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An inside look at al-Qaeda from 9/11 to the death of its founder—told through the words of Bin Laden and his closest circle As seen on 60 Minutes “A comprehensive, meticulously constructed and eye-opening look at bin Laden as husband, father and leader-in-hiding.... An engaging and persuasive read.”—Karen J. Greenberg, Washington Post “Never less than gripping.... [Offers] an extraordinary insight into the inner workings of al-Qaeda, both before and after 9/11, and lays bare the terrorist organisation's closely guarded plans, ambitions and frustrations.”—Saul David, Sunday Telegraph Usama Bin Laden's greatest fear was not capture or death but the exposure of al-Qaeda's secrets. At great risk to themselves and the entire mission, the U.S. Special Operations Forces, who carried out the Abbottabad raid that killed Bin Laden, took an additional eighteen minutes to collect Bin Laden's hard drives and thereby expose al-Qaeda's secrets. In this groundbreaking book, Nelly Lahoud dives into Bin Laden's files and meticulously distills the nearly 6,000 pages of Arabic private communications. For the first time, al-Qaeda's closely guarded secrets are laid bare, shattering misconceptions and revealing how and what Bin Laden communicated with his associates, his plans for future attacks, and al-Qaeda's hostility toward countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan. Lahoud presents firsthand accounts of al-Qaeda from 9/11 until the elimination of Bin Laden, in his own words and those of his family and closest associates.

Key Papers on Korea is a commemorative collection of papers celebrating 25 years of the Centre of Korean Studies (CKS), SOAS, University of London that have been written by senior academics and emerging scholars. The subjects covered in this collection reflect the different research interests and different strengths of the CKS and include historical perceptions of ancient kingdoms in Manchuria, North Korean propaganda literature, the problematic history of Sino-North Korean borderlands, the millenarian aspects of Won Buddhism, and the importance of the years 1910-11 in the development of Korean music. The collection is framed by two pieces on SOAS, which have been commissioned exclusively for this publication: an introduction that examines the 60-year history of Korean studies at SOAS, and a closing paper that sheds light on the rare collections of Korean art held at SOAS.

The nine contributions in The Trade in Papers Marked with non-Latin Characters initiated by Anne Regourd (ed.) approach global history through the paper trade. They cover, in addition to a paper used in 14th C Persia, papers used in Africa (Ethiopia, Nigeria, Tunisia) and Asia (the Ottoman Levant, Mecca, Persia, Russia, and Yemen) during the 19th-20th C. Primarily based on paper examination and quantitative data, the book invites us to treat papers as a source, and provides tools to determine the production of manuscripts in space and time for the area of interest. This methodology offers new insights on the competition between suppliers to the various markets particularly in respect of the emergence of import-export trading companies. Le commerce des papiers à marques à caractères non-latins, dont Anne Regourd (éd.) est à l'initiative, a pour projet de traiter d'histoire globale par le commerce du papier. Les neuf contributions réunies ici font apparaître un premier exemple de ce papier, persan, dès le xive s. sous les Moẓaffarides et, principalement, des papiers utilisés en Afrique (Éthiopie, Nigéria, Tunisie) et en Asie (Levant ottoman, La Mecque, Perse, Russie et Yémen), aux xixe et xxe s. S'appuyant sur l'observation des papiers et des données quantitatives, le livre invite à prendre le support de l'écrit comme source de l'histoire du commerce et donne des instruments pour déterminer la production de manuscrits dans l'espace et le temps pour une aire définie. Cette méthode renouvelle notre connaissance de l'approvisionnement des marchés, avec, en particulier, l'apparition de compagnies d'import-export. Contributors are: Michaelle Biddle, Evyn Kropf, Anne Regourd, Francis Richard, Alice Shafi-Leblanc, Jan Just Witkam, Olga Yastrebova. Foreword by Anna-Grethe Rischel.

