Views From The Edge

by Yavari, Neguin

• ISBN13: 9780231134729
• ISBN10: 023113472X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-11-30
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr

Summary

These essays were written by colleagues and former students of Richard Bulliet, the scholar and mentor whose "most important contribution remains his extraordinary imagination in the service of history." The hallmark of "Views from the Edge," then, is innovative scholarship in all periods of Islamic history. Its authors share a commitment to asking original historiographical questions, with an overall orientation toward issues in social history. Topics in methodology and narrative strategies form the focus of several articles in the medieval period, including the use of biblical metaphors and the portraiture of a courtesan to competing paradigms of legitimacy in the mid-eighth century. European encounters with Islam in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries and the contemporary practice of horsemanship pertain to the early modern period, while reactions to the Balfour Declaration, Islamism in the early twentieth century, the Middle East in crime fiction, and the use of the pre-Islamic past as nationalist propaganda are among the themes dealing with recent history.

Table of Contents

Introductions
Preface	vii
Neguin Yavari, Lawrence G. Potter, Jean-Marc Ran Oppenheirn
Doing It: Richard W. Bulliet and Islamic Studies	ix
Fred Donner (University of Chicago)
Richard W. Bulliet: Personal Observations	xix
Leila Fawaz (Tufts University)
Richard W. Bulliet: Bibliography	xxi
About the Contributors	xxxiii
Essays
Trading Diaspora, State Building and the Idea of National Interest	3	(16)
Ina Baghdiantz-McCabe (Tufts University)
Palestinian and Jordanian Views of the Balfour Declaration	19	(8)
Alexander Bligh (College of Judea and Samaria)
Standards of Living in East and West: England and Egypt Before and After the Black Death	27	(18)
Stuart J. Borsch (Assumption College)
Ancient Iranian Ideas in a Modern Context: Aspects of Royal Legitimacy Under Muhammad Riza Shah Pahlavi	45	(18)
Jamsheed K. Choksy (Indiana University)
A Note on Biblical Narrative and `Abbasid History	63	(7)
Tayeb El-Hibri (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Historical Patterns of Higher Education for Women in Morocco Since Independence	70	(16)
Patricia C. Gloster-Coates (Pace University)
'Arib al-Ma'muniya: A Third/Ninth Century Abbasid Courtesan	86	(15)
Matthew S. Gordon (Miami University)
The Ideas of Amir Shakib Arslan Before and After the Collapse of the Ottoman Empire	101	(15)
Mahmoud Haddad (Balamand University)
City Administration in Hafez's Shiraz	116	(25)
John Limbert (United States Department of State)
From Artistic Endeavor to Economic Enterprise; Horsemanship from the 18th to the 20th Centuries	141	(13)
Jean-Marc Ran Oppenheim (Marymount College of Fordham University)
Capturing Imagination: The Buja and Medieval Islamic mappa mundi	154	(30)
Karen C. Pinto (American University of Beirut)
Herat Under the Karts: Social and Political Forces	184	(24)
Lawrence G. Potter (Columbia University)
Khurasan and the Crises of Legitimacy: A Comparative Historiographical Perspective	208	(22)
Parvaneh Pourshariati (University of Ohio)
Women in the Sectarian Politics of Lebanon	230	(10)
Sofia Saada (Lebanese University)
Islam, Italy's Internal Frontier	240	(15)
Ariel Salzmann (Queen's University, Ontario)
The Rise of the Ottoman Empire: The Black Death in Medieval Anatolia and its Impact on Turkish Civilization	255	(25)
Uli Schamiloglu (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
"The Tomb of the Twelfth Imam" and Other Tales of Crime	280	(11)
Reeva Spector Simon (Columbia University)
Islam on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Voltaire's Mahomet Crosses the Atlantic	291	(13)
Denise A. Spellberg (University of Texas, Austin)
The Gendered Edge of Islam	304	(18)
Elizabeth Thompson (University of Virginia)
Polysemous Texts and Reductionist Readings: Women and Heresy in the Siyar al-Muluk	322
Neguin Yavari (Columbia University)