A lively debate is currently being conducted in the social sciences around the concepts of "tribe", "segmentary societies" and "Islam in society". This wide-ranging collection by thirteen distinguished anthropologists contributes to the debate by examining various segmentary Islamic tribal societies from Morocco to Pakistan.

Argues that the campaigns that fall under "The War on Terror" have exacerbated the already-broken relationship between central Islamic governments and the tribal societies within their borders.

Medieval Islamic society was overwhelmingly a society of peasants, and the achievements of Islamic civilization depended, first and foremost, on agricultural production. Yet the history of the medieval Islamic countryside has been neglected or marginalized. Basic questions such as the social and religious identities of village communities, or the relationship of the peasant to the state, are either ignored or discussed from a normative point of view. This volume addresses this lacuna in our understanding of medieval Islam by presenting a first-hand account of the Egyptian countryside. Dating from the middle of the thirteenth century, Abu 'Uthman al-Nabulusi's Villages of the Fayyum is as close as we get to the tax registers of any rural province. Not unlike the Domesday Book of medieval England, al-Nabulusi's work provides a wealth of detail for each village which far surpasses any other source for the rural economy of medieval Islam. It is a unique, comprehensive snap-shot of one rural society at one, significant, point in its history, and an insight into the way of life of the majority of the population in the medieval Islamic world. Richly annotated and with a detailed introduction, this volume offers the first academic edition of this work and the first translation into a European language. By opening up this key source to scholars, it will be an indispensable resource for historians of Egypt, of administration and rural life in the premodern world generally, and of the Middle East in particular.

Why contemporary Islam is able to support austerely traditional and conservative regimes as well as revolutionary ones is the subject of this collection of essays. Professor Gellner's position is supported by a series of case studies and critical evaluations of rival interpretations.

Publisher description

The emergence of Islam has in recent years become a matter of heated debate, mainly because Islamic historiography is a battle-field of contradictory versions of the past. In this second collection of studies, several of which appear here for the first time, Michael Lecker distances himself from the clash of theories, concentrating instead on several basic issues. They all belong to the preparatory work that still remains to be done on the social and economic environment in which Islam emerged. The volume includes the following sections: Arabia on the Eve of Islam; Muhammad and his Companions; and Arabian Tribes in Pre- and Early Islamic Arabia. The third section includes much extended and fully-documented versions of nine Encyclopaedia of Islam articles dealing with Arabian tribes and tribal society.

A lively debate is currently being conducted in the social sciences around the concepts of "tribe", "segmentary societies" and "Islam in society". This wide-ranging collection by thirteen distinguished anthropologists contributes to the debate by examining various segmentary Islamic tribal societies from Morocco to Pakistan.