alusur: A Pathfinder

This is a computer-generated pathfinder created against the Distant Reader study called alusur.

Each Distant Reader study carrel is composed of many individual items. Each item is bibliographically described with author, title, date, summary, and keyword values. Below is a list of the items' most signficant keywords as well as lists of the items themselves. Purpusing the content of this pathfinder provides the student, researcher, or scholar with one way to get their heads around the scope of the carrel. The keywords include:

Wusṭā; History; Arabic; Ibn; Century; Press; Medieval; World; Sources; Studies; Book; Muḥammad; Muslim; Text; Middle; Persian; Chapter; Time; Islam; Manuscript; Mamluk; Women; Literature; Scholars; Andalus; Egypt; Dīn; Example; Empire; Years; Michael; Oxford; Edition; Art; Law; Baghdad; Texts; ʿabd; Paper; City; Amina; Qurʾān; Maghrib; Students; Reviews; Thought; Lines; Converts; Eunuchs; Kalām; Mem; Al‐fāḍil; Tribes; Labarta

Depending on how this pathfinder was created, many of the bibliographic sections will include elaborations on the meaning(s) of the given keywords. These elaborations were generated by feeding the items' summaries to a large langauge model and asking the model to address the question, "What is X?", where "X" is the keyword. The result will be a few sentences of elaboration. Be forewarned. The elaborations are often plausible, but they should not be take as truth. Instead, they should be taken as points for consideration.