This issue of Cairo Papers takes up the various dimensions of migration and refugees in the Euro-Mediterranean region over different periods in the last two centuries. It looks at both the migration of waves of Italians and Greeks to Egypt from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, and at migration from the Arab southern and eastern rims of the Mediterranean to Europe starting in the twenty-first century. The disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology, and political science have been mobilized to undertake the research its chapters embody. They address the history of migration in the region, relations between Mediterranean countries of origin and their diasporas, the impact of interest groups on the formulation of migration policies in countries of destination, and the policies for integration of recent flows arriving in Europe. The chapters are based on papers delivered at Cairo Papers 25th annual symposium in collaboration with the Center for Migration and Refugee Studies.

In recent years, the food question has been a central concern for politicians, economists, international organizations, activists and NGOs alike, as well as social scientists at large. This interest has emerged from the global food crisis and its impact on the environment and the political economy and security of the global south, as well as the expansion of scholarly studies relating food issues to agrarian questions with the objective of developing theoretical frameworks that would allow for a critical analysis of the current food issues at historical, cultural, social, political and economic levels. In this context, Cairo Papers organized its 2016 symposium around the food question in the Middle East. Papers in this collection address the food question from both its food and agricultural aspects, and approach it as the site of political and economic conflicts, as the means of sociocultural control and distinction, and as the expression of national and ethnic identities. Contributors: Ellis Goldberg, Saker ElNour, Hala Barakat, Khaled Mansour, Malak S. Rouchdy, Habib Ayeb, Christian Handerson, Sara Pozzi, and Sara El-Sayed.

The sociology of sports in the Middle East has been neglected compared to other world regions. This volume aspires to encourage a greater focus on this topic. Here are assembled papers that discuss various aspects of this subject. As it happens all deal with football (soccer) largely in Egypt but including other Middle Eastern countries. Some are historically or politically oriented while others take a more sociological approach. Papers deal with the relation between organized sports and fans, with the special place of youngsters and women in sports, or with the role of sports in a more general understanding of culture and society as indicators of modernization and other facets of social change. Sportive competitions arouse keen passions around such issues as gender, class, and nationality, while they raise questions about leadership on and off the field, and about the economic impact of the games. The topic needs more research.

Challenges, opportunities, and methodological issues in the creation of oral history archives in the Arab worldOral history archives have always been at the forefront of liberatory social movements in general, and of feminist movement in particular. Until the end of the twentieth century in the Arab world, archives of women's oral narratives were almost non-existent with the exception of small documentation efforts tied to individual research. However, since 2011, there has been a marked increase in the documentation of projects.In this context, the Women and Memory Forum organized a conference in 2015 about the challenges of creating gender sensitive oral history archives in times of change. The papers in this collection shed light on documentation initiatives in Arab countries in transitional and conflict situations, in addition to international experiences. They engage with questions around archives and power, the challenges and opportunities presented by new technologies to the making and preserving of archives, ethical concerns in the construction of archives, women's archives and the production of alternative knowledge, as well as conceptual and methodological issues in oral history.CONTRIBUTORS: Faiha Abdulhadi, Sondra Hale, Manal Hamzeh, Maissan Hassan, Nahawand El Kaderi Issa, Diana Magdy, Jean Said Makdisi, Noor Nieftagodien, Rafif Saidawy, Lucine Taminian, Stephen Urgola

Since 2007, the conferences organized under the title ‘Broadening Horizons'have provided a regular venue for postgraduates and early career scholars in Ancient Near Eastern Studies. Three volumes present the proceedings of the 6th Broadening Horizons Conference, which took place at the Freie Universität Berlin from 24–28 June, 2019. The general theme, ‘Bridging the Gap: Disciplines, Times, and Spaces in Dialogue', is aimed at encouraging communication and the development of multidisciplinary approaches to the study of material cultures and textual sources. Volume 1 contains 17 papers from Session 1: Entanglement. Material Culture and Written Sources in Dialogue; Session 2: Integrating Sciences in Historical and Archaeological Research; and Session 5: Which Continuity? Evaluating Stability, Transformation, and Change in Transitional Periods.

