The years 738-745/121-127, which this volume covers, saw the outbreak in Syria of savage internecine struggles between prominent members of the Umayyad family, which had ruled the Islamic world since 661/41. After the death of the caliph Hishām in 743-/125, the process of decay at the center of the Umayyad power--the ruling family itself--was swift and devastating. Three Umayyad caliphs (al-Walīd II, Yazīd III, and Ibrahim) followed Hishām within little more than a year, and the subsequent intervention of their distant cousin Marwān b. Muhammad (the future Marwān II) could not arrest the forces of opposition that were shortly to culminate in the ʿAbbāsid Revolution of 750/132. In this volume al-Ṭabarī deals extensively with the end of Hishām's reign, providing a rich store of anecdotes on this most able of Umayyad caliphs. He also covers in depth the notorious lifestyle of al-Walīd II, the libertine prince and poet, whose career has attracted much scholarly attention in recent years. Moreover, al-Ṭabarī chronicles at great length the events of the rebellion and death of the Shi'ite pretender, Zayd ibn ʿAlī, at al-Kūfah, as well as recording in detail the activities farther to the east, where Naṣr ibn Sayyār was serving as the last Umayyad governor of Transoxiana and Khurasan, the very area from which the ʿAbbāsid Revolution was to spring. The text also contains several official letters which shed much light on Umayyad propaganda and on early Islamic epistolary style. The hindsight conferred by subsequent centuries highlights the full significance of these half-dozen years or so. Al-Ṭabarī documents the incubation of the ʿAbbāsid Revolution, an event of great importance in world history, and traces the failure of the principal Shi'ite revolt of the eighth century, a debacle which was also to have serious repercussions, for it generated the foundation of Zaydi principalities in Iran and the Yemen. Yet even these major themes are secondary to the epic tale that al-Ṭabarī unfolds of the tragic downfall of the first dynasty in Islam.

The years 738-745/121-127, which this volume covers, saw the outbreak in Syria of savage internecine struggles between prominent members of the Umayyad family, which had ruled the Islamic world since 661/41. After the death of the caliph Hishām in 743-/125, the process of decay at the center of the Umayyad power--the ruling family itself--was swift and devastating. Three Umayyad caliphs (al-Walīd II, Yazīd III, and Ibrahim) followed Hishām within little more than a year, and the subsequent intervention of their distant cousin Marwān b. Muhammad (the future Marwān II) could not arrest the forces of opposition that were shortly to culminate in the ʿAbbāsid Revolution of 750/132. In this volume al-Ṭabarī deals extensively with the end of Hishām's reign, providing a rich store of anecdotes on this most able of Umayyad caliphs. He also covers in depth the notorious lifestyle of al-Walīd II, the libertine prince and poet, whose career has attracted much scholarly attention in recent years. Moreover, al-Ṭabarī chronicles at great length the events of the rebellion and death of the Shi'ite pretender, Zayd ibn ʿAlī, at al-Kūfah, as well as recording in detail the activities farther to the east, where Naṣr ibn Sayyār was serving as the last Umayyad governor of Transoxiana and Khurasan, the very area from which the ʿAbbāsid Revolution was to spring. The text also contains several official letters which shed much light on Umayyad propaganda and on early Islamic epistolary style. The hindsight conferred by subsequent centuries highlights the full significance of these half-dozen years or so. Al-Ṭabarī documents the incubation of the ʿAbbāsid Revolution, an event of great importance in world history, and traces the failure of the principal Shi'ite revolt of the eighth century, a debacle which was also to have serious repercussions, for it generated the foundation of Zaydi principalities in Iran and the Yemen. Yet even these major themes are secondary to the epic tale that al-Ṭabarī unfolds of the tragic downfall of the first dynasty in Islam.

Muqarnas is sponsored by The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Muqarnas 26 contains articles on a variety of topics that span and transcend the geographic and temporal boundaries that have traditionally defined the history of Islamic art and architecture. Contributors include Robert McChesney, Mattia Guidetti, Marcus Schadl, Christian Gruber, Katia Cytryn-Silverman, Doris Abouseif, Olga Bush, Emine Fetvaci, Moya Carey, Bernard O'Kane, Hadi Maktabi, Nadia Erzini and Stephen Vernoit.

This volume is a general survey of the history of Jordan from ancient times to the present. The author covers the major events that took place in this region since ancient times. Starting with the history of the region in Biblical times, the author discusses the major developments in the ancient kingdoms of Edom, Moab, and Amon, which shared common borders with the Hebrew kingdoms. He then provides a detailed coverage of the events that took place during the Nabatean period. The author demonstrates how the character of this region had changed with the rise of Islam and the expansion of the Arabs and their encounter with the Byzantines. In addition, the author demonstrates how the rise of the Mamluk Sultanate affected the region. The author provides a detailed analysis explaining how the Hashemite Kingdom Jordan emerged and how the Ottomans and the British contributed to its rise. In addition to the political developments that took place in this region, the reader will become familiar with the economic, social, and cultural developments which contributed to the emergence of the modern Hashemite Kingdom. The book’s audience includes college undergraduates, graduates, postgraduates, scholars, as well as lay readers with interest in this strategically important region. The book is based on primary and secondary sources written in several languages.

