This engaging book presents a new chapter in paper's history: how its use in Islamic lands during the Middle Ages influenced almost every aspect of medieval life. The text and illustrations (of papermaking techniques and the many uses to which paper was put) give new luster and importance to a now-humble material. 100+ illustrations.

This book provides, for the first time in English, a concise and scholarly study of papermaking in the Islamic world derived largely from published sources in English, and informed by the writer's professional knowledge of papermaking.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Islamic Shangri-La transports readers to the heart of the Himalayas as it traces the rise of the Tibetan Muslim community from the 17th century to the present. Radically altering popular interpretations that have portrayed Tibet as isolated and monolithically Buddhist, David Atwill's vibrant account demonstrates how truly cosmopolitan Tibetan society was by highlighting the hybrid influences and internal diversity of Tibet. In its exploration of the Tibetan Muslim experience, this book presents an unparalleled perspective of Tibet's standing during the rise of post–World War II Asia.

Presbyterian pastor Ben Daniel tackles common stereotypes and misconceptions that tend to define Islam in the popular imagination.

The untold story of how paper revolutionized art making during the Renaissance, exploring how it shaped broader concepts of authorship, memory, and the transmission of ideas over the course of three centuries In the late medieval and Renaissance period, paper transformed society--not only through its role in the invention of print but also in the way it influenced artistic production. The Art of Paper tells the history of this medium in the context of the artist's workshop from the thirteenth century, when it was imported to Europe from Africa, to the sixteenth century, when European paper was exported to the colonies of New Spain. In this pathbreaking work, Caroline Fowler approaches the topic culturally rather than technically, deftly exploring the way paper shaped concepts of authorship, preservation, and the transmission of ideas during this period. This book both tells a transcultural history of paper from the Cairo Genizah to the Mesoamerican manuscript and examines how paper became "Europeanized" through the various mechanisms of the watermark, colonization, and the philosophy of John Locke. Ultimately, Fowler demonstrates how paper--as refuse and rags transformed into white surface--informed the works for which it was used, as well as artists' thinking more broadly, across the early modern world.

The Islamic Moral Economy is an academic book that analyzes the religious permissibility or lack thereof of the existing repertoire of financial instruments used in Islamic banking and finance. The work is both timely and sound, especially considering the growth of the international Islamic banking and insurance industries, and the Great Recession of 2007-2010. The Islamic Moral Economy is an excellent introductory book for academics and finance professionals wishing to gain a better understanding of Islamic moral constraints on economic transactions and how most current Islamic banking transactions are structured. More specifically, the author examines the utopian nature of the Islamic moral economy with a special emphasis on riba (i.e., financial interest and illogical increase), which is inescapable in the global interconnected economy, and therefore insoluble within the framework of the Islamic Moral Economy. Unlike other books on the subject, The Islamic Moral Economy places a special emphasis on the ubiquity of financial interest and illogical increase in both current Islamic banking and finance as well as conventional economics.