There is much controversy over the number of wives attributed to the Prophet Mohammed: various claims range from four to nine or more. On one point, however, everyone agrees: Aishah was his favourite. The story of this remarkable woman has been concealed or ignored for generations. She lived for several decades after the Prophet's death and was deeply involved in the turbulent political conflict that shaped the early Muslim nation. Certainly, Aishah did not conform to any proscription against women in Islamic public life. Having extensively mined scholarly Arabic source material, Abbott nonetheless tells her story in a popular,narrative style. Aishah is not only a gripping tale, but also an attempt to recover part of the lost history of Muslim women who resisted the restrictions Islam sought to impose on them.

This book develops academic understanding of Muslim urban space by pursuing the structural logic of the premodern Arab-Muslim city, or medina. With particular reference to The Book of Walls, an historical discourse of Islamic law whose primary subject is the wall, the book determines the meaning of a wall and then uses it to analyze the space of Fez. One of a growing number of studies to address space as a category of critical analysis, the book makes the following contributions to scholarship. Methodologically, it breaks with the tradition of viewing Islamic architecture as a well-defined object observed by a specialist at an aesthetically directed distance; rather, it inhabits the logic of this architecture by rethinking it discursively from within the culture that produced it. Hermeneutically, it sheds new light on one of North Africa's oldest medinas, and thereby illuminates a type of environment still common to much of the Arab-Muslim world. Empirically, it brings to the attention of mainstream scholarship a legal discourse and aesthetic that contributed to the form and longevity of this type of environment; and it exposes a preoccupation with walls and other limits in premodern urban Arab-Muslim culture, and a mythical paradigm informing the foundation narratives of a number of historic medinas. Presenting a fresh perspective for the understanding of Muslim urban society and thought, this innovative study will be of interest to students and researchers of Islamic studies, architecture and sociology.

This is a detailed yet accessible guide to the way in which religion and politics interacted during the earliest years of Islam. It focuses on the period of the first four caliphs, untangling the crisis of sucession and the subsequent schism between the Sunni and Shi'i movements in Islam, and drawing on a combination of primary documents and scholarship in the field. It includes two appendices featuring original English translations of key source material.

An essay in literary criticism with a difference, addressing the nature of blasphemy and using selected novels by Salman Rushdie, Najib Mahfuz and Nikos Kazantzakis as case studies.