Wusṭā

Instrumental Jawārī: On Gender, Slavery, and Technology in Medieval Arabic Sources by Balafrej, Lamia (2023) - ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Barqūqī, vol. 1 (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Saʿāda, [1938]), 380. 56. Edited by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Barqūqī. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr al; arabic; balafrej; cambridge; century; example; female; gender; history; ibn al; islamic; jawārī; jāriya; lamia; machines; medieval; press; slavery; slaves; sources; studies; subject; technology; university; university press; water; women; wusṭā
“Out of Love for You”: Orienting Rūs Expressions of Emotion in Arabic Geography by Upham, Tonicha Mae (2024) - Ḥasan al-Sandūbī, 266–75 (Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿa al-Tijāriyya, 1933), 266. 59. On readings of jāriya and ghulām as indicative of slavery and associated translational issues, see, for instance, Lamia Balafrej, “Instrumental Jawārī: On Gender, Slavery, and Technology in Medieval Arabic Sources,” Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 31 (2023): 96–126, at 96–97; Shawkat M. Toorawa and Ibn al-Sāʿī, “Note on the Translation,” in Consorts of the Caliphs: Women and the Court of Baghdad, by Ibn al-Sāʿī, ed. Keywords: accounts; al-ʿuṣūr al; arabic; emotions; funerary; gender; geographical; history; ibn; ibn faḍlān; islamic; love; medieval; miskawayh; new; press; rusta; rūs; sacrifice; sacrificial; sources; studies; university; upham; women; wusṭā; ḥubb
Unlearning the Aesthetics of Malicious Joy by Talib, Adam (2024) - ل ِِج �َن�ْْفَس� ِِمْْن َن�ْْرِِجٍٍس فَسقى ِرايَض� َب َض� انِفًْرا ق�بَْلَُْتُُه فبىك وَ�ْْعْر� ْقَع� �ٱَّدَلِْمَعِ ِِمْْن َ�ِْجْفاِِنُِه فَأكَََّن و� ْرٍد َ�َمْْح�ْرٍ �َساق�َط� ف�ْْوَق� و� ٌد َت َب�ْر� اكَّن� يف �ٱ ِ ا ُْر يِّن يف َخْليْليت َمُُع� قد الِم� قاَل� َ�ِفٍْق Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr al; arabic; bashshār; burd; cairo; classical; ibn; literature; nowaihi; nuwayhī; poem; poetry; saliva; shiʿr; studies; university; woman; wusṭā; � ِ; � �
Muḥammad b. Khalaf Wakīʿ (m. 306/918), ou le désamour de Bagdad by Tillier, Mathieu (2024) - Muḥammad b. al-Walīd al-Busrī al-Baṣrī al-Qurashī (m. années 250/864), traditionniste baṣrien. Abū ʿ Umar fut cadi du district bagdadien de Madīnat al-Manṣūr de 284 à 292/897 à 904–905, d’al-Sharqiyya de 292 à 296/904–905 à 908–909, puis également de la rive orientale (al-jānib al-sharqī) Keywords: akhbār; akhbār al; al-ʿuṣūr al; aḥmad; b. al; bagdad; beyrouth; cadis; cette; comme; dans; des; dhahabī; dār; dār al; d’al; d’un; est; ibid; ibn; ibn al; khalaf; les; lui; madīnat al; miḥna; muḥammad; nous; par; pas; pour; que; qui; quḍāt; qu’il; ses; son; sur; taʾrīkh; taʾrīkh al; tillier; une; voir; voir al; wakīʿ; wusṭā; ṭabarī
La khuṭba d’Abū Ḥamza al-Shārī : soulèvement ibāḍite et rhétorique de la contestation en péninsule Arabique au second siècle de l’Islam. Traduction commentée d’une version inédite du sermon by Baptiste, Enki (2024) - Kitāb al-ʿIbār wa-dīwān al-mubtadaʾ wa-l-khabar fī ayyām al-ʿarab wa-l-ʿajam wa-l-barbar wa-man ʿ āṣarahum min dhawī al-sulṭān al-akbar. al-Khalīl al-Farāhīdī. Keywords: a. al; abdulrahman al; abī; abū al; ahl al; ainsi; akhbār al; al salimi; al-ʿuṣūr al; allāh b.; alors; après; aurait; aux; avait; avec; avons; b. abī; b. al; b. yaḥyā; b. ʿabd; badʾ al; baptiste; beyrouth; bien; brill; cambridge; cas; ce que; cela; celle; celui; cette; ceux; comme; comme le; contexte; contre; c’est; dans al; dans ce; dans la; dans les; dans son; dans un; de ce; de cette; de dieu; de la; de l’islam; de se; de son; de ʿabd; dernier; des; deux; dieu et; dieu le; donc; doute; du sermon; dār al; d’abū; d’al; d’ibn al; d’un; early; encore; enki; entre; est; et al; et dans; et de; et la; et les; et nous; et que; et son; et une; fait; fut; gens; ghumma al; hommes; ibn al; ibrāhīm; ibāḍite; ibāḍī; ici; il est; ils; islamic; izkawī; jaʿfar al; kashf al; khuṭba dans; khārijites; kitāb al; la khuṭba; la révolte; les; les sources; leur; leyde; lui; l’histoire; l’ibāḍisme; l’islam; l’on; l’époque; mais; maktabat al; malik; marsham; mascate; milieu; mouvement; musulmans; muḥammad; même; nayyir al; new; notamment; notre; nous; n’est; oman; omanais; par al; par la; par les; par un; paris; parmi; pas; plus; politique; pour; pouvoir; première; press; prophète; prêche; puis; qawmī; qaḥṭān; que; que dieu; que la; que les; que nous; qui; qu’il; sallām al; sans; saʿīd al; semble; sermon; ses; shuʾūn al; shārī; sirḥān al; siyar; siècle; soit; son; sont; sources; sous; sur la; sur les; sīra; taʾrīkh al; texte; thaqāfa; tout; traduction; très; turāth al; umayyad; umayyades; une; university; version; viiie; voir; voir al; vol; vous; wilkinson; wizārat al; wusṭā; yémen; yāqūt al; yūsuf al; ziyād al; à al; édité; édité par; également; était; été; être; ʿabd al; ʿalī al; ʿan al; ʿumar; علــى; مــن; هللا; وال; ّمثّ; ḥamza al; ḥamza et; ḥaḍramawt; ḥumayd al; ṭabaqāt al; ṭālib al
Textile Mobilities across Medieval Afro-Eurasia by Dospel Williams, Elizabeth (2023) - • Given the resources invested in the materials and technology of textile production, fabrics were highly valued as currency and portable wealth. Mongol elites invested substantially in textile production, which included both government-sanctioned production as well as control over private workshops. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr; art; egypt; mobilities; museum; production; silk; structure; textiles; weave; wusṭā; ṭirāz
Learning Middle Armenian at the Court of Meḥmed II: Language, Knowledge, and Power before the Imperial Rise of Ottoman Turkish by Budak, Samet ; Pifer, Michael (2024) - Learning Middle Armenian at the Court of Meḥmed II • 321 80 زیسنت To live, to subsist ُُوْخِْچنَاْْل To heal; to recover one’s health; to gain fresh vigor ողջնալ125 MA 81 بسنت To bind َقَاِبَيْْل To bind կապել CA 82 گشادن To open پَاَاَنْْل To open բանալ CA 83 َابنگ زدن To exclaim; to cry out َيْْل َقَاْچْنِ Learning Middle Armenian at the Court of Meḥmed II • 331 228 نُواخنت To soothe, caress; to praise; to play an instrument ِکَْکُِوَیَْْل To caress; to flatter գգուել CA 229 گنِجيْدن To be contained; to hold exactly; to be filled; to fit in138 َمْْݣِنْْل Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr; al-ʿuṣūr al; amirdovlat; amiroutzes; arabic; armenian; ayasofya; book; budak; byzantine; cambridge; century; constantinople; court; court library; empire; fig; grammar; greek; hexaglot; history; istanbul; knowledge; language; latin; learning; library; manuscripts; medical; medieval; mediterranean; meḥmed ii; michael; middle armenian; museum; new; ottoman court; ottoman language; ottoman palace; ottoman turkish; palace; palace library; period; persian; physician; pifer; press; production; samet; study; sultan; texts; time; topkapı; translation; turkish; university; use; vernacular; words; world; wusṭā; � �
Will I Be Happy, Will I Be Rich? Three Lot Books (Qurʿas) from the Library of Qāniṣawh al-Muḥammadī by D'hulster, Kristof (2024) - ان املتهوم بريء ١٤ واملرجفون يف املدينة يدل علي بطالن احلرب ١٥ ما هلم به من علم اال اتباع الظن يدل علي العجز واحلدالن ١٦ فغلبوا هنالك وانقلبوا صاغرين يلد علي البخل والشح والدين ١٧ ومن يبخل فامنا يبخل عن نفسه يدل علي انه يرزق علما ١٨ وما اوتيتم من العلم اال َقليال يدل علي انه ال يويف ابلعهد ١٩ ال يرَقبون يف مؤمن اال وال ذمة يدل علي حسن القسمة ٢0 وهلم فيها ازواج مطهرة 102 • Kristof D’hulster Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024) ٣ سورة النساء يدل السلطان وخَريه ٧ امة يهدون ابحلق وبه يعدلون يدل علي النصر من الغلبة ٨ وينصركم عليهم يدل علي بطالن ما سأل عنه ٩ وحيل بينهم و بني ما يشتهون يدل على انه ال يرزق هذا املال ١0 مّستهم الباساء والضراء يدل علي َقلة الريح واملنفعة ١١ فما تزيدونين غَري ختسَري يدل علي سرعة َقدوم الغايب ١٢ ايتني من كل فج عميق يدل علي أتخَري السفر ١٣ وما هم خبارجني منها يدل علي ادراك احلاجة ١٤ َقد اصبتم مثليها يدل علي البغضة Keywords: 1999/2; al-ʿuṣūr al; alfadhol; allah; arrival; ayasofya; book; chance; children; circle; concern; contents; delay; divination; d’hulster; d’hulster al-ʿuṣūr; example; fig; fol; god; good; house; instructions; introduction; knowledge; kristof; kunitzsch; line; lot; love; manuscript; matter; muḥammad; need; news; number; page; people; promise; property; qurʿa; qurʿa al; qāniṣawh al; return; ruler; section; sura; table; text; thee; title; topic; travel; truth; wusṭā; اال; االمر; احلاجة; الذي; السفر; السلطان; اليت; انه; ايل; سورة; علــي; على; فيه; ماال; مــن; هذا; هذه; هللا; وال; يدل علي; يرزق
Dark Deeds, Broken Bodies: Medieval Islamic Narratives of Violence against Corpses by Marashi, Taryn (2024) - See also the brief mention of Ibn al-Zayyāt’s death in al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī, Taʾrīkh Baghdād, 3:594–95. Disliked by many of his colleagues, Ibn al-Zayyāt was, according to the historian al-Yaʿqūbī (d. 294/897), “a man of intense severity and little compassion,” traits that he manifested in his treatment of people.41 The historian al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī (d. 463/1071) adds that Ibn al-Zayyāt and Ibn Abī Duʾād (d. 240/854), a chief judge and inquisitor during the miḥna controversy whom al-Mutawakkil favored early on in his reign, were bitter enemies. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr al; b. al; b. ʿabd; beirut; bodies; body; caliph al; corpse; dead; death; dār al; funerary; grave; ibn al; islamic; isḥāq; khaṭīb al; kitāb al; medieval; muslim; muḥammad; mūsā; punishment; taʾrīkh; violence; wusṭā; zayyāt; ʿabd al; ṭabarī
A Neglected Armenian Source of the Late Umayyad Era: The Martyrdom of Vahan of Gołt‘n by Greenwood, Tim; Grant, Alasdair; Hagan, Kieran; Pecorini Goodall, Leone; Read, Lewis (2025) - Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 33 (2025) A Neglected Armenian Source of the Umayyad Era • 72 Translation [869]157 Lament for the evils that came to pass across this country of Armenia in one hundred and fifty-two of the era158 through fire and captivity by the southern people of Ishmael,159 along with the martyrology of Saint Vahan, who was the son of Saint Xosrov, lord of Gołt‘n.160 And after thirty-three years of the captivity of Armenia Saint Vahan was martyred, in one hundred and eighty-five of the era.161 (1.1) Just as late antique Armenian literary compositions can be viewed as Sasanian sources, in that they were composed within the borders—real and conceptual—of Sasanian Iran (Ērānšahr) and were shaped by the political, social, and cultural contexts in which they were produced, so Armenian works composed in the eighth and ninth centuries may be treated as Umayyad or ʿAbbāsid sources, in that they, too, were composed inside the caliphate—the dār al-Islām.5 Arguably, therefore, the perceived isolation of medieval Armenian compositions reflects the linguistic and disciplinary boundaries of modern scholarship rather than the original circumstances of their production. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr al; ant‘ilias; armenian; body; century; christian; city; context; death; era; et al; god; gołt‘n; greek; greenwood; hayoc; hishām; history; holy; islamic; lord; martyrdom; muslim; narrative; note; patmut‘iwn; place; press; prince; roman; ruṣāfa; saint; sasanian; source; tann; text; thomson; time; trans; umayyad; university; vacca; vahan; work; world; wusṭā; łewond
Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddima and the Maps of al-Idrīsī by Hiatt, Alfred (2025) - Similar points are made in the ʿIbar: Ibn Khaldūn, Tārīkh al-duwal al-islāmiyya, 1:26–27, 47, 81. Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 33 (2025) Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddima and the Maps of al-Idrīsī • 26 Ocean, and the Black Sea? ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ibn Khaldūn, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr al; arabic; cities; clime; description; fols; geography; hiatt; history; ibn khaldūn; idrīsī; maghrib; maps; muqaddima; mushtāq; nuzhat al; reading; rosenthal; sea; section; south; text; trans; world; wusṭā
Mail-Order Mihrabs: Collaborative Labor in the Design of Tile Revetments in Iran and the Ottoman Empire by Blessing, Patricia (2024) - Although most known sites where Kashan tiles were installed are located within present-day Iran, they were also exported widely, as archaeological evidence shows. Sarre was by no means innocent when it comes to trade in plundered tile revetments, as a number of Kashan tiles, some attributed to specific sites in Iran and others without provenance, were part of his collection of Islamic art: Sarre, Denkmäler persischer Baukunst, figs. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr; al-ʿuṣūr al; architecture; art; blair; blessing; century; fig; ilkhanid; inv; iran; islamic; kashan; luster; medieval; mihrab; museum; new; ottoman; persian; press; production; shrine; site; tiles; university; wusṭā
Medieval Georgian Coinage: A Cross-Cultural Introduction by Rapp, Stephen H. (2024) - See Irakli Pʻaġava [Paghava], “Šuasaukunovan kʻartʻul monetebze gamosaxuli pʻiguruli nišnebis interpretacʻia: heraldikuri pʻigura da ara monograma,” Heroldi (2016): 73–83, with English summary, “Figured Symbol on Medieval Georgian Coins: Alternative Interpretation,” at 115; and Stephen H. Rapp Jr., “The Coinage of Tʻamar, Sovereign of Georgia in Caucasia: A Preliminary Study in the Numismatic Inscriptions of Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Georgian Royal Coinage,” Le Muséon 106, nos. The use of Arabic on Georgian coins is unrelated to the translation of Christian texts from Arabic into Georgian. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr; arabic; armenian; bagratid; bennett; byzantine; cambridge; caucasia; caucasus; century; christian; coinage; coins; cross; davitʻ; dundua; eastern; empire; fig; georgian; giorgi; god; history; image; inscription; islamic; king; kʻartʻuli; medieval; modern; new; numizmatika; oxford; press; rapp; reverse; series; source; stephen; studies; tʻamar; tʻbilisi; university; university press; vol; world; wusṭā
Mkrtičʻ Nałaš: An Armenian Bishop as Pillar of the Aqquyunlu State? : Synchronisms in the Armenian and Aqquyunlu History of Diyarbakır, 1430–1450 CE by Leube, Georg (2025) - To bridge this gap, the present contribution examines three pivotal moments in the tenure of the Armenian bishop, painter, and poet Mkrtičʻ Nałaš (d. after 1469 CE) in Diyarbakır to argue that his career was inextricably entangled with the trajectory of the Aqquyunlu “Turkmen” rulers who were establishing Diyarbakır as a regional center at the time. Accordingly, I suggest that we should see the processes of Aqquyunlu state formation as including members of the Armenian clerical elite such as Mkrtičʻ Nałaš. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr; al-ʿuṣūr al; aqquyunlu; armenian; bishop; cathedral; century; christian; church; dari; december; des; diyarbakır; ergani; foundation; history; ibn; mamluk; manuscript; mkrtičʻ; nałaš; note; qara; rulers; state; wusṭā; xačʻikyan; ʿuthmān; ḥamza
Emotional Manipulation, Coercion, and Precarity in the Tales of Jamīl and Buthayna by Lawrence, Jonny (2025) - Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Salām ʿ Aṭā (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1971), 331–37; Mughulṭāy b. Qilīj, al-Wāḍiḥ al-mubīn fī dhikr man ustushhida min al-muḥibbīn (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Intishār al-ʿArabī, 1997), 158–68; Ibn Abī Ḥajala, Dīwān al-ṣabāba (Beirut: Dār wa-Maktabat al-Hilāl, 1980), 251. See, for example, Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī, Kitāb al-Aghānī, ed. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr al; beirut; beloved; buthayna; coercion; desire; dār; dār al; experience; ḥusayn; ibn; ibn al; iṣbahānī; jamīl; kuthayyir; lawrence; literature; love; manipulation; medieval; poetry; precarity; press; reading; relationship; scene; stories; story; time; tradition; university; way; women; world; wusṭā; ʿudhrī
Globalizing the Medieval: A Methodology by Davis-Secord, Sarah (2024) - But what if we approached the “global Middle Ages” as a method rather than a claim?1 How could “globalizing” our study and teaching about the pre-1500 past change not only the words we use to describe that past, but also our understanding of the meanings of it, particularly regarding the ways in which distant regions, cultures, and peoples were linked to each other?2 A globalized system is not simply one in which some societies participate in important linkages across distances, but one in which the connected regions are inextricable from each other and from the system itself.3 Such interdependence could take many shapes, but I think that multidirectionality is an important hallmark of globalized connections: we cannot only think about global connections as a conduit for goods, people, or ideas from 1. To do global work in pre-1500 centuries well, I think we must do it carefully. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr; connections; davis; medieval; middle; silk; wusṭā
Across Sea and Ocean: Transmitting and Receiving Caliphal Sovereignty Claims between the Late Medieval Cairo Sultanate and the Sultanates of India by Banister, Mustafa (2025) - ʿAbd al-Rāzīq al-Ṭanṭāwī al-Qarmūṭ (Cairo: al-Zahrāʾ, 1989), 480–1; Yūsuf Ibn Taghrībirdī, al-Nujūm al-zāhira fī mulūk Miṣr wa-l-Qāhira, ed. Edited by Elizabeth M. Sartain as Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī, II: al-Taḥadduth bi-niʿmat Allāh. Keywords: abbasid; al-ʿalāqāt; al-ʿalāqāt al; al-ʿuṣūr al; baghdad; cairo; caliph al; caliphal; caliphate; cambridge; century; coins; delhi; dār al; dīn; dīn al; fīrūz; ghiyāth al; history; ibn; indian; investiture; islam; islamic; muslim; muḥammad; new; ocean; press; rulers; sea; shāh; sultan; sultan al; sultanate; university; wusṭā; ʿabd al
White Camphor and Peppercorn Hair: Blackness in Medieval Arabo-Asia by Ha, Guangtian (2025) - ََّن َخلييل �أوصاين �أَّْن �أمُسع وُ�طيع واإ ، قا�: اإ ٍ عن �أيب ذْر� Abū Dharr said, “My closest friend [i.e., the Prophet] advised me to listen and obey, even if [the leader] is a slave with amputated limbs. � اّل� بقحههف ْر�أٌس ْرجههَل مههن �أعِّدائههم. Keywords: abū; abū al; al-ʿuṣūr al; arabic; article; asia; black; blackness; cairo; cambridge; camphor; century; china; chinese; dār al; guangtian; hair; history; indian; islands; kingdom; kunlun; kāfūr; literature; medieval; mutanabbī; ocean; people; peppercorn; press; slave; sources; southeast; studies; university; white; world; wusṭā; ʿajāʾib; ʿajāʾib al; � �
What’s in a World? The “Indian Ocean World” as a Research Framework by Gajewska, Maria (2025) - • 386 This creates confusion and invites the question of why “Indian Ocean world” is a useful framework at all. This chronological framing begins with the first written evidence for direct voyages between the western and eastern poles of the Indian Ocean and ends with the entry of European colonial powers into Indian Ocean trade (first the Portuguese, later the Dutch, British, and French), which ultimately led to its integration with global trade networks. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr; centuries; century; coast; connections; east; eleventh; evidence; history; indian ocean; littoral; maritime; medieval; ocean world; oman; oxford; period; port; power; red; sea; textiles; trade; university; wusṭā
The Tatars of the Sūdān: Race, Place, and Power in Ibn Saʿīd’s Geography by Barker, Hannah (2025) - It involved a Tibetan woman whose baby was stolen by an eagle and nursed by a lioness.79 As an adult in human society, he was named Son of the Black Lion (Alb Qarā Arslān Biljikī or Farkh al-Asad al-Aswad).80 Ibn al-Dawādārī said that he had encountered this myth in The Book of the Great Ruling Father, a rare volume in the collection of his friend Amīn al-Dīn al-Ḥamawī in Bilbays, and that the volume attributed the myth to a person from Azerbaijan.81 On one hand, Ibn al-Dawādārī described this as a rare book containing a previously unknown story. 1–116: a complete manuscript, dated 714/1314–15, titled Kitāb al-Jughrāfiyyā fī al-aqālīm al-sabʿa wa-zād fīhi al-aṭwāl wa-l-ʿarūḍ ziyāda (The book of geography according to the seven climes and the extension in it of the longitudes and the latitudes), which belonged to Abū al-Fidā, 13. Keywords: abū al; africa; al al; al-ʿuṣūr al; century; damot; damādim; east; et al; geography; history; ibn; ibn al; ibn saʿīd; islam; kingdom; kitāb al; medieval; mongols; new; press; race; saʿīd al; scholars; studies; sūdān; tatars; thirteenth; turks; university; west; world; wusṭā
The “Lamp of Hind” in Cairo: How an Indian Jurist Became the Chief Hanafi Judge of the Mamluk Sultanate in the Fourteenth Century by Baig, Sohaib (2025) - Isḥāq b. Aḥmad Sirāj al-Dīn al-Hindī al-Ḥanafī (d. 773) taḥqīqan wa-dirāsatan,” Majallat Kulliyyat al-Sharīʿa wa-l-Qānūn 28, no. 2 (2024): 618–74, at 656. Aḥmad Sirāj al-Dīn al-Hindī al-Ḥanafī (d. 773) taḥqīqan wa-dirāsatan.” Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr al; asia; beirut; cairo; century; chief; delhi; dār al; dīn al; hadith; hanafi; hind; ibn; ibn al; indian; islamic; judge; lamp; law; madhhab; mamluk; mecca; muḥammad; scholars; school; shafiʿi; sirāj al; south; sultanate; texts; university; wusṭā; ʿabd al
Selenocentrism and Heliocentrism in Early Modern Persianate Imperial Cultures: ʿAlī versus Jesus, with Hermes Presiding : A Harranian Essay in Astro-Decoloniality by Melvin-Koushki, Matthew (2025) - Upon ʿAlī ʿĀdilshāh’s death, Chānd Bībī (d. 1600), his wife, took power, and her military exploits against the Mughals earned her fame as Queen of the Deccan to this day.129 As should now be obvious, their royal names were designed to be read together as a simple Islam-in-India imperial riddle: the marriage of ʿAlī, King of the Balance (Arabic-Persian), to Chānd, God Moon (Sanskrit-Persian), makes a legendary power couple in Hellenic and Vedic terms; that Chānd was physically Warrior Queen and female World-Changer too only doubled that Twaining synergy. As astro-decolonial remedy, I propose Selenocentrism and Heliocentrism as a primary binary pair whose creative tension helped shape human cultures generally and Islamicate ones specifically, and early modern Persianate imperial cultures above all: for they saw the apotheosis of the peculiarly Islamic embrace of Harranian-Hermetic astral magic as the preferred vehicle of Neoplatonic philosophical-theurgic practice, rejecting the weird Greek insistence on Moon as nonimperial female only in favor of the Harranian devotion to male Moon as Cosmic King and brother to male-female Hermes. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr al; arabic; cambridge; christian; cosmic; cultures; empire; female; god; heliocentrism; history; ibn; imperial; islamic; koushki; latin; lettrist; lunar; magic; matthew; matthew melvin; melvin; mercury; moon; mughal; muḥammad; new; occult; ottoman; persian; press; pythagorean; safavid; science; selenocentrism; state; sun; timurid; university; university press; western; world; wusṭā; york; ʿalī
Kitāb al-Safar: A Book on the Management of Travel by a Yemeni Rasulid Sultan by Jāzim, Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Raḥīm ; Varisco, Daniel Martin (2025) - هــو ُدْهــن ُشــجر منهــا الَّشــْرِبنْي، واليـَنـْبُــوت، والَعْرَعــر، والُعتُــم، والَتألَــب.. وذكــره املظفــر يف كتــاب املعتمــد فقــال أب�ــه يســمى ابلفارســية األســفيوس، وابليوان�يــة وفســليون، وأتويلــه البـَْرُغْو�ِــي، وأ�فــع مــا يف هــذا النبــات بــزره، ولــه قــوة ُمرُبدة، إذا تضمــد بــه مــع اخلــل ودهــن الــورد واملاء �فــع مــن وجــع املفاصــل، واألورام الظاهــرة يف أصــول اآلذان، واخلراجــات، واألورام البلغميــة، والتــواء العصــب، وهــو يرُبد ترُبيــداً قــوايً، وهــو يرُبد احلــرارة ويــلني اخلّشــو�ة.. ولــه أيضــاً فوئــد طبيــة مجــة ذكــرت يف املعتمــد. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr al; ibn; jāzim; jāzim al-ʿuṣūr; kitāb al; malik al; muḥammad; raḥīm; raḥīm jāzim; safar; sultan; text; travel; wusṭā; ʿabd al; أ �; أيب; أيضــاً; أَو; أَْيَضــاً; إىل; األصل; األفضــل; اإل; اإىل; البــَـْرد; البـَْرد; الذي; الرُبد; السر; السرــلطان; السِّ; الصِّ; الطبيــة; الطــب; العلمــي; العلمي; الــذي; الــَسرْي; الفصيلــة; اليت; اليمــن; اليمن; الَســَفر; الَعطَــش; الَــِذي; الَماء; الَمــاء; الََباب; الُمَســاِفر; الّشهايب; الَّشــِدْيد; املاء; املظفر; املظفــر; املعتمد; املعتمــد; امللــك; اَليِت; بالد; بتناه; بعــض; بــات; بــن; بني; بِــه; حــب; حممــد; حنــو; ذكــره; راجع; راجــع; رمست; زيــت; عبــد; عــن; علــى; على; عليــه; عىل; ــب; ــت; ــه; فقــال; فوائــد; فيــه; فيهــا; فِإ; قَــد; كا �; كتــاب; كذا; كــثرية; للُمَســاِفر; لَــُه; مجع; مدينــة; معجــم; معجم; معــروف; مــا; مــع; مــن; منــه; منهــا; مَل; مُثّ; هــذا; هللا; و �; والصواب; وامســه; وذكــر; وقد; وقــد; وكان; ولــه; ومل; وهــو; وهــو مــن; وهو; ويســمى; ويســمى يف; ويف; وََكَذلِــك; يــة; يـَنـَْبِغي; يف األصل; يف بالد; يِف; َأن; َحــّب; َذلِــك; َذِلك; َســاَعة; َضــَرر; َعَلْيــه; َغرْي; َكان; َكَمــا; َلُه; َواَل; َوُدْهــن; َوِإن; ُدْهــن; ُشــجر; ُكّل; ِإاَل; ِإن; ِإىَل; ِإَذا; ِجَيَِ; ِمنـَْهــا; ِمْنــُه
The Multiplicity of Mosque Architecture in China by Wu, Sylvia (2025) - Is it valid for the state to argue that domes are not authentic to China’s Muslim architecture and replace them with elements reminiscent of a tradition most widely followed in historical China, such as that of the Great Mosque of Xi’an? 4. What does this suggest about the geography of religious authority in imperial China? Fig. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr; architecture; central; china; chinese; fig; hall; islamic; minaret; mosque; multiplicity; muslim; quanzhou; site; students; wusṭā
In Search of the Early Islamic Economy by Bonner, Michael (2019) - ʿAbd Allāh b. Shihāb al-Dīn al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafāʾ bi-akhbār Dār al-Muṣṭafā (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Ādāb, 1373/1953), 1:541–43; R. Foote, “Umayyad Markets and Manufacturing: Evidence for a Commercialized and Industrializing Economy in Early Islamic Bilād al-Shām” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1999), 182–83. 80. See also A. Walmsley, “Production Exchange and Regional Trade in the Islamic East Mediterranean: Old Structures, New Systems?,” in The Long Eighth Century: Production, Distribution and Demand, ed. I. L. Hansen and C. Wickham, 265–343 (Leiden: Brill, 2000); idem, Early Islamic Syria: An Archaeological Assessment (London: Bloomsbury, 2007); M. Morony, “Economic Boundaries? Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr; al-ʿuṣūr al; bonner; brill; caliphate; cambridge; cambridge university; early; economy; empires; history; islamic; journal; law; leiden; markets; michael; modern; new; press; roman; state; time; trade; umayyad; university; university press; world; wusṭā
Reacting to Muḥammad: Three Early Islamic Poets in the Kitāb al-Aghānī * by Klasova, Pamela (2019) - The second aim is to follow the later reception of the poets and their incorporation into the Arabo-Islamic canon through an examination of the narratives (akhbār) that accompany the verses in Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī’s (d. 356/967) Kitāb al-Aghānī, the underlying assumption being that these akhbār are secondary to the verses. Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī, Kitāb al-Aghānī, ed. Keywords: abū; abū al; abū khirāsh; abū miḥjan; aghānī; akhbār; al-ʿuṣūr al; appendix; arabic; b. al; banū al; blood; cambridge; death; dīwān; encyclopaedia; history; ibn al; islamic; iṣfahānī; jāhiliyya; jāhilī; kitāb al; klasova; life; man; memory; mufaḍḍal al; muslim; muḥammad; new; pamela; poem; poetry; poets; press; scholars; second; society; stetkevych; suḥaym; time; tradition; tribe; university; verses; war; wine; world; wusṭā; zuhayr; ʿabd al
A Newly Discovered Letter of the Early Arabic Alphabet: A Distinction between Final Jīm and Final Ḥāʾ/Khāʾ and Its Nabataean Origins* by van Putten, Marijn (2019) - bi-maṣābīḥ (201r, l. 14) Q67:30 ʾaṣbaḥa (202r, l. 8) Q69:6 bi-rīḥ (203r, l. 12) Q69:52 fa-sabbiḥ (203v, l. 23) Q70:4 Q4:100 yakhruj (Arabe 330g 53r, l. 10) Q9:46 al-khurūj (Arabe 330g 64r, l. 14) Q35:13 yūliju (Arabe 334a 7v, l. 6) Q7:56 al-riyāḥ (A328a, 32v. Keywords: 6087; al-ʿuṣūr al; appendix; arabe; arabic; curved; distinction; example; islamic; junāḥ; jīm; letter; manuscripts; nos; nūḥ; rīḥ; shape; wusṭā; ḥāʾ; ḥāʾ/khāʾ
Nourishing the Noble: Breastfeeding and Hero-Making in Medieval Arabic Popular Literature by Schine, Rachel (2019) - On this feature, see Aḥmad Shams al-Dīn al-Ḥajjājī, Mawlid al-baṭal fī al-sīra al-shaʿbiyya (Cairo: Dār al-Hilāl, 1991), 48–49; Nabīla Ibrāhīm, Ashkāl al-taʿbīr fī al-adab al-shaʿbī (Cairo: Dār Nahḍat Miṣr, 1966), 129. 8. Ashkāl al-taʿbīr fī al-adab al-shaʿbī. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr al; arabic; beirut; breastfeeding; brill; cairo; child; children; dhāt al; dār al; dārim; et al; family; hero; himma; ibn; islam; islamic; junduba; kinship; leiden; literature; making; medieval; milk; moses; mother; muḥammad; new; nourishing; nurse; nursing; popular; press; qiṣaṣ al; rachel; schine; sīrat al; sīrat dhāt; text; university; version; wet; wife; women; wusṭā; ʿabd al; ḥusna
An Unexpected Romance: Reevaluating the Authorship of the Khosrow-nāma* by O’Malley, Austin (2019) - One of the difficulties for ʿAṭṭār scholarship has been the dearth of biographical information, both within his 7. George Morrison (Leiden: Brill, 1981); Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “Some Observations on the Place of ʿAṭṭār within the Sufi Tradition,” in Colloquio italo-iraniano sul poeta mistico Fariduddin ʿAṭṭār (Roma, 24–25 Marzo 1977) (Rome: Accademia An Unexpected Romance: Reevaluating the Authorship of the Khosrow-nāma* Austin O’MAlley The University of Arizona (austinomalley@email.arizona.edu) Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr; argument; authorship; century; din; din ʿaṭṭār; elāhi; farid al; introduction; kadkani; khosrow; lines; manuscript; manṭeq; mokhtār; nāma; persian; poem; poetry; romance; shafiʿi; tehran; works; wusṭā; ʿaṭṭār
Women, Identity, and Power: A Review Essay of Antony Eastmond, Tamta’s World by Pogossian, Zaroui (2019) - However, her methodological considerations on the facets of Armenian identity and the tension between modern scholarly discourse limited by a “national” view and the available evidence would have added depth to Eastmond’s own analysis.10 Zekiyan, too, has explored the multiple components of medieval Armenian identity, emphasizing its “polyvalence.” Both labels were used to denote Muslims in medieval Armenian sources, rather than reflecting ethnic belonging.31 Presumably, both women converted to Christianity after their marriage to Xawṙas, given that Xawṙas and Zmruxt eventually commissioned a Gospel manuscript that commemorated Xut‘lu Xat‘un. Keywords: academy; al-ʿuṣūr; armenian; book; century; church; des; eastmond; erevan; family; georgian; history; identities; identity; inscriptions; iwanē; monastery; power; press; sciences; sources; tamta; t‘amt‘a; women; world; wusṭā; zak‘arids; zak‘arē
Daniel Alan Brubaker, Corrections in Early Qurʾānic Manuscripts by Sidky, Hythem (2019) - The plethora of early manuscripts at our disposal combined with digital technologies making them accessible has reawakened a fervor among both scholars and the public. First, one would have to show that the incidence of orthographic deviations is greater in earlier manuscripts than in later ones. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr; allāh; book; brubaker; corrections; example; manuscripts; quranic; rasm; standard; text; word; wusṭā
Remembering Michael Bonner by Borrut, Antoine (2019) - Remembering Michael Bonner Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27 (2019): 357 When I think through these disjointed snippets in light of conversations I have had with others since Michael passed in May, a few common threads emerge to force cohesion on the rambling and unpredictable memories. Remembering Michael Bonner Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27 (2019): 358 While people who knew Michael only from his work might think first of the scholar with such exacting standards for his own work as well as the work of his students— I can also remember how quickly that laugh turned back toward the business at hand—and a polyglot’s linguistic mastery, those of us who had the advantage of studying under and working alongside Michael knew him as a warm and funny man whose enthusiasm for his work and learning in general drew many of us away from other pursuits to study the history of the medieval Islamic world with him. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr; arabic; bonner; michael; student; time; work; wusṭā
Remarks by the Recipient of the 2018 MEM Lifetime Achievement Award Given at the Annual Meeting of Middle East Medievalists by Whitcomb, Donald (2019) - Awards Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27 (2019): iii-ix This acknowledgement of my work in Islamic archaeology comes as a complete surprise and therefore is all the more appreciated. I found that, in the field of Islamic archaeology, this was a new and rare approach that necessitated study of historical contexts as well as art historical resources. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr; archaeology; east; field; islamic; near; studies; study; wusṭā
Mecca and Macoraba* by Morris, Ian D. (2018) - (London: James and John Knapton et al., 1728), s.v. Bearman, P.J. et al., eds. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr al; ancient; arabian; arabic; arabs; bochart; brill; century; chicago; crone; der; derivation; dictionary; dozy; early; eds; et al; geography; great; hebrew; history; islam; islamic; johann; leiden; leipzig; london; macoraba; makkah; mecca; medieval; mkrb; morris; new; oxford; paris; place; press; ptolemy; scholars; sources; south; studies; temple; town; trade; university; van; vol; word; wusṭā
Introduction by Fierro, Maribel; Cressier, Patrice (2018) - For a scholar who worked for some time in the Almohad court, al-Salālijī does not seem to have suffered any persecution for reminding his readers that infallibility or impeccability was limited to the prophets—thus excluding Ibn Tūmart and his representation as al-imām al-maʿsūm al-mahdī al-maʿlūm—and that Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, ʿUthmān and ʿAlī were the rightly guided caliphs and imams (fa-hum al-khulafāʾ al-rāshidūn wa-al-aʾimma al-mahdiyyūn), a characterization that the Almohad caliphs tried hard to associate with themselves in various ways. Beirut: Dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 1411/1991. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr; almohad; andalus; caliphate; caliphs; de al; del; des; fierro; history; ibn; islamic; les; new; paris; west; wusṭā
The Jihād of the Caliphs and the First Battles of Islam: Memory, Legitimization and Holy War, from Cordoba to Tinmal by Albarrán, Javier (2018) - Ibn ʿ Idhārī, al-Bayān al-Mughrib fī akhbār al-Andalus wa al-Maghrib, eds. Ibn ʿIdhārī, al-Bayān al-Mughrib, vol. II, 294; Dhikr bilād al-Andalus, ed. and trans. Keywords: abū; al-ʿuṣūr al; almohad; andalus; battles; bayān al; caliph al; caliphs; de al; de ibn; de la; eds; fierro; history; ibn al; islam; islamic; jihād; kitāb al; los; madrid; memory; muḥammad; new; prophet; tūmart; umayyad; vol; war; wusṭā; ʿabd al
Preparing the Almohad Caliphate: The Almoravids* by Buresi, Pascal (2018) - Abū al-Ḥakam ʿAlī b. Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Lakhmī al-Murkhī was the secretary for ʿAbd al-Muʾmin, following his father, who held the same position under ʿAlī b. Yūsuf b. Tashfīn. This was also the case in al-Andalus where the dynasty of the Umayyad emirs (138/756-316/929), then the caliphs (316/929-422/1031), reinforced this Arab supremacy. Keywords: abū; al-ʿuṣūr al; almohad; almoravid; andalus; authority; caliphate; century; de al; ibn; islam; maghrib; power; tashfīn; wusṭā; yūsuf; yūsuf b.; ʿabd al
The Numismatic Evidence for the Reign of Aḥmad b. Ṭūlūn by Treadwell, Luke (2017) - Fahmy, ʿA., ‘Al-ṣinaj al-ṭūlūniyya wa al-sikka al-ikhshīdiyya wa al-jadīd fīhimā’, Baghdad, 1957, pp. A recent specimen of this type offered for sale in the Bruno Peus auction of 7 –9 November 2012, identifies the date of issue as 2(6)4/877 and the mint as al-thughūr al-shāmiyya (Peus 2012, no. 1471). Keywords: abū; al-ʿuṣūr al; aḥmad; aḥmad b.; b. ṭūlūn; caliph; caliph al; caliphal; coins; dinars; dāya; egypt; evidence; governor; ibn al; ibn ṭūlūn; miṣr; muwaffaq; muʿtamid; state; tulunid; wusṭā; year
The Abbasid “Golden Age”: An Excavation by Cooperson, Michael (2017) - 48 • Michael cooperson Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017) al-tamaddun al-islāmī. 2. Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017) The Abbasid “Golden Age”: An Excavation • 57 and the overall effect is so dense that the few obvious fabrications (for example, the story where Ibn Hanbal is shipwrecked on a desert island, ¶4.22) stand out like a sore thumb.71 To fully appreciate the reality effect (as Roland Barthes would call it) of this material, we might compare it to what is known about an earlier celebrity, al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (d. 728). Keywords: abbasid; age; al-ʿuṣūr al; arabic; arabs; baghdad; century; cooperson; culture; decline; der; early; example; golden; history; ibn; islamic; literature; michael; new; ottoman; period; studies; von; wusṭā; zaydān
Conflict and Community in the Medieval Caucasus by Vacca, Alison M. (2017) - In this leg of the campaign, according to al-Ṭabarī, “Bughā also sent Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Wārithī al-Naṣrānī against the inhabitants of Armenia, Arab and non-Arab alike” ( ).63 Bughā sat above the town and watched Zīrak and Abū al-ʿAbbās burn the city and capture Isḥāq and his son ʿ Amr. Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017): 66-112 In 238/852-3,1 Abū Mūsā Bughā al-Kabīr, a celebrated general in al-Mutawakkil’s army, sent two of his lieutenants, Zīrak and the son of Abū al-ʿAbbās, against an opponent named Abū Mūsā in the town of Kithīsh/K‘t‘iš.2 Keywords: abū; abū al; al-ʿuṣūr al; arab; arabic; arcruni; armenian; army; ašot; bagratuni; bughā; bughā al; campaign; caucasus; christian; communities; community; conflict; history; ibn; identity; isḥāq; khuwaythiyya; medieval; muslim; mūsā; patmut‘iwn; power; press; son; sources; taʾrīkh; t‘ovma; women; wusṭā; xut; ṭabarī
Reflections on the Identity of the Arabian Conquerors of the Seventh-Century Middle East by Hoyland, Robert G. (2017) - Webb presents his theory in his book Imagining the Arabs: Arab Identity and the Rise of Islam (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), on which see Philip Wood’s review in this issue of Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā; in his review of my In God’s Path: “The March of Islam”, Times Literary Supplement, 13 March 2015, 24; and in the article in the following footnote. http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/42023/among-the-believers 118 • RobeRt G. Hoyland Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017) One could interpret this for or against Donner, since on the one hand, “those who believe” are distinguished from Jews, Sabians and Christians, intimating an awareness of confessional boundaries, but, on the other hand, they are categorized together with Jews, Sabians and Christians in respect of their common belief in God and the Last Day, their righteous behavior and an implication of easy entry into heaven.23 Thus, although it is not made explicit in what way other monotheist groups related to Muhammad’s community in this world, they certainly would appear to be on a par with Muhammad’s community in the next world, sharing equally in the benefits of the afterlife. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr; arab; arabic; believers; century; community; conquerors; donner; god; history; hoyland; identity; islam; islamic; muhammad; muslim; new; path; press; religion; term; university; webb; wusṭā
New Insights into Early Islamic Historiography by Dehghani Farsani , Yoones (2017) - While, for example, an analysis of a wide range of classical sources on the descriptions of Burāq has shown that the information about its physical appearance originates exclusively in Basra, and is found especially in the Basran exegete Qatāda b. Diʿāma’s (d. 118/735) narrations, I can show that Ibn Isḥāq’s accounts on the isrāʾ episodes also demonstrate that the Basran exegetical traditions (i.e., a mixture of Qatāda’s and his teacher al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī’s Overall, my contribution discusses the role of the early second/eighth Basran exegetical material, especially the traditions which are often attributed to al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī and Qatāda, both in IV. Keywords: abū; al-ʿuṣūr al; arabic; aʿtham; aḥmad; b. al; fitna; futūḥ al; historiography; history; ibn; ibn al; ibn aʿtham; islamic; jews; kitāb al; muslim; muḥammad; prophet; qurʾān; scheiner; shām; sources; translation; work; wusṭā; wāqidī
Was Ibn Wāḍiḥ al-Yaʿqūbī a Shiʿite Historian? The State of the Question* by Anthony, Sean W. (2016) - al-Intiqāʾ fī faḍāʾil al-thalātha al-aʾimma al-fuqahāʾ. Edited by ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ Abū Ghudda. Edited by Jalāl al-Dīn al-Ḥusaynī al-Armawī al-Muḥaddith. Keywords: abū; al-ʿuṣūr al; aḥmad; bakr; beirut; chronicle; dār al; history; ibn; ibn al; islamic; kitāb; leiden; muḥammad; muḥammad al; prophet; shiʿite; tārīkh; vols; wusṭā; wāḍiḥ; wāḍiḥ al; yaʿqūbī; ʿabd al; ʿalī
