Growing up in Iran, both refused to accept traditional Muslim mores, and dreamed of careers in literature and on the stage. Their lives changed abruptly when Pari was coerced by their father into marrying a wealthy and cruel suitor. Nahid narrowly avoided a similar fate, and instead negotiated with him to pursue her studies in America. When Nahid received the unsettling and mysterious news that Pari had died after falling down a flight of stairs, she traveled back to Iran-now under the Islamic regime-to find out what happened to her truest friend, confront her past, and evaluate what the future holds for the heartbroken in a tale of crushing sorrow, sisterhood, and ultimately, hope.

    Its purpose is to detach human beings from their homes and, by bringing them to Islam's birthplace, to emphasize the equality of all people before God. Since its inception in the seventh century, the Hajj has been the central theme in a large body of Islamic travel literature. Beginning with the European Renaissance, it has also been the subject for a handful of adventurous writers from the Christian West who, through conversion or connivance, managed to slip inside the walls of a city forbidden to non-Muslims. One Thousand Roads to Mecca collects significant works by observant writers from the East and West over the last ten centuries. These two very different literary traditions form distinct sides of a spirited conversation in which Mecca is the common destination and Islam the common subject of inquiry.

    A history of the evolution and ideals of Islam, with a life of the prophecy. Contents: Life and Ministry of the Prophet: Mohammed the prophet; Hegira; prophet at Medina; hostility of the Koreish and the Jews; invasion of Medina; prophets clemency; diffusion of the faith; year of deputations; fulfillment of the prophet's work; apostolical succession; Spirit of Islam: ideal of Islam; religious spirit of Islam; idea of future life in Islam; church militant of Islam; status of women in Islam; bondage in Islam; political spirit of Islam; political divisions and schisms of Islam; literary and scientific sprit of Islam; rationalistic and philosophical spirit of Islam; idealistic and mystical spirit in Islam.

    Few write for the non-specialist as well as Will Durant, and this book is a splendid example of his eminently readable scholarship. Durant’s insight and wit never cease to dazzle; The Story of Philosophy is a key book for anyone who wishes to survey the history and development of philosophical ideas in the Western world.

    Yet the author of the Muqaddima, the most important study of history ever produced in the Islamic world, is not as well known as he should be, and his ideas are widely misunderstood. In this groundbreaking intellectual biography, Robert Irwin provides an engaging and authoritative account of Ibn Khaldun's extraordinary life, times, writings, and ideas. Irwin tells how Ibn Khaldun, who lived in a world decimated by the Black Death, held a long series of posts in the tumultuous Islamic courts of North Africa and Muslim Spain, becoming a major political player as well as a teacher and writer. Closely examining the Muqaddima, a startlingly original analysis of the laws of history, and drawing on many other contemporary sources, Irwin shows how Ibn Khaldun's life and thought fit into historical and intellectual context, including medieval Islamic theology, philosophy, politics, literature, economics, law, and tribal life. Because Ibn Khaldun's ideas often seem to anticipate by centuries developments in many fields, he has often been depicted as more of a modern man than a medieval one, and Irwin's account of such misreadings provides new insights about the history of Orientalism.In contrast, Irwin presents an Ibn Khaldun who was a creature of his time—a devout Sufi mystic who was obsessed with the occult and futurology and who lived in an often-strange world quite different from our own.

    The poems are haunting, the evocation of emotional life vivid. But her analysis also reveals how deeply implicated poetry and sentiment are in the play of power and the maintenance of a system of social hierarchy. What begins as a puzzle about a single poetic genre becomes a reflection on the politics of sentiment and the relationship between ideology and human experience.

    In the past, Westerners viewed the Arab world as licentious, and Western intolerance of sex led them to brand Arabs as decadent; but as Western society became more sexually open, the supposedly prudish Arabs soon became viewed as backward. Rather than focusing exclusively on how these views developed in the West, in Desiring Arabs Joseph A. Massad reveals the history of how Arabs represented their own sexual desires. To this aim, he assembles a massive and diverse compendium of Arabic writing from the nineteenth century to the present in order to chart the changes in Arab sexual attitudes and their links to Arab notions of cultural heritage and civilization.           A work of impressive scope and erudition, Massad’s chronicle of both the history and modern permutations of the debate over representations of sexual desires and practices in the Arab world is a crucial addition to our understanding of a frequently oversimplified and vilified culture. “A pioneering work on a very timely yet frustratingly neglected topic. . . . I know of no other study that can even begin to compare with the detail and scope of [this] work.”—Khaled El-Rouayheb, Middle East Report “In Desiring Arabs, [Edward] Said’s disciple Joseph A. Massad corroborates his mentor’s thesis that orientalist writing was racist and dehumanizing. . . . [Massad] brilliantly goes on to trace the legacy of this racist, internalized, orientalist discourse up to the present.”—Financial Times

