Al Manhal

Examines the socio-cultural history of the regions where Islam took hold between the 7th and 16th century. This two-volume work contains 700 alphabetically arranged entries, and provides a portrait of Islamic civilization. It is of use in understanding the roots of Islamic society as well to explore the culture of medieval civilization.

The history of the Black Sea as a source of Mediterranean slaves stretches from ancient Greek colonies to human trafficking networks in the present day. At its height during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the Black Sea slave trade was not the sole source of Mediterranean slaves; Genoese, Venetian, and Egyptian merchants bought captives taken in conflicts throughout the region, from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, the Balkans, and the Aegean Sea. Yet the trade in Black Sea slaves provided merchants with profit and prestige; states with military recruits, tax revenue, and diplomatic influence; and households with the service of women, men, and children. Even though Genoa, Venice, and the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt and Greater Syria were the three most important strands in the web of the Black Sea slave trade, they have rarely been studied together. Examining Latin and Arabic sources in tandem, Hannah Barker shows that Christian and Muslim inhabitants of the Mediterranean shared a set of assumptions and practices that amounted to a common culture of slavery. Indeed, the Genoese, Venetian, and Mamluk slave trades were thoroughly entangled, with wide-ranging effects. Genoese and Venetian disruption of the Mamluk trade led to reprisals against Italian merchants living in Mamluk cities, while their participation in the trade led to scathing criticism by supporters of the crusade movement who demanded commercial powers use their leverage to weaken the force of Islam. Reading notarial registers, tax records, law, merchants' accounts, travelers' tales and letters, sermons, slave-buying manuals, and literary works as well as treaties governing the slave trade and crusade propaganda, Barker gives a rich picture of the context in which merchants traded and enslaved people met their fate.

Eritrea is located in northeast Africa on the Red Sea coast and boasts one of the oldest human settlements in the region. One-million-year-old human remains have been found in the Danakil Depression in the country, which is home to one of the oldest-written scripts in sub-Saharan Africa: Ge'ez. Eritrea was also pioneer in multi-party democracy in Africa and had a democratic constitution based on United Nations principles in 1952. But it is also home to one of the earliest armed liberation movements in Africa - a conflict that Mohamed Kheir Omer witnessed firsthand, having grown up in Eritrea as a member of the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF). In this book, he traces the history of the country, exploring how ethnicity, religion, geography, colonialism, and other factors have shaped its fate - and what must be done to ensure its people enjoy a brighter future. The history of Eritrea is similar to others on the continent, and its people continue to struggle to build a just, democratic, and inclusive country.

He was a ruthless conqueror, feared throughout Asia, Europe and Africa, and a superb military tactician. Yet he was also a patron of the arts and learning and he turned his capital - Samarkand - into a great city. Arabshah's biography of Tamerlane is that of a contemporary, and was written soon after the events it describes. It is highly detailed and, in contrast to most biographies of Tamerlane, is also highly critical, which makes it especially interesting. It is the major historical source on one of history's great conquerors. This edition carries a new introduction by a leading scholar.

Research on the Mamluk period has so far remained relatively silent about the Mamluk descendants, who are often referred to by the Arabic term awlād al-nās (roughly: children of the elite). After Ulrich Haarmann's fundamental theses, research on this group seems to have paused, in comparison to the study dedicated to other social groups of Mamluk society. This volume brings together the results of an international conference and presents the state of the art in approaching the Mamluk descendants, whose emic perception as a group and social roles were far more differentiated and variable than previously assumed. The contributions shed light on the status of the Mamluk descendants from a variety of viewpoints, including historiographies, archival material, and artifacts produced by Mamluk descendants.

A fairly extensive book of English idiomatic expressions and sayings put into standard Arabic and supported by example sentences.

The central government's power over water, space, and people expanded steadily over time, enabled by increasing oil revenues. The operations of the Arabian American Oil Company proved critical to expansion and to achieving power over the environment. Political authority in Saudi Arabia took shape through global networks of oil, science, and expertise. And, where oil and water were central to the forging of Saudi authoritarianism, they were also instrumental in shaping politics on the ground. Nowhere was the impact more profound than in the oil-rich Eastern Province, where the politics of oil and water led to a yearning for national belonging and to calls for revolution. --

In the United States and Europe, the word "caliphate" has conjured historically romantic and increasingly pernicious associations. Yet the caliphate's significance in Islamic history and Muslim culture remains poorly understood. This book explores the myriad meanings of the caliphate for Muslims around the world through the analytical lens of two key moments of loss in the thirteenth and twentieth centuries. Through extensive primary-source research, Mona Hassan explores the rich constellation of interpretations created by religious scholars, historians, musicians, statesmen, poets, and intellectuals. Hassan fills a scholarly gap regarding Muslim reactions to the destruction of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad in 1258 and challenges the notion that the Mongol onslaught signaled an end to the critical engagement of Muslim jurists and intellectuals with the idea of an Islamic caliphate. She also situates Muslim responses to the dramatic abolition of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924 as part of a longer trajectory of transregional cultural memory, revealing commonalities and differences in how modern Muslims have creatively interpreted and reinterpreted their heritage. Hassan examines how poignant memories of the lost caliphate have been evoked in Muslim culture, law, and politics, similar to the losses and repercussions experienced by other religious communities, including the destruction of the Second Temple for Jews and the fall of Rome for Christians. A global history, Longing for the Lost Caliphate delves into why the caliphate has been so important to Muslims in vastly different eras and places.