Muslims And Others In Early Islamic Society

The interaction between Muslims and the other religious denominations of the Middle East in the period 620-1020 is the subject of this volume. This is arguably the single most important issue in the history of the early Islamic Middle East, since the Muslims were initially a minority in the lands that they had conquered and so had to reach some modus vivendi with the various religious communities in their realm. Fifteen articles by leading scholars shed light on this process from a number of different perspectives: historical, conceptual, legal, social and theological. An introduction both gives an overview and examines possibilities for future research. The period under study is demarcated at one end by the Prophet Muhammed (d. 632) who, as the Qur’an tells us, had to deal with Jews, Christians and polytheists. At the other end lies the great legal/political thinker Manardi (d. ca. 1020), by whose time the Middle East had become substantially Islamicised.

This book traces the journey of new Muslims as they joined the early Islamic community and articulated their identities within it. It focuses on Muslims of slave origins, who belonged to the society in which they lived but whose slave background rendered them somehow alien. How did these Muslims at the crossroads of insider and outsider find their place in early Islamic society? How did Islamic society itself change to accommodate these new members? By analysing how these liminal Muslims resolved the tension between belonging and otherness, Conquered Populations in Early Islam reveals the shifting boundaries of the early Islamic community and celebrates the dynamism of Islamic history.

This book will be immensely helpful to those who wish to orient themselves to what has become a very large body of literature on medieval Islamic history. Combining a bibliographic study with an inquiry into method, it opens with a survey of the principal reference tools available to historians of Islam and a systematic review of the sources they will confront. Problems of method are then examined in a series of chapters, each exploring a broad topic in the social and political history of the Middle East and North Africa between A.D. 600 and 1500. The topics selected represent a cross-section of Islamic historical studies, and range from the struggles for power within the early Islamic community to the life of the peasantry. Each chapter pursues four questions. What concrete research problems are likely to be most challenging and productive? What resources do we possess for dealing with these problems? What strategies can we devise to exploit our resources most effectively? What is the current state of the scholarly literature for the topic under study?

Written in straight-forward language by leading Islamic scholars, 14 essays cover the basics of Islamic faith and practice, the foundations of state and society, the early Muslim empires, Islamic universalism in the later Middle Ages, and the later Muslim empires.

Jacques Waardenburg writes about relations between Muslims and adherents of other religions. After illuminating various aspects of Islam from an outside point of view in his volume "Islam" (published in 2002 by de Gruyter) his second volume changes the perspective: The author shows how Muslims perceived non-Muslims - particularly Christianity and "the West", but also Judaism and Asian religions - in many centuries of religious dialogue and tensions. The main focus is on Muslim minorities in Western countries and on religious dialogues of which he provides first-hand knowledge through his participation in several important dialogue meetings. After 50 years of research and personal involvement, Waardenburg aims at a mutual understanding and reconciliation of Islam and other religions, particularly Christianity, both on an international level as well as on a more local level where "old" and "new", Christian and Muslim Europeans live together.

"This third edition of Ira M. Lapidus's classic A History of Islamic Societies has been substantially revised to incorporate the insights of new scholarship and updated to include historical developments in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Lapidus's history explores the beginnings and transformations of Islamic civilizations in the Middle East and details Islam's worldwide diffusion to Africa, Spain, Turkey and the Balkans, Central, South and Southeast Asia, and North America, situating Islamic societies within their global, political, and economic contexts. It accounts for the impact of European imperialism on Islamic societies and traces the development of the modern national state system and the simultaneous Islamic revival from the early nineteenth century to the present. This book is essential for readers seeking to understand Muslim peoples."--Publisher information.

This is the fifth volume in the series of Papers on Islamic History, prepared in connection with colloquia sponsored jointly by the Near Eastern History Group at Oxford and the Middle East Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The first four volumes dealt respectively with "The Islamic City, Islam and the Trade of Asia, Islamic Civilization 9501150, "and "Studies in Eighteenth Century Islamic History. "The fifth colloquium, which produced "Studies on the First Century of Islamic Society, "was held in Oxford in 1975.Essays in this volume include an Introduction by the editor, G. H. A. Juynboll; Syriac Views of Emergent Islam by S. P. Brock; The Origins of the Muslim Sanctuary at Mecca by G. R. Hawting; The Arab Conquests and the Formation of Islamic Society by I. M. Lapidus; and The Conquerors and the Conquered: Iran by M. G. Moronv.Other essays include On Concessions and Conduct: A Study in Early Hadith by M. J. Kister; Early Development of Kalam by J. van Ess; The Early Development of the Ibadi Movement in Basra by J. C. Wilkinson; Some Imami Interpretations of Umayyad History by E. Kohlberg; On the Origins of Arabic Prose: Reflections of Authenticity by G. H. A. Juynboll; and Some Considerations Concerning the Pre-Islamic and the Islamic Foundations of the Authority of the Caliphate by H. M. T. Nagel."