The first interdisciplinary study of the history of contact between Iranians and the peoples and polities of the Indian Ocean.Most of the historiography of the Iranian world focuses on interactions and migrations between Iran, Central Asia and India. Nonetheless, this Iranian world was also closely connected to the maritime one of the Indian Ocean. While scholarship has drawn attention to diverse elements of these latter interactions, ranging from the claims to Shirazi descent of East African communities, to Persian elements in Malay literature, and Iranian communities of merchants in China, such studies have remained largely isolated from one another. The consensus of historiography on the Indian Ocean presents it as an'Arabic cosmopolis', or, in earlier times, a Sanskrit one. The aim of this book is thus to bring together scholars working on disparate aspects of Persianate interactions with the Indian Ocean world from antiquity to modern times to provide a more rounded picture of both the history of the Persianate world, broadly conceived, and that of the Indian Ocean.The book brings together a collection of internationally renowned scholars from a variety of disciplines – including archaeology, history, literature, linguistics, art history – and covers interactions in Iran's political and commercial relations with the Indian Ocean world in history, Persian-speaking communities in the Indian Ocean world, Persian(ate) elements in Indian Ocean languages and literatures, Persian texts dealing with the Indian Ocean, and connections in material culture.

This book contains a selection of papers presented at the Red Sea VII conference titled “The Red Sea and the Gulf: Two Maritime Alternative Routes in the Development of Global Economy, from Late Prehistory to Modern Times”. The Red Sea and the Gulf are similar geographically and environmentally, and complementary to each other, as well as being competitors in their economic and cultural interactions with the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. The chapters of the volume are grouped in three sections, corresponding to the various historical periods. Each chapter of the book offers the reader the opportunity to travel across the regions of the Red Sea and the Gulf, and from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean from prehistory to the contemporary era.With contributions by Ahmed Hussein Abdelrahman, Serena Autiero, Mahmoud S. Bashir, Kathryn A. Bard, Alemsege, Beldados, Ioana A. Dumitru, Serena Esposito, Rodolfo Fattovich, Luigi Gallo, Michal Gawlikowski, Caterina Giostra, Sunil Gupta, Michael Harrower, Martin Hense, Linda Huli, Sarah Japp, Serena Massa, Ralph K. Pedersen, Jacke S. Phillips, Patrice Pomey, Joanna K. Rądkowska, Mike Schnelle, Lucy Semaan, Steven E. Sidebotham, Shadia Taha, Husna Taha Elatta, Joanna Then-Obłuska and Iwona Zych

The chapters of this volume contain a series of detailed studies of various aspects of Fatimid rule in the regions of its Mediterranean and Near Eastern empire, 909 to 1171 AD, including separately the role of the imam-caliph, wazīr, chief qāḍī and dāʿī, and other political and public offices of this Shīʿī caliphate. Geographically it covers North Africa, Sicily, the Levant, Hijaz, Cairo and Egypt in the medieval period, with special attention to books, science and libraries, court society, festivals, intellectual traditions and Ismaili doctrines, its religious appeal, military, enemies and rivals, among them the Abbasids, Umayyads, and Ibadis.

The Adventure of the Illustrious Scholar: Papers Presented to Oscar White Muscarella, edited by Elizabeth Simpson, is a Festschrift celebrating the career of one of the foremost archaeologists of the ancient Near East. Oscar Muscarella is a former curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a formidable scholar who has excavated at sites in Turkey, Iran, and the United States. He has published eight books and nearly 200 articles, excavation reports, and reviews on topics ranging from the arts of antiquity and the importance of connoisseurship, to the difficulties of dating and the problems of forgeries, the looting of ancient sites, and the antiquities trade. The forty-seven contributors are experts in the areas of Muscarella's interests and are major scholars in their fields. This volume constitutes an unusual, important, and timely addition to the archaeological and art historical literature.

