Books in the Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization series

Jerusalem was never just another Ottoman town, but in the heyday of the Ottoman Empire it displayed many of the characteristics of a Muslim traditional society. Professor Cohen uses the Arabic and Turkish archives to reconstruct a vivid and detailed picture of everyday life in this lively urban centre.

This study of two contrasting towns in Anatolia focuses on their domestic environment. Through her use of documents from the kadi registers of Ankara and Kayseri, Dr Faroqui follows changes in patterns of house ownership over approximately a century. The urban society thus revealed differs from the patterns generally associated with the 'Islamic city' model.

Through a study of the Islamic patronate, this book tests the hypothesis that Roman law was a formative influence on Islamic law. It concludes that Roman law contributed only in so far as it was part and parcel of the rather different legal practice of the Near Eastern provinces.

By examining a wide range of Arabic and Persian literature from the eighth to the thirteenth century, this 1997 book shows the tension that existed between the traditional egalitarian ideal of early Islam, and the hierarchical impulses of the classical period.

How was the use of violence against Muslims explained and justified in medieval Islam? What role did state punishment play in delineating the private from the public sphere? What strategies were deployed to cope with the suffering caused by punishment? These questions are explored in Christian Lange's in-depth study of the phenomenon of punishment, both divine and human, in eleventh-to-thirteenth-century Islamic society. The book examines the relationship between state and society in meting out justice, Muslim attitudes to hell and the punishments that were in store in the afterlife, and the legal dimensions of punishment. The cross-disciplinary approach embraced in this study, which is based on a wide variety of Persian and Arabic sources, sheds light on the interplay between theory and practice in Islamic criminal law, and between executive power and the religious imagination of medieval Muslim society at large.

A fascinating account of the official methods of communication employed in the Near East from pre-Islamic times to the Mamluk period. This is a long-awaited contribution to the history of pre-modern communications systems in the Near Eastern world.

The empire of the Qara Khitai, one of the least known dynasties in the history of Central Asia, existed for nearly a century before it was conquered by the Mongols in 1218. Michal Biran considers its political, institutional and cultural histories.

This volume examines the monetary history of the Ottoman empire from the fourteenth century until the end of World War I. It also discusses the implications of monetary developments for social and political history. This is an important book by one of the most distinguished economic historians in the field.

In this 2005 book, Ruby Lal explores domestic life and the place of women in the Mughal court of the sixteenth century. Challenging traditional interpretations of the haram, she reveals a complex society where noble men and women negotiated their everyday life and political affairs in the 'inner' chambers and the 'outer' courts.

This book attempts to identify elements of mannerism and classicism in medieval Arabic poetry. Instead of focusing on rhetorical devices, as is conventional in such studies, the author carries out a structuralist analysis of complete poems.

A survey of an entire tradition of historical thought and writing across a span of eight hundred years.

This book is an intellectual biography of Muhammad al-Shawkani, one of the founding fathers of Islamic reformism, and a history of the transition from traditional Shiism to Sunni reformism in pre-modern Yemen. The book demonstrates how Shawkani's ideas remain of central importance to modern Islamic thinking.

For over half a millennium the Mamluks wielded power over Egypt. During this time they formed a remarkable political, military and economic elite, ruling as sovereigns from 1250 to 1517. In this book, distinguished scholars provide an accessible introduction to the structure of political power under the Mamluks and its economic foundations.

In this 1996 study of military society in Ottoman Egypt, Jane Hathaway contends that the basic framework within which this elite operated was the household, a conglomerate of patron-client ties. This pioneering study will have a major impact on the understanding of Egyptian history, and will be essential reading for scholars in the field, and for pre-modern historians generally.

This study describes and explains the revolutionary changes which transformed the agricultural life of the Islamicized world in the four centuries following the early Arab conquests. Professor Watson discusses eighteen crops - from sorghum and rye to the watermelon - which spread through the Near East and North Africa during this period.

Why and under what circumstances did the religion of Islam emerge in a remote part of Arabia at the beginning of the seventh century? Traditional scholarship maintains that Islam developed in opposition to the idolatrous and polytheistic religion of the Arabs of Mecca and the surrounding regions. In this study of pre-Islamic Arabian religion, G. R. Hawting adopts a comparative religious perspective to suggest an alternative view. By examining the various bodies of evidence which survive from this period, the Koran and the vast resources of the Islamic tradition, the author argues that in fact Islam arose out of conflict with other monotheists whose beliefs and practices were judged to fall short of true monotheism and were, in consequence, attacked polemically as idolatry. The author is adept at unravelling the complexities of the source material, and students and scholars will find his argument both engaging and persuasive.

This book considers the importance of the silk trade in Safavid Iran and its commercial relationship with its European neighbours. Theoretical and innovative, it makes a major contribution to debates on the social and economic history of the pre-modern world.

In the Middle Ages, Damascus was one of the most important cities of Eurasia. Michael Chamberlain focuses on the city to develop a new approach to the relationship between society and culture in the medieval Middle East.

This is the first book-length study of the ideas and teachings of the leading tenth-century Ismaili theoretician Abu Ya'qub al-Sijistani.

Yossef Rapoport explores the prevalence of divorce in medieval Islamic society. In so doing, he reveals that women possessed a surprising level of economic independence which they manipulated to initiate divorce as often as men. The book makes a significant contribution to the social history of an understudied period.

Thomas Allsen's latest book breaks new scholarly boundaries in its exploration of cultural and scientific exchanges across Mongol Eurasia. Contrary to popular belief, Mongol rulers were intensely interested in the culture of their sedentary subjects and, under their auspices, commodities, ideologies and technologies were disseminated from East to West.

First published in 2000, Chase Robinson's book takes account of the research available in early Islamic history, interweaving history and historiography to interpret the political, social and economic transformations in the Mesopotamian region after the Islamic conquests. This is a sophisticated study in a burgeoning field in Islamic studies.

Masters explores the evolution of Christian and Jewish communities in the Ottoman empire over four hundred years. Early communities lived with the hierarchy of Muslim law, but the nineteenth century marked the beginning of tensions between Muslims and Christians and the twentieth-century rhetoric of religious fundamentalism.

In a unique study of rural administration in the Ottoman Empire, Amy Singer explores the relationship between Palestinian peasants and Ottoman provincial officials around Jerusalem in the mid-sixteenth century.