This album includes photographs of the Holy Lands that are found in the Yildiz Albums. Mainly due to the different forms of government, legal systems, and also because of commercial concerns, this appearance of the Haramayn today is quite different from what you will see in the book. There are few traces of the Ottomans left in Mecca and Medina today, therefore this album holds a special significance as a record of the four centuries of Ottoman service to the region.

Scholars from a range of fields tell the story of the Hajj and explain its significance as one of the key events in the Muslim religious calendar. This volume pays attention to the diverse aspects of the Hajj, as lived every year by hundreds of millions of Muslims worldwide.

In Hajj Travelogues: Texts and Contexts from the 12th Century until 1950 Richard van Leeuwen maps the corpus of hajj accounts from the Muslim world and Europe. The work outlines the main issues in a field of study which has largely been neglected. A large number of hajj travelogues are described as a textual type integrating religious discourse into the form of the journey. Special attention is given to their intertextual embedding in the broader discursive tradition of the hajj. Since the corpus is seen as dynamic and responsive to historical developments, the texts are situated in their historical context and the subsequent phases of globalisation. It is shown how in travelogues forms of religious subjectivity are constructed and expressed.

A bold new conceptualization of Islam that reflects its contradictions and rich diversity What is Islam? How do we grasp a human and historical phenomenon characterized by such variety and contradiction? What is "Islamic" about Islamic philosophy or Islamic art? Should we speak of Islam or of islams? Should we distinguish the Islamic (the religious) from the Islamicate (the cultural)? Or should we abandon "Islamic" altogether as an analytical term? In What Is Islam?, Shahab Ahmed presents a bold new conceptualization of Islam that challenges dominant understandings grounded in the categories of "religion" and "culture" or those that privilege law and scripture. He argues that these modes of thinking obstruct us from understanding Islam, distorting it, diminishing it, and rendering it incoherent. What Is Islam? formulates a new conceptual language for analyzing Islam. It presents a new paradigm of how Muslims have historically understood divine revelation—one that enables us to understand how and why Muslims through history have embraced values such as exploration, ambiguity, aestheticization, polyvalence, and relativism, as well as practices such as figural art, music, and even wine drinking as Islamic. It also puts forward a new understanding of the historical constitution of Islamic law and its relationship to philosophical ethics and political theory. A book that is certain to provoke debate and significantly alter our understanding of Islam, What Is Islam? reveals how Muslims have historically conceived of and lived with Islam as norms and truths that are at once contradictory yet coherent.

This book highlights the history of Islamic popular devotional art and visual culture in 20th-century India, weaving the personal narrative of the author’s journey through his understanding of the faith. It begins with an introductory exploration of how the basic and universal image of Mecca and Medina may have been imported into Indian popular print culture and what variants it resulted in here. Besides providing a historical context of the pre-print culture of popular Muslim visuality, the book also explores the impact the 1947 Partition of India may have made on the calendar art in South Asia. A significant portion of the book focuses on the contemporary prints of different localised images found in India and what role these play in the users’ lives, especially in the augmentation of their popular faith and cultural practices. The volume also compares the images published in India with some of those available in Pakistan to reflect different socio-political trajectories. Finally, it discusses why such a vibrant visual culture continues to thrive among South Asian Muslims despite the questions raised by the orthodoxy on its legitimacy in Islam, and why images and popular visual cultures are inevitable for popular piety despite the orthodox Muslims’ increasing dissociation from them. This work is one of the first books on Indian Muslim poster art, with rare images and simple narratives, anecdotes about rituals, ceremonies and cultural traditions running parallel to research findings. This second edition contains a new Afterword that discusses challenges to religious plurality arising on account of changing political landscapes, economic liberalisation, technology and new media, and socio-religious developments. It will appeal to the lay reader as well as the specialist and will be especially useful to researchers and scholars in popular culture, media and cultural studies, visual art and performance studies, and sociology and social anthropology.

Topkapi Palace was the official and primary residence of the Ottoman sultans for almost four centuries of their 624-year reign. This illustrated guide to Topkapi Palace (the heart of a vast transcontinental empire until the mid-nineteenth century) explores Ottoman history, as it relates to specific sections of the palace. Ortayli, a famed Turkish historian and scholar, introduces the audience to the outer and inner sections of the palace as well as the family quarters, providing them with profound background information about their functions, architecture and decorations. His references to the palace customs, people, and particular events present the reader with a living history.

This volume looks at sustainable protection and sustainable use of cultural and natural heritage, particularly in view of the current challenges of the 21st century. For more than 40 years the World Heritage Convention has regulated the protection of the cultural and natural heritage of humankind, particularly in that heritage shall be protected if it is threatened by modern development. The international community has also adopted sustainability and sustainable development, as objectives to facilitate the protection of cultural and natural heritage. Sustainable heritage protection and use must therefore be preserved in the face of the global challenges it faces and must be perceived in terms of societal, political and corresponding economic paradigms.