This volume contains a selection of fourteen papers presented at the Red Sea VI conference held at Tabuk University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 2013. It sheds light on many aspects related to the environmental and biological perspectives, history, archaeology and human culture of the Red Sea, opening the door to more interdisciplinary research in the region. It stimulates a new discourse on different human adaptations to, and interactions with, the environment. With contributions by Andre Antunes, K. Christopher Beard, Ahmed Hussein, Emad Khalil, Solène Marion de Procé, Abdirachid Mohamed, Ania Kotarba-Morley, Sandra Olsen, Andrew Peacock, Eleanor Scerri, Pierre Schneider, Marijke Van Der Veen and Chiara Zazzaro.

This study examines the process of unionizing domestic workers in Lebanon, highlighting the potentialities as well as the obstacles confronting it, and looks at the multiple power relations involved through axes of class, gender, race, and nationality. The author situates this struggle within the larger scene of the labor union'movement'in the country, and discusses the contribution of women's rights organizations in rendering visible cases of abuse against migrant domestic workers. She argues that the'death'of class politics has made women's rights organizations address migrant domestic worker issues as a separate labor category, further contributing to their production as an'exception'under neoliberalism.

This edited volume represents the research results of two international conferences organized and sponsored by the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg:'Environmental Approaches in Pre-Modern Middle Eastern Studies'and'Material Culture Methods in the Middle Islamic Periods'. The following work consists of three parts, which correspond to the themes of the aforementioned conferences (Contributions to Environmental History and Material Culture Studies) and a third which bridges the gap between the two approaches (Practice and Knowledge Transfer). The present contributions cover a wide range of such topics as urban pollution, local perceptions of weather, rural estate economy, Sufi understandings of nature and the body and mind, houses and socialization, text and gardens, local know-how and interdependence in medieval Syrian agriculture, crop selection and the medieval agricultural economy.

This volume offers an account of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) as a rational theologian who created a symbiosis of philosophy and theology and infused rationality into Sufism. The majority of the papers herein deal with important topics of al-Ghazālī's work, which demonstrate his rational treatment of the Qurʾān and major subjects of Islamic theology and everyday life of Muslims. Some other contributions address al-Ghazālī's sources and how his intellectual endeavors were later received by scholars who had the same concern of reconciling religion and rationality within Islam, Christianity and Judaism.With contributions by Binyamin Abrahamov, Hans Daiber, Ken Garden, Avner Giladi, Scott Girdner, Frank Griffel, Steven Harvey, Alfred Ivry, Jules Janssens, Taneli Kukkonen, Luis Xavier López-Farjeat, Wilferd Madelung, Yahya M. Michot, Yasien Mohamed, Eric Ormsby, M. Sait Özervarlı, and Hidemi Takahashi.

Established in 1982, the British Association for Korean Studies has published nine sets of Papers in the period 1991–2005 – the outcome of conferences, study days and workshops. The themes of Korea past and Korea present were selected to give the editors and BAKS council the widest choice of options in terms of scholarship, subject matter and interest.

In a world where almost all societies are multi-religious and multi-ethnic, we need to study how social cohesion can be achieved in different contexts. In some geographical areas, as in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, people of different religious belonging have, through the ages, lived side by side, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in dissonance. In other geographical regions, as in Scandinavia, societies have been quite religiously homogeneous but only recently challenged by immigration.In both locations the relations between religious minority and majority are very much on the agenda. In order to discuss the situation for non-Muslims in Muslim majority societies, a consultation was convened with both Muslim and Christian participants from Pakistan, Palestine, Lebanon, and Sweden. Some of the participants work in academic settings, others in faith-based organisations, some in jurisprudence and others with theological issues. Non-Muslims in Muslim Majority Societies is the result of thatconsultation. The intention of the book is to trigger reflection and further thinking, through papers that discuss issues such as freedom of religion, minority rights, secular and religious legislation, and inter-religious dialogue in Muslim majority societies. Although the articles are presented as'works in progress'and remain tentative in many of their conclusions, this book is an important contribution to the global debate over religious tolerance and religious pluralism.

