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Shi'i Muslims believe that by divine decree, at a place called Ghadir Khumm, the Prophet Muhammad declared his cousin and son-in-law 'Ali as his successor, and the first in a lineage of Imams to whom the Muslim community should owe its allegiance. The Ismaili branch of the Prophet's descendants founded the Fatimid Empire, which claimed dominion over much of the Muslim world, and later established a state administered from the fortress of Alamut. The Mongol onslaught devastated the Ismailis, and it was long believed that the Imams and their community had been annihilated. Only in recent times has the community's continued existence become apparent, but research into the lost centuries of their history has just begun.

An account of the transformation of the Middle East as a result of the rise of Islam, the Arab conquest of the region and the establishment of the Umayyad Empire, especially as it affected Jerusalem and Palestine, including a discussion of what little can be gleaned about John's own life.

Al-Ma'mūn admired the Umayyad clan's picturesque ruins, then settled down to a picnic of wine and bazmāward, a roast meat and white bread delicacy of Iranian origin, fit for a bazm, as its name suggests. The Kitāb al-aghānī now comes quickly to the point, which is a resounding gaffe made by the well-known singer 'Allūya. This chapter mentions that nostalgia for the incident might be stirred by the sight of an abandoned country house sheltered by ancient trees. But in the West, their kingdom still endured, and with it something of the diversity and inventiveness of late antique Syria, as it had survived even under the caliphate.

This chapter details attempts on the part of the East Roman or Byzantine Empire to reverse the Arab conquests. Efforts on the part of the Emperors Constans II and Justinian II to restore Roman control to the occupied territories are examined in detail, and the reasons for their failure elucidated. As divisions within the Arab elite were surmounted, the new political order in the Near East achieved a measure of stability and the world of the Caliphate acquired a more coherent and cohesive identity. The Arab conquest of North Africa effectively put an end to hopes for Byzantine revival, and the war-torn Empire of Constantinople itself entered a period of major internal cultural, ideological, and organizational reconfiguration. With Byzantine control of the central Mediterranean dislocated, the societies of the West would now follow new paths of development

This chapter is a comparative study of early and late exegeses of Qur’an 22:39-40 and of the specific historical circumstances in which they were generated. The focus is on what this changing hermeneutic trajectory might have to tell us about the complex relationships of Muslims with the People of the Book through time in Islamic realms. It will also explore how the rise of the imperial Umayyad and Abbasid states and realpolitik in the context of relations with non-Muslim (particularly Byzantine) realms may have accounted for many of these transformations.

This chapter examines the origins and meanings of the words manār and manāra, from which the word ‘minaret’ derives. It discusses how Umayyad and early Abbasid patrons built tall and slender towers that visually and symbolically framed the mosques of Medina and Mecca, and perhaps Jerusalem; the Abbasids also erected towers to serve as guideposts along the pilgrimage road between Iraq and the Hijaz.

Capital punishment can be understood as simultaneously an exercise of actual power – the ending of a human life – and an exertion of symbolic, or ritual, power.1 In this combination of symbolic transformation with real physical change, executions are unusual rituals. But the use of extreme violence against the human body certainly does have ritual characteristics, in that it has established rules (which may, of course, be deliberately challenged or broken) and in that these rules are used to make the drastic transformation in the status of the executed party seem legitimate and proper, to reassert more general ideas about the correct social order and to communicate threats and warnings to others who might seek to upset it. The victim of the execution is quite literally marked out as beyond reintegration into society. Their body becomes a kind of text, which can be read in a multitude of ways: the authorities carrying out the killing usually have one set of messages in mind, but the victim themselves, and those who witness or remember the act, may have very different ideas.

Arab women writers draw on a rich, ancient heritage, which stretches back to civilizations that flourished in the region before the Islamic conquest. Al-Khansa' emerges positively in the culture; others were ostracized and held up as the epitome of wickedness and depravity. In later periods—the 'Abbasid, Umayyad, and Andalusian eras—biographical dictionaries and literary encyclopedias are filled with the names of hundreds of women, including female poets. Arab women's writing has dealt with a diversity of themes addressed in various styles, although historical concerns and an awareness of a double burden remains a basic theme in their writing. Writing women from various Arab countries are growing daily more aware of the exigencies of thoughtful, artistic writing, going beyond pure ideological criteria and fragile, direct moralizing or didacticism.

This chapter discusses the huge and rapid military expansion of the Arab Umayyads and its impact on genders. It resulted in the creation of massive numbers of women taken as slaves- sabaya- which was permitted according to the classical reading of the Qur’an. Men on the other hand, refuse to apply the same right of women according to the Qur’an. The only woman to come forward to fight Umayyad invasion, was Queen Dihya of the Berbers in North Africa. The Umayyad failed to learn from such model, and Muslims who came afterwards did not attempt to follow such example of women rulers. The Umayyads tried to follow the Prophet’s model of political marriage to boost their rule, using women as a trophy. Caliph al-Walid II created his realm of desires gathering thousands of concubines around him, which some had limited political influence. On the other hands, one see the usage of eunuchs as guards to the harem section, following the Prophet’s model.