Of Islamic Grammatology: Ibn Turka’s Lettrist Metaphysics of Light* by Melvin-Koushki, Matthew (2016) - Under the rubric of ʿilm al-adab Ibn al-Akfānī gives equal treatment to speech and writing as vehicles of communication, with emphasis on poetry and rhetoric, treating sequentially of lugha, taṣrīf, maʿānī, bayān, badīʿ,ʿarūḍ, qawāfī, naḥw, qawānīn al-kitāba, qawānīn al-qirāʾa and manṭiq (Irshād al-Qāṣid, 22-29). 21. The letter is the enlightening elixir (al-iksīr al-munīr); were a drop of it to strike the vaults of dark bodies that fill the realms of contingency (al-ʿawālim al-imkāniyya), it would forthwith dispel their intrinsic darkness and transform their substance from base to noble, rendering those gross bodies pure light to illumine the dark realms of matter and becoming.108 As Ibn Turka argues, in sum, every level of the letter is a construct of eternally emanated divine light, both ontologically and epistemologically—even speech. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr al; arabic; book; cambridge; century; context; culture; derrida; doctrine; dīn; existence; form; god; grammatology; history; ibn al; ibn turka; intellectual; iran; islamic; islamicate; knowledge; koushki; koushki al-ʿuṣūr; letters; lettrist; light; magic; mamluk; matthew; melvin; metaphysics; new; number; occult; ottoman; pen; period; persian; philosophy; place; quest; safavid; scholars; science; speech; spoken; tashkīk al; theory; time; timurid; tradition; world; writing; written; wusṭā; ʿalī; ʿilm al
A Moveable Feast: “Food as a Cultural Signifier” by Stone McNeece, Lucy (2016) - Ms. Willhelm affirmed that food aid has both a colonial and postcolonial history. In the 20th century industrialized nations have sought to project their influence by means of humanitarian assistance such as food aid and this has included corporate as well as philanthropic donors. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr; american; arabic; culture; european; feast; food; paper; quince; signifier; university; wine; wusṭā
Denis Genequand and Christian Julien Robin (eds.), Les Jafnides: des rois arabes au service de Byzance by Borrut, Antoine (2016) - Greg Fisher (ed.), Arabs and Empire Before Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Peter Webb, Imagining the Arabs: Arab Identity and the Rise of Islam (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016); Aziz al-Azmeh, The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity: Allāh and his People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), on which, see Webb’s review in Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 23 (2015), 149-53; Isabel Toral-Niehoff, Al-Ḥīra. Eine arabische Kulturmetropole im spätantiken Kontext (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), and reviewed by Michael Bonner in this issue of Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā, 181-186. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr; century; christian; ghassān; jafnids; les; robin; roman; wusṭā
Muḥammad’s Deputies in Medina by Cook, Michael (2015) - Dhū ʾl-Qaʿda 7 ʿUmrat al-qaḍiyya62 ʿUwayf ibn al-Aḍbaṭ al-Duʾalī SS 3-4:370.12 25. Khalīfa: ʿUwayf ibn al-Aḍbaṭ al-Duʾalī Wāqidī: Ibn Hishām: 24 Khalīfa: 22 Zayd ibn Ḥāritha Wāqidī: 3, 17 Ibn Hishām: 3 Khalīfa: Keywords: abū; al-ʿuṣūr al; barr; deputies; deputy; expedition; hishām; ibn abī; ibn al; ibn hishām; ibn isḥāq; ibn maslama; ibn saʿd; ibn ʿabd; ibn ʿurfuṭa; ibn ḥabīb; ibn ḥazm; istīʿāb; khalīfa; maktūm; medina; muḥammad al; muḥammad ibn; names; ruhm al; sachau; sibāʿ ibn; sources; taʾrīkh al; umm; wusṭā; wāqidī; zayd ibn; ʿabd al; ʿabdallāh al; ʿabdallāh ibn; ʿuthmān ibn; ṭabaqāt
Māwardī’s Legal Thinking by Melchert, Christopher (2015) - I have elsewhere reviewed his training in Shāfiʿi law and his position within the school.2 In modern times, Māwardī has become most famous for al-Aḥkām al-sulṭānīyah.3 He is most famous today for al-Aḥkām al-sulṭānīyah, a review of the law as it affects or requires the action of the caliph. Keywords: abū; al-ʿuṣūr al; beirut; dār al; example; hadith; ibn; ibn al; islamic; law; muḥammad; māwardī; prayer; ritual; school; studies; virgin; vols; waqf; wusṭā; ʿabd al; ḥāwī
Ibn Aʿtham and His History by Conrad, Lawrence I. (2015) - In the main body of the Kitāb al-futūḥ (i.e. before the beginning of the dhayl), one of al-Mansūr’s daughters tells a tale of how her grandmother, pregnant with the future caliph, dreamed that a lion came forth from her and received the homage of all the other predatory beasts.118 As it happens, the immediate informant for this story is al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥubāb al-Muqriʾ al-Baghdādī, who died in Baghdād in 301/914.119 See al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī (d. 463/1071), Taʾrīkh Baghdād (Cairo: Maktabat al-Khānjī, 1349/1931), VIII, 301:4-302:2, no. 3813. Keywords: abū; account; al-ʿuṣūr al; arabic; author; aʿtham al; book; caliphate; century; conrad; date; death; end; fact; futūḥ; futūḥ al; history; ibid; ibn al; ibn aʿtham; isnāds; kitāb al; lawrence; material; muḥammad; persian; point; shīʿī; sources; text; viii; work; wusṭā; ʿalī
Clifford Edmund Bosworth: An Updated Bibliography by O’Neal, Michael (2015) - Ḥusayn ʿAlī al-Labūdī, al-Usar al-ḥākima fi ’l-Islām. A journal devoted to the study of handwritten materials of the Middle East, I, Leiden 1986, in JSS, XXXIII/2 (1988), 314–17; Widād al-Qāḍī, Bishr b. Abi ’l-Kubār al-Balawī, numūdhaj min al-nathr al-fannī al-mubakkir fi ’l-Yaman, Beirut 1405/1985, in JSS, XXXIII/2 (1988), 318–19; M.H. Burgoyne, with D.S. Richards, Mamluk Jerusalem. Keywords: abū; al-ʿuṣūr; al-ʿuṣūr al; arabic; art; arts; asia; aḥmad; bosworth; bull; c.e; cambridge; central; century; clifford; dīn; east; edmund; eds; ei2; eir; historical; history; ibn; iii; iran; islamic; item; journal; jras; jss; leiden; london; medieval; memoriam; middle; minorsky; muḥammad; new; period; persian; publ; reprinted; reviews; ser; society; studies; university; vii; vol; world; wusṭā; york
“With All Good Wishes”: Remembering Patricia Crone by Van Bladel, Kevin (2015) - For a bibliography of Patricia Crone’s work, please see Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts: Essays in Honor of Professor Patricia Crone, edited by B. Sadeghi, A.Q. Ahmed, A. Silverstein, and R. Hoyland (Leiden: Brill, 2015), xxiv-xxix. In Memoriam: Patricia Crone Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 23 (2015): 224 possessed another very rare characteristic: Patricia was genuinely humble and modest, despite her unusual gifts. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr; crone; end; life; patricia; time; wusṭā
Qamarayn: The Erotics of Sameness in the 1001 Nights by Antrim, Zayde (2020) - (Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿa al-Kubrā bi-Būlāq, 1251/1835) [hereafter Calcutta II]; and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ṣafatī al-Sharqāwī, ed., Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr al; arabic; beauty; bnf arabe; bodies; body; budur; bulaq; calcutta; century; characters; desire; difference; erotics; fifteenth; fol; gender; king; literature; mahdi; manuscript; new; nights; press; qamar al; sameness; sex; stories; story; terms; university; women; wusṭā; zaman
Who Compiled and Edited the Mashhad Miscellany? by Treadwell, Luke (2020) - Al-Thaʿālibī notes that Badīʿ al-Zamān put some of Abū Dulaf’s poetry into the mouth of the protagonist of his maqāma, Abū al-Fatḥ al-Iskandarī. Some years later, the qāḍī Abū al-ʿAnbas al-Ṣaymarī (d. 275/888), perhaps taking his cue from al-Jāḥiẓ, wrote several now lost treatises on behaviors regarded as aberrant, including pimping, prostitution, masturbation, and pederasty, that were listed by Ibn al-Nadīm.75 This zany literary output earned al-Ṣaymarī the posthumous honor of having a maqāma written in his name by Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī.76 Abū Dulaf ’s contribution to the field was a long poem, the Qasīda sāsāniyya, which he wrote for al-Ṣāḥib b. ʿAbbād. Keywords: abū; abū dulaf; al-ʿuṣūr al; b. al; book; buldān; dulaf; dulaf al; editors; faqīh; ibn al; ibn faḍlān; islamic; kitāb; kitāb al; manuscript; mashhad; mashhad miscellany; miscellany; passages; risāla; section; text; treadwell; turks; version; wusṭā
A Call to Arms: An Account of Ayyubid or Early Mamluk Alexandria by Bruning, Jelle (2020) - A transcription of this manuscript with some differences in the text and its vocalization has been entered into al-Maktaba al-shāmila al-ḥadītha.11 9. Muḥammad Ḥ. al-Fiqqī, Fuʾād Sayyid, and Maḥmūd M. al-Ṭanāḥī (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Sunna al-Muḥammadiyya, 1381–1406/1962–86), 2:241; Ibn Taghrī Birdī, al-Nujūm al-zāhira fī mulūk Miṣr wa-l-Qāhira (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyya, 1929–72), 11:194; al-Silafī, Muʿjam al-safar, ed. Keywords: account; al-ʿuṣūr al; alexandria; arabic; author; ayyubid; b. al; beirut; brill; bruning; cairo; city; dār al; gate; ibn al; ibn ʿabd; jelle; king; kitāb al; kutub; kutub al; leiden; lighthouse; mamluk; manuscript; mirror; mosque; muslim; muḥammad; para; ribāṭ; text; wahhāb; wusṭā; ʿabd al
The Rebellious Son: Umayyad Hereditary Succession and the Origins of Ḥijāzī Opposition by Tayyara, Abed el-Rahman (2020) - This stance perhaps explains the association of his name in some traditions with the Qadarite movement.103 Al-Ṭabarī’s account on the authority of al-Baṣrī echoes in many later tafsīr works, such as those of al-Ṭūsī,104 al-Māwardī,105 al-Baghawī,106 al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1143–1144),107 al-Ṭabrisī,108 Ibn ʿAṭiyya,109 Ibn al-Jawzī,110 al-Nīsābūrī (d. 728/1328),111 and al-Nasafī (d. 710/1310).112 The first resembles al-Zajjāj’s interpretation and holds that the verse speaks of a licentious, unbelieving, disobedient son (al-fājir, al-kāfir, al-ʿāqq li-wālidayhi).98 Unlike al-Zajjāj, al-Ṭabarī traces this interpretation back to al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (d. 110/728), with an isnād that includes the following Basran transmitters: Muḥammad b. Bashshār (d. 252/866) → Hawdha b. Khalīfa (d. 210/826) → ʿAwf al-Aʿrābī (d. 146/764). Keywords: abī; al-ʿilmiyya; al-ʿuṣūr al; allāh; b. al; beirut; dār al; early; ibn al; islamic; kitāb al; kutub; muʿāwiya; muḥammad; narrative; press; qurʾān; raḥmān; son; succession; tafsīr al; taʾrīkh; umayyad; vols; wusṭā; ʿabd al; ḥadīth
A Brief History of Islamic Civilization from Its Genesis in the Late Nineteenth Century to Its Institutional Entrenchment by van Bladel, Kevin (2020) - Recognizing this, specialists continue to posit modified, hybrid, and rationalized Islamic civilizations, sometimes using different terminology for the same effect.46 Even if Islamic civilization foundations and journals keep their names, can historians abandon Islamic civilization and enhance their analysis? Abstract This article sketches the early history of Islamic civilization from its genesis in the late nineteenth century to its institutionalization in the twentieth. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr; century; chicago; civilization; education; grunebaum; history; hodgson; islamic; middle; muslim; new; press; studies; study; university; von; world; wusṭā
Le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa face aux milieux cléricaux islamiques et miaphysites (Ier–IIe / VIIe-VIIIe siècles) by Pierre, Simon (2020) - Le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 214 de Séert, à propos de l’exemption de la jizya sur les « vêtus de laine » de la province du Bēt Garmay239. Hors de la hiérarchie officielle, les holy men formèrent aux yeux des populations rurales superficiellement christianisées, les pagani, des référents et des arbitres alternatifs, à la fois proches et charismatiques. Keywords: abū; ainsi; al-ʿuṣūr al; alors; arabes; arabo; aurait; aussi; aux; avait; avec; bakr; bar; beyrouth; bien; cambridge; ces; cette; ceux; chronicon; chronique; chronique de; chrétiens; colonne; comme; dans; dans la; dans les; dans un; de ce; de la; de son; des; deux; dès; dār al; d’un; encore; entre; est; esṭūnōrō; et al; et de; et les; et sa; eux; forme; fut; histoire; ibid; ibn; ici; ils; islam; islamic; la colonne; la vie; les; les stylites; leur; lui; l’église; l’époque; mais; michel; milieu; moines; monastère; musulmans; même; non; nous; outre; par; par les; paris; pas; pierre; point; pour; press; propos; que; que la; que les; qui; qu’il; reclus; saint; sans; selon; sens; ses; siméon; siècle; solitaires; son; sont; stylite; stylite et; sur; sur la; sur les; syriac; syriaque; syrien; syro; terme; tour; tout; tradition; une; university; vie; vie de; viiie; voir; vol; wusṭā; à un; édité; édité par; églises; étaient; était; été; être; ḥadīṯ; ṣawmaʿa
The Treatment of Coeval Persian Poetry in Arabic Anthologies of the Eleventh/Seventeenth Century: A Preliminary Study by Beers, Theodore S. (2020) - I believe this is a reproduction of the version that was published in Cairo by al-Maṭbaʿa al-Wahbiyya in 1284/1867–68. Another helpful overview is provided by Muḥammad Zāhid Abū Ghudda in “al-ʿAllāma al-muʾarrikh al-adīb al-shāʿir Muḥammad Amīn al-Muḥibbī,” website of Rābiṭat al-ʿUlamāʾ al-Sūriyyīn, March 1, 2016, https://islamsyria. com/site/show_articles/7939/. 30. Keywords: al-ʿaṣr; al-ʿuṣūr; anthologies; arabic; coeval; edition; ibn; maʿṣūm; muḥammad; muḥibbī; nafḥat; persian; poetry; poets; rayḥāna; sadd; sulāfat; tehran; treatment; work; wusṭā; ṣāʾib
Dans le ventre de l’histoire: Sindbad le marin ou la satire du glouton? by Garnier, Sébastien (2020) - Je l’observai à son insu alors que la dalle avait été remise en place et que le cortège s’était éloigné. Elles le taraudent encore au dernier voyage rémunérateur (V6) : N’étais-je pas tranquille chez moi, dans un pays où je vivais heureux, jouissant de bien manger, bien boire et de me bien vêtir ? Keywords: ainsi; al-ʿuṣūr; alors; aux; avec; bencheikh; bien; cette; croix; c’est; dans; dans le; de la; des; deux; d’un; faim; ici; layla; les; lui; l’histoire; mais; manger; marin; mer; mille; nous; nuits; par; paris; pas; plus; pour; pétis; que; qui; qu’il; ses; sindbad; son; sur; tout; une; ventre; voir; voyages; wusṭā; île
Adab without the Crusades: The Inebriated Solidarity of a Young Officer’s Hunting Epistle by Keegan, Matthew L. (2020) - al-Muhadhdhib al-Dimashqī, a Damascene preacher of the sixth/twelfth century.22 At the end of the allegorical epistle, ʿImād al-Dīn seems almost apologetic about its hortatory quality, saying: “This epistle ends with a sermonizing section (faṣl waʿẓī), which is not the task of the book (laysa min sharṭ al-kitāb).”23 ʿ Imād al-Dīn al-Iṣfahānī, Kharīdat al-qaṣr wa-jarīdat ahl al-ʿaṣr (Levant), ed. Keywords: abū; adab; al-ʿuṣūr al; arabic; asceticism; century; companions; crusades; drinking; dīn; epistle; hunting; islamic; keegan; kharīda; mamluk; piety; poetry; solidarity; time; university; wine; wusṭā; yaghmur; ʿimād al
Ḥadīth as Common Discourse: Reflections on the Intersectarian Dissemination of the Creation of the Intellect Tradition by Klasova, Pamela (2020) - [al-Iṣbahānī, d. 430/1038] narrated it in his Ḥilya and al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī [d. 463/1071] in [his] Asmāʾ man rawā ʿan Mālik [“Names of those who transmitted ḥadīth from Mālik”]138 through the narration (riwāya) of the abovementioned Ibn Abī Rajāʾ.139 Al-Khaṭīb said: “This ḥadīth is to be rejected (munkar) from the corpus of Mālik [b. Anas]’s ḥadīths.” al-Suyūṭī, al-Laʾāliʾ al-maṣnūʿa, 1:128–32. Keywords: a. al; abū; abū al; al-ʿuṣūr al; authority; b. al; bika; discourse; dār al; early; existence; god; ibn; imam al; intellect; isnāds; kitāb al; lahu; m. al; maktabat al; muḥammad; muḥammad al; pen; prophet; qāla; second; shīʿī; sunnī; thumma; university; wusṭā; ʿabd; ʿabd al; ʿaql; ḥadīth; ṣadrā
The Paperwork of a Mamluk Muqṭaʿ: Documentary Life Cycles, Archival Spaces, and the Importance of Documents Lying Around by Livingston, Daisy (2020) - The phenomenon of document reuse, for instance, has been highlighted as a practice with profound implications for understanding archiving. It is difficult to get a meaningful grasp of this particular kind of document reuse. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr; amirs; archival; archive; collection; corpus; documentary; documents; egypt; geniza; life; livingston; mamluk; material; paperwork; petition; practices; preservation; reuse; university; wusṭā
Being Persian in Late Mamluk Egypt: The Construction and Significance of Persian Ethnic Identity in the Salons of Sultan Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 906–922/1501–1516) by Mauder, Christian (2020) - M. M. al-Fākhūrī and Y. ʿAbbāra (Damascus: Manshūrāt Wizārat al-Thaqāfa, 1972–1973), 2(1):48; Muṣṭafā ʿAlī, The Ottoman Gentleman of the Sixteenth Century: Mustafa Âli’s “Mevaʾidüʾn-Nefaʾis fi Kavaʿidiʾl-Mecalis”; 383 • Christian Mauder Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 28 (2020) claiming to constitute eyewitness accounts of what was said and done during the meetings.27 Two of these works, Nafāʾis majālis al-sulṭāniyya fī ḥaqāʾiq asrār al-Qurʾāniyya by one Ḥusayn b. Muḥammad al-Ḥusaynī, known as al-Sharīf, and al-Kawkab al-durrī fī masāʾil al-Ghawrī of unknown authorship, have been known to scholarship since the mid-twentieth century and are available in incomplete editions.28 In the case of al-Kawkab al-durrī and al-ʿUqūd al-jawhariyya, this consistency is the result of textual interdependence between the two texts, which could share the same (presently unknown) author. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr al; arabic; cairo; court; egypt; ghawrī; history; identity; islamic; language; late; majālis al; mamluk; mauder; medieval; nafāʾis; persian; press; sharīf; studies; sultan; sultan al; university; wusṭā; ʿazzām
The Poetics of the Sufi Carnival: The Rogue Lyrics (Qalandariyyāt) as Heterotopic Countergenre(s) by Thomas Miller, Matthew (2022) - The conflation of seemingly irreconcilable religious particularities—e.g., Magian wine in a Christian monastery—occurs not infrequently in medieval Persian Sufi poetry. The turn away from the Kaʿba in this poem (and, in other qalandarī poems, the turn away from the mosque, ascetics’ lodge, etc.) is, in a sense, a metaphoric performance of the qalandarī poet’s rejection of the poetic world of ascetic-homiletic and royal court poetry. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr; al-ʿuṣūr al; dīn; dīvān; fakhr; figure; genre; ghazal; islamic; line; literature; meaning; medieval; meisami; miller; mock; new; panegyric; persian; poem; poetic; poetry; press; qalandariyyāt; qalandarī; rogue; sanāʾī; studies; sufi; tehran; tradition; type; university; wine; winehouse; world; wusṭā; ʿaṭṭār; ʿirāqī
The Long Arm of the Provincial Law: A Custody Battle in a Qāḍī Petition from the Medieval Fayyūm by Weitz, Lev (2022) - Būlāq: al-Maṭbaʿa al-Kubrā al-Amīriyya, 1314/1896–97. Ibrahim, Child Custody, 78–79; Ibn Qudāma, Mughnī, 11:412–13; al-Sarakhsī, Mabsūṭ, 5:210; Khalīl b. Isḥāq al-Jundī, al-Tawḍīḥ fī sharḥ al-Mukhtaṣar al-faraʿī li-Ibn al-Ḥājib, ed. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr al; arabic; arm; b. al; b. rizq; century; child; custody; document; dār al; egypt; father; fayyūm; grandmother; ibn; ibrāhīm; islamic; judge; law; muḥammad; petition; qāḍī; rizq; wusṭā; ʿabd al; ḥasan; ṭuṭūn
The Umayyad and Early Abbasid Inscriptions in the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina by Munt, Harry (2022) - Modern discussions include al-ʿAlī, “al-Muʾallafāt al-ʿarabiyya,” 129–30; Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Munajjid, Muʿjam mā ullifa ʿan rasūl Allāh (ṣ) (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-Jadīd, 1402/1982), 93–94; ʿAbd Allāh ʿUsaylān, al-Madīna al-munawwara fī āthār al-muʾallifīn wa-l-bāḥithīn qadīman wa-ḥadīthan (Medina: ʿAbd Allāh ʿUsaylān, 1418/1997), 32–33. 69. Al-Sakhāwī, Iʿlān, 273; followed by al-Munajjid, Muʿjam, 93–94; and ʿUsaylān, al-Madīna al-munawwara, 33. 88. Keywords: abbasid; abbasid inscriptions; abū al; akhbār al; al-ʿabbās al; al-ʿuṣūr al; allāh al; amīr al; aʿlāq al; b. al; bāb al; caliph; caliph al; discussion; dār al; early; et al; god; hārūn al; ibn al; inscriptions; islamic; kitāb al; madīna al; maghānim al; mahdī; makka al; maktabat al; manāsik; masjid al; medina; mosque; muʾassasat al; muḥammad al; nafs al; prophet; samhūdī; taʾrīkh al; text; umayyad; wafāʾ al; work; wusṭā; yaḥyā; ʿabd al; ʿabd allāh
Dear Muʿāwiya: An “Epistolary” Poem on a Major Muslim Military Defeat during the Mediterranean Campaigns of AH 28–35/649–56 CE by Miller, Nathaniel A. (2023) - Another Hudhalī poet from Khunāʿa, Abū al-ʿIyāl’s clan, complains of having been left behind in Arabia while his family has gone to Egypt (Miṣr).45 Still another Hudhalī, Abū Ṣakhr, declares that some kin “have left Tihāma, our land, and for Mecca have exchanged Babylon (Bāb al-Yūn),” referring to the Byzantine name for the Egyptian fortress adjacent to which the Muslim garrison of Fusṭāṭ was established.46 These poetic references to Hudhayl in Egypt are corroborated by Abū al-Qāsim ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿAbd al-Ḥakam (d. 257/871), the chronicler of the Egyptian conquests, who mentions the location of Hudhayl’s quarter in early Fusṭāṭ.47 The texts of the muʿāraḍa between Badr and Abū al-ʿIyāl make absolutely no reference to the narrative of a slain nephew, so there is no reason to accept the latter as the poems’ subject. Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī, Kitāb al-Aghānī, ed. Keywords: abī; abū; abū al-ʿiyāl; al-ʿiyāl; al-ʿuṣūr al; b. al; badr; constantinople; egypt; history; ibn; ibn saʿd; islamic; kitāb al; military; muslim; muʿāwiya; oxford; poem; press; pseudo; saʿd; sebēos; studies; university; wusṭā; ʿabd al; ʿamr; ʿuthmān; ṭabarī
Translating Race in the Islamic Studies Classroom by Schine, Rachel (2022) - Sīrat al-Amīra Dhāt al-Himma, ed. ʿAlī b. Mūsā al-Maqānibī (Beirut: al-Maktaba al-Shaʿbiyya, 1980), 1:598. 207. Sīrat ʿAntara b. Shaddād (Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Jumhuriyya al-ʿArabiyya, 1980), 1:365. https://www.aramcoworld.com/Articles/November-2016/The-Great-Migration-of-the-Bani-Hilal https://www.aramcoworld.com/Articles/November-2016/The-Great-Migration-of-the-Bani-Hilal Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022) Keywords: abbasid; african; al-ʿuṣūr al; arabic; arabs; black; cambridge; century; classroom; difference; dār al; east; faḍlān; history; human; ibid; ibn; ibn al; ibn faḍlān; islamic; journal; library; literature; medieval; middle; modern; montgomery; muslim; muḥammad al; nasab; new; new york; non; penguin; people; press; qutayba; race; rachel; racialization; racism; schine; slavery; studies; term; text; translation; tūnisī; university; university press; wahhāb; ways; white; world; wusṭā; york; ʿabd al; ʿantara
Dating Ibn Aʿtham’s History: Of Persian Manuscripts, Obscure Biographies, and Incomplete Isnāds by McLaren, Andrew (2022) - It simply reads: “Al-Ḥasan b. al-Ḥubāb al-Muqriʾ al-Baghdādī said . . .” The figures in question are Muḥammad b. Yazīd al-Yamānī, i.e., al-Mubarrad (d. 285/898), cited in Ibn Aʿtham, Futūḥ, 8:252.8–9, and Ibn al-Ḥubāb al-Muqriʾ (d. 301/914), cited at 8:211.ult. Keywords: abū; abū al; al-ʿuṣūr al; allāh al; aʿtham al; b. al; balawī; cambridge; century; conrad; date; dating; early; et al; futūḥ; hadith; history; ibn al; ibn aʿtham; ibn ʿadī; isnāds; jurjān; kitāb al; lindstedt; madāʾinī; muḥammad al; persian; press; sahmī; sallāmī; taʾrīkh; text; wusṭā; ʿabd al
‘The ʿAbbas after Whom Those Who Rule in Baghdad Are Named’: Al-ʿAbbās b. al-Walīd in Late Antique Accounts of the Marwānids and the Third Fitna by Pecorini Goodall, Leone (2022) - Other figures reported by al-Yaʿqūbī to have rebelled against al-Yazīd b. al-Walīd are Bishr b. al-Walīd in Qinnasrīn, ʿUmar b. al-Walīd in Jordan, and Yazīd b. Sulaymān b. ʿAbd al-Malik in Palestine.139 This means that, in al-Yaʿqūbī, three of four revolts against Yazīd b. al-Walīd were carried out by his own brothers, which contradicts the strong fraternal aspect of the other accounts. In the same poem as referenced in n. 206, attributed to al-Ḥakam b. al-Walīd while imprisoned, the short-lived heir nominated Marwān as caliph after himself: fa-inna ahlaku anā wa-walī ʿahdī // fa-Marwānun amīru al-muʾminīnā (“If I and my heir-apparent [walī ʿahdī] should die//then Marwān [should be] commander of the faithful”) (al-Balādhurī, Ansāb al-ashrāf, 9:249). 209. Keywords: al-ʿabbās; al-ʿuṣūr al; ansāb al; arabic; b. al; b. marwān; b. ʿabd; balādhurī; caliph; chronicle; dār al; early; et al; fitna; hishām; history; ibn; idem; islamic; khalīfa b.; kitāb al; madāʾinī; malik; marwān; marwānid; maslama; narrative; press; rule; sources; theophanes; theophilus; tārīkh; university; vols; walīd b.; wusṭā; yazīd b.; ʿabd al; ṭabarī
A Preliminary Study of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Hermetica: Texts, Context, and Doctrines by Saif, Liana (2021) - This manuscript includes the third bāb, entitled al-Isqūṭās (al-Ustuwaṭṭās?), from al-Kitāb al-Shāmil fī al-baḥr al-kāmil (The Comprehensive Book on the Perfect Sea), a magic text by Sirāj al-Dīn Abū Yaʿqūb al-Sakkākī (1160–1229). In addition to Dhakhīrat Iskandar and another text on stones, which is described below, this manuscript includes the third bāb, entitled al-Isqūṭās, from al-Sakkākī’s magic text al-Kitāb al-Shāmil fī al-baḥr al-kāmil (The Comprehensive Book on the Perfect Sea).32 Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr al; alexander; arabe; arabic; aristotelian; aristotle; astrology; b. al; book; century; der; fols; ghāyat al; greek; hermes; hermetica; ibid; ibn al; ikhwān al; islamic; kitāb al; leiden; london; magic; maktabat al; medieval; occult; psah; pseudo; rūḥāniyyāt; sage; saif; sciences; sirr al; study; texts; ustuwaṭṭās; work; world; wusṭā; years; zoroastrian; ʿilal al
The Life of Christopher by Mugler, Joshua (2021) - س؛ اكثر: ز 2196 جزية: ز؛ جزية يسميها: س 2197 يسمونها: ز؛ يسميها: س 2198 مفيض: س؛ نقيض: ز 2199 يودون: ز؛ بوزن: س 2200 يعطي ويعين الضعيف: س؛ يعين ذا الضعف: ز 2201 يكف: س؛ يكفف: ز 2202 تادية: ز؛ بادية: س 2203 عمن ال: س؛ لما: ز 2204 ولم: ز؛ –س 2205 يكن: ز؛ يمكن: س 2206 يقرر: س؛ يقدر: ز 2207 يخالفه: ولكنــه فيمــا كان يمكنــه مــا كان قــط فــي االحســان 2124 الننا: ز؛ ال: س 2125 في: ز؛ –س 2126 اشيا: ز؛ االشيا: س 2127 التي: ز؛ الذي: س 2128 فاما: ز؛ فلما: س 2129 النه استشفع بك: س؛ الني استشنع به: ز 2130 في: س؛ –ز 2131 يستر: س؛ يصير: ز 2132 االكبر: Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr al; aleppo; antioch; antiochians; anṭākī; arabic; byzantine; canard; catholicos; century; christian; christopher; church; city; dawla; des; edition; emperor; end; father; god; good; greek; group; hand; head; histoire; ibid; ibn; ibn al; ibrāhīm; john; joshua; life; man; manuscript; meaning; monastery; mugler; mugler al-ʿuṣūr; muslim; patriarch; people; person; place; rashīq; reads; rule; sayf al; saying; story; symeon; syriac; text; things; time; translation; treiger; vie; way; word; wusṭā; yūḥannā; zayat; ʿīsā; اال; ابــن; اخــر; اذا; البطريــرك; التــي; الدولــة; الذي; الذيــن; الــذي; الــى; الن; الوقــت; الى; اليــه; اليه; انطاكية; انطاكيــة; انــه; اهــل; ايضــا; بحســب; بعــد; بــل; بــه; ذاك; ذلــك; ذلك; ز al-ʿuṣūr; ســيف; صححته; عــن; على; غيــر; ــة; فــي; فــي ذلــك; فقــال; فيــه; فيمــا; قــد; كان; كان فــي; كانــت; كانــوا; لــم; لــه; مثــل; مدينــة; مــا; مــا كان; مــع; مــن; منهــم; نحــن; نفســه; هاهنــا; هذا; هــذا; هــو; هللا; هنــاك; واحــد; وال; وامــا; وان; وذاك; وكان; ولكــن; ولكنــه; يــا; يكــن
The Ribāṭ of Gurjī Khātūn (“the Georgian Lady”): New Data about Women Patrons, Chancery Practices, and Foundation Inscriptions in Seventh/Thirteenth-Century Saljuq Anatolia by Durand-Guédy, David (2021) - Al-sitr al-ʿāliyya (“the elevated veil”) is more probable than al-sitr al-ghāliyya (“the expansive veil”) for a metaphoric address to a high-ranking lady. In Saljuq Iran, the head of the family was al-sulṭān al-aʿẓam, while the princes with an appanage (such as Sanjar b. Malik-Shāh and his nephews in western Iran) were only al-malik al-muʿaẓẓam. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr al; anatolia; antalya; caravanserai; century; david; düden; dīn; dīn kay; georgian; ghiyāth al; gurjī; gurjī khātūn; han; inscription; kay; khusraw; khātūn; kkh; kırkgöz; patronage; patrons; press; qubād; redford; ribāṭ; saljuq; seljuk; son; sultan; text; university; women; wusṭā; ʿalāʾ al
Blurred Boundaries and Novel Normativities: The Jews of Arabia, the Quranic Milieu, and the “Islamic Judaism” of the Middle Ages by Pregill, Michael E. (2021) - I do not think it unfair to say that inquiry into the intersections between Islam and Judaism, especially in the era before the full flowering of the Judeo-Arabic culture of the Middle Ages, remains marginal to mainstream Jewish studies despite the important implications of such research.119 Hughes positions himself as a scholar of religion first and seems condensed and repurposed (or simply taken over verbatim) from Shared Identities as well. In Muslim and Jew Hughes raises the subject of “non-canonical” sources that shed light on early Islam (p. 26), though what he actually seems to mean are references to the Prophet and the rise of Islam found in early non-Muslim sources. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr; approach; boundaries; contemporary; history; hughes; identities; identity; islam; islamic; jews; judaism; michael; muslim; muḥammad; period; press; princeton; quran; religion; scholars; studies; study; time; traditions; university; university press; wasserstrom; work; wusṭā
Full Issue by Borrut, Antoine; Gordon, Matthew; Vacca, Alison (2021) - Aḥmad al-Wāḥidī (d. 468/1076), Tafsīr al-basīṭ (Riyadh: Wizārat al-Taʿlīm al-ʿĀlī, 2010), 6:281; al-Rāzī, al-Tafsīr al-kabīr, 9:166. For similar passages in Sunni exegeses of the time, see, e.g., al-Wāḥidī, Tafsīr al-basīṭ, 6:282; al-Rāzī, al-Tafsīr al-kabīr, 9:167. Keywords: a. al; abū al; academic; account; adam; ages; ahl al; ahmad al; akhbār al; al servicio; al ándalus; al-ʿarūsī al; al-ʿuṣūr al; alexander; allāh al; analysis; anatolia; andalus; antioch; antiquity; anṭākī; appears; approach; arabe; arabic; aristotelian; aristotle; armenian; article; astrology; attribution; author; aḥkām al; aḥmad al; b. al; basis; bayn al; baʿd al; baḥr al; biḥār al; book; boundaries; brill; byzantine; bālīnās al; caliph al; cambridge; case; centuries; century; chapter; christian; christopher; city; commentary; conquest; contemporary; context; corpus; creation; culture; dastūr al; daughter; david; dawla; de al; de la; death; der; des; development; dhakhīrat al; dhū al; digraph; discourse; discussion; dizbar al; durr al; düden; dār al; dīn al; early; east; edinburgh; end; et al; eve; evidence; example; fact; fakhr al; father; fayḍ al; ferrín; field; fol; following; fols; form; furāt al; garcía; gender; ghiyāth al; ghāyat al; god; gonzález; good; great; greek; group; gurjī; hand; hermes; hermetica; hirmis al; hirschkind; histoire; history; holy; hughes; hādī; hāshim al; i. al; ibid; ibn al; ibrāhīm al; identities; identity; ikhwān al; ilzām al; imam al; imāmī; information; inscription; interpretation; introduction; islamic; iḥyāʾ al; jalāl al; james; jamāʿat al; jerusalem; jews; jihād; journal; judaism; jāmiʿ al; kalām al; kanz al; kashf al; kay; khawāṣṣ al; khusraw; khātūn; king; kitāb al; knowledge; kostandin; kutub al; lady; language; layth al; left; leiden; les; lewon; library; life; literature; london; m. al; magic; majmaʿ al; maktabat al; malik al; manhaj al; manuscript; mariun; markaz al; maslama al; material; maʿshar al; maʿānī al; maḥakkāt al; maṭbaʿat al; meaning; medieval; michael; middle; min al; mughīth al; murtaḍā al; murūj al; muslim; muʾassasat al; muḥammad al; muḥsin al; nahj al; nahḍa al; narrative; nashr al; nature; negationism; new; notes; nāṣir al; nūr al; occult; original; origins; ortega; oxford; paris; past; patriarch; people; period; persian; perspective; pilgrimage; place; point; practice; present; press; princeton; prophet; psah; pseudo; queen; question; quranic; qurʾān al; qāsim al; rawḍ al; raḥmān al; reading; reads; redford; reference; religion; research; review; rib; riḍā al; rutbat al; rūḥāniyyāt al; saif; saljuq; sanjuán; sawāṭiʿ al; sayf al; saʿīd al; scholars; scholarship; sciences; second; shams al; sharāsīm al; shaykh al; sirr al; sirāj al; sobre al; social; son; sources; spanish; spelling; state; sts; studies; study; subject; sultan; sulṭān al; sūrat al; tafsīr al; taʾthīr al; tenth; terms; text; things; time; title; tradition; translation; turāth al; understanding; university; university press; use; van; vol; wa al; wasserstrom; way; women; words; work; world; writing; wusṭā; yaʿqūb al; years; york; ġāyat al; ʿabd al; ʿalāʾ al; ʿalī al; ʿilal al; ʿilm al; ʿimād al; ʿishq al; ʿizz al; ʿiṣmat al; ʿuyūn al; الــى; بــل; ذلــك; ز al-ʿuṣūr; فــي; كان; لــه; مــا; مــن; هــذا; وال; وكان; ḥasan al; ḥayyān al; ḥiyākat al; ḥātim al; ṣafwat al; ṭabaqāt al; ṭibāʿ al
The Mosque‒Dār al-Imāra Complex at ʿAnjar: Preliminary Notes from a Multi-layered Exploration of Ceremonial Spaces in the Marwānid Period by Santi, Aila (2022) - In most madīnas (and normally in qaṣrs), the mosques are embedded in substantial palatine cities (as in Qaṣr al-Ḥayr al-Sharqī, the citadel of ʿAmmān, or Mshatta); in others, such as ʿAqaba and Ramla, the case of a palace by the qibla side of the mosque has yet to be made by archaeology. Genequand, D. “Les décors en stuc du bâtiment E à Qaṣr al-Ḥayr al-Sharqī.” Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr al; art; building; complex; early; hall; imāra; islamic; miḥrāb; mosque; mosque‒dār al; new; palace; prayer; press; santi; site; umayyad; university; wall; wusṭā; ʿanjar
The Rebellion of al-Ḥārith b. Surayj (116–28/734–46): The Local Perspective by Huseini, Said Reza (2022) - “Jahm b. Ṣafwān wa-makānatuhu fī al-fikr al-islāmī.” E. Yarshater, updated April 10, 2012, https://iranicaonline.org/articles/jahm-b-safwan; Kh. al-ʿUlā, “Jahm b. Ṣafwān wa-makānatuhu fī al-fikr al-islāmī” (MA thesis, Baghdad University, 1965). 23. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr al; arab; b. al; bactrian; balkh; black; converts; documents; dār al; islam; islamic; jizya; khurasan; muslim; press; qaghān; rebellion; region; revolt; rulers; studies; surayj; taʾrīkh; türgesh; umayyad; university; wusṭā; ʿabd al; ḥārith; ḥārith b.; ṭabarī
Was Muṭarrif b. al-Mughīra al-Thaqafī a Khārijite? Rebellion in the Early Marwānid Period by Hagemann, Hannah-Lena (2022) - 446 • HannaH-Lena Hagemann Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022) Was Muṭarrif b. al-Mughīra al-Thaqafī a Khārijite? Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022) Was Muṭarrif b. al-Mughīra al-Thaqafī a Khārijite? Keywords: account; al-ʿuṣūr al; ashʿath; b. al; balādhurī; ibn al; islamic; khārijism; khārijite; mughīra al; muṭarrif; rebellion; revolt; shabīb; taʾrīkh; thaqafī; wusṭā; ʿabd al; ʿurwa; ḥajjāj; ṭabarī
Sweet Water on the Sea Route to China: Watering Stops and Torpedo-Jar Capacities in Long-Distance Indian Ocean Sailing by Lambourn, Elizabeth (2022) - Working from the 2021 publication of the volumetric capacity of a group of so-called torpedo jars excavated in Thailand, this article proposes some preliminary quantitative estimates of the volume of freshwater, and thus the number of water jars, required on board vessels at the time. Figure 3: Schlingloff’s interpretation of the Ajanta ship image with storage vessels identified as water jars. Keywords: akhbār; al-ʿuṣūr; al-ʿuṣūr al; arabic; belitung; capacity; century; china; indian; jars; lambourn; liters; maritime; new; ocean; phanom; route; sea; ship; sources; storage; surin; torpedo; torpedo jars; trade; university; vessels; water; wreck; wusṭā
Key to the Kingdom: Variation as a Key to Understanding the Arabic Gospel Manuscripts by Stokes, Phillip W. (2023) - Methodology, Manuscripts, and Manuscript Families The scholarship on the comparison of Arabic Gospel manuscripts and the establishment of Vorlagen as well as genetic relationships between families based on those Vorlagen is long, and a full review is beyond the scope of the present paper.12 I will take Kashouh’s classification as a starting point and reference other proposals as relevant to the data presented below.13 As noted earlier (in footnote 9), most studies that have explored the relationships between Arabic Gospel manuscripts have focused on lexical similarities. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr; arabic; case; data; families; family; features; gospel; kashouh; kingdom; manuscripts; patterns; sar; stokes; study; tanwīn; text; variation; wusṭā; ت ت
Entangled Symbols: Silk and the Material Semiosis of the Zanj Rebellion (869–83) by Grant, Philip (2022) - “This was the most humiliating stratagem ever employed against the profligate,” al-Ṭabarī reports, as other Zanj wished to be treated likewise, and a number rushed to go over to al-Muwaffaq. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:philipagrant%40gmail.com?subject= 574 • PhiliP Grant Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022) when troops from two Zanj galleys sought safe conduct (amān) for themselves and their equipment, boats, and sailors, he “ordered that brocade robes of honour (khilaʿ dībāj)1 and jewel-bedecked belts and other gifts” be given to them, including “robes of red silk and white garments” (khilaʿ min khilaʿ al-ḥarīr al-aḥmar wa-l-thiyāb al-bayḍ); their sympathy thus won, the coopted rebels were posted in a place where their former comrades could see them. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr al; century; cloth; history; honor; islamic; material; muwaffaq; muḥammad; new; object; philip; press; production; rebellion; rebels; revolt; robes; silk; silk robes; taʾrīkh; things; university; world; wusṭā; zanj; ʿabbasid; ʿalī; ṭabarī
A Form-Critical Analysis of the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna Stories: Tribal, Ideological, and Legal Incentives behind the Transmission of the Prophet’s Biography by Roohi, Ehsan (2022) - According to some accounts, these words (that occur in the sources with certain variants) were allegedly once part of the Qurʾānic text, but were eventually abrogated; see al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī, 1:350; Ibn Saʿd, al-Ṭabaqāt al-kubrā, ed. However, the fact that the curses of these martyrs (Allāhumma aḥṣihim ʿadadan …) are almost identical in diction signifies a stronger connection between these stories than the mere utilization of the theme of al-duʿāʾ al-maẓlūm. Keywords: accounts; al-ʿuṣūr al; analysis; arafat; b. al; banū; banū al; beirut; biʾr; biʾr maʿūna; brill; criticism; crucifixion; dār al; early; et al; form; history; ibn; ibn al; islam; islamic; khubayb; kitāb al; leiden; maghāzī; maʿūna; medina; muḥammad; muḥammad al; narratives; new; press; prophet; rajīʿ; sources; stories; story; studies; sīra; university; wusṭā; wāqidī; ʿabd al; ʿamr b.
Fatwās on Jihād from Premodern Morocco: Introduction and Critical Edition of an Excerpt from al-Zayyātī’s Selected Jewels by Hendrickson, Jocelyn (2023) - The full title of his exegesis of the Qurʾān is al-Jāmiʿ al-muḥarrar al-wajīz fī tafsīr al-Kitāb al-ʿAzīz, better known as Tafsīr Ibn ʿAṭiyya. Al-Nawāzil al-ṣughrā, al-musammā al-Minaḥ al-sāmiya fī al-nawāzil al-fiqhiyya. Keywords: abū al; adab al; ahl al; al-ʿarabī al; al-ʿuṣūr al; allāh al; arabic; aḥmad al; b. al; basis; beirut; bnrm; bāb al; century; christian; compilation; de al; dār al; dīn al; et al; fatwās; fatāwā al; fez; fifteenth; fāsī; gharb al; group; hendrickson; history; ibn al; islamic; jawāhir al; jewels; jihād; jocelyn; jurist; jāmiʿ al; kitāb al; kulliyyat al; l-ʿulūm al; library; maghrib al; manuscripts; markaz al; mediterranean; min al; miʿyār al; morocco; muqaddimāt al; muslim; muḥammad al; mālikī; nashr al; nawāzil al; opinions; period; portuguese; press; property; qarn al; question; qurʾān; rabat; read; rushd al; scholars; second; shajarat al; shuʾūn al; shuʿayb al; sources; sunan al; tasūlī; territory; text; turāth al; university; vols; wazzānī; wizārat al; wusṭā; zayyātī; ʿabd al; ʿalī al; أّن; إىل; املســلمن; اًل; علــى; على; عليــه; مــا; مــن; هللا; واًل; ḥadīth; ḥasan al
Closing Ranks: Discipline and Loyalty in the Umayyad Army by Sijpesteijn, Petra M. (2022) - The troops take fierce exception, and when al-Ḥajjāj refuses to bend, prominent leaders such as al-Hudhayl b. ʿImrān b. al-Fuḍayl al-Burjumī (d. 76/695),15 ʿAbd Allāh b. Ḥakīm b. Ziyād al-Mujāshiʿī (d. 76/695), and Qutayba b. Muslim (d. 96/715)16 begin to work with ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Jārūd to arrange al-Ḥajjāj’s removal as governor of Iraq.17 Initially, the mutineers seem to be winning. For him, see Crone, Slaves, 163. 490 • Petra M. SijPeSteijn Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022) intervenes with the caliph on behalf of al-Ghaḍbān b. al-Qabaʿtharā;101 the caliph grants al-Ghaḍbān an amān, which causes al-Ḥajjāj to release him. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr al; ansāb; b. al; balādhurī; caliph; empire; governor; history; ibid; ibn al; iraq; islamic; jārūd; malik; muhallab; power; press; revolt; soldiers; taʾrīkh; troops; umayyad; university; wusṭā; ʿabd al; ḥajjāj