Print culture, in both its material and cognitive aspects, has been a somewhat neglected field of Middle Eastern intellectual and social history. The essays in this volume aim to make significant contributions to remedying this neglect, by advancing our knowledge and understanding of how and why the development of printing both affected, and was affected by, historical, social and intellectual currents in the areas considered. These range geographically from Iran to Latin America, via Kurdistan, Turkey, Egypt, the Maghrib and Germany, temporally from the 10th to the 20th centuries CE, and linguistically through Arabic, Judæo-Arabic, Syriac, Ottoman Turkish, Kurdish and Persian.

These studies develop a more open way of reading China's traditional narrative literature, in which publishing culture, religious culture, historical circumstance and social institutions all play a part. The concept of vernacular culture is discussed in broad terms and explored through particular examples.This volume, which marks Glen Dudbridge's retirement as Shaw Professor of Chinese at Oxford University, brings together fourteen of his research papers published over more than thirty years. They form three themed groups: books and publishing; medieval narrative and religious culture; vernacular culture. Each group presents a mixture of discursive pieces with more technical and empirical research, and most of the papers also have links that reach across the division into groups.

How different was the practice of magic in the Latin West from that of the eastern Mediterranean basin? Was it just derivative from Greek practice, or did it have its own originality? The recent discovery of important new curse-tablets in Mainz and in the Fountain of Anna Perenna at Rome has made the question newly topical. This volume contains the first commented editions in English of most of these new texts as well as major surveys of new prayers for justice. Other sections are devoted to the discourse of magic in the West, to the linguistics and aims of cursing, and to the major field of protective and eudaemonic magic up to and including the Visigothic slates and the Celtic loricae. The essays are by well-known scholars in the field as well as by established and younger Spanish scholars.

This volume, a product of international collaboration, presents readers with the state of the field in Khazar Studies. The Khazar Empire (ca. 650 - ca. 965-969), one of the largest states of medieval Eurasia, extended from the Middle Volga lands in the north to the Northern Caucasus and Crimea in the south and from the Ukrainians steppelands to the western borders of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in the east. Turkic in origin, it played a key role in the history of the peoples of Rus', medieval Hungary and the Caucasus. Khazaria became one of the great trans-Eurasian trading terminals connecting the northern forest zones with Byzantium and the Arabian Caliphate. In the ninth century, the Khazars converted to Judaism. This book sheds new light on many unanswered, but fundamental questions regarding the Khazar Empire, so important in medieval Eurasia.

This collection of papers is intended to provide a survey of the history of political ideas in the Ottoman world from its dawn around 1300 to its downfall in the early 20th century. It features fourteen original papers by some of the most prominent and innovative scholars of Ottoman history. The book sheds light on the complex role that ideas have played in all aspects of Ottoman social and political life throughout the history of the Ottoman world, across time, space, social class, and ethnic and religious identity. Histories of Political Thought in the Ottoman World takes exception to a common tendency, both among Ottoman historians and in the broader academic world, that considers Ottoman political life exclusively in terms of the political ideas of the Sunni Muslim governing elite. It makes clear that the non-elite, non-Sunni Muslim, non-Muslim, non-Turkish, and female members of the Ottoman society have also significantly contributed to the making of Ottoman political culture throughout its history.

