis, have pretended to rediscover materials that might have belonged to the Arabian Nights-similar to those tales published, a few years later, by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall and his translator Guillaume Stanislas Trebutien. (2) The other parts contain stories not known to be included in any of the different manuscripts or redactions of the Arabian Nights. In these parts, Cazotte and Chavis have rather compiled stories from various manuscripts in the royal library that contained suitable material (Decote, Correspondance 101, 103, 107). A similar phenomenon is known from anthologies by various other authors, both published previously and later, such as Les Mille et un Jours (The Thousand and One Days, 1710-12) by Francois Petis de La Croix (1653-1713); Les Mille et un Quarts d'heure (The Thousand and One Quarters of an Hour, 1712) and other works by Thomas-Simon Gueullette (1683-1766); or Rosenol (Pil of Roses, 1813) by Hammer-Purgstall (1774-1856), collected from a variety of written sources which are not the Arabian Nights2 Both trends existed in those days. Even if we prefer to interpret the work as being characterized by the former trend, the latter practice remains in the background and enriches our understanding of the contemporary attitude towards a creative translation of fiction, even allowing for the freedom of inventing or adding new passages (Shaw 80-81, especially n. 277). These aspects of creative writing in the period under consideration are also illustrated by Cazotte's question (Decote, Correspondance 127) whether his stories are inferior to those rendered by the famous scholar and writer Antoine Galland (1646-1715), the first French translator of the Arabian Nights3 For the present contribution, I have used a later edition of Cazotte's tales, published under the interesting title Les veillees du sultan Schahriar avec la sultane Scheherazade (The Nocturnal Conversations of sultan Schahriar with his wife Scheherazade, 1793). …

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/41388714

Jacques Cazotte, His Hero Xaïloun, and Hamîda the Kaslân: A Unique Feature of Cazotte’s “Continuation” of the Arabian Nights and a Newly Discovered Arabic Source That Inspired His Novel on Xaïloun

Joseph Sadan

Papers

Le mobilier au Proche Orient médiéval

Le tombeau de Moïse à Jéricho et à Damas

Un intellectuel juif au confluent de deux cultures: Yehûda al-Harîzî et sa biographie arabe

Jacques Cazotte, His Hero Xaïloun, and Hamîda the Kaslân: A Unique Feature of Cazotte’s “Continuation” of the Arabian Nights and a Newly Discovered Arabic Source That Inspired His Novel on Xaïloun