The emergence of the modern Zionist Movement was driven by the search for a homeland in Palestine for the stateless and persecuted Jewish People. The organized migration and settlement of Jewish people under the banner of the World Zionist Organization trampled the fundamental rights of Palestine People and continuously rejected their statehood. The rejectionist policy practiced by Zionists and the State of Israel explains the persistence of the Palestine question. This book devotes to examine the historical origin and evolution of Arab-Israeli conflict from 1881, the year of first Aliya, to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. It investigates socio-political and cultural aspects of the conflict with an emphasis on the historical factors. The book offers a comprehensive and comprehensible analysis of the History of Palestine.

The October 1973 Middle East War transformed the region’s politics and had a huge impact on the international political system as a whole. Arguments about the causes, effects, and meaning of the war and about why it ran its course the way it did have played a key role in shaping the understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict, of American policy in the Middle East, and of many other major issues. For the 50th anniversary of the war, this book grapples with these issues in an objective way by using the mass of declassified material that has recently become available.

Arab cultural discourse has been slow to respond to changing sexual behaviour. The contributors to this collection pick up the slack, ranging across such disciplines as literature, history, sociology and psychology. Is Damascus the 'chastity capital' of the Middle East, where perceptions of wealth and class fuel female rivalries? How do gay men cruise in Beirut? How do young women in Tunis cope with both social pressures to become thin and family pressures to gain weight? What do Lebanese creative-writing students write about sexual practices versus public behaviour? The fresh, compelling research topi covered include masculinity and migration; colonialism and sexual health; fantasy and violence; and domestic workers and sexual tensions. 'Other people's sex lives have always been a source of fascination, and nowhere more so than in the Middle East ... Ground-breaking.' New Statesman

Presented in six principal analytic chapters with supporting appendices, this book explores the role of Islam in precipitating Europe’s twelfth century commercial renaissance. Employing the classic analytic techniques of economics, Gene Heck determines that medieval Europe’s feudal interregnum was largely caused by indigenous governmental business regulation and not by shifts in international trade patterns. He then proceeds by demonstrating how Islamic economic precepts provided the ideological rationales that empowered medieval Europe to escape its three-centuries-long experiment in “Dark Age economics” ― in the process, providing the West with its archetypic tools of capitalism. While treatises such as Maxime Rodinson’s excellent book, Islam and Capitalism, document the capitalistic nature of the Islamic economic system, in applying modern economic method to medieval orientalist historiography, this work is unique in capturing both the evolution and the impact of the system’s role in forging medieval history.

Demonstrating that history is always political, Shapira (Zionism, Tel Aviv U., Israel) and Penslar (history, U. of Toronto, Canada) present nine works of historiography, examining the production of Zionist history in Israel and attacks upon its formulations of the past that came from both left and right perspective within the circle of Israeli historians. An effort has been made to include contributors from all three of these perspectives. The contributions are all based on papers first presented at conferences sharing the same name as the text, held in January and February of 2001 in Tel Aviv and New York. Distributed in the US by ISBS. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The resurgence of Palestinian nationalism in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war tended to overshadow the fact that Palestinian national consciousness is not a new phenomenon, but traces its origins back to the time when the first stirrings of nationalism were being felt in many parts of the under-developed world. This work, first published in 1974, is based on both Arabic and Hebrew primary sources as well as English and French official and unofficial documents, and was the first detailed study of the infancy period of Palestinian nationalism. The book begins by establishing the position of Palestine and Jerusalem in Islamic history and their significance within the concepts of Islam, and outlines the social and political features of the Palestinian population at the beginning of the First World War. The author then charts in detail the development of Palestinian nationalism over the decade after the War. Two major forces influenced this development and reacted with it: Zionism, with its ambitious schemes for settling Jews in Palestine and creating a National Home for them there, and Arab nationalism on a wider scale, which was emerging spontaneously with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the spreading of ideas of self-determination. The growing threat posed by Zionism awoke the Palestinian population to the need for organization and the establishment of their own identity to oppose it, while the focus of their national aspirations widened or narrowed according to the ability which they felt at any given time to confront Zionism and achieve self-expression within a Palestinian rather than an all-Syrian national framework. The events of these turbulent years – the confrontations with the British, delegations, boycotts, proposals and rejections, the emergence of al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the Wailing Wall conflict and its repercussions – are all described within the context of these wider considerations, which also include Britain’s own role as holder of the Mandate over Palestine.