This book presents eight papers about important historiographical issues as debated in the history of science in Islamicate societies, the history of science and philosophy of medieval Latin Europe and the history of mathematics as an academic discipline. Six papers deal with themes about the sciences in Islamicate societies from the ninth to the seventeenth centuries, among them novelty, context and decline. Two other papers discuss the historiographical practices of historians of mathematics and other disciplines in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.The central argument of the collected papers is that in addition and beyond the study of scientific texts and instruments historians of science in Islamicate societies need to pay attention to cultural, material and social aspects that shaped the scientific activities of the authors and makers of such texts and instruments. It is pointed out that the diachronic, de-contextualized comparison between methods and results of scholars from different centuries, regions and cultures often leads to serious distortions of the historical record and is responsible for the long-term neglect of scholarly activities after the so-called'Golden Age'. The book will appeal in particular to teachers of history of science in Islamicate societies, to graduate students interested in issues of methodology and to historians of science grappling with the unresolved problems of how think and write about the sciences in concrete societies of the past instead of subsuming all extant texts, instruments, maps and other objects related to the sciences under macro-level concepts like Islam or Latin Europe. (CS 1114).

This Variorum volume reprints ten papers on contextual elements of the so-called ancient sciences in Islamicate societies between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries. They address four major themes: the ancient sciences in educational institutions; courtly patronage of science; the role of the astral and other sciences in the Mamluk sultanate; and narratives about knowledge. The main arguments are directed against the then dominant historiographical claims about the exclusion of the ancient sciences from the madrasa and cognate educational institutes, the suppression of philosophy and other ancient sciences in Damascus after 1229, the limited role of the new experts for timekeeping in the educational and professional exercise of this science, and the marginal impact of astrology under Mamluk rule. It is shown that the muwaqqits (timekeepers) were important teachers at madrasas and Sufi convents, that Mamluk officers sought out astrologers for counselling and that narratives about knowledge reveal important information about scholarly debates and beliefs. Colophons and dedications are used to prove that courtly patronage for the ancient sciences continued uninterrupted until the end of the seventeenth century. Furthermore, these papers refute the idea of a continued and strong conflict between the ancient and modern sciences, showing rather shifting alliances between various of them and their regrouping in the classifications of the entire disciplinary edifice. These papers are suited for graduate teaching in the history of science and the intellectual, cultural and social history of the Middle East and for all readers interested in the study of the contexts of the sciences.

This volume collects 21 papers on Classical Islam by one of the world's leading experts on medieval Islamic history. The papers explore career of the Prophet Muhammad and the environment from which he sprang; the evolution of Islamic mysticism; political thought; and philosophical themes.

As an indispensable introduction to local history of the Khams region of Eastern Tibet/Western China (with due attention for contemporary thinking about frontier regions), this volume contains seven papers on Khams pa (Eastern Tibet) local history, representing politics, and agency and their historiographical representations on the Khams frontiers.The articles have been arranged to reflect common themes. Wim van Spengen, William Coleman and Peng Wenbin locate Khams in a broader political history, exploring the fluidity of the frontier and its turbulent dislocations, as Khampas encountered and responded to Tibetan and Chinese national projects in the early part of the twentieth century. Fabienne Jagou and Carole McGranahan shift their gaze to individual figures and their engagement with Chinese and Tibetan social politics. Peter Schwieger's analysis of history as oral narrative positions Khams in relation to Central Tibet, as does the subject of Tsering Thar's paper, which concerns the influence of a Bonpo lama in religious innovation.

This volume is a collection of paper by colleagues, friends and students, in honor of Jeffrey Chadwick. The papers cover the various topic that he has dealt with in his career, including biblical historical geography, and the archaeology and history of the Levant and its environs during the Bronze and Iron Ages, and the Second Temple Period.Following a preface and introduction about the honoree, the volume is divided into 4 sections: Biblical Historical Geography; Bronze Age Canaan and its Neighbors; Iron Age Israel and its Neighbors; Second Temple Israel.