History

Review of Anderson, Fenwick, & Rosser-Owen (eds.), The Aghlabids and Their Neighbors by Gordon, Matthew S. (2022) - Her work, always stimulating, not simply on Aghlabid matters but more generally on the shaping of early medieval Islamicate and Mediterranean society and politics, deserves to be widely read. One understands that Talbi, the most important modern scholar of Aghlabid history bar none, and a prolific writer on Maghribi history more generally, knew of the book and was slated to contribute a foreword. Keywords: aghlabid; century; chapter; history; islamic; maghrib; volume
Remarks by the Recipient of the 2021 MEM Lifetime Achievement Award by Behrens-Abouseif, Doris (2022) - While working on the topography of late Mamluk Cairo for my MA, I discovered a Mamluk building! The conference organized by Frédéric Bauden, Mamluk Cairo, a Crossroads of Embassies, was an eye-opener. Keywords: art; book; cairo; culture; history; islamic; mamluk; years
Remarks by the Recipient of the 2022 MEM Lifetime Achievement Award by Riedlmayer, András (2023) - I ended up staying on in Istanbul for more than three years, happily spending my days in the Ottoman archives and reading in Islamic manuscript libraries. It was an exciting time in the profession and in the field of Middle Eastern studies, with advances in automation and digitization and the changes these brought to libraries and to the humanities. Keywords: history; librarian; libraries; library; research; time; war
Review of Al Salimi and Madelung, Ibāḍī Texts by Baptiste, Enki (2024) - The sīra of Munīr b. al-Nayyir al-Jaʿlānī is of considerable interest in understanding how the Omani Ibāḍī community addressed the challenge of piracy (no. 4, pp. Based on other siyar he authored and late biographical dictionaries, however, it can be safely assumed that he lived during the same period as Munīr b. al-Nayyir al-Jaʿlānī or Hāshim b. Ghaylān. Keywords: abū; al salimi; b. al; century; early; epistle; history; ibāḍism; ibāḍī; islamic; madelung; oman; salimi; siyar; sources; sīra; texts
Turning to Another Possible Medieval Millennium by Matheou, Nicholas (2024) - See most relevantly here: Robert I. Moore, “A Global Middle Ages?,” in The Prospect of Global History, ed. Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? Keywords: ages; cambridge; history; medieval; middle; press; turn; university; world
Defining Global Interconnectedness: The Central Role of the Medieval Middle East in Afro-Eurasian Networks by Park, Hyunhee (2024) - For example, while historians of China have noted a commercial revolution from 600 to 1400 due to internal factors like improved agricultural technologies, Billy So’s book Prosperity, Region, and Institutions in Maritime China emphasizes the significant, yet often neglected, impact of foreign trade on Quanzhou, including the export of Chinese porcelains to the Middle East during this period.15 Redefining the global Middle Ages to highlight the vibrant exchanges between the medieval Middle East, East Asia, and the wider world challenges traditional Eurocentric narratives and enriches our understanding of the period. This shift is particularly relevant for the study of the medieval Middle East, which played a pivotal role in the interconnected networks of broader Afro-Eurasia. Keywords: cambridge; east; global; history; medieval; middle; world
The Tides of Global History by Fancy, Hussein (2024) - During my time in graduate school, historians were trading in truffles for parachutes, which is to say, trading an interest in the smallest scale for the largest.1 Microhistories were giving way to global histories that sought to make sense of a globalized world. Global histories readily became, to borrow a line from David Damrosch, “culturally deracinated, philologically bankrupt, and ideologically complicit with the worst tendencies of global capitalism. Keywords: global; history; mediterranean; world
The Intricate World and the Mundane University by Schine, Rachel (2024) - Tāj al-Dīn b. al-Subkī, Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿiyya al-kubrā, ed. al-Idrīsī, Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq (Cairo: Maktabat al-Thaqāfa al-Dīniyya, 2002), 1:963. 29. Keywords: ages; gma; heng; history; idrīsī; journal; medieval; middle; studies; university; world; ṣuḥba
The Global Middle Ages between Empire and Neoliberalism by Kaldellis, Anthony (2024) - GMA will also not be able to “see” Romanía—the real name of the east Roman state—if it clings to the axiom that the medieval era began with “the collapse of the Roman empire” around 500 AD.12 Be that as it may, unlike global history GMA is definitely a new approach, especially its focus on inter-regional connectivity and the flow of goods and culture above and beyond the history of the states in which they were produced. In my effort to understand the Global Middle Ages, I distinguish it from global histories of the Middle Ages. Keywords: ages; empire; globalization; gma; history; medieval; western
The Problem of the Global Middle Ages : A View from the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine by Ragab, Ahmed (2024) - Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024) Global Middle Ages Roundtable • 493 discussing non-European history, where the term science is linguistically foreign and does not carry the legitimacy of the word’s Latin ancestry.17 At another level, applying these themes to non-European history offers another layer of provincialization. Keywords: ages; history; knowledge; middle; modern; narratives; press; science
Interdisciplinary Sources & Methods for the Study of Pre-Archival Societies: The Case of Baghdad by Neggaz, Nassima; Van Renterghem, Vanessa (2024) - Eugénie Rébillard focused on criminal figures in early Abbasid Baghdad by analyzing a range of literary and normative sources. The conference concluded with a public lecture by Hugh Kennedy and Maaike van Berkel, which explored the crucial role of food and water in early Abbasid Baghdad. Keywords: abbasid; baghdad; berkel; city; history; neggaz; panel; period; renterghem; sources; van
The Global Middle Ages, Political History, and Democracy by Hemmat, Kaveh Louis (2024) - Globalizing medieval political history can help ameliorate to this elite myopia. — Marshall Hodgson2 While political history has consumed so much attention of the historian’s profession as a whole, it is if anything underrepresented as a topic within global and transregional history, and of the medieval period especially. Keywords: cambridge; democracy; history; medieval; middle; modern; university; world
Global Microhistories and the Object Archive by Flood, Finbarr Barry (2024) - In addition, the emergence of early modernity as the Ur-horizon of the global before globalization has often been accompanied by assertions that one can speak of the global in any meaningful sense only after there is a consciousness of all five continents.2 Such an approach assumes that global history begins only around 1500 CE, effectively situating Europe at the heart of things in perpetuity. As the historian Alan Strathern reminds us, “[t]he celebration of connectedness in global history writing risks analytical banality unless we are also able to make visible temporal and geographic variations in its extent. Keywords: ages; century; flood; global; globalization; histories; history; materials; middle; university; world
Remarks by the Recipient of the 2024 MEM Lifetime Achievement Award: Given at the Annual Meeting of Middle East Medievalists (13 December 2024) by Paul, Jürgen (2025) - I had already arranged everything for my first trip to Soviet Central Asia when this congress took place, and in September 1986, I flew to Tashkent via Leningrad. In the Soviet period, Muslim Central Asia was the preserve of a very small number of scholars. Keywords: asia; central; field; history; scholars; soviet
Remembering Kenneth G. Holum by Walmsley, Alan (2019) - Ken loved teaching, and he especially loved working with his graduate students. At first, by his own admission, Ken was party to this disingenuous interpretation of Caesarea’s history, but by the 1980s significant doubt as to the validity of this view began to appear in a number of Ken’s publications, culminating in his ground-breaking BASOR publication of 1992 entitled “Archaeological Evidence for the Fall of Byzantine Caesarea.” Keywords: caesarea; excavations; history; holum; ken; students; university; years
Remarks by the Recipient of the 2017 MEM Lifetime Achievement Award Given at the Annual Meeting of Middle East Medievalists by Pinckney Stetkevych, Suzanne (2018) - For me, that was Arabic poetry, clearly text-based and grounded in a variety of Islamic and Middle East Studies fields, but now engaging as well a wide range of exhilarating ideas, from linguistics to literary theory, from structuralism to ritual theory, that held the promise of bringing classical Arabic poetry out of the Orientalist closet and engaging and integrating it into a broader humanistic enterprise. [By this I mean the “high” qaṣīd poetry, not the more common-place and eminently imitable rajaz-type poetry such as we find in al-Sīrah al-Nabawiyyah.] Keywords: arabic; history; islamic; poem; poetry; qaṣida; work
The Maturing of Medieval Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies by Donner, Fred M. (2017) - Language study in Iran has been difficult for American students since 1979 for obvious reasons. I would say that programs for language study in Turkey, which have until recently been quite robust, must be put on our watch list as political developments play out in that country. Keywords: 1970s; arabic; history; islamic; middle; programs; studies; study
Mona Hassan, Longing for the Lost Caliphate: A Transregional History by Adil, Sabahat F. (2017) - In terms of sources, this chapter centers on historical documents to examine attitudes towards the caliphate, which ought to be contrasted with the emphasis on texts such as juridical in earlier chapters. Overall Lost Caliphate makes numerous noteworthy contributions to scholarship. Keywords: caliphate; chapter; history
Remarks by the Recipient of the 2015 MEM Lifetime Achievement Award by Bulliet, Richard W. (2016) - I benefited from the works of the Orientalists, of course, but quantitative history and the history of technology were wide open fields where I could ask new and important questions and hope to find answers. I believe I have lived up to both commitments, but one consequence has been that I seldom schooled anyone in my approach to quantitative history, animal history, or history of technology. Keywords: cards; columbia; history; middle
“The Shape of a Career” Remarks by the Recipient of the 2013 MEM Lifetime Achievement Award by Humphreys, R. Stephen (2015) - MEM Awards Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 23 (2015): vii-x I must begin by expressing my thanks to the officers and board of Middle East Medievalists for bestowing on me the honor of a Lifetime Achievement Award. It comes from a group of colleagues whose work I greatly admire, and who have been at the heart of the extraordinary progress in studies on the medieval Middle East over the past two decades. Keywords: east; history; islamic; middle
Seta Dadoyan, The Armenians in the Medieval Islamic World: Paradigms of Interaction, Seventh to Fourteenth Centuries. by Vacca, Alison M. (2015) - She pulls in references to comparable Ayyūbid-, Mongol-, Safavid-, and Ottoman-era treaties and concludes: “it can be argued that irrespicive [sic] of their authenticity— which cannot be established anyway—in medieval Armenian histories the tradition of oaths should be studied as a single broad aspect of Islamic-Armenian relations. Samuēl Anec‘i’s text actually covers the Arab conquest of Dabīl/Dwin very briefly and does not mention Ḥabīb b. Maslama at all.13 Dadoyan’s footnote for Samuēl Anec‘i’s rendition of the treaty points the reader not to the Hawak‘munk‘ itself, but to a passage from a modern study of Armenian history that does not mention Samuēl at all. Keywords: armenian; dadoyan; history; islamic
Clifford Edmund Bosworth by Azad , Arezou (2015) - Ian R. Netton, “An Appreciation of the Life of Professor Clifford Edmund Bosworth,” posted In Memoriam: Clifford Edmund Bosworth Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 23 (2015): 168 hundreds of articles, twenty monographs and edited volumes, hundreds of confer- ence papers, and editorial productions of multi-tome compendia such as the Ency- clopaedia of Islam (second edition), the British Institute of Persian Studies journal (IRAN) for more than 40 years—“surely a record in journal editorship!” by his own account4—the Journal of Semitic Studies, and the UNESCO series on The History of Civilizations in Central Asia, as well as numerous major translation projects in advanced age, Edmund Bosworth never lacked the time to meet and support the lowliest of scholars—myself included (I had the pleasure of Edmund’s acquaint- ance and mentorship in the last decade of his life). “Like Edmund Bosworth I have always eschewed the decent obscurity of Latin,” he declares.27 Edmund’s penchant for the underworld might also be reflected in his fine collection of Penguin original crime fiction editions.28 23. Keywords: arabic; bosworth; c.e; clifford; edinburgh; edmund; edmund bosworth; history; iran; islamic; medieval; new; press; sheffield; studies; university; years
Why Do We Need a New Textbook? by Van Steenbergen, Jo (2020) - There definitely were great history textbooks out there (Hodgson, Lapidus, Hourani, Endress & Hillenbrand, Egger, Choueiri, Noth & Paul, Haarmann, Garcin, et al.). Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 28 (2020): 409-410 Teaching Note Back in early 2007, when I started teaching an undergraduate survey course on Islamic history, I was frustrated in my search for teaching materials that would align with how I had come to appreciate that history. Keywords: history; islamic; world
Amikam Elad, The Rebellion of Muḥammad al-Nafs al-Zakiyya in 145/762: Ṭālibīs and Early ʿAbbāsīs in Conflict by Gordon, Matthew (2020) - Most modern discussions center on the rebellion organized by al-Nafs al-Zakiyya (“the Pure Soul”) and his reportedly talented full brother (Ibrāhīm) against the new Abbasid caliph, Abū Jaʿfar al-Manṣūr, in 145/762. Elad provides the stuff of a richer context, however, in bringing together a wealth of detail on, for example, the person and family of al-Nafs al-Zakiyya. Keywords: elad; history; nafs
Jean Aubin, Études sur l’Iran médiéval: Géographie historique et société by Durand-Guédy, David (2020) - In Iran, Aubin (Ūbin) is known mostly through translations of articles quoting him, starting with Denise Aigle’s collection of articles (The Mongol Empire between Myth and Reality: Studies in Anthropological History [Leiden: Brill, 2015]). Bayhaqī in article 7; Shabānkāraʾī in article 9; Ibn Bazzāz in articles 11–13; Faryūmadī in article 17).6 But these omissions do not detract from the fact that this is a fine book that will be of benefit to every specialist in medieval Iran. Keywords: article; aubin; history; iran; jean; mongol; sources; volume
Thomas Bauer, Warum es kein islamisches Mittelalter gab: Das Erbe der Antike und der Orient by Mauder, Christian (2020) - For a useful overview of current systems of periodization of Islamic history and the debates about them, see F. Donner, “Periodization as a Tool of the Historian with Special Reference to Islamic History,” Der Islam 91, no. 1 (2014): 20–36, especially 28–36; and with regard to early Islam in particular, A. Borrut, “Vanishing Syria: Periodization and Power in Early Islam,” Der Islam 91, no. 1 (2014): 37–68. Moreover, Bauer develops a reasoned alternative to this term and the periodi- zation it expresses by arguing that, up to the eleventh century CE, Islamic history should be understood as the final, albeit not fundamentally distinct, phase of late antiquity. Keywords: bauer; century; history; islamic; middle; period
Remarks by the Recipient of the 2020 MEM Lifetime Achievement Award Given at the Annual Meeting of Middle East Medievalists by Cook, Michael (2021) - On the Holberg Seminar, see the special dossier published last year in this journal: “Islamic History Broadly Conceived: A Tribute to Michael Cook and the Holberg Seminar,” guest-edited by Sébastien Garnier, Matthew L. Keegan, and Pamela Klasova, Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 28 (2020). MEM Awards Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 29 (2021): iv-ix First and foremost, let me say how much I appreciate the honor that Middle East Medievalists, its members and officers, are doing me in giving me this award. Keywords: arabic; career; field; history; michael; time; years
Feeling Bad about Emotional History: The Case of Andalucismo by García-Sanjuán, Alejandro (2021) - E. González Ferrín, “Historiología del Islam y al-Andalus, entre el post-orientalismo y la Historia Oficial,” Imago crítica 3 (2011): 71; idem, “711: Historiología de una conquista,” in Al-Andalus y el mundo árabe (711–2011): Visiones desde el arabismo, 67–90 (Granada: Sociedad española de estudios árabes, 2012), 70. https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/10/the-reconquista-of-the-mosque-of-cordoba-spain-catholic-church- https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/10/the-reconquista-of-the-mosque-of-cordoba-spain-catholic-church- 316 • AlejAndro GArcíA-SAnjuán Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 29 (2021) of the Islamic Iberian past: a few years ago, he expressed support for the most unhinged conspiracy theory in recent Spanish history, according to which the 2004 bombings in Madrid were the work not of al-Qaeda but of the Basque terrorist organization ETA.62 In his book, Hirschkind not only develops an uncritical view of Andalucismo and its intrinsically emotional reading of the past but also legitimizes a rather farfetched conflation of modern Andalusia and al-Andalus. Keywords: andalucismo; andalus; de al; de la; feeling; ferrín; garcía; gonzález; hirschkind; history; islam; islamic; negationism; olagüe; past; sanjuán; spain; spanish

