The first dynasty to mint gold dinars outside of the Abbasid heartlands, the Aghlabid (r. 800-909) reign in North Africa has largely been neglected in the scholarship of recent decades, despite the canonical status of its monuments and artworks in early Islamic art history. The Aghlabids and their Neighbors focuses new attention on this key dynasty. The essays in this volume, produced by an international group of specialists in history, art and architectural history, archaeology, and numismatics, illuminate the Aghlabid dynasty’s interactions with neighbors in the western Mediterranean and its rivals and allies elsewhere, providing a state of the question on early medieval North Africa and revealing the centrality of the dynasty and the region to global economic and political networks. Contributors: Lotfi Abdeljaouad, Glaire D. Anderson, Lucia Arcifa, Fabiola Ardizzone, Alessandra Bagnera, Jonathan M. Bloom, Lorenzo Bondioli, Chloé Capel, Patrice Cressier, Mounira Chapoutot-Remadi, Abdelaziz Daoulatli, Claire Déléry, Ahmed El Bahi, Kaoutar Elbaljan, Ahmed Ettahiri, Abdelhamid Fenina, Elizabeth Fentress, Abdallah Fili, Mohamed Ghodhbane, Caroline Goodson, Soundes Gragueb Chatti, Khadija Hamdi, Renata Holod, Jeremy Johns, Tarek Kahlaoui, Hugh Kennedy, Sihem Lamine, Faouzi Mahfoudh, David Mattingly, Irene Montilla, Annliese Nef, Elena Pezzini, Nadège Picotin, Cheryl Porter, Dwight Reynolds, Viva Sacco, Elena Salinas, Martin Sterry.

An innovative study which explores how the presence of Muslim communities transformed Europe and stimulated Christian society to define itself.

The ‘Alawis, or Alawites, are a prominent religious minority in northern Syria, Lebanon, and southern Turkey, best known today for enjoying disproportionate political power in war-torn Syria. In this book, Stefan Winter offers a complete history of the community, from the birth of the ‘Alawi (Nusayri) sect in the tenth century to just after World War I, the establishment of the French mandate over Syria, and the early years of the Turkish republic. Winter draws on a wealth of Ottoman archival records and other sources to show that the ‘Alawis were not historically persecuted as is often claimed, but rather were a fundamental part of Syrian and Turkish provincial society. Winter argues that far from being excluded on the basis of their religion, the ‘Alawis were in fact fully integrated into the provincial administrative order. Profiting from the economic development of the coastal highlands, particularly in the Ottoman period, they fostered a new class of local notables and tribal leaders, participated in the modernizing educational, political, and military reforms of the nineteenth century, and expanded their area of settlement beyond its traditional mountain borders to emerge from centuries of Sunni imperial rule as a bona fide sectarian community. Using an impressive array of primary materials spanning nearly ten centuries, A History of the ‘Alawis provides a crucial new narrative about the development of ‘Alawi society.

Arabic-Islamic Views of the Latin West provides an insight into how the Arabic-Islamic world perceived medieval Western Europe in an age that is usually associated with the rise and expansion of Islam, the Spanish Reconquista, and the Crusades. Previous scholarship has maintained that the Arabic-Islamic world regarded Western Europe as a cultural backwater at the periphery of civilization that clung to a superseded religion. It holds mental barriers imposed by Islam responsible for the Muslim world's arrogant and ignorant attitude towards its northern neighbours. This study refutes this view by focussing on the mechanisms of transmission and reception that characterized the flow of information between both cultural spheres. By explaining how Arabic-Islamic scholars acquired and processed data on medieval Western Europe, it traces the two-fold 'emergence' of Latin-Christian Europe — a sphere that increasingly encroached upon the Mediterranean and therefore became more and more important in Arabic-Islamic scholarly literature. Chapter One questions previous interpretations of related Arabic-Islamic records that reduce a large and differentiated range of Arabic-Islamic perceptions to a single basic pattern subsumed under the keywords 'ignorance', 'indifference', and 'arrogance'. Chapter Two lists channels of transmission by means of which information on the Latin-Christian sphere reached the Arabic-Islamic sphere. Chapter Three deals with the general factors that influenced the reception and presentation of this data at the hands of Arabic-Islamic scholars. Chapters Four to Eight analyse how these scholars acquired and dealt with information on themes such as the western dimension of the Roman Empire, the Visigoths, the Franks, the papacy and, finally, Western Europe in the age of Latin-Christian expansionism. Against this background, Chapter Nine provides a concluding re-evaluation.

Born from the fields of Islamic art and architectural history, the archaeological study of the Islamic societies is a relatively young discipline. With its roots in the colonial periods of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, its rapid development since the 1980s warrants a reevaluation of where the field stands today. This Handbook represents for the first time a survey of Islamic archaeology on a global scale, describing its disciplinary development and offering candid critiques of the state of the field today in the Central Islamic Lands, the Islamic West, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. The international contributors to the volume address such themes as the timing and process of Islamization, the problems of periodization and regionalism in material culture, cities and countryside, cultural hybridity, cultural and religious diversity, natural resource management, international trade in the later historical periods, and migration. Critical assessments of the ways in which archaeologists today engage with Islamic cultural heritage and local communities closes the volume, highlighting the ethical issues related to studying living cultures and religions. Richly illustrated, with extensive citations, it is the reference work on the debates that drive the field today.

The written text was a pervasive feature of cultural practices in the medieval Middle East. At the heart of book circulation stood libraries that experienced a rapid expansion from the twelfth century onwards. While the existence of these libraries is well known our knowledge of their content and structure has been very limited as hardly any medieval Arabic catalogues have been preserved. This book discusses the largest and earliest medieval library of the Middle East for which we have documentation - the Ashrafiya library in the very centre of Damascus - and edits its catalogue. This catalogue shows that even book collections attached to Sunni religious institutions could hold rather unexpected titles, such as stories from the 1001 Nights, manuals for traders, medical handbooks, Shiite prayers, love poetry and texts extolling wine consumption. At the same time this library catalogue decisively expands our knowledge of how the books were spatially organised on the bookshelves of such a large medieval library. With over 2,000 entries this catalogue is essential reading for anybody interested in the cultural and intellectual history of Arabic societies. Setting the Ashrafiya catalogue into a comparative perspective with contemporaneous libraries on the British Isles this book opens new perspectives for the study of medieval libraries.

In Majd al-Dīn al-Fīrūzābādī (1329-1415): A Polymath on the Eve of the Early Modern Period, Vivian Strotmann provides a detailed reconstruction of the famous lexicographer’s and travelling scholar’s life and works. The ‘author of the Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ’ is widely known for his Arabic lexicon, which overshadows the astounding breadth of his writing. This polymathic aspect is elucidated through detailed reconstruction of al-Fīrūzābādī’s corpus, including examination of works that were considered lost and misapprehensions concerning ascriptions of authorship. Through minute analysis of biographical sources, the book shows al-Fīrūzābādī’s development as a scholar, his central role in the defence of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s teachings and thereby his importance as a powerful intellectual in Timurid times and for developments during the Early Modern Period.