A compelling look at the Fatimid caliphate's robust culture of documentationThe lost archive of the Fatimid caliphate (909–1171) survived in an unexpected place: the storage room, or geniza, of a synagogue in Cairo, recycled as scrap paper and deposited there by medieval Jews. Marina Rustow tells the story of this extraordinary find, inviting us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that before 1500 the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents, and preserved even fewer.Beginning with government documents before the Fatimids and paper's westward spread across Asia, Rustow reveals a millennial tradition of state record keeping whose very continuities suggest the strength of Middle Eastern institutions, not their weakness. Tracing the complex routes by which Arabic documents made their way from Fatimid palace officials to Jewish scribes, the book provides a rare window onto a robust culture of documentation and archiving not only comparable to that of medieval Europe, but, in many cases, surpassing it. Above all, Rustow argues that the problem of archives in the medieval Middle East lies not with the region's administrative culture, but with our failure to understand preindustrial documentary ecology.Illustrated with stunning examples from the Cairo Geniza, this compelling book advances our understanding of documents as physical artifacts, showing how the records of the Fatimid caliphate, once recovered, deciphered, and studied, can help change our thinking about the medieval Islamicate world and about premodern polities more broadly.

The Late Bronze Age in the Levant is a period of much interest to archaeologists, historians and biblical scholars. This is a period with intense international relations, rich in ancient sources, which provide historical data for the period, and is a crucial formative period for the peoples and cultures who play central roles in the Hebrew Bible. Recent archaeological research in Israel and surrounding countries has provided new, exciting, and in some cases, groundbreaking finds, interpretations and understanding of this period.The fourteen papers in this volume represent the proceedings of a conference held at Bar-Ilan University in 2014 (with the additional of several invited papers not presented at the conference), which provide both overviews of Late Bronze Age finds from several important sites in Israel and surrounding countries, as well as several synthetic studies on the various issues relating to the period. These papers, by and large, represent a broad view of cuttting edge research in the archaeology of the ancient Levant in general, and on the Late Bronze Age specifically.

The papers in this collection have a common theme in the question of modernity and mass culture. Two papers, those by Chaney and Featherstone respectively, discuss aspects of this theme in a general, global context, all the others are concerned more specifically with the regional context of the Middle East. All the articles in this collection were

These twenty-three papers focus on recent research into the Upper Palaeolithic of the Levant, a murky period of human history (ca 45,000 to 20,000 years ago) during which modern patterns of human behaviour and communication became the norm. The vast majority of archaeological data from this period relates to chipped stone tools and most contributors focus on defining and distinguishing the two main traditions in lithic technology - the Levantine'Aurignacian'and the'Ahmarian'. Some papers report on recent fieldwork, others seek to define and explain reasons for variation and change in material culture. Do lithic traditions represent different corporate groups of hunter-gatherers, or can variation be explained by other factors, such as adaptations to local landscapes and environments or changing patterns of mobility? An appendix provides a comprehensive list of available Upper Palaeolithic 14C dates in the Near East. Most of the papers derive from a conference session on the Levantine Upper Palaeolithic, held as part of the Society for American Archaeology annual meeting in 2000.

The debate on Orientalism began some fifty years ago in the wake of decolonization. While initially considered a turning point, Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) was in fact part of a larger academic endeavor – the political critique of “colonial science” – that had already significantly impacted the humanities and social sciences. In a recent attempt to broaden the debate, the papers collected in this volume, offered at various seminars and an international symposium held in Paris in 2010-2011, critically examine whether Orientalism, as knowledge and as creative expression, was in fact fundamentally subservient to Western domination. By raising new issues, the papers shift the focus from the center to the peripheries, thus analyzing the impact on local societies of a major intellectual and institutional movement that necessarily changed not only their world, but the ways in which they represented their world. World history, which assumes a plurality of perspectives, leads us to observe that the Saidian critique applies to powers other than Western European ones — three case studies are considered here: the Ottoman, Russian (and Soviet), and Chinese empires. Other essays in this volume proceed to analyze how post-independence states have made use of the tremendous accumulation of knowledge and representations inherited from previous colonial regimes for the sake of national identity, as well as how scholars change and adapt what was once a hegemonic discourse for their own purposes. What emerges is a new landscape in which to situate research on non-Western cultures and societies, and a road-map leading readers beyond the restrictive dichotomy of a confrontation between West and East. With contributions by: Elisabeth Allès; Léon Buskens; Stéphane A. Dudoignon; Baudouin Dupret; Edhem Eldem; Olivier Herrenschmidt; Nicholas S. Hopkins; Robert Irwin; Mouldi Lahmar; Sylvette Larzul; Jean-Gabriel Leturcq; Jessica Marglin; Claire Nicholas; Emmanuelle Perrin; Alain de Pommereau; François Pouillon; Zakaria Rhani; Emmanuel Szurek; Jean-Claude Vatin; Mercedes Volait