Arabic

Review of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, Kalīlah and Dimnah by Beers, Theodore S. (2022) - These religious flourishes are not found in the earliest extant manuscripts of the Arabic Kalīla and Dimna, such as the one used for the edition of ʿAbd al-Wahhāb ʿAzzām.9 As Fishbein notes, there are other versions of Kalīla and Dimna that are set in a still more explicitly Islamic context, with quotes from Qurʾanic verses and aḥādīth. The book could be handed to students with little prior contextualization; they could use the introduction to gain a general idea of Kalīla Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, ʿAbd Allāh Rūzbih b. Dādūya. Keywords: arabic; dimna; edition; fishbein; ibn; kalīla; manuscript; text; translation
Review of Qutbuddin, Arabic Oration by Klasova, Pamela (2022) - The first monograph on early Arabic oration as a genre in a Western language was Stefan Dähne’s 2001 dissertation: Stefan Dähne, “Reden der Araber: die politische h̲uṭba in der klassischen arabischen Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 2001). Important articles on the topic are Tahera Qutbuddin, “Khuṭba: The Evolution of Early Arabic Oration,” in Classical Arabic Humanities in their Own Terms, ed. Keywords: arabic; chapter; early; islamic; oration; oratory; qutbuddin; sermon; speeches
Reconsidering Islām and Dīn in the Medinan Qurʾan by Lindstedt, Ilkka (2023) - The letter invokes ahl al-islām and, moreover, ahl al-dīn al-islām al-dīn al-qayyim, which is a rather awkward formulation but can be translated as “the people of the religion, Islam, the upright religion” or, supposing that the definite article before the first al-dīn in the phrase is a mistake and should be omitted, “the people of the religion of Islam, the upright religion. Whatever the exact meaning here of ʿinda allāh, it is clear that al-dīn is predicated by al-islām. Keywords: arabic; believers; dīn; god; group; islām; law; medinan; obedience; press; qurʾan; qurʾanic; religion; university; verse; word
Review of Ibn al-Mujāwir, Ṣifat bilād al-Yaman wa-Makka by Varisco, Daniel (2023) - Ibn al-Mujāwir quotes from several noted earlier scholars, such as the Tārīkh al-Yaman of ʿUmāra al-Yamanī (d. 569/1175),5 al-Masʿūdī, al-Bīrūnī, and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī. Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 31 (2023): 228-231 Book Review Ibn al-Mujāwir, Abū Bakr b. Muḥammad. Keywords: arabic; century; ibn; jāzim; mujāwir; smith
Remarks by the Recipient of the 2023 MEM Lifetime Achievement Award by Hillenbrand, Carole (2024) - Even today there are still opportunities galore to research many unduly neglected aspects of medieval Islamic studies. Thus, I gradually acquired a solid knowledge of Islamic history from the rise of Islam to the gunpowder empires of early modern times. Keywords: arabic; islamic; studies; university; years
Review of Ibn al-Muʿtazz, In Deadly Embrace by Gunduz, Haci (2024) - Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024): 613-615 Book Review Ibn al-Muʿtazz, ʿAbd Allāh. However, the palace guards rejected Ibn al-Muʿtazz as an alternative, and he was deposed the following day and ultimately killed shortly thereafter. Keywords: arabic; montgomery; muʿtazz; poems
'Masʾalatun or Mas'ʾalatun? That Is the Question! The Implications of Traditional Persian Metrics for Classical Arabic Stress by Tabibzadeh, Arya (2025) - This conclusion accords with Watson’s reconstruction of ClAr stress, which considers both initial and antepenultimate stress patterns possible (Watson, “Word Stress in Arabic,” 13–14). Thus, although complete certainty is impossible, it is likely that the practice of reciting the metra with ClAr word stress patterns was a feature of Persian prosody from its very beginning in the eleventh century. Keywords: arabic; clar; metra; pattern; persian; recitation; stress; word
Review of Hollenberg and Asatryan, The Nusayri Path of Knowledge by De Smet, Daniel (2025) - A copy of a slightly older manuscript, dated 1810 and kept in a private collection in Jerusalem, was provided to the editors by Meir Bar-Asher, one of the leading scholars in the field of Nuṣayrī studies. 51–53), the editors admit that they were confronted with a problem, which seems recurrent when editing this kind of text. Keywords: arabic; manuscript; text
Adam Talib, How Do You Say “Epigram” in Arabic? Literary History at the Limits of Comparison by Schine, Rachel (2019) - Maqāṭīʿ poems were not explicitly discussed as a genre by premodern literary critics. The first chapter, “A Bounding Line,” then turns to the historical trajectory through which maqāṭīʿ poems came to prominence under a formal designation throughout the seventh/thirteenth century. Keywords: arabic; epigram; genre; maqāṭīʿ; poems; talib
Navigating Language in the Early Islamic World by Vacca, Alison M. (2018) - He also suggested, then, that we might uncover the variations of early Islamic Arabic by revisiting the traditional corpora, focusing specifically on Christian Palestinian Arabic and Judeo-Arabic. In the final presentation, “Towards an Arabic Cosmopolis: Culture and Power in Early Islam,” Antoine Borrut (University of Maryland) presented the two main narratives that have dominated the discussions of language change in the early Islamic world, Arabization and the translation movement. Keywords: arabic; documents; east; islamic; language; period; university; world
Post-Eurocentric Poetics: New Approaches from Arabic, Turkish and Persian Literature by Seeden, Helga (2018) - Persian literary theory argues that creation and interpretation are controvertible, as are the poet and critic. She argued that, if viewed in its entirety, the uninterrupted and self-contained tradition of Persian literary production over half a millennium possessed its own “dynamic for the transmission of literary tradition.” Keywords: arabic; persian; poetics; poetry; university
Peter Webb, Imagining the Arabs: Arab Identity and the Rise of Islam by Wood, Philip (2017) - It was not simply a period of ungodly impiety for all writers, and he emphasizes the degree to which authors like al-Balādhurī recognized a nobility among pre-Islamic Arabs that anticipates the cultural competition between their (alleged) descendants and non-Arab Muslims (268). Turning much received wisdom on its head, he argues that there was no homogenous Arab people that lived in pre-Islamic Arabia to whom Muhammad delivered his message. Keywords: arabic; arabs; islamic; peninsula; roman; script; use; webb
Arabic Fatḥ as ‘Conquest’ and its Origin in Islamic Tradition by Donner, Fred M. (2016) - Muḥammad ibn Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, Tafsīr (30 vols., Cairo: al-Matbaʿa al-maymanīya, 1321/1903), XXVI, 42-5. 26. Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 24 (2016): 1-14 Scholarship on the rise of Islam routinely translates the Arabic word fatḥ (pl. futūḥ),1 when used in the context of the first expansion of the Believers’ movement, as “conquest. Keywords: arabian; arabic; conquest; fatḥ; god; islamic; meaning; oxford; press; qurʾān; university
Isabel Toral-Niehof, Al-Ḥīra, Eine arabische Kulturmetropole im spätantiken Kontext by Bonner, Michael (2016) - Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 24 (2016) 184 • Michael BonneR The chapter concludes by asking whether a truly Christian Arabic poetry existed in al-Ḥīra; the answer to this question is no, not by any strict definition of the term. The conversion of al-Nu‘mān III b. al-Mundhir took place (largely through the machinations of ‘Adī b. Zayd), around a decade before his dethronement and the final destruction of the Lakhmid state. Keywords: arabic; book; century; christian; islamic; niehoff; ḥīra
Wolfhart P. Heinrichs by Cooperson, Michael (2015) - In Memoriam Wolfhart P. heinrichs (1941-2014)* Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 23 (2015): 227-229 On January 23, 2014, we lost a teacher, a mentor, and a friend. In Memoriam: Wolfhart P. Heinrichs Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 23 (2015): 228 married Alma Giese, a fellow scholar of Arabic and Islam, and an accomplished translator into German. Keywords: arabic; wolfhart
Al-Muḥassin b. ʿAlī al-Tanūkhī, Stories of Piety and Prayer: Deliverance Follows Adversity by Hámori, András (2020) - This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:hamori%40princeton.edu?subject= Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 28 (2020) 431 • András Hámori In composing his Faraj, al-Tanūkhī (d. 384/994) took up a narrow genre already in existence and turned it into one of delightful variety. This second Faraj baʿd al-shidda, which has been published, is described by al-Tanūkhī as being “about twenty folios long” and consisting “mostly of reports about the Prophet . . . Keywords: arabic; bray; min; stories; story; tanūkhī
The Digraph اى in the Quranic Consonantal Text and the Identification of a New Letter Shape for Final Hē in the 7th to 8th Century Arabic Script by Al-Jallad, Ahmad (2021) - L. Nehmé, “New Dated Inscriptions (Nabataean and Pre-Islamic Arabic) from a Site near Al-Jawf, Ancient Dūmah, Saudi Arabia,” Arabian Epigraphic Notes 3 (2017): 121–64. 48. Dūmah sixth-century Arabic inscription: A Christian Arabic-script graffito from the region of Dūmat al-Jandal, northern Saudi Arabia; see L. Nehmé, “New Dated Inscriptions (Nabataean and Pre-Islamic Arabic) from a Site near Al-Jawf, Ancient Dūmah, Saudi Arabia,” Arabian Epigraphic Notes 3 (2017): 121–64. Keywords: arabic; digraph; glottal; inscriptions; orthography; quranic; script; spelling; stop; text; van; word
Pre-Modern Comparative Literary Practice in the Multilingual Islamic World(s): (Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Centre/OCCT, University of Oxford, 22–24 July 2021) by Burt, Clarissa (2021) - Next, Alaaeldin Mahmoud (American University of the Middle East in Kuwait) presented “Rethinking the Art of Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 29 (2021) Conference Report: Pre-Modern Comparative Literary Practice • 325 Composition (Inshāʾ) in Arabic and Persian Maqāmāt: Badīʿ al Zamān al-Hamadhānī and al-Ḥarīrī in Dialogue with Ḥamīd al-Dīn Balkhī.” (d. 540/1144) treatise al-Muʿarrab min al-kalām al-aʿjamī ʿalā ḥurūf al-muʿjam. Keywords: arabic; century; conference; ottoman; paper; persian; poetry; quran; sufi; university
The Mā lidhdhat al-ʿishq illā li-l-majānīn; Ḥiyākat al-kalām; and Lima ishtadda ʿishq al-insān li-hādhā al-ʿālam? by Raad, Philip (2021) - Weaving Words consists of selections from al-Muḥassin b. ʿAlī al-Tanūkhī’s (d. 384/994) anthologies al-Faraj baʿd al-shidda (Deliverance Follows Adversity) and Nishwār al-muḥāḍara wa-akhbār al-mudhākara (The Table-Talk of a Mesopotamian Judge).3 For selections from the Nishwār, the editors turned to the printed edition: al-Muḥassin b. ʿAlī al-Tanūkhī, Nishwār al-muḥāḍara wa-akhbār al-mudhākara, ed. Keywords: arabic; editors; love; philip; series
Alexandre M. Roberts. Reason and Revelation in Byzantine Antioch: The Christian Translation Program of Abdallah ibn al-Fadl by Bardi, Alberto (2021) - Undoubtedly, Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 29 (2021) Alexandre M. Roberts’ Reason and Revelation in Byzantine Antioch • 345 Ibn al-Fadl needed what we would consider a scientific and philosophical background to understand Basil and the other authors with whom he engaged for his translations, such as Isaac the Syrian, John Chrysostom, John of Damascus, John of Thessaloniki, and Maximos the Confessor. Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 29 (2021): 343-347 Book Review Reason and Revelation in Byzantine Antioch: The Christian Translation Program of Abdallah ibn al-Fadl, by Alexandre M. Roberts, is a remarkable achievement. Keywords: arabic; fadl; greek; ibn; philosophy