    But as Cemil Aydin explains in this provocative history, it is a misconception to think that the world s 1.5 billion Muslims constitute a single religio-political entity. How did this belief arise, and why is it so widespread? The Idea of the Muslim World searches for the intellectual origins of a mistaken notion and explains its enduring allure for non-Muslims and Muslims alike.Conceived as the antithesis of Western Christian civilization, the idea of the Muslim world emerged in the late nineteenth century, when European empires ruled the majority of Muslims. It was inflected from the start by theories of white supremacy, but Muslims had a hand in shaping the idea as well. Aydin reveals the role of Muslim intellectuals in envisioning and essentializing an idealized pan-Islamic society that refuted claims of Muslims racial and civilizational inferiority.After playing a key role in the politics of the Ottoman Caliphate, the idea of the Muslim world survived decolonization and the Cold War, and took on new force in the late twentieth century. Standing at the center of both Islamophobic and pan-Islamic ideologies, the idea of the Muslim world continues to hold the global imagination in a grip that will need to be loosened in order to begin a more fruitful discussion about politics in Muslim societies today.

    Mernissi recounts the extraordinary stories of fifteen queens and reflects on the implications for the ways in which politics is practiced in Islam today, a world in which women are largely excluded from the political domain.

    ترجم الكتاب إلى العديد من اللغات العالمية.واسم الكتاب كاملاً طوق الحمامة في الألفة والأُلاف. ويحتوي الكتاب على مجموعة من أخبار وأشعار وقصص المحبين، ويتناول الكتاب بالبحث والدَّرس عاطفة الحب الإنسانية على قاعدة تعتمد على شيء من التحليل النفسي من خلال الملاحظة والتجربة. فيعالج ابن حزم في أسلوب قصصي هذه العاطفة من منظور إنساني تحليلي. والكتاب يُعد عملاً فريدًا في بابه.Ibn Hazm's Tawq al-Hamama ('The Ring of the Dove')The famous Arabic book on love and lovers, Tawq al-hamâma ('the Ring of the Dove'), is a splendid witness to the high age of Islamic culture in Spain. The book was written in or around 1022 CE in Játiva, south of Valencia, by Abu Muhammad `Ali Ibn Hazm al-Andalusi (Córdoba, 994-1064 CE). It is a youth work by this famous Andalusian poet, philosopher, jurist and scholar of comparative religion.In thirty chapters Ibn Hazm treats thirty moments or personages that are of relevance to love relationships, such as the signs of love, love at first sight, amorous allusions, correpondence between lovers, the messenger between the lovers, being together, fidelity and unfidelity, separation, death. Ibn Hazm alternates from theoritical observations to anecdotes of daily life and he ornates his essays with an abundance of appropriate poetry. The anecdotes are often very peronal and they give the reader a enthralling view on life and love in Islamic Córdoba. All poetry in the Ring of the Dove is Ibn Hazm's own.The Ring of the Dove has been preserved in only one manuscript, which is, since 1665, part of the Oriental collections of Leiden University Library (where it is registered as Or. 927). It was copied in 1338 CE, most probably in Egypt or Syria, from an original that is now lost. The manuscript was first acquired in Istanbul in the middle of the 17th century by the learned and bibliophile Dutch ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Levinus Warner (1619-1665). After his death his entire collection of books and manuscripts came to Leiden.The first edition of the Arabic text was made by the Russian D.K. Pétrof and was published in Leiden in 1914. Before that R.P.A. Dozy (1820-1883) had already published several fragments. All later editions and the numerous translations of the book are directly, or, mostly, indirectly based on the Leiden manuscript. Together they are proof to the fact that Ibn Hazm in his book on love and lovers treats themes that are for all humans in all times.

