The Power Of Oratory In The Medieval Muslim World

A remarkable book analysing the importance of oratory for transmitting religious knowledge, legitimising rulers and inculcating moral values in the medieval Islamic world.

Oratory and sermons had a fixed place in the religious and civic rituals of pre-modern Muslim societies and were indispensable for transmitting religious knowledge, legitimising or challenging rulers and inculcating the moral values associated with being part of the Muslim community. While there has been abundant scholarship on medieval Christian and Jewish preaching, Linda G. Jones's book is the first to consider the significance of the tradition of pulpit oratory in the medieval Islamic world. Traversing Iberia and North Africa from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, the book analyses the power of oratory, the ritual juridical and rhetorical features of pre-modern sermons and the social profiles of the preachers and orators who delivered them. The biographical and historical sources, which form the basis of this remarkable study, shed light on different regional practices and the juridical debates between individual preachers around correct performance.

The Mediterranean and its hinterlands were the scene of intensive and transformative contact between cultures in the Middle Ages. From the seventh to the seventeenth century, the three civilizations into which the region came to be divided geographically – the Islamic Khalifate, the Byzantine Empire, and the Latin West – were busily redefining themselves vis-à-vis one another. Interspersed throughout the region were communities of minorities, such as Christians in Muslim lands, Muslims in Christian lands, heterodoxical sects, pagans, and, of course, Jews. One of the most potent vectors of interaction and influence between these communities in the medieval world was inter-religious conversion: the process whereby groups or individuals formally embraced a new religion. The chapters of this book explore this dynamic: what did it mean to convert to Christianity in seventh-century Ireland? What did it mean to embrace Islam in tenth-century Egypt? Are the two phenomena comparable on a social, cultural, and legal level? The chapters of the book also ask what we are able to learn from our sources, which, at times, provide a very culturally-charged and specific conversion rhetoric. Taken as a whole, the compositions in this volume set out to argue that inter-religious conversion was a process that was recognizable and comparable throughout its geographical and chronological purview.

This book is the first on the history of both physical and mental disabilities in the Middle East and North Africa during Ottoman rule.

An innovative exploration of the local histories of the Persianate world and its preoccupation with identity, authority, and legitimacy.

A new understanding of the transformation of Anatolia to a Muslim society in the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries based on previously unpublished sources.

This pioneering research brings into focus the Islamic contribution and influence in the development of the modern law of the sea.