Women And The Holy City

Addresses the central role of Jewish and Muslim women's movements at the heart of the struggle over Jerusalem's sacred spaces.

The untold story of a trailblazing dynasty of royal women who ruled the Middle East and how they persevered through instability and seize greater power. In 1187 Saladin's armies besieged the holy city of Jerusalem. He had previously annihilated Jerusalem's army at the battle of Hattin, and behind the city's high walls a last-ditch defence was being led by an unlikely trio - including Sibylla, Queen of Jerusalem. They could not resist Saladin, but, if they were lucky, they could negotiate terms that would save the lives of the city's inhabitants. Queen Sibylla was the last of a line of formidable female rulers in the Crusader States of Outremer. Yet for all the many books written about the Crusades, one aspect is conspicuously absent: the stories of women. Queens and princesses tend to be presented as passive transmitters of land and royal blood. In reality, women ruled, conducted diplomatic negotiations, made military decisions, forged alliances, rebelled, and undertook architectural projects. Sibylla's grandmother Queen Melisende was the first queen to seize real political agency in Jerusalem and rule in her own right. She outmanoeuvred both her husband and son to seize real power in her kingdom, and was a force to be reckoned with in the politics of the medieval Middle East. The lives of her Armenian mother, her three sisters, and their daughters and granddaughters were no less intriguing. Queens of Jerusalem is a stunning debut by a rising historian and a rich revisionist history of Medieval Palestine.

Women's role in crusades and crusading examined through a close investigation of the narratives in which they appear. Narratives of crusading have often been overlooked as a source for the history of women because of their focus on martial events, and perceptions about women inhibiting the recruitment and progress of crusading armies. Yet women consistently appeared in the histories of crusade and settlement, performing a variety of roles. While some were vilified as "useless mouths" or prostitutes, others undertook menial tasks for the army, went on crusade with retinuesof their own knights, and rose to political prominence in the Levant and and the West. This book compares perceptions of women from a wide range of historical narratives including those eyewitness accounts, lay histories andmonastic chronicles that pertained to major crusade expeditions and the settler society in the Holy Land. It addresses how authors used events involving women and stereotypes based on gender, family role, and social status in writing their histories: how they blended historia and fabula, speculated on women's motivations, and occasionally granted them a literary voice in order to connect with their audience, impart moral advice, and justify the crusade ideal. Dr NATASHA R. HODGSON teaches at Nottingham Trent University.

The Global City & the Holy City explores the local embodied knowledge of women and men of different national, cultural and ethnic identities and age groups, living in London and Jerusalem. Their narratives focus on the three main concepts of Comfort, Belonging and Commitment to the various spaces in which they live. By deconstructing the meanings of these three notions and analyzing their expression in cognitive temporal maps, The Global City & The Holy City examines the practicalities of incorporating this kind of local embodied knowledge into the professional planning and management of cities in the age of globalization.

This book provides an unprecedented portrayal of a lively shari'a court in contemporary West Jerusalem, which belongs to the Israeli legal system but serves Palestinian residents of the eastern part of the city. It draws a rich picture of an intriguing institution, operating in an environment marked by legal pluralism and by exceptional political and cultural tensions. The book suggests an organizational-institutional approach to legal pluralism, which examines not only the relations between bodies of law but also the relations between courts of law serving the same population. Based on participant observations in the studied court as well as on textual and legal analyses of court cases and rulings, the study combines history and ethnography, diachronic and synchronic perspectives, and examines broad, macro-political processes as well as micro-level interactions. The book offers fresh perspectives on the phenomenon of legal pluralism, on shari'a law in practice and on Palestinian-Israeli relations in the divided city of Jerusalem. The work is a valuable resource for academics and researchers working in the areas of Legal Pluralism, Islamic Law, and socio-legal history of the Middle East.

Reprint of the original. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.

Reprint of the original. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.

Every year since 1968, when she made her first pilgrimage to the city, Ann Madsen has returned to Jerusalem. In the course of her many visits, and of the five years she spent there as a resident, Madsen became intimately familiar with the city she had loved at first sight. Yet as she came to know the women of Jerusalem--Muslims, Jews and Christians--she wondered at their courage and persistence. "Why do they stay here through war after war?" she asked herself. How were these women able to maintain their vision, their hope, in the midst of perpetual conflict and danger? The result of her questioning is this primer for peace, illustrated by the lives of twelve women who have made their homes and lives in this troubled and beloved city. The twelve women profiled in this book represent thousands of women who live and work every day in Jerusalem, where, without waiting for political negotiations to succeed, they have found their own ways to make peace.