Ibn

Review of Lindsay & Mourad (eds. and trans.), Muslim Sources of the Crusader Period by Smarandache, Bogdan C. (2022) - Diyāʾ al-Dīn, al-Ḥikāyāt al-muqtabasa fī karāmāt mashāyikh al-Arḍ al-Muqaddasa, ed. and trans. For a study devoted to this campaign, see Suhayr Muḥammad Ibrāhīm Nuʿayniʿ, al-Ḥurūb al-ṣalībiyya al-mutaʾakhkhira: Ḥamlat Buṭrus al-Awwal Lūsinyān ʿalā al-Iskandariyya, 1365 M/747 H (Giza: ʿAyn, 2002), reviewed by Niall Christie in Mamlūk Studies Review 10, no. 1 (2006): 199–201. Keywords: crusades; franks; ibn; islamic; lindsay; mourad; muslim; period; press; sources; students; university
Review of Balda-Tillier, Histoires d’amour et de mort by Lawrence, Jonathan (2022) - Easily the most exciting aspect of Balda- Tillier’s book for this reviewer is the fourth chapter, in which she makes use of the same granular precision we saw in the Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022) 634 • Jonathan Lawrence second chapter to analyse the biographical dictionary section of al-Wāḍiḥ al-mubīn. In her conclusion, Balda-Tillier brings the many and various strands of her analysis of this text together and provides a final meditation on al-Wāḍiḥ al-mubīn, in which she argues that Mughulṭāy marries literary sources with religious ideals. Keywords: balda; book; ibn; love; mughulṭāy; tillier; work; wāḍiḥ; ḥadīth
From Trial (Miḥna) to Tribulation (Balāʾ): A New Look at Ghulām Khalīl’s (d. 275/888) Inquisition against the Sufis by Musto, Antonio (2024) - Although noteworthy on its face, as discussed earlier, this narrative differs completely from the others and is almost certainly a fictional account.94 Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan b. al-Muẓaffar reported to us (akhbaranā) that Abū ʿUmar Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wāḥid said that al-Nūrī al-Ṣūfī reported to me, saying: When the miḥna happened, I and a group of Sufis were charged with unbelief (rumītu anā wa-jamāʿa min al-ṣūfiyya bi-l-kufr). Muḥammad Fatḥī Abū Bakr (Cairo: al-Dār al-Miṣriyya al-Lubnāniyya, 1994), 1:369. 51. Keywords: abū; abū al; al-ʿuṣūr al; b. al; balāʾ; beirut; dār al; ghulām; god; ibn; ibn al; khalīl; kitāb; kitāb al; miḥna; muḥammad; narrative; nūrī; sufis; trial; tribulation; ʿabd al
The Documentary Depth of Hadith Transmission: Audition Attendance Lists by Aljoumani, Said; Reier, Benedikt (2024) - The Damascene scholar Ibn Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Dimashqī (d. 842/1438) wrote a short treatise on these signs on the basis of the audition attendance list for a 630/1233 transmission of the Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī in the Muẓaffarī Mosque37 on Mount Qāsiyūn, next to Damascus.38 Ibn Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Dimashqī, “al-Intiṣār li-samāʿ al-Ḥajjār,” in Majmūʿ fīhi rasāʾil li-l-Ḥāfiẓ Ibn Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Dimashqī, ed. Keywords: attendance; attendance list; audition; audition attendance; certificates; hadith; ibn; list; manuscript; section; sessions; sibṭ; transmission; ḥajar; ṣaḥīḥ
Serious Laughter: Beyond the Jest-Earnest Binary in Classical Arabic Literature by Lawrence, Jonny (2025) - Abū Muḥammad Usāma b. Ibrāhīm (Cairo: Dār al-Farūq al-Ḥadītha, 2008), 10:439 [32492]. 518 • Jonny LawRence Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 33 (2025) Report on Serious Laughter • 519 moral absolutism can jar against the comedy explicit in the racy poems and stories that follow the Meccan poet in his playful, yet potentially dangerous, dalliances with pilgrims at the Kaʿba. In her presentation, “Early Islamic Contributions to the Serio-Comic: A David Narrative in a Ninth-century Hadith Collection as Case Study,” Madeline Wyse (University of California, Berkeley) turned our focus from the Prophet Muḥammad back to the Prophet Dāwūd (David), reading a series of ḥadīths from Ibn Abī Shayba’s al-Kitāb al-Muṣannaf fī al-aḥādīth wa-l-āthār.2 A scholar of both Rabbinic Judaism and early Islam, Wyse set the normative memory of Dāwūd in the Islamic imagination as an icon of repentance, following God’s discussion of Dāwūd’s faulty adjudication between two men and later repentance in Qurʾān 38:21–25, against earlier prototypical representations of this Prophet-King. Keywords: comedy; comic; humor; ibn; laughter; literature; paper; sūdūn; university
Review of Ibn Buṭlān, The Doctor’s Dinner Party by van Dalen, Elaine (2025) - The most recent editions include the one by ʿĀdil al-Bakrī (2002), who used a privately owned manuscript, which he collated with the Zalzal manuscript and MS 66/24 from al-Maktaba al-Ahmadiyya (Mosul),13 and ʿIzzat ʿUmar’s version (2003) based on MS Ambrosiana and a manuscript from al-Maktaba al-Mārūniyya (Aleppo).14 The present editors used, as did al-Barūdī, the eighteenth-century MS Ḥaddād as the base text for their edition, touting its “unambiguous superiority” (p. xxix) in view of its completeness and reliability in terms of poetry. For translations of the Arabic biographies of Ibn Buṭlān in Ibn al-Qifṭī and Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa, see Joseph Schacht and Max Meyerhof, The Medico-Philosophical Controversy between Ibn Buṭlān of Baghdad and Ibn Riḍwān of Cairo: A Contribution to the History of Greek Learning among the Arabs (Cairo: Maktabat Būl Bar Bīh, 1937), 51–66 (for the date 440, see p. 53). Keywords: buṭlān; dinner; ibn; party; ḥaddād
Writing for the Caliphate: The Unique Necklace by Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih* by Toral-Niehoff, Isabel (2018) - There I have shown that Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih organized his history as biographies of an uninterrupted chain of legitimate rulers (khulafāʾ) that linked the Prophet, via the eastern Umayyads, with the Umayyads in al-Andalus, ending with ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Nāṣir. Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih belonged to a class of citizens on the inferior rung of the social ladder who sought the patronage of those above them: this is suggested by the fact that he addressed several of his panegyrics to two prestigious members of the elite buyutāt (large aristocratic houses), namely to the commander Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. Abī ʿAbdāʾ19 and the minister ʿAbdallāh b. Muḥammad al-Zajjālī,20 which indicates that the precariously employed court poet was seeking to gain access to the inner circles.21 We do not know if he ever held an official position in the court administration as a kātib or some other capacity.22 After a period spent outside Cordoba during the fitna at the end of the 3rd/9th century, he returned to the Umayyad court of Cordoba around 300/912, where he spent the last decades of his life as court poet of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Nāṣir, whom he praised in numerous poems, the most famous being a long urjūza celebrating military campaigns undertaken at the beginning of his rule.23 It is likely that the cumbersome collection and composition of the ʿIqd took place during this tranquil period in his life, under the tutelage of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Nāṣir. Keywords: abbasid; adab; andalus; caliphal; caliphate; de al; des; ibn; ibn ʿabd; islamic; kitāb; knowledge; rabbih; umayyad; ʿabd; ʿabd al; ʿiqd
Facing the Mahdī’s True Belief: Abū ʿAmr al-Salālijī’s Ashʿarite Creed and the Almohads’ Claim to Religious Authority by Thiele, Jan (2018) - al-Salālijī, ʿ Aqīda, 87–9/23 and Imām al-Ḥaramayn Abū al-Maʿālī al-Juwaynī, Kitāb al-Irshād ilā qawāṭiʿ al-adilla Imām al-Ḥaramayn Abū al-Maʿālī al-Juwaynī, al-ʿAqīda al-niẓāmiyya, ed. Keywords: abū; al-ʿaqīda; al-ʿaqīda al; almohad; ashʿarite; doctrine; existence; god; ibn; irshād; juwaynī; proof; salālijī; tūmart; ʿaqīda
The Ḥammūdid Caliphate: A New Look through the Lens of Numismatics by Ariza Armada, Almudena (2018) - 3. Ibn ʿIdhārī, Kitāb al-Bayān III = Kitāb al-Bayān al-Mughrib fī akhbār al-Andalus wa-al-Maghrib, ed. Ibn ʿIdhārī, Kitāb al-Bayān al-Mughrib fī akhbār al-Andalus wa-al-Maghrib. Keywords: al-ʿuṣūr al; andalus; ariza; ariza armada; caliphate; ceuta; coins; de al; de barcelona; de la; de los; ibn; idrīs; las; madrid; monedas de; málaga; new; orán; yaḥyā; ʿalī; ḥammūdid; ḥammūdí
Notes and Brief Communications by Anthony, Sean W. (2018) - ʿUmar ʿAbd al-Salām al-Tadmurī (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿArabī, 2012), 3: 318. reasons having to do both with its legal ramifications for the shedding of blood within the sacred precincts of Mecca and for its role in polemics directed against the legitimacy of the Zubayrids. All other accounts give the name of the mawlā as Saʿd rather than Saʿīd (i.e., , not )—names that are easily confused.18 Indeed, the oldest source to mention Ibn al-Zubayr’s crucifixion of the man—the Muṣannaf of ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Ṣanʿānī سعيد سعد Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 26 (2018) Keywords: evidence; fallacy; ibn; inscription; islamic; material; mawlā; muʿāwiyah; saʿīd
Approaches to the Study of Pre-Modern Arabic Anthologies by Gallorini, Louise (2018) - Ghayde Ghraowi (New York University) presented a paper on Rayḥānat al-alibbā by Shihāb al-Dīn al-Khafājī (d. 1069/1658), a literary anthology compiling works of the author’s contemporaries as well as his own, in a particular political context. Aḥmad al-Sarrāj al-Qāriʾ (d. 500/1107). Keywords: anthologies; anthology; ibn; panel; poetry; university
Vanessa Van Renterghem, Les élites bagdadiennes au temps des Seldjoukides by Durand-Guédy, David (2018) - See, notably, the reviews by T. El-Hibri in the International Journal of Middle East Studies 34 (2002): 736-738; V. Van Renterghem in the Bulletin Critique des Annales Islamologiques 18 (2002): 65-67; and, most importantly, Shahab Ahmed in the Journal of the American Oriental Society 123/1 (2003): 179-182. and studies simply overlooked and, above all, by a thesis which proved untenable.13 That being said, and despite what Van Renterghem implies, her book and Ephrat’s have much in common: the same main biographical sources, the same focus on the ʿulamāʾ (not the only elites dealt with by Van Renterghem, but certainly the most documented), and the same themes (e.g. assessing Baghdad’s attraction or the family background of the ʿulamāʾ). Here, it seems to me that the most important sources on Saljuq Baghdad encapsulate a Ḥanbalī-Abbasid point of view that, to some extent, was embraced by Van Renterghem. Keywords: baghdad; book; chap; elites; ibn; period; renterghem; saljuq; sources; van; van renterghem; work
A Man for All Seasons: Ibn ʿUqda and Crossing Sectarian Boundaries in the 4th/10th Century by Brown, Jonathan (2016) - Another accusation was that he brought ḥadīth notebooks of highly dubious authenticity into Kufa and attributed them to Kufan teachers.6 These are noteworthy criticisms, but other Sunnis before and after Ibn ʿUqda (such as al-Ḥākim al-Naysābūrī, d. 405/1014) were tarnished with comparably barbed accusations, and they remained none the worse for wear. cit.), Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ (d. 544/1149), Kitāb al-Shifā (Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm, 2002), 177 (it is thābit); Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505), al-Laʾālīʾ al-maṣnūʿa fī al-aḥādīth al-mawḍūʿa, ed. Keywords: beirut; dār; dīn; ibn; sunni; vols; ʿuqda; ḥadīth
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Maḥjūbī, Al-Muṣṭalaḥ al-ḥadīthī min khilāl Kitāb al-Jarḥ wa-al-taʿdīl li-Ibn Abī Ḥātim al-Rāzī by Melchert, Christopher (2015) - Baḥth li-nayl al-duktūrāh fī al-dirāsāt al-islāmīyah (Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm, 1432/2011), 474 pages. It is a highly systematic survey of hadith terminology in Ibn Abī Ḥātim’s huge biographical dictionary, al-Jarḥ wa-al- taʿdīl. Keywords: ibn
Ibn Aʿtham al-Kūfī, Qiṭʿa min Kitāb al-futūḥ, li-l-ʿallāma al-muʾarrikh Abī Muḥammad Aḥmad b. Aʿtham al-Kūfī, al-mutawaffā baʿda sanat 320 h, qūbilat ʿalā nuskha qadīma min al-qarn al-sādis al-hijrī, akhrajahu wa-waḍaʿa fahārisahu Markaz Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth a by Schönléber, Mónika (2020) - This shortcoming was finally remedied, at least in part, by the publication of the hitherto most reliable and complete printed text, published in Hyderābād in 1968–1975 Ibn Aʿtham al-Kūfī, Qiṭʿa min Kitāb al-futūḥ, li-l-ʿallāma al-muʾarrikh Abī Muḥammad Aḥmad b. Aʿtham al-Kūfī, al-mutawaffā baʿda sanat 320 h, qūbilat ʿalā nuskha qadīma min al-qarn al-sādis al-hijrī, akhrajahu wa-waḍaʿa fahārisahu Markaz Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth al-Tābiʿ li-Dār Makhṭūṭāt al-ʿAtaba Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 28 (2020): 421-429 Book Review The book under review is a new, partial edition of Ibn Aʿtham al-Kūfī’s Kitāb al-futūḥ, made by Qays al-ʿAṭṭār and printed in 2017 in Karbalāʾ, Iraq.1 Although the Kitāb al-futūḥ has been edited several times over the past half-century, the present volume deserves special attention as it is based on a manuscript—MS Ankara (Saib 5418), kept in Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi Kütüphanesi of Ankara University—that has not been used for any of the work’s previous printed editions. Keywords: al-ʿaṭṭār; aʿtham; futūḥ; ibn; kitāb; kitāb al; text; zarzūr
Konrad Hirschler. A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture: The Library of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī by Bori, Caterina (2021) - Finally, Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s very personal self-inscription on his books and Hirschler’s skillful grasp of it allow the latter to track the provenance of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s books even though some of them are now scattered around the world. Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, also known as Ibn Mibrad, was a minor scholarly personality. Keywords: book; hadith; hirschler; hādī; ibn; ibn ʿabd; material; monument; taymiyya; ʿabd; ʿabd al
Portrait of a Jurist between Obedience and Rebellion: The Case of Abū Ḥanīfa by Şimşek, Ayşegül (2022) - ”47 Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh, also known as al-Nafs al-Zakiyya (“the pure soul”),48 revolted in Medina in 145/76249 and was soon followed in rebellion by his brother Ibrāhīm in Basra.50 Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī, Maqātil al-Ṭalibiyyīn, ed. Keywords: abū; abū al; abū ḥanīfa; b. al; fiqh; ibn; ibrāhīm; jaṣṣāṣ; muḥammad; rebellion; support; zayd; ʿabd; ʿalī; ḥanīfa
Governors and Provincial Elites in Umayyad Egypt: A Case Study of One “Rebellion” (709–10 CE) by Dar, Alon (2022) - On this person, see al-Maqrīzī, Kitāb al-Muqaffā al-kabīr, ed. Kitāb al-Muqaffā al-kabīr. Keywords: banū; caliph; egypt; elites; fahm; governor; ibn; islamic; kindī; province; qurra; umayyad; university; ʿabd al

Century

Rethinking the Wearable in the Middle Ages by Enderle, Ellen (2022) - Conference Report Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022): 654-661 The practice of adorning, protecting, and covering the body has long been fundamental to humankind, with recent archaeological discoveries yielding wearable ornaments dating to the Middle Pleistocene era.1 Bosselmann-Ruickbie explored questions of development, terminology, and wearability—particularly whether such ornaments were attached like collars to textiles or worn as a separate piece of jewelry. Keywords: ages; body; century; dress; jewelry; medieval; mongol; ornaments; paper; session; silk; wearable
Sexual Knowledge in the Islamic World: Historical Perspectives by Hamza, Shireen (2023) - While more than half of the conference’s papers were about Arabic texts, scholars of Persian and Ottoman Turkish literature were also present, along with scholars of Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia working in Persian, Urdu, Braj, Malay, and Chagatai. Authors of Persian medical texts in India often grappled with Ayurvedic knowledge, either by including select concepts and remedies in their texts of Galenic medicine or translating entire Ayurvedic texts. Keywords: century; conference; islamic; knowledge; presentation; sex; texts; university; women
Thomas A. Carlson, Christianity in Fifteenth-Century Iraq. Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization by Parkes Allen, Jonathan (2019) - In more recent years, “Assyrian” and “Chaldean” have emerged as signifiers of aspirational national identities attached to East Syriac communities, names that have also been used for the proliferation of separate churches coming out of the medieval Church of the East thanks to new connections with the Catholic Church and Protestant bodies. Finally, an expanded sense of Islamic diversity might help to further explicate one of Carlson’s more striking discoveries, concerning the East Syriac sense of time and practices of saint veneration. Keywords: carlson; century; christian; church; east; fifteenth; muslim; period; press; university
Spatial Thought in Islamicate Societies by Antrim, Zayde (2017) - Conference Report Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017): 141-148 For two days in the picturesque Swabian university town of Tübingen, a lively cohort of researchers came together for the first international confer- ence on spatial thought in Islamicate societies, 1000-1600 CE. Opening the first panel on the theme of genre, Emmanuelle Tixier du Mesnil (Université Paris X Nanterre La Défense) Spatial Thought in Islamicate Societies, 1000-1600: The Politics of Genre, Image, and Text (Tübingen, 30 March to 1 April 2017) Zayde Antrim, Jean-Charles Ducène, and Kurt Franz 142 • Zayde antrim, Jean-Charles duCène, & Kurt FranZ Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017) challenged traditional history of science approaches to Islamicate geography that amount to a catalog of discoveries (or, as she quipped, errors) shorn of social or political context. Keywords: century; conference; franz; genre; geography; space; thought; university; work
Christophe Picard, La Mer des Califes: Une histoire de la Méditerranée musulmane by Gordon, Matthew S. (2017) - To the second part of the book—“Les stratégies méditerranéennes des califes”— falls discussion of the scale and complexity of Muslim maritime investment. Picard, again, argues for maritime concerns as essential to the course of Islamic imperial history from its very onset. Keywords: abbasid; century; des; islamic; mediterranean; muslim; picard; sea
Amina Elbendary, Crowds and Sultans: Urban Protest in Late Medieval Egypt and Syria by Troadec, Anne (2016) - The works of such authors as Ibn Abī al-Surūr al-Bakrī (d. ca. 1619), al-Damurdāshī (d. 1775), and al-Jabartī (d. 1825), suggest a strong connection between the Egyptian historians of the late Mamluk period and the regime, which supports T. Khalidi’s thesis about “siyāsa-oriented historiography.” The author examines at length one case of the ascension of a commoner, that of Abū al-Khayr al-Naḥḥās (d. 1459), who has already been studied by R. Mortel. Keywords: author; century; chapter; elbendary; mamluk; period; protest
Eneko López Martínez de Marigorta. Mercaderes, Artesanos y ulemas: Las ciudades de las coras de Ilbira y Pechina en época omeya by Montel, Aurélien (2021) - The book is dedicated to the study of the cities of southeastern al-Andalus, nominally the kūras (“provinces”) of Elvira and Pechina. Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 29 (2021): 338-342 Book Review Because the history of al-Andalus has mostly been written from a capital-centered perspective, the historical trajectory of the provinces has elicited only slight historiographical interest. Keywords: almeria; author; book; century; pechina

Press

Indian Ocean Histories: Connections and Reflections by Balachandran, Jyoti Gulati (2025) - With their emphasis on the circulation of individuals, ideas, and commodities over a wider geography, Indian Ocean histories disrupt the area studies model and bring a transregional perspective to the academic study of the Middle East. For the importance of developing a “linguistic and orthographic geography” of the Indian Ocean to better understand cross-cultural exchanges, see Nile Green, “The Languages of Indian Ocean Studies: Models, Methods and Sources,” History Compass, 20, no. 7 (2022): e12703. Keywords: cambridge; indian; indian ocean; muslim; ocean; press; university; world

Medieval

Review of Nielson, Music and Musicians & Reynolds, Medieval Arab Music and Musicians by Wright, Owen (2023) - Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 31 (2023): 224-227 Book Review Lisa Nielson. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:ow%40soas.ac.uk%20?subject= 225 • Owen wright Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 31 (2023) performers), and on the room for negotiation across social lines of demarcation (with due reference to al-Jāḥiẓ’s penetrating analysis of the “wiles” of enslaved female singers). Keywords: court; medieval; music; musicians
Masthead & Table of Contents by Antrim, Zayde; Vacca, Alison M. (2023) - Book Review Editors Malika Dekkiche, University of Antwerp Luke Yarbrough, University of California, Los Angeles Editorial Board, Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā Manan Ahmed, Columbia University Sean Anthony, The Ohio State University Mushegh Asatryan, University of Calgary Hannah Barker, Arizona State University Francesca Bellino, Università di Napoli “L’Orientale” Evrim Binbaş, Universität Bonn Amina Elbendary, The American University in Cairo Corisande Fenwick, University College London Eve Krakowski, Princeton University Josef Meri, Hamad Bin Khalifa University Oya Pancaroğlu, Boğaziçi University Michael Pifer, University of Michigan Walid Salih, University of Toronto Vanessa Van Renterghem, Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (Paris) Board of Directors, Middle East Medievalists Arezou Azad (President), University of Oxford The University of Texas at Austin Najam Haider (Vice President), Barnard College Robert Haug (Secretary), University of Cincinnati Omniya Abdel Barr (Board Member), Victoria and Albert Museum and Egyptian Heritage Rescue Foundation Khodadad Rezakhani (Board Member), Leiden University Amanda Hannoosh Steinberg (Board Member), Harvard University Iman Darwish (Graduate Student Representative), Harvard University Natalie Kontny-Wendt (Graduate Student Representative), University of Hamburg Journal Website For submissions, archives, contact information, announcements, and more, please visit: https://journals.library.columbia.edu/ Editors Zayde Antrim, Trinity College Alison M. Vacca, Columbia University Middle East Medievalists (MEM) is an international professional non-profit association of scholars interested in the study of the medieval Middle East, expansively defined to include all geographies with prominent Muslim political, religious, or social presences between 500-1500 CE. Keywords: east; medieval; middle; review; university
Masthead & Table of Contents by Al-ʿUsur al-Wusta Editorial Board (2024) - Book Review Editors Jocelyn Hendrickson, University of Alberta Han Hsien Liew, Arizona State University Editorial Board, Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā Manan Ahmed, Columbia University Sean Anthony, The Ohio State University Mushegh Asatryan, University of Calgary Hannah Barker, Arizona State University Francesca Bellino, Università di Napoli “L’Orientale” Evrim Binbaş, Universität Bonn Amina Elbendary, The American University in Cairo Corisande Fenwick, University College London Eve Krakowski, Princeton University Josef Meri, Hamad Bin Khalifa University Oya Pancaroğlu, Boğaziçi University Michael Pifer, University of Michigan Walid Salih, University of Toronto Vanessa Van Renterghem, Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (Paris) Board of Directors, Middle East Medievalists Arezou Azad (President), University of Oxford Abigail Balbale (Vice President), New York University Robert Haug (Secretary), University of Cincinnati Omniya Abdel Barr (Board Member), Victoria and Albert Museum and Egyptian Heritage Rescue Foundation Walid Saleh (Board Member), University of Toronto Hannah-Lena Hagemann (Board Member), Universität Hamburg Amanda Hannoosh Steinberg (Board Member), Harvard University Iman Darwish (Graduate Student Representative), Harvard University Said Reza Huseini (Graduate Student Representative), Universiteit Leiden Journal Website For submissions, archives, contact information, announcements, and more, please visit: https://journals.library.columbia.edu/ Keywords: board; east; medieval; member; middle; university
Masthead & Table of Contents by none (2025) - Book Review Editors Jocelyn Hendrickson, University of Alberta Han Hsien Liew, Arizona State University Pedagogy File Editor Mathilde Montpetit, New York University Editorial Board, Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā Manan Ahmed, Columbia University Sean Anthony, The Ohio State University Mushegh Asatryan, University of Calgary Hannah Barker, Arizona State University Francesca Bellino, Università di Napoli “L’Orientale” Evrim Binbaş, Universität Bonn Amina Elbendary, The American University in Cairo Corisande Fenwick, University College London Eve Krakowski, Princeton University Josef Meri, Hamad Bin Khalifa University Oya Pancaroğlu, Boğaziçi University Michael Pifer, University of Michigan Walid Salih, University of Toronto Vanessa Van Renterghem, Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (Paris) Board of Directors, Middle East Medievalists Arezou Azad (President), University of Oxford Abigail Balbale (Vice President), New York University Jonathan Z. Brack (Secretary), Northwestern University Omniya Abdel Barr (Board Member), Victoria and Albert Museum and Egyptian Heritage Rescue Foundation Walid Saleh (Board Member), University of Toronto Hannah-Lena Hagemann (Board Member), Universität Hamburg Evyn Kropf (Board Member), University of Michigan Noemie Lucas (Board Member), University of Edinburgh Adam Ramadhan (Graduate Student Representative), Universiteit Leiden Journal Website For submissions, archives, contact information, announcements, and more, please visit: https://journals.library.columbia.edu/ Editors Zayde Antrim, Trinity College Alison M. Vacca, Columbia University Middle East Medievalists (MEM) is an international professional non-profit association of scholars interested in the study of the medieval Middle East, expansively defined to include all geographies with prominent Muslim political, religious, or social presences between 500-1500 CE. Keywords: board; medieval; member; middle; review; university
Stephennie Mulder, The Shrines of the ʿAlids in Medieval Syria by Antrim, Zayde (2015) - Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 23 (2015): 129-133 Book Review By surveying and interpreting major ʿAlid shrines in Syria from the eleventh century to today, Stephennie Mulder has produced a timely work of great value and insight. Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 23 (2015) Stephennie Mulder’s The Shrines of the ʿAlids in Medieval Syria • 131 by the different sects. Keywords: book; medieval; mulder; shrines; syria
Teaching Medieval Slavery and Captivity: An Online Pedagogical Resource by Barker, Hannah (2020) - Finally, I hope that presenting a broad array of sources will enable students to have more nuanced discussions about the ways in which slavery intersected with religion, race, and gender within medieval Islamicate societies. For those of us teaching the medieval Middle East, I hope that this website will help address three pedagogical Teaching Note Teaching Medieval Slavery and Captivity: An Online Pedagogical Resource Hannah Barker Arizona State University (Hannah.Barker.1@asu.edu) Keywords: medieval; slavery; teaching
Introduction: Acts of Rebellion and Revolt in the Early Islamic Caliphate by Sijpesteijn, Petra M.; Dar, Alon (2022) - Such rebellions required long and careful preparation and organization. Such rebellions did not intend to end interactions but rather sought to maintain bonds in order to communicate grievances and thereby negotiate a different relationship.5 The threat and practice of violence were part of this communication, and negotiations could turn into full-fledged disruptive and brutal rebellions.6 Therefore, the contributions to this dossier explore the dynamics between individuals, groups, and institutions that underpinned certain rebellions and highlight what these can tell us about the social and political structures of the caliphate. Keywords: case; dar; medieval; rebellions; rebels; revolt; sijpesteijn

World

Voyage Stories: The Natural and Supernatural on the Deck of a Dhow by Bishara, Fahad Ahmad (2025) - The voyage narrative is, in a sense, a genre of world history. For what is the truth in voyage narratives? Keywords: fiction; indian; ocean; voyage; world
Faith, Freedom, and Favors by Hankins, Rebecca (2025) - The beauty of The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi is that Amina embodies the complexity and simplicity of Islam and forcefully demonstrates that Islam is monotheistic, not monolithic. There is Dalila, the Christian apothecary whose knowledge of explosives saves Amina countless times. Keywords: amina; chakraborty; faith; fiction; novel; world
Muriel Debié. L’écriture de l’histoire en syriaque. Transmissions interculturelles et constructions identitaires entre hellénisme et islam. by Brown, Peter (2018) - Bar Hebraeus, The Ecclesiastical Chronicle, translated by David Wilmshurst (Piscataway, New Jersey: Gorgias Press, 2016), 244. bibliographies attached to each text shows how, in recent decades, Syriac studies have lurched forward. What can scholars who are not directly involved in the progress of Syriac studies draw from this magnificent book? Keywords: christianity; christians; church; debié; east; empire; middle; syriac; world
Chase Robinson, Islamic Civilization in Thirty Lives: The First 1,000 Years by Ulrich, Brian (2017) - The next two biographies, those of ʿAbd al-Malik and Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, establish aspects of Islam’s imperial high culture while continuing to highlight the types of primary sources available to historians. Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017): 204-209 Book Review The technique of using biography to make history accessible to newcomers is al Keywords: biographies; biography; civilization; islamic; robinson; world
Sessions on Slavery The International Medieval Congress by MacMaster, Thomas (2016) - At the 2015 IMC, the number of papers treating slavery directly seemed to have reached a peak but, as usual in such a large conference, some conflicted directly with each other. The response to the call for papers was unprecedented: the effort resulted in the organization of ten panels on the study of slavery in the medieval world. Keywords: paper; slavery; slaves; university; world
Nile Green, ed., The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca & Abbas Amanat and Assef Ashraf, eds., The Persianate World: Rethinking a Shared Sphere by Sharma, Sunil (2020) - The underlying questions in the volume edited by Amanat and Ashraf, as articulated in the introduction by Ashraf and the first essay by Amanat (“Remembering the Persianate”), are whether the “category of Iran” can effectively be marginalized in Persianate studies, and how Iranian studies—the concern is mainly with the discipline of history—can avoid the pitfalls of “parochialism and essentialism” (p . 13) . Stressing the existence of a vast sociocultural sphere connected by Persophonie (fārsī-zabān), a harmonious “comfort zone,” the editors emphasize the viability of Persianate studies as an academic field whose purview extends beyond language and literature. Keywords: amanat; essays; green; persian; sphere; studies; term; world

