Description:
Historians have long lamented the lack of contemporary documentary sources for the Islamic middle ages and the inhibiting effect this has had on our understanding of this critically important period. Although the field is richly served by surviving evidence, much of it is hard to locate, difficult to access, and philologically intractable. Presenting a mixture of historical studies and new editions of Greek, Arabic and Coptic material from the seventh to the fifteenth century C.E. from Egypt and Palestine, Documents and the History of the Early Islamic World explores the untapped wealth of documentary sources available in collections around the world and shows how this exciting material can be used for historical analysis.
Contributors include: Hugh Kennedy, Anne Regourd, Jairus Banaji, Alain Delattre, Shaun O'Sullivan, Anna Selander, Frédéric Bauden, Mostafa El-Abbadi, Rachel Stroumsa, Sebastian Richter, Tascha Vorderstrasse, Matt Malczycki, R.G. Khoury, Nicole Hansen, and Alia Hanafi.
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Review Quotes: "This is a concise book worth both for its amount and variety of information, addressing a surprisingly wide range of scientific questions regarding the possibility of using material and textual evidence in the search of information on either the intellectual, or cultural, economic, and political history of Egypt and Palestine; furthermore, it offers a kick off for an in depth research to students of maritime history, to researchers of the social history of the Middle East, of the fiscal policy of the era in the region as well as to students of the history Quran researching for the nihil obstat and imprimatur of the suras, to archeologists assessing cultural artifacts, to sociolinguists working on multilingualism in the Mediterreanean and papyrologists trying to link to all these fields of reseach."
Stavros Nikolaidis