Arab Dress, A Short History
Arab Dress, A Short History

Author: Norman Stillman

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2022-06-08

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9004491627

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This richly illustrated volume is a historical and ethnographic study of one important aspect of Arab and Islamic material culture - clothing. While in part descriptive, its principal focus is on the evolution and transformations of modes of dress over the past 1400 years throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and for the Middle Ages, Islamic Spain. Arab clothing is treated as part of an Islamic vestimentary system and is discussed within the context of the social, religious, esthetic, and political trends of each age. In addition to the five historical chapters, three chapters are devoted to major themes of Arab costume history - the dress code for non-Muslims, the important socio-economic and political institution of luxury fabrics and garments of honor, and the most well-known and frequently misunderstood institution of veiling.

Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt
Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt

Author: Eve Krakowski

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2019-03-19

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0691191638

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Much of what we know about life in the medieval Islamic Middle East comes from texts written to impart religious ideals or to chronicle the movements of great men. How did women participate in the societies these texts describe? What about non-Muslims, whose own religious traditions descended partly from pre-Islamic late antiquity? Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt approaches these questions through Jewish women’s adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). Using hundreds of everyday papers preserved in the Cairo Geniza, Eve Krakowski follows the lives of girls from different social classes—rich and poor, secluded and physically mobile—as they prepared to marry and become social adults. She argues that the families on whom these girls depended were more varied, fragmented, and fluid than has been thought. Krakowski also suggests a new approach to religious identity in premodern Islamic societies—and to the history of rabbinic Judaism. Through the lens of women’s coming-of-age, she demonstrates that even Jews who faithfully observed rabbinic law did not always understand the world in rabbinic terms. By tracing the fault lines between rabbinic legal practice and its practitioners’ lives, Krakowski explains how rabbinic Judaism adapted to the Islamic Middle Ages. Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt offers a new way to understand how women took part in premodern Middle Eastern societies, and how families and religious law worked in the medieval Islamic world.

When Women Ruled the World
When Women Ruled the World

Author: Kara Cooney

Publisher: National Geographic Society

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 1426219776

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"Explores the lives of six remarkable female pharaohs, from Hatshe psut to Cleopatra--women who ruled with real power ... What was so special about ancient Egypt that provided women this kind of access to the highest political office? What was it about these women that allowed them to transcend patriarchal obstacles? What did Egypt gain from its liberal reliance on female leadership, and could today's world learn from its example?"--

A Mediterranean Society
A Mediterranean Society

Author: Shelomo Dov Goitein

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1967

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 9780520048690

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"One of the best comprehensive histories of a culture in this century."--Amos Funkenstein, Stanford University

Women and Miracle Stories
Women and Miracle Stories

Author: Anna Korte

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-11-13

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 9047402871

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This book contains a multidisciplinary collection of studies on women in miracle stories found in texts ranging from religious classics to contemporary literary fiction. Miracle stories are a genre of great importance for the study of women's religious inheritance and for the historical and cultural understanding of women as 'makers of faith'. Miracle stories are very generally speaking more open to popular religion and culture than, for instance, doctrinal and official ecclesiastical texts, and as such, they can be of special interest to the study of women's lives and religious aspirations. Remarkably, up till now this genre has not been looked at from this point of view. This book aims to open this field for further research by presenting case studies from diverse angles and disciplines. Some of the questions this book tries to answer are: What do miracle stories specifically tell us about women? Are there some (types of) miracles that are in particular related to (certain groups of) women? What do these stories tell us about women as performers and/or subjects of miracles? What can be said about the social function and religious meaning of miracles by specifically looking at the way certain groups of women are practising and experiencing miracles? By including research on miracle stories in contemporary fiction written by women this book also wants to acknowledge and research the disputed status of 'miracles' as well of 'women' in our present society which is moving from modernity to post-modernity. Please note that Women and Miracle Stories is previously published by Brill in hardback (ISBN 90 04 16681 8, still available).

The Jews of Medieval Islam
The Jews of Medieval Islam

Author: Daniel Frank

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-10-11

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 9004493239

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This volume contains fifteen articles on the communal, social, and intellectual life of medieval Jewry in Islamic lands. The book is divided into three parts. Part I, 'Communities and Their Leaders' is devoted to the old Babylonian center in the East and the Andalusian community in the West. Part II, 'Self-Perceptions and Attitudes Towards Others' investigates the ways in which medieval Jews living under Islam viewed their gentile neighbours and expressed their own identity. Part III, 'Religious Philosophy, Mysticism, and Spirituality in Islam and Judaism' explores the impact of Islamic thought on the Jewish intellectual tradition. The collection depicts a civilization at once unified and diverse, revealing both consistent patterns of leadership and scholarship as well as distinctively local identities and collective memories.