Sources

Mathieu Tillier, L’invention du cadi: La justice des Musulmans, des Juifs et des Chrétiens aux premiers siècles de l’Islam. by Steven Judd, Steven (2019) - Tillier was able to identify thirty-eight papyri dealing with legal procedures in the collections catalogued in the Arabic Papyrology Database (https://www. Tillier addresses a variety of aspects of legal procedure, focusing primarily on the functioning of judicial audiences or hearings. Keywords: islamic; qāḍī; sources; tillier
Scott Savran, Arabs and Iranians in the Islamic Conquest Narrative by Lynch, Ryan J. (2019) - This discussion furnishes an opportunity for Savran to introduce the “audience trope” that is such an integral part of the depiction of the Sasanians in Islamic sources (and a key part of the book’s final three chapters). A Source-Critical Study (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1994); Tayeb El-Hibri, Parable and Politics in Early Islamic History: The Rashidun Caliphs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); and Tayeb El-Hibri, Reinterpreting Islamic Historiography: Keywords: arab; islamic; narrative; savran; sources
Lyall Armstrong, The Quṣṣāṣ of Early Islam by Klasova, Pamela (2017) - S. Lowinger and J. Somogyi, Budapest, 1948, 226-51; Idem, “The Criticism of the Islamic Preacher,” Die Welt des Islam II (1953), 215-31; Charles Pellat, “Ḳāṣṣ” EI2, C. E. Bosworth, The Mediaeval Underworld (Leiden, 1976), 23-9; al-Najm Wadīʿa Ṭāhā, al-Qasas, wa-’l-quṣṣāṣ fī al-adab al-islāmī (Kuwait, 1972); Q. al-Sāmarrāʾī “Kitāb al-quṣṣāṣ wa-’l mudhakkirīn, Majallat majmaʿ al-lugha al-ʿarabiyya bi-Dimashq, 4 (50) 1975, 849-88; Jamāl Jūda, “al-Qaṣaṣ wa-l-quṣṣāṣ fī ṣadr al-Islām: bayna al-wāqiʿ al-tārīkhī wa-’l-naẓra al-fiqhīya,” Dirāsāt tārīkhiyya 33/34 (Damascus, 1989), 105-141; Khalil ʿAthamina: Al-Qasas: Its Emergence, Religious Origin and Its Socio-Political Impact on Early Society,” Studia Islamica 76 (1992), 53-74; Maxim G. Romanov, “Computational Reading of Arabic Biographical Collections with Special Reference to Preaching in the Sunnī World (661-1300CE)” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2013). Yet, the author cautions against considering them all as political figures, for some, including Bilāl b. Saʿd, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. al-Qāsim, or Mūsā b. Sayyār, remained politically disengaged, and dedicated themselves only to religious education. Keywords: armstrong; chapter; islamic; material; qaṣaṣ; quṣṣāṣ; qāṣṣ; sources
Regional and Transregional Elites: Connecting the Early Islamic Empire by Heidemann, Stefan (2016) - Regional elites largely were confined to specific provinces, and it was in these regions where their sphere of influence was most visible. However, there were occasions where regional elites evolved into transregional elites, and vice versa, as in the case of the Aghlabids, whose founder was a (transregional) Keywords: conference; elites; empire; heidemann; military; province; sources
Robert Hoyland, In God’s Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire by Donner, Fred M. (2015) - Robert Hoyland, Seeing Islam As Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1997). Hoyland is certainly correct to point out the tendency of later Islamic sources to “Islamicize” the conquest movement, projecting their later understandings back to the origins period of the community. Keywords: arab; book; conquests; god; hoyland; islamic; path; sources
Jāsim Muḥammad Kaẓim, Ahl al-dhimmah fī al-mujtamaʿ al-Baghdādī fī al-ʿahdayn al-Buwayhī wa-al-Saljūqī by Yarbrough, Luke (2015) - Luke Yarbrough Department of History Saint Louis University (lyarbro5@slu.edu) mailto:lyarbro5%40slu.edu Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 23 (2015) 155 • Luke Yarbrough al-thānī wa-al-ʿaṣr al-Ayyūbī (Cairo, 1982 • Idem, Ahl al-dhimmah fī Miṣr fī al-ʿaṣr al-Fāṭimī al-awwal (Cairo, 1995 • Tawfīq Sulṭān Yūzbakī, Tārīkh ahl al-dhimmah fī al-ʿIrāq, 12–247 (Riyadh, 1983) • Shafīq Yamūt, Ahl al-dhimmah fī mukhtalif aṭwārihim wa-ʿuṣūrihim (Beirut, 1991) • Sayyidah Ismāʿīl Kāshif, Miṣr al-islāmiyyah wa-ahl al-dhimmah (Cairo, 1993) • Ḥasan al-Mimmī, Ahl al-dhimmah fī al-ḥaḍārah al-islāmiyyah (Beirut, 1998) (Cairo, 2000) • Yaḥyā Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Hādī Ḥusayn, Ahl al-dhimmah fī al-ʿIrāq fī al-ʿaṣr al-ʿAbbāsī: al-fatrah al-Saljūqiyyah namūdhajan (447–590/1055–1194) (Irbid, 2004) • Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-Hādī Sharīf, Aḥwāl ghayr al-muslimīn fī bilād al-Shām ḥattā nihāyat al-ʿaṣr al-Umawī (Amman, 2007) • Wasan Ḥusayn Muḥaymīd Ghurayrī, Ahl al-dhimmah fī al-ʿaṣr al-ʿAbbāsī: dirāsah fī awḍāʿihim al-ijtimāʿiyyah wa-al-iqtiṣadiyyah (Baghdad, 2009) • Banāz Ismāʿīl ʿAdū, Ahl al-dhimma fī bilād al-Kurd fī al-ʿaṣr al-ʿAbbāsī, 132–447/749–1055: dirāsah taʾrīkhiyyah taḥlīliyyah (Irbil, 2011) • Muḥammad al-Amīn Wuld Ān, Ahl al-dhimmah bi-al-Andalus fī ẓill al-dawlah al-Umawiyyah, 138–422/755– 1031 (Damascus, 2011) • ʿAlī Fulayḥ ʿAbdallāh al-Ṣumaydiʿī, Ahl al-dhimmah fī al-Maghrib al-Aqṣā min al-fatḥ al-Islāmī ḥattā nihāyat dawlat al-Muwaḥḥidīn (Amman, 2014) We may conclude this brief, inexhaustive survey with a 2005 Zagazig University dissertation — fittingly, by one of Qāsim’s students— Zaynab ʿAbdallāh Aḥmad Karīr’s Ahl al-dhimma fī al-ʿahd al-Ḥafṣī (626- 982/1228–1574). Keywords: ahl; author; baghdad; dhimmah; muslims; non; sources
Alejandro García Sanjuán. Yihad: La regulación de la guerra en la doctrina islámica clásica by Albarrán, Javier (2021) - Here, García Sanjuán studies what he calls “sectarian jihād,” jihād carried out Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 29 (2021) Alejandro García Sanjuán’s Yihad: La regulación de la guerra • 362 against other Muslims. In addition to outlining his selection of sources, García Sanjuán specifies in the introduction how he will address the study of jihād. Keywords: book; example; garcía; islamic; jihād; sanjuán; sources; war
Julián M. Ortega Ortega. La conquista islámica de la Península Ibérica: Una perspectiva arqueológica by Ballestín, Xavier (2021) - The chapters’ titles are quite straightforward and explanatory, even for a readership not used to the history of al-Andalus or the High Middle Ages: chapter 1 (pp. 25–35), “(De)limiting the scope of the sources”; chapter 2 Julián M. Ortega Ortega. Rather, Ortega has used the archaeological remains of material culture to detect and understand the Islamic conquest and the distinctive appearance of al-Andalus. Keywords: andalus; book; chapter; conquest; culture; islamic; material; ortega; sources

Studies

Remembering Speros Vryonis, Jr. by Leiser , Gary (2019) - In Turkey, Aydoğan Demir (Tarih Remembering Speros Vryonis, Jr. Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27 (2019): 343 Incelemeleri Dergisi 1 [1983]) considered the book worthless. Upon his retirement the Vryonis Center was closed, and in 2002 its library was transferred to California State University Sacramento, where it became the Tsakopoulos Hellenic Collection. Keywords: center; greek; speros; studies; vryonis; work
Ehsan Yarshater by Daniel , Elton L. (2018) - In Memoriam Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 26 (2018): 270-272 The passing of Ehsan Yarshater, the Hagop Kevorkian Professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies at Columbia University, on 2 September 2018 in Fresno, California, was a tremendous loss not just for Iranian studies but for the scholarly world. With the recommendation and support of Henning, Yarshater received a visiting position at Columbia University in 1958, and, in 1961, was appointed to the new Kevorkian chair in Iranian studies there, which he held until his retirement in 1999. Keywords: studies; university; yarshater
Günter Lüling by Donner , Fred M. (2017) - He was at first utilized as a support worker for the Navy, and then, * I am grateful to Friedrich Lüling, Günter Lüling’s son, for providing important information about his studies, and to the Lüling family for their warm support. Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017): 229-234 In Memoriam Günter LüLinG (1928—2014)* Dr. Günter Lüling, author of a number of revisionist works on the Qur’ān and the history of Islam’s origins, died on 10 September 2014, in Wasser- burg am Inn, Germany. Keywords: erlangen; günter; lüling; qur’ān; studies; work

Book

Review of al-Shishtāwī, Khayrāt al-sulṭān Qāytbāy by Livingston, Daisy (2023) - Khayrāt al-sulṭān Qāytbāy wa-munshaʾātuhu al-mawqūfa ʿalā al-ḥaramayn al-sharīfayn min khilāl kitāb waqfihi al-maḥfūẓ bi-l-maktaba al-ahliyya bi-Bārīs (Cairo: Dār al-Āfāq al-ʿArabiyya, 2018). In this part of the book, al-Shishtāwī follows the waqf deed in also laying out the personnel who were to be paid with the proceeds of the endowment (pp. Keywords: book; cairo; codex; deed; document; endowment; mamluk; medina; note; qāytbāy; shishtāwī; waqf
Joel Blecher, Said the Prophet of God: Hadith Commentary across a Millennium by van Lit, O.P., L. W. Cornelis (2019) - Chapter 7 shifts the focus back to the unique challenges posed by al-Jāmiʿ al-ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī. Where this succinctness actually hurts the argumentation is in chapter 8, in which Blecher is able to show that al-Suyūṭī preferred short commentaries but comes up short in explaining exactly why and what impact this preference had. Keywords: blecher; book; commentaries; commentary; hadith; writing
Michael Brett, The Fatimid Empire. The Edinburgh History of the Islamic Empires by Walker, Paul E. (2018) - Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 26 (2018): 249-251 Book Review Those of us intimately involved in the study of Fatimid history, as well as others who teach areas of Islamic history in which this dynasty played a significant role, have long lamented the lack of a good, substantial one-volume account of that era suitable for use in classroom instruction and also generally available and accessible for anyone inter- ested in the period. Online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_30871 pale by comparison to the many items of information I picked up from this book, interpretations of issues I am now forced to rethink and look at in a new light, terms such as “seveners” I previously thought misleading and obsolete but may have been convinced otherwise, along with many works in the bibliography that ought to be read or reread. Keywords: book; brett; ismaili
Thomas Bauer, Die Kultur der Ambiguität: Eine andere Geschichte des Islams by Toral-Niehof, Isabel (2016) - Bauer posits a dichotomy between an ‘ambiguity-tolerant’ pre-modern Islam and an ‘ambiguity-intolerant’ West. (For other questionable omissions, see the review by Irene Schneider).5 Another point concerns his under- standing of sex, gender and sexuality in pre-modern Islam, which is debatable;6 and Bauer’s almost complete neglect of female sexuality and gender in a chapter addressing sexuality in Islam is also hardly comprehensible. Keywords: ambiguity; bauer; book; chapter; islam; islamic
Remarks by the Recipient of the 2014 MEM Lifetime Achievement Award by Crone, Patricia (2015) - MEM Awards Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 23 (2015): iii-vi When I discussed with Matthew what I should talk about, he said he’d like to hear some manner of reflection on my work, career, books, students, and the state of the field, or some combination of these things. After Meccan Trade, or at the same time (both this and other books took a long time to reach print), I published God’s Caliph with Martin Hinds. Keywords: battle; book; thought
Emma J. Flatt, The Courts of the Deccan Sultanates: Living Well in the Persian Cosmopolis by Walravens, Meia (2020) - The author provides a clear explanation of this concept, engaging with Sheldon Pollock’s work on the Sanskrit Cosmopolis, as well as with Richard Eaton’s and Philip Wagoner’s use of the term Persian Cosmopolis (pp. 17–24). Although the introduction recognizes that one should not disregard the local context when focusing on the Persian Cosmopolis (pp. Keywords: book; cosmopolis; deccan; flatt; persian
Wendy M. K. Shaw. What Is “Islamic” Art? Between Religion and Perception by Slingluff, Sarah (2021) - Yet for Islamic art historians, her willingness to be candid and clear about the supposed prohibition of figural image in Islamic art is welcome. Shaw hopes, she writes, to move the conversation from the production of Islamic art to its reception, empha- sizing commonalities across time and space. Keywords: art; book; chapter; field; islamic; shaw
Daniella Talmon-Heller. Sacred Place and Sacred Time in the Medieval Islamic Middle East: A Historical Perspective by Smail, Kader (2021) - The redemption of ʿAlid memory, as recalled by Borrut, seems to have followed the paradigm suggested by Stephen Humphreys: covenant, betrayal, Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 29 (2021) 372 • Kader Smail and redemption. The first part studies the sanctification of the martyrdom of al-Ḥusayn, Muḥammad’s grandson and ʿAlī’s second son, through the construc- 1. Keywords: book; heller; islamic; rajab; talmon; ḥusayn

Muḥammad

Transformation by Hamza, Shireen (2025) - Najm al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Ghazzī, al-Kawākib al-sāʾira bi-aʿyān al-miʾat al-ʿāshira (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1997), 1:51. 11. Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 33 (2025): 425-430 Transformation Shireen hamza Northwestern University Narrating The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi—a novel about Islam and motherhood, crew and captain, sorcery and sea monsters—is a quiet scribe named Jamal. Keywords: amina; gender; jamal; muḥammad; novel; people; sex

Muslim

State-building, Political Thought and the Other in Muslim Imperial Peripheries by Hünefeld, Kerstin; Pukhovaia, Ekaterina (2023) - In the concluding discussion following the keynote, participants highlighted that another direction for future research could comprise the study of the form and the substance of being Muslim throughout premodern Muslim history, emphasizing the tribe/state relationship as a pronounced problem for Muslim states and, therefore, Islam altogether. mailto:e.pukhovaia%40hum.leidenuniv.nl?subject= mailto:kerstin.huenefeld%40mail.huji.ac.il?subject= 221 • EkatErina Pukhovaia and kErstin hünEfEld Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 31 (2023) • How did Others (non-Muslims, non-mainstream Muslim sects, tribes, minority ethnic groups) contribute to the development of Muslim states and empires? Keywords: hebrew; jerusalem; muslim; state; university
Diego R. Sarrio Cucarella, Muslim-Christian Polemics across the Mediterranean: by Shachar, Uri (2018) - Chapter 3 treats the first chapter of al-Ajwiba, which is also the most polemical one in tone and content, where al-Qarāfī responds to the claims brought forth in the Melkite tradition that stand at the bottom of this correspondence. The final chapter of al-Ajwiba (and the penultimate chapter in Cucarella’s book) deals with proofs of Muḥammad’s prophecy that al-Qarāfī attempts to find in the Old and New Testament. Keywords: chapter; christian; christianity; cucarella; muslim; qarāfī
Luke B. Yarbrough, Friends of the Emir: Non-Muslim State Officials in Premodern Islamic Thought by Ballan, Mohamad (2020) - Throughout the chapter, Yarbrough highlights how Muslim jurists developed diverse rationales for limiting, discouraging, or prohibiting the employment of non-Muslim officials; how these rationales were frequently repeated and developed during moments of tension with states or non-Muslim elites; and how jurists sought, above all, to mediate between their madhhab traditions and contemporary exigencies. Chapter 2 (“Preludes to the Discourse: Non-Muslim Officials and Late Ancient Antecedents”) presents a synchronic study of non-Muslim officials and the reasons for their employment while surveying late antique discourses around dissenting officials, particularly surviving writings on non-Christian officials in the Eastern Roman Empire and non-Zoroastrian officials in the Sasanian Empire. Keywords: chapter; discourse; islamic; muslim; non; officials; prescriptive; yarbrough

Text

Al-Malik al-Afḍal al-ʿAbbās b. ʿAlī b. Dāwūd al-Rasūlī, Bughyat al-fallāḥīn fī al-ashjār al-muthmira wa-l-rayāḥīn by Varisco, Daniel (2020) - One of the glaring errors is misidentifying the author of Milḥ al-malāḥa, whom he elsewhere recognizes as al-Ashraf (p. 77), as al-Malik al-Muẓaffar in a footnote on p. 193, note 3. These are the tenth-century al-Filāḥa al-Nabaṭiyya attributed to Ibn Waḥshiyya and translated from the Syriac, the Arabic translation of the Byzantine al-Filāḥa al-Rūmiyya of Qusṭūs (Cassiano Basso Scolastico) of the sixth–seventh century, and the eleventh- century al-Filāḥa of the Andalusian Ibn Baṣṣāl. Keywords: afḍal; copy; manuscript; text; yemen

Middle

Masthead & Table of Contents by Antrim, Zayde; Vacca, Alison M. (2022) - Book Review Editors Malika Dekkiche, University of Antwerp Luke Yarbrough, University of California, Los Angeles Editorial Board, Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā Manan Ahmed, Columbia University Sean Anthony, The Ohio State University Mushegh Asatryan, University of Calgary Hannah Barker, Arizona State University Francesca Bellino, Università di Napoli “L’Orientale” Evrim Binbaş, Universität Bonn Amina Elbendary, The American University in Cairo Corisande Fenwick, University College London Eve Krakowski, Princeton University Josef Meri, Hamad Bin Khalifa University Oya Pancaroğlu, Boğaziçi University Michael Pifer, University of Michigan Walid Salih, University of Toronto Vanessa Van Renterghem, Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (Paris) Board of Directors, Middle East Medievalists Stephennie Mulder (President), The University of Texas at Austin Najam Haider (Vice President), Barnard College Robert Haug (Secretary), University of Cincinnati Adam Talib (Board Member), Durham University Arezou Azad (Board Member), University of Oxford Khodadad Rezakhani (Board Member), Leiden University Amanda Hannoosh Steinberg (Board Member), Harvard University Shireen Hamza (Graduate Student Representative), Harvard University Natalie Kontny-Wendt (Graduate Student Representative), University of Hamburg Journal Website For submissions, archives, contact information, announcements, and more, please visit: https://journals.library.columbia.edu/ Editors Zayde Antrim, Trinity Colege Alison M. Vacca, Columbia University Managing Editor Christiane-Marie Abu Sarah, Erskine College Middle East Medievalists (MEM) is an international professional non-profit association of scholars interested in the study of the medieval Middle East, expansively defined to include all geographies with prominent Muslim political, religious, or social presences between 500-1500 CE. Keywords: board; east; middle; rebellion; review; university
Letter from the Editors by Borrut, Antoine (2017) - UW stands as a platform from which to bring out significant new scholarship. Finally, we are also determined to promote non-Anglophone scholarship. Keywords: middle; reviews; scholarship
Letter from the Editors by Borrut, Antoine (2015) - This new issue of al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā (UW) marks a turning point. Letter from the Editors Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 23 (2015): i-ii (Photo of Antoine Borrut by Juliette Fradin Photography) Keywords: middle

Persian

Review of Williams, The Masnavi of Rūmī by Mikkelson, Jane (2023) - (That being said, there may be English readers who prefer to read long narratives in rhyme, and surely it is a good thing to have multiple thoughtful scholarly translations of Rūmī available in English today.) This meter’s specific rhythm doesn’t have an exact English equivalent, and Williams transposes Rūmī’s rhymed and metered Persian into an unrhymed English iambic pentameter—Shakespeare’s favorite form—which, as Williams proposes, best conveys the feel and flow of the Persian. Keywords: english; masnavī; persian; rūmī; williams
Taẕkirah-i Khayr al-bayān: The Earliest Source on the Career and Poetry of Ṣāʾib Tabrīzī (d. ca. 1087/1676) by Beers, Theodore S. (2016) - Due to expense Ta!kirah-i Khayr al-bayān: The Earliest Source on the Career and Poetry of Ṣā#ib Tabrīzī (d. ca. 1087/1676) theodoRe S. BeeRS University of Chicago (tbeers@uchicago.edu) 115 • theodoRe S. BeeRS Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 24 (2016) Both the Khayr al-bayān, and MS Or. 3397 in particular, have been known for some time. Theodore S. Beers, “The Biography of Vahshi Bāfqi (d. 991/1583) and the Tazkera Tradition,” Journal of Persianate Studies 8 (2015): 219–20. 132 • theodoRe S. BeeRS Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 24 (2016) Appendix: Khayr al-bayān MS Or. 3379 Fig. 1: Page 374a from Khayr al-bayān MS Or. 3379. Keywords: bayān; edition; fol; gulchīn; khayr al; maʿānī; persian; poets; shāh; taẕkirah; tehran; verses; vols; ḥusayn; ṣāʾib

Chapter

Review of Kumakura, Chusei Ejiputo no Tochiseido to Nairukangai by Igarashi, Daisuke (2023) - This is valuable in demonstrating one aspect of Mamluk land management and record keeping as well as significant in identifying one of the sources of al-Tuḥfa al-saniyya by finding a partial match between a single register from the reign of the Mamluk sultan al-Ashraf Shaʿbān (r. 1363–77) and a record in al-Tuḥfa al-saniyya. Part I, “Continuities and Discontinuities in the Administration of Records,” consisting of four chapters, focuses on the Daftar jayshī, the principal historical source of the book, and examines the documentary administration of land under the Circassian Mamluk regime and the transfer of Mamluk land records to the Ottoman government. Keywords: chapter; daftar; egypt; land; mamluk; ottoman; records
Review of Morimoto and Rizvi, Knowledge and Power in Muslim Societies by Husayn, Nebil (2025) - Perhaps further discussion of how Sayyid Muḥammad’s understanding of the occultation differed from key exponents of the theory such as al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā (d. 1044) and al-Shaykh al-Ṭūsī (d. 1067) would have been helpful for readers. Chapter 4, “Knowledge for All: Zayn al-Dīn al-Kashshī (d. before 1228) on Philosophical Writing” by Hisashi Obuchi, explores the various facets of the question “what is philosophy?” by examining the work of Zayn al-Dīn al-Kashshī, an influential student of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1210) who was revered for his expertise in logic. Keywords: chapter; islamic; knowledge; philosophy; power
Review of Aillet, L’archipel ibadite by Bosanquet, Antonia (2025) - Later, in the twelfth century, the incursions of the Ayyubid commander Qarāqūsh put further pressure on Ibadi communities, as did the raids of the Banu Ghāniyya from the thirteenth century, who used Ibadi settlements for their conflict with the Almohads. Aillet, who has devoted considerable attention in previous works to notions of centrality, margins, and connectivity in empire, makes this question the pivot of his study of Ibadi history in the Maghrib. Keywords: aillet; chapter; ibadi; maghrib
Jennifer A. Cromwell, Recording Village Life: A Coptic Scribe in Early Islamic Egypt. by Legendre, Marie (2019) - The chapter reveals that the drafting of tax documents was a closely regulated process in the twenty or so years in which they are attested at Djeme and that only one scribe at a time was involved in drawing up such texts. Chapter 4, “Recording Taxes,” shows that Aristophanes was first involved in drawing up fiscal documents in 724, when he wrote tax demand notes for the office of the amīr of Luxor and Esna, Sahl b. ʿAbd Allāh.3 Keywords: aristophanes; chapter; coptic; cromwell; djeme; documents; tax; texts; village

Time

Remarks by the Recipient of the 2019 MEM Lifetime Achievement Award Given at the Annual Meeting of Middle East Medievalists (New Orleans, 14 November 2019) by Fierro, Maribel (2021) - María Luisa Ávila, initially trained as a mathematician, has spent most of her academic life building an extremely useful online resource, the Prosopography of the Scholars of al-Andalus, which now Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 28 (2020) Remarks by the Recipient of the 2019 MEM Lifetime Achievement Award • vi comprises more than 11,000 entries. I still remember the computer she was using in 1985 when she wrote her PhD dissertation on demographics in al-Andalus through an analysis of the biographies of scholars. Keywords: andalus; scholars; spain; study; time

Islam

Shahab Ahmed by Eltantawi , Sarah (2016) - “Most doctoral students start out as reformers...” In Memoriam: Shahab Ahmed Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 24 (2016): 210 The comment typified Shahab in several respects. Shahab once asked me to articulate exactly why I was pursuing a Ph.D. in Islamic studies. Keywords: ahmed; islam; shahab
Aziz al-Azmeh, The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity: Allāh and His People by Webb, Peter (2015) - One reference in the reconstituted ‘source’ of the second/eighth Ibn Isḥāq’s biography of Muhammad is quoted as evidence for the ‘fact’ that pre-Islamic Arabs had a habit of rubbing their bodies on idols (226). It is directed against the formerly hyper-critical approach to early Islam adopted by various scholars, but in seeking to redress earlier cynicism, al-Azmeh swings far towards a form of positivism whereby writers of Arabic literary sources between the second/ eighth and fourth/tenth centuries are lauded as “antiquarians” (The Arabs in Islam 43, 62; The Emergence of Islam 173) with “scrupulous” intentions to accurately record pre-Islamic facts. Keywords: arabs; azmeh; emergence; islam; pre

Manuscript

The Mongols’ Baghdad: Knowledge Transmission through Manuscript Cultures Before and After the Conquest by Löhr, Nadine (2023) - The research shed light on the comparison of manuscript production between the pre- and post- Mongol periods and the potential role of Mongol patronage in facilitating the circulation of philosophical knowledge. The diverse panels covered various aspects, including the loss of books, manuscript production, art, architecture, history, philosophy, sciences, and religion. Keywords: baghdad; conference; knowledge; manuscript; mongol; panel; production