This chapter focuses on two forms of punishment during the early Umayyad period: public humiliation and banishment. These two forms of punishment are especially, although not exclusively, associated with offenses involving questions of gender and sex. They are also frequently paired despite of the apparent contradiction between displaying offenders to the public at large and hiding them away in remote places for exile. Public humiliation or tashhīr and banishment nafy were used as measures against the poet's tashbib, transgressions against the line of gender segregation, and hija to maintain the social and moral fabric of the Muslim society. Although the measures such as banishment and public humiliation did not fit comfortably into the moral system of the shari'a developed by the jurisprudents, these forms of punishments were seen as effective measures for persevering public morality. These two forms of punishment had the effect of casting out the offender from a respectable society, however, banishment was a failed experiment as it merely moved the offender from one part of the Islamic community to another. However, this form of exile gradually changed when banishments to remote places and imprisonments began to take place.

The evidence for caliphal accession and succession became plentiful after the victory of the Marwanid Umayyads in the second civil war (683–92). However, what evidence there is for the Sufyanid Umayyad period indicates that many aspects of the Marwanid ritual had precedents in late-seventh-century practice. Indeed the reign of Mu،awiya b. Abi Sufyan and his son Yazid can be seen as a period of experimentation with the trappings of Near Eastern monarchy and the prelude to the establishment of a more successful Islamic state by their Marwanid cousins after the second fitna of 683 to 692. This is evident in the account of the rituals of Mu،awiya's accession and in the efforts to establish Yazid b. Mu،awiya as the successor. This chapter examines the Syriac account of Mu،awiya's accession. It also discusses the efforts to secure the succession of Yazid as Mu،awiya's successor. Discussed as well in this chapter are the: Sufyanid accessional ritual and the basis for Sufyanid support; dynastic succession; and succession at the Sufyanid court as seen in poetries of their time.

It seems legitimate to enquire what the court taste of which Quṣayr 'Amra is a typical example can tell us about the broader cultural identity and aspirations of the Umayyad elite and, to the extent that that elite was representative, of the Arab conquerors generally. The eye of the student of Quṣayr 'Amra is caught especially by the art of Coptic Egypt. Evidence for Sasanian art being as deficient as that for Coptic is abundant; the Iranian element at Quṣayr 'Amra is correspondingly elusive. It is true that art produced under the Umayyads outside Syria might be less eclectic. Umayyad art often seems awkward and ill digested; yet there is a chemistry, however wild, between its elements. The thematic abundance of Quṣayr 'Amra's paintings may be in part a meditation on precisely this cultural encounter and economic conjuncture.

This chapter focuses on a set of Arabic stories from the Umayyad period (661–750) that were further elaborated in the literature of the Abbasid period (750–1258). These tales about chaste lovers typically feature a pastoral setting, a male point of view, a melancholy mood, and lovers who live, suffer, and die for love—providing delight for the court audiences for whom they were performed. Not all stories about chaste love, however, fit the dominant paradigm, and unusual cases can shed light on ways in which the Umayyads were viewed in the Abbasid imagination, point to intersections between love story and political life, and show how stories of chaste love live on in courtly, orthodox Islamic, and Sufi discourse.

This introductory chapter argues that despite the numerous accounts of the political history of Umayyad al-Andalus, its relationship to the Jewish and Christian communities under its rule can be viewed only from scattered evidence in the Arabic–Islamic literary sources. Given the limitations of literary sources, the book turns to early Andalusi and Maghribi Maliki legal texts for evidence that could contribute to a deeper understanding of life in al-Andalus. It presents an examination of Islamic legal texts as sources for understanding intercommunal relations in a legal and historical context. The chapter discusses the conceptualization, expression, and imposition of boundaries by rulers, judges, and jurists, and looks at boundary testing as a mechanism for the transmutation and the continuity of regular social practices.

This chapter presents an overview of the establishment of Umayyad authority in al-Andalus during the ninth and tenth centuries. It examines how political identity is expressed in religious terms and how the political and religious authorities worked together in determining who was an insider or an outsider to the Muslim community. Particularly, the principles of Umayyad dynastic legitimacy and authority, as well as the regime's exercise of power, structured Umayyad rule and the political culture of al-Andalus in the ninth and tenth centuries. The chapter aims to provide a political context for understanding social and legal boundary making in al-Andalus, as well as to elaborate the role played by the ruling dynasty in defining political community.

In this chapter readers delve deeper into the inner world of commentary and fine-grained commentarial reasoning, while keeping in mind the complex social and historical milieu of late Umayyad Andalusia, in which the Maliki legal orthodoxy sought to maintain dominance amid the fragmenting caliphate in Cordoba, the nascent Zahiri opposition, and the rapid growth of traditionism throughout Andalusia and North Africa. In the case of discretionary punishment (ta’zir), which the Maliki orthodoxy in Andalusia had firmly established as unrestricted, this chapter explores how Maliki judges like al-Muhallab (d. 1044) and Ibn Battal (d. 1057) reconciled a cluster of hadith that claimed to restrict discretionary punishment to ten lashes. In doing so, this chapter tracks the how debates evolved from an approach that dismissed the “ten lashes” hadith in favor of the orthodoxy’s unrestricted discretion to an approach that conceded to traditionalists that the “ten lashes” hadith was authoritative but, contra Zahiri critics, corralled its meaning in favor of broad judicial discretion.