    Why the French Don't Like Headscarves explains why headscarves on schoolgirls caused such a furor, and why the furor yielded this law. Making sense of the dramatic debate from his perspective as an American anthropologist in France at the time, John Bowen writes about everyday life and public events while also presenting interviews with officials and intellectuals, and analyzing French television programs and other media.Bowen argues that the focus on headscarves came from a century-old sensitivity to the public presence of religion in schools, feared links between public expressions of Islamic identity and radical Islam, and a media-driven frenzy that built support for a headscarf ban during 2003-2004. Although the defense of la�cit� (secularity) was cited as the law's major justification, politicians, intellectuals, and the media linked the scarves to more concrete social anxieties--about communalism, political Islam, and violence toward women.Written in engaging, jargon-free prose, Why the French Don't Like Headscarves is the first comprehensive and objective analysis of this subject, in any language, and it speaks to tensions between assimilation and diversity that extend well beyond France's borders.

    In other words, we're facing not a radicalization of Islam, but the Islamization of radicalism.Indeed, Roy argues, young European Muslims drawn to IS are attracted to the organization's violent means rather than utopian dreams of a caliphate. He places IS in the context of other radical millenialist groups such as China's Red Guards, Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, and Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army. In doing so, he shows that violence, not religious fundamentalism, is the central thread connecting young people who are drawn to radical groups.Jihad and Death is a concise dissection of the highly sophisticated narrative mobilized by IS: the myth of the caliphate recast into a modern story of heroism and nihilism.

    For centuries following the fall of Rome, western Europe was a benighted backwater, a world of subsistence farming, minimal literacy, and violent conflict. Meanwhile Arab culture was thriving, dazzling those Europeans fortunate enough to catch even a glimpse of the scientific advances coming from Baghdad, Antioch, or the cities of Persia, Central Asia, and Muslim Spain. T here, philosophers, mathematicians, and astronomers were steadily advancing the frontiers of knowledge and revitalizing the works of Plato and Aristotle. I n the royal library of Baghdad, known as the House of Wisdom, an army of scholars worked at the behest of the Abbasid caliphs. At a time when the best book collections in Europe held several dozen volumes, the House of Wisdom boasted as many as four hundred thousand.Even while their countrymen waged bloody Crusades against Muslims, a handful of intrepid Christian scholars, thirsty for knowledge, traveled to Arab lands and returned with priceless jewels of science, medicine, and philosophy that laid the foundation for the Renaissance. I n this brilliant, evocative book, Lyons shows just how much "Western" culture owes to the glories of medieval Arab civilization, and reveals the untold story of how Europe drank from the well of Muslim learning.

    Written with verve and extraordinary access to primary sources in several languages, Icon of Evil is the definitive account of the man who during World War II was called “the führer of the Arab world” and whose ugly legacy lives on today.In 1921, the beneficiary of an appointment the British would live to regret, Haj Amin al-Husseini became the mufti of Jerusalem, the most eminent and influential Islamic leader in the Middle East. For years, al-Husseini fomented violence in the region against the Jews he loathed and wished to destroy. Forced out in 1937, he eventually found his way to the country whose legions he desperately wished to join: Nazi Germany.Here, with new and disturbing details, David G. Dalin and John F. Rothmann show how al-Husseini ingratiated himself with his hero, Adolf Hitler, becoming, with his blonde hair and blue eyes, an “honorary Aryan,” while dreaming of being installed Nazi leader of the Middle East. Al-Husseini would later recruit more than 100,000 Muslims in Europe to fight in divisions of the Waffen-SS, and obstruct negotiations with the Allies that might have allowed four thousand Jewish children to escape to Palestine. Some believe that al-Husseini even inspired Hitler to implement the Final Solution. At war’s end, al-Husseini escaped indictment at Nuremberg and was harbored in France before being given a hero’s welcome in Egypt.Icon of Evil chronicles al-Husseini’s postwar relationships with such influential Islamic figures as the radical theoretician Sayyid Qutb and Saddam Hussein’s powerful uncle, General Khairallah Talfah, and his crucial mentoring of the young Yasser Arafat. Finally, it provides compelling evidence that al-Husseini’s actions and writings serve as inspirations today to the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist organizations pledged to destroy Israel and the United States.Revelatory and unsettling, Icon of Evil reveals an essential character in the worst crimes of the modern era. It is an important addition to our understanding of the past, present, and future of radical Islam.

    In this classic work, Peter Mansfield follows the historic struggle of the region over the last two hundred years. This new edition updates recent developments in the Middle East, including the turbulent events in Afghanistan, the troubled relationship between the U.S. and Iraq, the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict, and the rise of Islamic Jihad. Incisive and illuminating, A History of the Middle East is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand what is perhaps the most crucial and volatile nerve center of the modern world.