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The ancient Middle East was the theater of passionate interaction between Phoenicians, Aramaeans, Arabs, Jews, Greeks, and Romans. At the crossroads of the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, and the Arabian peninsula, the area dominated by what the Romans called Syria was at times a scene of violent confrontation, but more often one of peaceful interaction, of prosperous cultivation, energetic production, and commerce--a crucible of cultural, religious, and artistic innovations that profoundly determined the course of world history. Maurice Sartre has written a long overdue and comprehensive history of the Semitic Near East (modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel) from the eve of the Roman conqu...
An archaeological guidebook to the awe-inspiring site of an ancient Bedouin city In the vast alluvial plains of the Saudi desert lie the ruins of a once-thriving ancient city, remarkably well preserved with more than 100 monuments and tombs along the sandstone massifs. Though they existed for many years as a number of nomadic Bedouin tribes, the ancient Nabataean people eventually established their kingdom in the Hejaz region of western Saudi Arabia in the 1st century. They built a vast city surrounded by a rampart beyond which lay the necropolis where they buried their dead and the area reserved for their religious brotherhoods. This guide to the ruins of Hegra is the first of its kind and offers readers a detailed photographic tour of the site and its superb monuments as well as chapters on the history of the Nabataeans accompanied by maps, a glossary and a bibliography for further study.
This book continues the work of The Qur’ān in its Historical Context, in which an international group of scholars address an expanded range of topics on the Qur’ān and its origins, looking beyond medieval Islamic traditions to present the Qur’ān’s own conversation with the religions and literatures of its day. Particular attention is paid to recent debates and controversies in the field, and to uncovering the Qur’ān’s relationship with Judaism and Christianity. After a foreword by Abdolkarim Soroush, chapters by renowned experts cover: method in Qur'ānic Studies analysis of material evidence, including inscriptions and ancient manuscripts, for what they show of the Qur'ān�...
In the course of his career, Professor Richard M. Frank of the Catholic University of America produced a hugely significant corpus of works on the intellectual activity in Classical Islam known as Kalam, which he argued should be rendered as 'speculative theology'. He also wrote on the Qur'an, on the Arabic and Syriac philosophical tradition, and argued vigorously for a new reading of the famous religious scholar and theologian al-Ghazali (d. 1111) as a devotee of the cosmology of Ibn Sina (d. 1037). In this volume, fourteen scholars, many of them contemporaries of Professor Frank, engage with his legacy with important and seminal works which take some of his ideas as their points of departu...
Providing commentary on the controversial revisionist school of Qur’anic studies, this book explores the origins, scholarship and development of the Qur'an. The collection of articles, each written by a distinguished author, treat very familiar passages of the Qur’an in an original manner, combining thorough philology, historical anthropology, and cultural history. This book addresses in a critical fashion the hottest issues in recent works on the Quran. Among other things, the contributors analyze the controversial theories of Luxenberg regarding Syriac and the Quran, and in particular his argument that the term Hur refers not to virgins but to grapes.
Little is known about Arabia in the sixth century, yet from this distant time and place emerged a faith and an empire that stretched from the Iberian peninsula to India. Today, Muslims account for nearly a quarter of the global population. A renowned classicist, G. W. Bowersock seeks to illuminate this obscure and dynamic period in the history of Islam—exploring why arid Arabia proved to be such fertile ground for Muhammad’s prophetic message, and why that message spread so quickly to the wider world. The Crucible of Islam offers a compelling explanation of how one of the world’s great religions took shape. “A remarkable work of scholarship.” —Wall Street Journal “A little book of explosive originality and penetrating judgment... The joy of reading this account of the background and emergence of early Islam is the knowledge that Bowersock has built it from solid stones... A masterpiece of the historian’s craft.” —Peter Brown, New York Review of Books
Late Antique Responses to the Arab Conquests is a showcase of new discoveries in an exciting and rapidly developing field: the study of the transition from Late Antiquity to Early Islam. The Arab conquests are shown to have changed both the Arabian conquerors and the conquered.
The Qur'an is the foundational sacred text of the Islamic faith. Traditionally revered as the literal word of God, its pronouncements and discussions form the bedrock of Islamic beliefs and teachings. Notwithstanding its religious pre-eminence and the fact that it is the sacred text for over one billion of the world's Muslims, the Qur'an is also considered to be the matchless masterpiece of the Arabic language. Its historical impact as a text can be discerned in all aspects of the heritage of the Arabic literary tradition. Over recent decades, academic engagement with the Qur'an has produced an impressive array of scholarship, ranging from detailed studies of the text's unique language, styl...
Long before Muhammed preached the religion of Islam, the inhabitants of his native Arabia had played an important role in world history as both merchants and warriors Arabia and the Arabs provides the only up-to-date, one-volume survey of the region and its peoples, from prehistory to the coming of Islam Using a wide range of sources - inscriptions, poetry, histories, and archaeological evidence - Robert Hoyland explores the main cultural areas of Arabia, from ancient Sheba in the south, to the deserts and oases of the north. He then examines the major themes of *the economy *society *religion *art, architecture and artefacts *language and literature *Arabhood and Arabisation The volume is illustrated with more than 50 photographs, drawings and maps.
How did Islam's sacred scripture, the Arabic Qur'an, emerge from western Arabia at a time when the region was religiously fragmented and lacked a clearly established tradition of writing to render the Arabic language? The studies in this volume, the proceedings of a scholarly conference, address different aspects of this question. They include discussions of the religious concepts found in Arabia in the centuries preceding the rise of Islam, which reflect the presence of polytheism and of several varieties of monotheism including Judaism and Christianity. Also discussed at length are the complexities surrounding the way languages of the Arabian Peninsula were written in the centuries before ...