Women, Islam, and Abbasid Identity - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Women, Islam, and Abbasid Identity write by Nadia Maria El Cheikh. This book was released on 2015-10-06. Women, Islam, and Abbasid Identity available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. When the Abbasids overthrew the Umayyad dynasty in 750 CE, an important element in legitimizing their newly won authority involved defining themselves in the eyes of their Islamic subjects. Nadia Maria El Cheikh shows that ideas about women were central to the process by which the Abbasid caliphate, which ushered in Islam’s Golden Age, achieved self-definition. In most medieval Islamic cultures, Arab Islam stood in opposition to jahl, or the state of impurity and corruption that existed prior to Islam’s founding. Over time, the concept of jahl evolved into a more general term describing a condition of ignorance and barbarism—as well as a condition specifically associated in Abbasid discourse with women. Concepts of womanhood and gender became a major organizing principle for articulating Muslim identity. Groups whose beliefs and behaviors were perceived by the Abbasids as a threat—not only the jahilis who lived before the prophet Muhammad but peoples living beyond the borders of their empire, such as the Byzantines, and heretics who defied the strictures of their rule, such as the Qaramita—were represented in Abbasid texts through gendered metaphors and concepts of sexual difference. These in turn influenced how women were viewed, and thus contributed to the historical construction of Muslim women’s identity. Through its investigation of how gender and sexuality were used to articulate cultural differences and formulate identities in Abbasid systems of power and thought, Women, Islam, and Abbasid Identity demonstrates the importance of women to the writing of early Islamic history.
The Most Noble of People
The Most Noble of People - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Most Noble of People write by Jessica Coope. This book was released on 2021-03-11. The Most Noble of People available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The Most Noble of People presents a nuanced look at questions of identity in Muslim Spain under the Umayyads, an Arab dynasty that ruled from 756 to 1031. With a social historical emphasis on relations among different religious and ethnic groups, and between men and women, Jessica A. Coope considers the ways in which personal and cultural identity in al-Andalus could be alternately fluid and contentious. The opening chapters define Arab and Muslim identity as those categories were understood in Muslim Spain, highlighting the unique aspects of this society as well as its similarities with other parts of the medieval Islamic world. The book goes on to discuss what it meant to be a Jew or Christian in Spain under Islamic rule, and the degree to which non-Muslims were full participants in society. Following this is a consideration of gender identity as defined by Islamic law and by less normative sources like literature and mystical texts. It concludes by focusing on internal rebellions against the government of Muslim Spain, particularly the conflicts between Muslims who were ethnically Arab and those who were Berber or native Iberian, pointing to the limits of Muslim solidarity. Drawn from an unusually broad array of sources—including legal texts, religious polemic, chronicles, mystical texts, prose literature, and poetry, in both Arabic and Latin—many of Coope’s illustrations of life in al-Andalus also reflect something of the larger medieval world. Further, some key questions about gender, ethnicity, and religious identity that concerned people in Muslim Spain—for example, women’s status under Islamic law, or what it means to be a Muslim in different contexts and societies around the world—remain relevant today.
Bedouin and ‘Abbāsid Cultural Identities
Bedouin and ‘Abbāsid Cultural Identities - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Bedouin and ‘Abbāsid Cultural Identities write by Ruqayya Yasmine Khan. This book was released on 2019-10-18. Bedouin and ‘Abbāsid Cultural Identities available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This literary-historical book draws out and sheds light upon the mechanisms of "the ideological work" that the Arabic Majnūn Laylā story performed for ‘Abbāsid urbanite, imperial audiences in the wake of the disappearance of the "Bedouin cosmos." The study focuses upon the processes of primitivizing Majnūn in the romance of Majnūn Laylā as part of the paradigm shift that occurred in the ‘Abbāsid empire after the Greco-Arabian intellectual revolution. Moreover, this book demonstrates how gender and sexuality are employed in the processes of primitivizing Majnūn. As markers of "strangeness" and "foreignness" in the ‘Abbāsid interrogations of the multiple categories of ethnicity, culture, identity, religion and language present in their cosmopolitan milieus. Such "cultural work" is performed through the ideological uses of alterity given its mechanisms of distancing (e.g., temporal and spatial) and nearness (e.g., affective). Lastly, the Majnūn Laylā love story demonstrates, in its text and reception, that a Greco-Arabian and Greco-Persian subculture thrived in the centers of ‘Abbāsid Baghdad that molded and shaped the ways in which this love story was compiled, received and performed. Offering a corrective to the prevailing views expressed in Western scholarly writings on the Greco-Arabian encounter, this book is a major contribution to scholars and students interested in Islamic studies, Arabic and comparative literature, Middle East and gender studies.
A Struggle for Identity
A Struggle for Identity - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook A Struggle for Identity write by Firdous Azmat Siddiqui. This book was released on 2014. A Struggle for Identity available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle.
Queens, Eunuchs and Concubines in Islamic History, 661-1257
Queens, Eunuchs and Concubines in Islamic History, 661-1257 - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Queens, Eunuchs and Concubines in Islamic History, 661-1257 write by Taef El-Azhari. This book was released on 2019-06-24. Queens, Eunuchs and Concubines in Islamic History, 661-1257 available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Drawing on specific historical case studies and events, this book looks at the role of women, mothers, wives, eunuchs, concubines, qahramans and atabegs in the dynamics and manipulation of medieval Islamic politics.
