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Europe and the Islamic Worldsheds much-needed light on the shared roots of Islamic and Western cultures and on the richness of their inextricably intertwined histories, refuting once and for all the misguided notion of a \"clash of civilizations\" between the Muslim world and Europe. In this landmark book, three eminent historians bring to life the complex and tumultuous relations between Genoans and Tunisians, Alexandrians and the people of Constantinople, Catalans and Maghrebis--the myriad groups and individuals whose stories reflect the common cultural, intellectual, and religious heritage of Europe and Islam. Since the seventh century, when the armies of Constantinople and Medina fought for control of Syria and Palestine, there has been ongoing contact between the Muslim world and the West. This sweeping history vividly recounts the wars and the crusades, the alliances and diplomacy, commerce and the slave trade, technology transfers, and the intellectual and artistic exchanges. Here readers are given an unparalleled introduction to key periods and events, including the Muslim conquests, the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, the commercial revolution of the medieval Mediterranean, the intellectual and cultural achievements of Muslim Spain, the crusades and Spanish reconquest, the rise of the Ottomans and their conquest of a third of Europe, European colonization and decolonization, and the challenges and promise of this entwined legacy today. As provocative as it is groundbreaking, this book describes this shared history in all its richness and diversity, revealing how ongoing encounters between Europe and Islam have profoundly shaped both.

This is an analysis of the powerful Islamic religious movement, initiated by Ibn Tumart among the Berber tribesmen of North Africa, which culminated in the creation of the huge Almohad empire in the twelfth century. Professor Le Tourneau presents his reflections on the place of the movement in history as well as on its influence in present-day Africa. His principal aim is to elucidate how the Almohads managed to unite all of North Africa and Spain in one empire, and why they ultimately failed to hold their empire together. He also shows that some of the essential factors in Almohad society are still influential in Africa today and that the Almohad experience can aid contemporary promoters of North African unity and prevent them from repeating the mistakes of the twelfth-century rulers.Originally published in 1969.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Power in the Portrayalunveils a fresh and vital perspective on power relations in eleventh- and twelfth-century Muslim Spain as reflected in historical and literary texts of the period. Employing the methods of the new historical literary study in looking at a range of texts, Ross Brann reveals the paradoxical relations between the Andalusi Muslim and Jewish elites in an era when long periods of tolerance and respect were punctuated by outbreaks of tension and hostility. The examined Arabic texts reveal a fragmented perception of the Jew in eleventh-century al-Andalus. They depict seemingly contradictory figures at whose poles are an intelligent, skilled, and noble Jew deserving of homage and a vile, stupid, and fiendish enemy of God and Islam. For their part, the Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic texts display a deep-seated reluctance to portray Muslims in any light at all. Brann cogently demonstrates that these representations of Jews and Muslims--each of which is concerned with issues of sovereignty and the exercise of power--reflect the shifting, fluctuating, and ambivalent relations between elite members of two of the ethno-religious communities of al-Andalus. Brann's accessible prose is enriched by his splendid translations; the original texts are also included. This book is the first to study the construction of social meaning in Andalusi Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, and Hebrew literary texts and historical chronicles. The novel approach illuminates nuances of respect, disinterest, contempt, and hatred reflected in the relationship between Muslims and Jews in medieval Spain.

The main objective of this article is to reflect on the importance and influence of the Andalusian cultural legacy during the years of the Almohad dominance in the Islamic West. To do this, I will examine the written Arabic documentation and those material testimonies that have reached us, which will allow me to get closer to a greater knowledge of this reformist movement. In this sense, I will analyze the artistic, political and religious landscape, which will lead me to address a reality that becomes the vehicle of legitimation of this new caliphate.

Elmore sets down a tentative morphography of Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi's list of books by Ibn al- Arabi in order to detect some hints of the chronological and doctrinal interrelations of the various treatises in the curricular re

Fuat Sezgin's publication of the facsimile edition of a rare manuscript of the Qalāʾid id al-jumān fī farāʾid id shuʿarāʾ hādhā 'l-zamān (Frankfurt, 1990), an anthology and biographical dictionary of poets of the turn of the seventh/thirteenth century by Ibn al-Shaʿʿār al-Mawṣilī (d. 654/1256), offers an unexpected and revealing new perspective on the social background of the great Ṣūfī theorist, Muḥyī 'l-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 638/1240), in the Almohad jundīyah (professional army). It also features a firsthand account of the occasion on which the young Andalusian decisively entered the Ṣūfī path. The new information should call into question a long-standing view of Ibn al-ʿArabī's family as \"noble, rich and very religious.\"