Footnote:
In English
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web
Description:
Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- INTRODUCTION -- Chapter One. REFERENCE WORKS -- Chapter Two. THE SOURCES -- Chapter Three. EARLY HISTORICAL TRADITION AND THE FIRST ISLAMIC POLITY -- Chapter Four. MODERN HISTORIANS AND THE ABBASID REVOLUTION -- Chapter Five BAYHAQĪ AND IBN TAGHRĪBIRDĪ -- Chapter Six. IDEOLOGY AND PROPAGANDA -- Chapter Seven. THE FISCAL ADMINISTRATION OF THE MAMLUK EMPIRE -- Chapter Eight. A CULTURAL ELITE -- Chapter Nine. ISLAMIC LAW AND ISLAMIC SOCIETY -- Chapter Ten. URBAN TOPOGRAPHY AND URBAN SOCIETY -- Chapter Eleven. NON-MUSLIM PARTICIPANTS IN ISLAMIC SOCIETY -- Chapter Twelve. THE VOICELESS CLASSES OF ISLAMIC SOCIETY -- ABBREVIATIONS -- BIBLIOGRAPHIC INDEX -- INDEX OF TOPICS AND PROPER NAMES
This book will be immensely helpful to those who wish to orient themselves to what has become a very large body of literature on medieval Islamic history. Combining a bibliographic study with an inquiry into method, it opens with a survey of the principal reference tools available to historians of Islam and a systematic review of the sources they will confront. Problems of method are then examined in a series of chapters, each exploring a broad topic in the social and political history of the Middle East and North Africa between A.D. 600 and 1500. The topics selected represent a cross-section of Islamic historical studies, and range from the struggles for power within the early Islamic community to the life of the peasantry. Each chapter pursues four questions. What concrete research problems are likely to be most challenging and productive? What resources do we possess for dealing with these problems? What strategies can we devise to exploit our resources most effectively? What is the current state of the scholarly literature for the topic under study?