The Making Of The Medieval Middle East

A bold new religious history of the late antique and medieval Middle East that places ordinary Christians at the center of the story In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. Jack Tannous argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East’s history. What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, Tannous provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East. This provocative book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.

In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. Largely agrarian and illiterate, Christians often called “the simple” outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East's history

Cyrus Schayegh’s socio-spatial history traces how a Eurocentric world economy and European imperialism molded the Middle East from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. Building on this case, he shows that the making of the modern world is best seen as the reciprocal transformation of cities, regions, states, and global networks.

Focusing on routes and journeys throughout medieval Europe and the Middle East in the period between Late Antiquity and the thirteenth century, this multi-disciplinary book draws on travel narratives, chronicles, maps, charters, geographies, and material remains in order to shed new light on the experience of travelling in the Middle Ages. The contributions gathered here explore the experiences of travellers moving between Latin Europe and the Holy Land, between southern Italy and Sicily, and across Germany and England, from a range of disciplinary perspectives. In doing so, they offer unique insights into the experience, conditions, conceptualization, and impact of human movement in medieval Europe. Many essays place a strong emphasis on the methodological problems associated with the study of travel and its traces, and the collection is enhanced by the juxtaposition of scholarly work taking different approaches to this challenge. The papers included here engage in cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary dialogue and are supported by a discursive, contextualizing introduction by the editors.

This selection of papers by scholarly specialists offers an introduction to the history of the book and book culture in West Asia and North Africa from antiquity to the 20th century. The flourishing and long-lived manuscript tradition is discussed in its various aspects - social and economic as well as technical and aesthetic. The very early but abortive introduction of printing - long before Gutenberg - and the eventual, belated acceptance of the printed book and the development of print culture are explored in further groups of papers. Cultural, aesthetic, technological, religious, social, political and economic factors are all considered throughout the volume. Although the articles reflect the predominance in the area of Muslim books - Arabic, Persian and Turkish - the Hebrew, Syriac and Armenian contributions are also discussed. The editor’s introduction provides a survey of the field from the origins of writing to the modern literary and intellectual revivals.

This book seeks to explain the political and religious factors leading to the economic reversal of fortunes between Europe and the Middle East.

This history of Middle Eastern women is the first to survey gender relations in the Middle East from the earliest Islamic period to the present. Outstanding scholars analyze a rich array of sources ranging from histories, biographical dictionaries, law books, prescriptive treatises, and archival records, to the Traditions (hadith) of the Prophet and imaginative works like the Thousand and One Nights, to modern writings by Middle Eastern women and by Western writers. They show that gender boundaries in the Middle East have been neither fixed nor immutable: changes in family patterns, religious rituals, socio-economic necessity, myth and ideology—and not least, women’s attitudes—have expanded or circumscribed women’s roles and behavior through the ages.

This volume focuses on the interplay between urban society and material culture in the medieval and Ottoman Middle East. The history of Jerusalem in the middle ages is discussed by a number of papers as well as Mamluk Tripoli and the urban history of Palestine during the Crusades. The multi-role of the cadi in the Muslim city is illuminated by two studies cases concerning the Fatimid and Mamluk periods. Three aspects of material culture; the production and spread of paper, textiles and the trade in medicinal substances also are dealt with.