Mamluk

A New Source on the Social Gatherings (majalis) of the Mamluk Sultan Qānṣawh al-Ghawrī by Mauder, Christian ; Markiewicz, Christopher (2016) - early 10th/16th c.), and al-Kawkab al-durrī fī masāʾil al-Ghawrī of unknown authorship.2 Both texts include the purported proceedings of al-Ghawrī’s majālis and focus primarily on 1. His place in literature and learning (three books written under his patronage),” in Actes du xxe Congrès International des Orientalistes, Bruxelles 5-10 Septembre 1938, Leuven 1940, 321-322. 2. ʿAzzām, ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (ed.), Majālis al-sulṭān al-Ghawrī, Cairo 1941. learned discussions taken up at these gath- erings pertaining to law, Quranic exegesis, history, literature, theology, philosophy and the natural sciences, among others. Keywords: al-ʿuqūd; anonymous; fol; ghawrī; mamluk; sultan
Petrus Martyr Anglerius, Legatio Babylonica. Edition, Übersetzung und Kommentar von Hans Heinrich Todt by Mauder, Christian (2016) - Born in the Italian town of Arona on the shores of the Lago Maggiore in 1457, Petrus Martyr held numerous diplomatic, educational and administrative posts at various localities in northern and central Italy, thereby using to full advantage his thorough education in the antique Latin cultural heritage which he had received in Milan and Rome. After his return from his diplomatic embassy to Egypt, Petrus Martyr received several promotions, including that to the post of Prior of Granada in 1503. Keywords: mamluk; martyr; petrus; todt

Women

Witches by Saif, Liana (2025) - ʿIzz al-Dīn b. al-Athīr, al-Kāmil fī al-tārīkh, ed. Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 33 (2025): 414-419 Witches Liana Saif University of Amsterdam Aisha Qandisha, one of the most well-known female jinn figures in Moroccan folklore, both feared and desired, is frequently depicted as an impossibly beautiful woman with animalistic traits below the waist which she conceals until it is too late. Keywords: aisha; amina; dalila; liana; magic; occult; saif; sirafi; women
Matthew S. Gordon and Kathryn Hain, eds., Concubines and Courtesans by Ali, Kecia (2018) - One thread weaving through the volume is the way that reproductive strategies, especially but not only when rulership is in play, might lead to shifting preferences for marriage to free women, who could offer family alliances, or concubinage with enslaved women, whose lack of such ties would avoid potential divided loyalties. One of the merits of this volume is the number of enslaved women about whom it presents biographical information— though of varying levels of detail and facticity. Keywords: concubinage; concubines; gordon; hain; islamic; slavery; volume; women
Created After, From, and For the Man? : Development of Premodern Shiʿi Exegetic Discourse on the Creation of Woman by von Schöneman, Katja (2021) - Aḥmad al-Wāḥidī (d. 468/1076), Tafsīr al-basīṭ (Riyadh: Wizārat al-Taʿlīm al-ʿĀlī, 2010), 6:281; al-Rāzī, al-Tafsīr al-kabīr, 9:166. For similar passages in Sunni exegeses of the time, see, e.g., al-Wāḥidī, Tafsīr al-basīṭ, 6:282; al-Rāzī, al-Tafsīr al-kabīr, 9:167. Keywords: abū al; adam; al-ʿuṣūr al; b. al; creation; discourse; et al; eve; exegesis; gender; imāmī; islamic; m. al; man; muḥammad al; qurʾān; rib; sunni; tafsīr al; tradition; women

Literature

Anna Dolinina by Tolmacheva, Marina (2017) - But in 1960, things were changing in Soviet http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/22497726 http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/22497726 http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/22497726 http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/22497726 http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/22497726 http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/22497726 http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/936199810 http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/936199810 In Memoriam: Anna Dolinina (1923—2017) • 227 Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017) “Oriental Studies.” There, she became fascinated with the Orient and developed an interest in Arabic literature. Keywords: anna; dolinina; literature; russian; university

Scholars

Ērān: Central and West Asia in the First Millennium CE by Alford, Daniel (2024) - Part of the problem facing Sasanian scholars is a lack of networks connecting senior and junior academics. Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024): 577-583 Conference Report: Ērān: Central and West Asia in the First Millennium CE Research Forum (University of Lille, 15-19 July 2024) Conference Organizers: EkatErina nEchaEva khodadad rEzakhani University of Lille University of Leiden Report by: daniEl alford University of Lille The Ērān: Central and West Asia in the First Millennium CE Research Forum was held on 15–19 July 2024 at the University of Lille, France. Keywords: day; empire; forum; keynote; research; sasanian; scholars; university; west; ērān

Andalus

Review of Albarrán, Ejércitos benditos by Balbale, Abigail Krasner (2022) - Based on his doctoral disserta- tion, “Los discursos de guerra santa y la memoria de las primeras batallas del Islam, al-Andalus, Siglos X-XIII” (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2019), this book reflects the author’s broad familiarity with a wide range of Arabic, Latin, and Castilian sources on the concept and practice of holy war. Albarrán’s close reading of these sources demonstrates the ways in which discourses of holy war emerged in the Islamic West in the context of the broader Islamic Middle Period, and also in contact and competition with the Christian kingdoms of Iberia. Keywords: albarrán; andalus; holy; jihad; war

Egypt

Joshua Mabra, Princely Authority in the Early Marwānid State: The Life of ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Marwān by Gordon, Matthew S. (2017) - ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz governed Egypt for twenty years—65/685 to 85/705—during which time he stood as heir to ʿAbd al-Malik (d. 85/705), the caliph, his far better known half-brother. Marwān did so in style, marrying twice, in fact, into the Kalb, then in his appointment of ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz as governor and second heir to the caliphate (after ʿAbd al-Malik). Keywords: al-ʿazīz; egypt; islamic; mabra; new; ʿabd
George T. Scanlon by Abdulfattah, Iman (2015) - In Memoriam GeorGe T. Scanlon (1925-2014)* Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 23 (2015): 230-236 Born in Philadelphia on April 23, 1925, George T. Scanlon was more than just a scholar of Islamic art and architecture; he was a true Renais- sance man who paved the way in areas as wide-ranging as salvage archaeology and scholarly writing. Perhaps little-known outside of certain circles is that Scanlon anonymously endowed the annual George Antonius Memorial lecture at the Middle East Centre of St Antony’s College, now in its 40th year; he also gave generously over the years to key institutions that supported the study of the Middle East, such as The American University in Beirut and Middle East In Memoriam: George T. Scanlon Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 23 (2015): 235 Medievalists. Keywords: auc; egypt; fustat; george; scanlon; university

Dīn

Review of Brack, An Afterlife for the Khan by Auer, Blain (2025) - His work contributes to a fuller understanding of how Mongol rulers adapted to and influenced the cultural and political landscapes of the medieval Islamic world. Catholic and Nestorian priests, Sunni and Shiʿa scholars, and Buddhist monks were given a platform to express their views before the court of Mongol rulers. Keywords: brack; dīn; kingship; mongol; rulers

Example

The Relative Lenience or Strictness of the Sunni Schools of Law by Melchert, Christopher (2025) - Abstract ʿAbd al-Wahhāb b. Aḥmad al-Shaʿrānī (d. Cairo, 973/1565), al-Mīzān, is a survey of agreements and disagree- ments among the Sunni schools of law. With his uncanny 1. Page references to come will be to al-Shaʿrānī, Kitāb al-Mīzān, ed. Keywords: example; law; lenient; schools; shaʿrānī; strict

Empire

Military Foundations, Ribāts, and Urbanization: The Roman, Early Islamic, and Spanish Empire in Comparison by Heidemann, Stefan; Franz, Kurt; Mewes, Katharina (2024) - However, as time went on, the manumission of military slaves broadened the Muslim elite beyond its initial Arab ethnic origin, and military cities developed into civilian ones. These included: long-distance military logistics and strategy (the small Spanish armies were without any possibility of fast replenishment); the role of imperial competitors (the Spanish Empire had to defend its realm against other European empires); questions of regional autonomy (the Spanish provinces possessed a high degree of internal autonomy while the far-away Crown provided the legal frame); the production of regional loyalty far away from the center (a powerful loyalty bound Spanish American elites to the Crown until the nineteenth century); relations with conquered people (Church and Crown expressed the need to protect natives against undue exploitation); the relation to nomads at the fringes (the Apache and Comanche were at various times allies and foes, and only the horses of the Spanish Empire enabled them to build up vast nomadic realms of their own). Keywords: cities; empire; islamic; military; roman

Years

Thierry Bianquis by Bearman, Peri (2015) - As my professional relationship with Thierry began at this time and in this context, I will limit my remarks to the years of his tenure as last editor of the French edition of the EI. Thierry, and his predecessor, spent countless bruising hours in their search for money to pay for the encyclopedia articles to be translated into French, and more often than is widely known took the translations upon themselves, unpaid. Keywords: bianquis; edition; french; thierry; years

Michael

Introduction: A Note from the Holbergians by Garnier, Sébastien; Klasova, Pamela; Keegan, Matthew L. (2020) - Rather spontaneously, each member of the group shared their own reflections and heartfelt thanks to Michael, to Kim, and to the professors and graduate students who made up the Holberg Seminar. These divergent methodological approaches proved harmonious rather than cacophonous, thanks to Michael and to the other Holberg faculty members. Keywords: holberg; holbergians; michael; seminar

Oxford

The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy. Edited by Khaled El-Rouayheb and Sabine Schmidtke. Oxford Handbooks by Connelly, Coleman (2019) - For instance, many later contributions to Islamic philosophy come in the form of commentaries or even versifications, which were often dismissed as derivative or unoriginal on the basis of inadequate study. The volume concludes, in an exciting first for the field of Islamic philosophy as traditionally conceived, by discussing four twentieth-century philosophers— Muḥammad Iqbāl (d. 1938), Muḥammad Bāqir al-Ṣadr (d. 1979), ʿAllāma Ṭabāṭabāʾī (d. 1981), and Zakī Najīb Maḥmūd, treated respectively by Mustansir Mir (ch. 27), Keywords: handbook; oxford; philosophy; volume
Sabine Schmidtke, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Theology by Renard, John (2018) - An especially welcome aspect of the volume’s historical coverage is the organic treatment of major schools, from their precursors to their more “formal” foundational origins, through their survival and continuations across the centuries. On an initial cursory glance at the table of contents, one might get the impression that the Ashʿarite wing got the lion’s share of coverage among major schools, perhaps at the expense of its too-little studied and under-appreciated opposite number, the Māturīdīya. Keywords: handbook; oxford; theology; volume

Edition

Abū Isḥāq al-Ṣābiʾ, Dīwān Rasāʾil al-Ṣābīʾ. by Pomerantz, Maurice A. (2018) - Iḥsān Dhannūn al-Thāmirī (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 2010); al-Khwārizmī, Rasāʾil, ed. M. Pourgol (Tehran: Anjuman-i Āthār va Mafākhir-i Farhangī, 2005); al-Hamadhānī, Badīʿ al-Zamān, Kashf al-maʿānī wa-al-bayān ʿan rasāʾil Badīʿ al-Zamān, ed. I. al-Ṭarābulsī (Beirut: al-Maṭbaʿa al-Kāthūlīkiyya, 1890). such as the letters of al-Ṣāḥib b. ʿAbbād (d. 385/995), ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. Yūsuf a l -Shīrāz ī (d . 375/985) , Abū Bakr al-Khwārizmī (d. 383/993) and Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī (d. 398/1008) were collected primarily for the training of scribes employed in state chanceries. Frédéric Bauden, “Review of Al-Mawāʿiẓ wa-l-iʿtibār fī dhikr al-khiṭaṭ wa-l-āthār li-Taqī al-dīn Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī ibn ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Maqrīzī. Keywords: edition; hachmeier; letters; rasāʾil; thāmirī; ṣābiʾ
Mālik b. Anas, Al-Muwaṭṭaʾ: The Recension of Yaḥyā b. Yaḥyā al-Laythī; A Translation of the Royal Moroccan Edition by Hernández, Adday (2020) - Maribel Fierro, “El alfaquí beréber Yaḥyā b. Yaḥyā al-Layṯī (m. 234/848), ‘El inteligente de al-Andalus,’” in Ávila Navarro, Biografías y género biográfico, 269–344, at 334. 14. Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr, Kitāb al-Tamhīd li-mā fī al-Muwaṭṭaʾ min al-maʿānī wa-l-asānīd, ed. Keywords: edition; islamic; muwaṭṭaʾ; mālik; translation; yaḥyā

Art

Irene “Renie” A. Bierman-McKinney by Bacharach, Jere L. (2015) - Renie then went to work on her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, which had no one in Islamic art history. In fact Renie is the only major scholar of her generation in Islamic art history who was not trained by either Oleg Grabar at Harvard or Richard Ettinghausen in New York. Keywords: art; renie; university

Law

Lena Salaymeh, The Beginnings of Islamic Law: Late Antique Islamicate Legal Traditions by Melchert, Christopher (2018) - My approach in this review will therefore be to look past her theory to see whether she explains particular early legal problems in ways that seem useful to a traditional historian of Islamic law. A theoretical chapter against the idea of identifiably Aryan or Semitic origins of Islamic law seems mostly an exercise in knocking down straw men. Keywords: islamic; law; salaymeh

Baghdad

Review of Muhammad, Sufis in Medieval Baghdad by Held, Pascal (2025) - Sufi lodges offered spiritual and material support for people, in the form of instruction and al-ṣafwa (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī, 2012); idem, Ṣayd al-khāṭir (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1992); idem, Salwāt al-aḥzān bi-mā ruwiya ʿ an dhawī al-ʿirfān (Alexandria: Manshaʾat al-Maʿārif, 1970); ʿ Abd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī, al-Ghunya li-ṭālibī ṭarīq al-ḥaqq (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, 1996); idem, Futūḥ al-ghayb (Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Azhariyya li-l-Turāth, 2004); idem, al-Fatḥ al-rabbānī (Giza: Dār al-Rayān li-Turāth, n.d.); Abū al-Najīb al-Suhrawardī, Adāb al-murīdīn ([Jerusalem]: Institute of Asian and African Studies, Hebrew University, 1978); Abū Ḥafṣ ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī, ʿAwārif al-maʿārif (Cairo: Maktaba al-Thaqāfa al-dīniyya, 2006); Najm al-Dīn Rāzī, Mirṣād al-ʿibād (Tehran: Sherikat-i Intishārāt-i ʿIlmī wa-Farhangī, 1988). Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 33 (2025): 537-539 Book Review Muhammad, Atta. Keywords: baghdad; public; sphere; sufis

Texts

Important New Developments in Arabographic Optical Character Recognition by Thomas Miller, Matthew (2017) - Figure 2: Kraken’s Transcription Interface 8 • Kiessling, miller, romanov, & savant Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017) producing a library of OCR models that gradually will cover all major typefaces and editorial styles used in modern Arabic-script printing. See: https://github.com/tmbdev/clstm https://github.com/tmbdev/ocropy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCRopus https://github.com/tmbdev/clstm 10 • Kiessling, miller, romanov, & savant Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017) Keywords: accuracy; data; kraken; model; ocr; script; texts; training

ʿabd

Review of O’Meara, The Kaʿba Orientations by Smail, Kader (2022) - Again, it would be problematic to endorse al-Azraqī’s claim about al-Walīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik without additional research. In the same vein, the Meccan chronicler also reports that the first caliph who adorned the building was al-Walīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 86–96/705–715). Keywords: building; kaʿba; o’meara; ʿabd

Paper

Mysticism and Ethics in Islam by Gallorini, Louise (2019) - Acknowledging that no exact equivalent of ethics as a philosophical category can be found within the Islamic intellectual heritage, and recognizing that Muslim scholars have not methodically studied this category as defined today, this paper explored the place of the Sufi tradition in dealing with ethical considerations in the Sunni intellectual tradition while challenging the commonly held view that the latter Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27 (2019) Conference Report: Mysticism and Ethics in Islam • 269 took an antiphilosophical and antirational turn after al-Ghazālī’s (d. 1111) critique of philosophy. Looking beyond the existing view of Muslim reformers’ criticism of Sufism, this paper described how, on the contrary, such reformers embraced and promoted certain aspects of classical works of Sufism, a prime example being the Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn by al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), which was used by reformers such as Rashīd Riḍā (d. 1935) and Muḥammad ʿAbduh (d. 1905) in driving home their own ethical concerns. Keywords: conference; ethics; islamic; paper; sufi; sufism; university

City

The Swahili Coast by Thompson, KD (2025) - In the novel, we learn that Amina’s one-time friend Majed is a cartographer who grew up in Kilwa and once worked for the Sultan, whose authority eventually stretched along the entire Swahili Coast. Born on Pemba, a Swahili island that is today part of Zanzibar, Amina herself is far more complex than most readers will expect: a Muslim 1. Keywords: amina; city; swahili

Amina

Piracy by Kooria, Mahmood (2025) - Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 33 (2025) A Sea of Sorcery Round Table • 437 Amina al-Sirafi is introduced on the first page as a smuggler and pirate, but after reading almost five hundred pages of the novel, it remains unclear how she qualifies as a pirate, what exact actions made her one, or what precisely she smuggled during her maritime career. Such layered perspectives on piracy, beyond blanket generalizations, are captured in The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty, which tells the story of the titular character set across the northwestern Indian Ocean in the mid-twelfth century. Keywords: adventures; amina; chakraborty; sirafi
A Sea of Sorcery: Roundtable on The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Hamza, Shireen (2025) - Ibn al-Mujāwir, Ṣifat bilād al-Yaman wa-Makka wa-baʿḍ al-Ḥijāz (Cairo: Dār al-Thaqāfa al-Dīniyya, 1996), 296–97. 2. Shannon Chakraborty, The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi (New York: Harper Voyager, 2023), 57–58. Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 33 (2025): 412-413 A Sea of Sorcery: Roundtable on The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi Shireen hamza Northwestern University When Shannon Chakraborty published The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, I realized that it may become the most popular English-language book about the medieval Indian Ocean world to be published in my lifetime. Keywords: amina

Qurʾān

Review of Thaver, Beyond Sectarianism by Asatryan, Mushegh (2025) - See, for example, the rules of debate explicitly articulated by the tenth-century Muslim theologian, Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī (d. 936), as recorded by Ibn Fūrak, Maqālāt al-shaykh Abī l-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī, ed. It first situates al-Raḍī in his political and cultural milieu and the Ḥaqāʾiq in its literary and intellectual context. Keywords: intellectual; qurʾān; raḍī; sectarianism; shiʿi; thaver

Maghrib

Review of Ghouirgate, Les Empires berbères by Struillou, Ana (2024) - However, he contends that, from the late seventeenth century onwards, interest in medieval North Africa shifted from Iberia to France and Holland. The author, a specialist on the Almohad Empire and on the Tamazight languages, sets out to investigate how what he calls the “Berber Empires”—the Almoravids and Almohads—have been perceived and interpreted since the medieval period in North Africa and elsewhere. Keywords: almohads; maghrib; north; past

Students

Introduction: The Holberg Seminar by Borrut, Antoine (2020) - Michael invited Khaled El-Rouayheb (Harvard University), Jack Tannous (Princeton University), and myself to assist in organizing the seminar, starting with the selection of participants. The central aim of the Seminar was to provide the participants with sustained and high- level feedback on their research and writing at a formative stage in their careers. Keywords: participants; seminar; students

Reviews

Letter from the Editors by Borrut, Antoine; Gordon, Matthew S. (2018) - To simply restate our central guiding principle from previous letters, we remain committed to using al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā as a platform from which to bring out important and groundbreaking new scholarship. The contributions to this fourth issue of al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā (UW) in its new (online, open-access, peer- reviewed) format includes, alongside a set of article-length studies, eight book reviews, including a contribution by Peter Brown (Princeton University); three conference reports; a short notice by Sean Anthony; and Elton Daniel’s obituary of the late and much lamented Ehsan Yarshater. Keywords: islamic; reviews; scholarship

Thought

Tariq Jafer, Razī: Master of Qurʾanic Interpretation and Theological Reasoning by Friedman, Rachel Anne (2016) - Al-Rāzī was not the first thinker to make many of the important intellectual moves that Jaffer examines, and the book provides some background on earlier thinkers such as al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), accounting for the ways in which al-Rāzī responded to and incorporated his predecessors’ insights into his thought. Tariq Jaffer’s new book stands on the shoulders of long-standing work by the likes of Ignaz Goldziher and Josef van Ess, as well as scholars who have recently written on al-Rāzī including Ayman Shihadeh and Michel Lagarde. Keywords: jaffer; rāzī; thought

Lines

Abolfazl Khatibi, Āyā Firdawsī Maḥmūd-i Ghaznavī rā hajv guft? by Beers, Theodore S. (2017) - Still other lines have metrical faults, or employ Arabic loanwords that occur nowhere else in Firdawsī’s œuvre. There may be a few exceptions to this statement, depending on how one views the earliest works that quote lines from Firdawsī, such as the anonymous chronicle Mujmal al-tavārīkh va al-qiṣaṣ (begun in 520/1126), and indeed the Chahār maqālah. Keywords: firdawsī; hajv’nāmah; khatibi; lines; maḥmūd; shāhnāmah

Converts

William Chester Jordan, The Apple of His Eye: Converts from Islam in the Reign of Louis IX. J by Bianchini, Janna (2019) - But when faced with the question of whether Louis IX’s evangelical efforts among Muslims actually produced converts, or what might have become of such converts after their baptisms, most historians would demur; given the limited William Chester Jordan, The Apple of His Eye: Converts from Islam in the Reign of Louis IX. On this subject, Jordan’s own first book is still required reading: William C. Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Rulership (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). Keywords: converts; jordan; louis; muslims

Eunuchs

Hans-Peter Pökel, Der unmännliche Mann: Zur Figuration des Eunuchen im Werk von al-Ǧāḥiẓ (gest. 869) by Sánchez, Ignacio (2019) - The reception of the Aristotelian Problemata by al-Jāḥiẓ and, in general, by the Basran Muʿtazila is a complicated matter that awaits further research, but I cannot help but wonder whether many of the notions and argumentations that we can read in the K. al-Ḥayawān might not have come, in fact, from this tradition. Pökel provides here a detailed discussion of the castration techniques that al-Jāḥiẓ describes in intricate detail in his K. al-Ḥayawān and that might involve surgical excision (khiṣāʾ, gonadectomy, and jibāb, penectomy) or contusions that result in testicular atrophy (wijāʾ, the Latin ablatio). Keywords: eunuchs; jāḥiẓ; pökel

Kalām

Thomas Würtz, Islamische Theologie im 14. Jahrhundert. by Mauder, Christian (2017) - Thereafter it turns, likewise briefly, to the teachings of Ibn Sīnā and Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī inasmuch as these are relevant for al-Taftāzānī before shedding light on the Qurʾan commentaries of Jār Allāh al-Zamakhsharī and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī that Würtz uses in the remainder of his study to point to similarities and differences between al-Taftāzānī’s writings and the tafsīr tradition of his period. In Sharḥ al-Maqāṣid, however, which again offers a sophisticated and nuanced discussion of various theological views on the topic but pays also special attention to relevant Qurʾanic verses, al-Taftāzānī voices support not for the standard Māturīdī understanding, but for an Ashʿarī view that assumes positions of the neo-Jabriyya, while Tahdhīb al-manṭiq wa-l-kalām shows him embracing a mainstream Ashʿarī outlook and distancing himself from the neo-Jabriyya. Keywords: kalām; sharḥ; taftāzānī; würtz

Mem

Letter from the Editors by Borrut, Antoine (2016) - We are pleased to present the new issue of al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā (UW). Turning to the later Persianate literary realm, Beers offers a close assessment of an unpublished manuscript text containing Letter from the Editors Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 24 (2016): i-ii (Photo of Antoine Borrut by Juliette Fradin Photography) the earliest documentation of the life and career of Ṣāʾib Tabrīzī (d. ca. 1087/1676). Keywords: mem

Al‐fāḍil

Can Doctoral Dissertations Disappear? A Look at Ibrahim al‐Hafsi’s “Correspondance officielle et privée d’al‐Qāḍī al‐Fāḍil” and its Prospects in a Digital Age by Smarandache, Bogdan C. (2015) - Dr. al-Hafsi undertook the gargantuan effort of collecting and collating al-Qāḍī’s works. Exceeding the proposed aims of his dissertation, Dr. al-Hafsi generously provides a biography of al‐Qāḍī al‐Fāḍil’s life, analyzes his political thought in the context of the jihād al-Ifranj (jihād against the Franks), and explores his social network. Keywords: al‐fāḍil; al‐qāḍī; dissertation

Tribes

Ṭaha Ḥusayn ʿAwaḍ Hudayl, Tamarrudāt al-qabīla fī ʿaṣr al-dawla al-Rasūlīya wa-atharhā fī al-ḥayāt al-ʿāmma fī al-Yaman by Martin Varisco, Daniel (2015) - A genealogical chart of the descendants of ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn Hārūn (known as al-Rasūl) is provided, Ṭaha Ḥusayn ʿAwaḍ Hudayl, Tamarrudāt al-qabīla fī ʿaṣr al-dawla al-Rasūlīya wa-atharhā fī al-ḥayāt al-ʿāmma fī al-Yaman (626-858 H) Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 23 (2015): 147-148 Book Review This important volume is based on a doctoral dissertation submitted in 2004 to the Department of History at Aden University. Keywords: tribes

Labarta

Ana Labarta (with Carmen Barceló). Anillos de la Península Ibérica, 711–1611 by Fierro, Maribel (2021) - The medieval religious, legal, and cultural norms related to the use of rings—whatever such norms there were— are dealt with in an illuminating section that highlights the Mālikī dislike of men’s using gold or iron rings; as mentioned, this prohibition is to be related to the almost complete prevalence of silver rings found in Islamic contexts (p. 51). Were gold rings reused, and would such reuse explain their disappearance? Keywords: islamic; labarta; rings

Epilogue

For more detail, about this study carrel, see the computed home page. For more detail about study carrels in general, see the read me file.

Created: 2025-12-23