The Cambridge Global History of Fashion: Volume 1
The Cambridge Global History of Fashion: Volume 1

Author: Christopher Breward

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-07-31

Total Pages: 849

ISBN-13: 1108851487

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Volume I surveys the long history of fashion from the ancient world to c. 1800. The volume seeks to answer fundamental questions on the origins of fashion, challenging Eurocentric explanations that the emergence of fashion was a European phenomenon and shows instead that fashion found early expressions across the globe well before the age of European colonialism and imperialism. It sheds light on how fashion was experienced in a multitude of ways depending on class, gender, and race, and despite geographical distance, fashion connected populations across the globe. Fashions flowered and were reseeded, through entanglements of empire, forced and voluntary migration, evolving racial systems, burgeoning sea travel and transcontinental systems.

Routledge Revivals: Medieval Islamic Civilization (2006)
Routledge Revivals: Medieval Islamic Civilization (2006)

Author: Josef Meri

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-01-12

Total Pages: 1790

ISBN-13: 1351668226

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Islamic civilization flourished in the Middle Ages across a vast geographical area that spans today's Middle and Near East. First published in 2006, Medieval Islamic Civilization examines the socio-cultural history of the regions where Islam took hold between the 7th and 16th centuries. This important two-volume work contains over 700 alphabetically arranged entries, contributed and signed by international scholars and experts in fields such as Arabic languages, Arabic literature, architecture, history of science, Islamic arts, Islamic studies, Middle Eastern studies, Near Eastern studies, politics, religion, Semitic studies, theology, and more. Entries also explore the importance of interfaith relations and the permeation of persons, ideas, and objects across geographical and intellectual boundaries between Europe and the Islamic world. This reference work provides an exhaustive and vivid portrait of Islamic civilization and brings together in one authoritative text all aspects of Islamic civilization during the Middle Ages. Accessible to scholars, students and non-specialists, this resource will be of great use in research and understanding of the roots of today's Islamic society as well as the rich and vivid culture of medieval Islamic civilization.

Studies in Byzantine, Islamic and Near Eastern Silk Weaving
Studies in Byzantine, Islamic and Near Eastern Silk Weaving

Author: Anna Muthesius

Publisher: Pindar Press

Published: 2006-12-31

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 1915837235

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This volume complements Anna Muthesius' two earlier ground-breaking volumes in the field of silk as material culture: Studies in Byzantine and Islamic Silk Weaving and Studies in Silk in Byzantium. The publication highlights the fact that similar patterns of selection were at work in the acquisition of silks by secular and ecclesiastical bodies. These patterns of selection were governed not only by fashions of the time, but by access to international trade routes leading to the Great Silk Road linking the Near East to the Mediterranean. The surviving silks prove that Mediterranean/Near Eastern silk trade flourished continuously and for centuries prior to the thirteenth century, contrary to what has previously widely been assumed. It also highlights the crucial role of the Caucasian silk routes in accessing the Great Silk Road in the early period, and the contribution of Georgian (and Armenian) silk weaving after the thirteenth century. Above all, the book demonstrates how important it is to assess the impact of Near Eastern silk manufacture and distribution in relation to Byzantine and Islamic Mediterranean silk production and trade.

The Jews of Iran
The Jews of Iran

Author: Houman M. Sarshar

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2014-09-17

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0857727656

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Living continuously in Iran for over 2700 years, Jews have played an integral role in the history of the country. Frequently understood as a passive minority group, and often marginalized by the Zoroastrian and succeeding Muslim hegemony,, the Jews of Iran are instead portrayed in this book as having had an active role in the development of Iranian history, society, and culture. Examining ancient texts, objects, and art from a wide range of times and places throughout Iranian history, as well as the medieval trade routes along which these would have travelled, The Jews of Iran offers in-depth analysis of the material and visual culture of this community. Additionally, an exploration of modern novels and accounts of Jewish-Iranian women's experiences sheds light on the social history and transformations of the Jews of Iran from the rule of Cyrus the Great (c. 600-530 BCE) to the Iranian Revolution of 1978/9 and onto the present day. By using the examples of women writers such as Gina Barkhordar Nahai and Dalia Sofer, the implications of fictional representation of the history of the Jews of Iran and the vital importance of communal memory and tradition to this community are drawn out. By examining the representation of identity construction through lenses of religion, gender, and ethnicity, the analysis of these writers' work highlights how the writers undermine the popular imagining and imaging of the Jewish 'other' in an attempt to create a new narrative integrating the Jews of Iran into the idea of what it means to be Iranian. This long view of the Jewish cultural influence on Iran's social, economic, political, and cultural development makes this book a unique contribution to the field of Judeo-Iranian studies and to the study of Iranian history more broadly.