The dry climate of Egypt has preserved about 130,000 Arabic documents, mostly on papyrus and paper, covering the period from the 640s to 1517. Up to now, historical research has mostly relied on literary sources; yet, as in study of the history of the Ancient World and medieval Europe, using original documents will radically challenge what literary sources tell us about the Islamic world.The renaissance of Arabic papyrology has become obvious by the founding of the International Society for Arabic Papyrology (ISAP) at the Cairo conference (2002), and by its subsequent conferences in Granada (2004), Alexandria (2006), Vienna (2009), and Tunis (2012). This volume collects papers given at the Vienna conference, including editions of previously unpublished Coptic and Arabic documents, as well as historical and linguistic studies based on documentary evidence from Early Islamic Egypt.With contributions by: Anne Boud'hors; Florence Calament; Alain Delattre; Werner Diem; Alia Hanafi; Wadād al-Qāḍī; Ayman A. Shahin; Johannes Thomann and Jacques van der Vliet.For more titles about Papyrology, please click here.

Migrations and population dynamics are considered very problematic topics in the fields of ancient studies. Recent scholarship in (pre)historical population has generated new impulses by using scientific approaches using radiogenic and stable isotopes, and palaeogenetics, as well as computer simulation. As a result, the state of migration research has undergone rapid change. Several research groups presented papers at aconference held in Berlin in 2010, addressing specific historical aspects of population dynamics and migration, with no chronological or geographical restrictions, in the light of cutting-edge bio-archaeological research. This volume, divided into three larger thematic sections (isotope analysis, population genetics, and modelling and computer simulation), presents experiences and insights about methodological approaches, research results and prospects for future research in this area in a varied collection of papers. Scholars from widely diverse scientific disciplines present their approaches, findings and interpretations to an audience far broader than the circles of the individual disciplines.

Energy is essential to the ongoing process of development in the Arabian Gulf region, both in terms of its direct use and in the allocation of the proceeds from its export. Hence, there is an ever-present need to achieve the maximum level of energy security possible for producers and consumers alike, particularly in light of today's various geo-strategic developments and escalating economic and security-related challenges. To discuss the issue of energy security in the Arabian Gulf, the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research (ECSSR) convened its 15th Annual Energy Conference under the title Energy Security in the Gulf: Challenges and Prospects on November 16–18, 2009 in Abu Dhabi, UAE, hosting a group of distinguished energy experts from various academic, professional and technical backgrounds. This book comprises a collection of the papers presented at the conference, and as such provides a scholarly examination of energy security in a region vital to the global energy industry, yet characterized by instability and conflict. The papers presented in this volume identify energy security challenges in a globalized economy in view of worldwide consumption uncertainties, oil price preferences and the diversification of energy sources. The interplay between oil prices and fiscal sustainability in the Gulf states is examined, as well as the politicization of markets and the relationship between energy resources and regional conflict. Russian and Asian perspectives on energy security are also discussed, as is the role of new technology in achieving energy sustainability for both producers and consumers.

British discourse during the Mandate, with its unremitting convergence on the problematic ‘native question', and which rested on racial and cultural theories and presumptions, as well as on certain givens drawn from the British class system, has been taken for granted by historians. The validity of cultural representations as pronounced within official correspondence and colonial laws and regulations, as well as within the private papers of colonial officials, survives more or less intact. There are features of colonialism additional to economic and political power, which are glaring yet have escaped examination, which carried cultural weight and had cultural implications and which negatively transformed native society. This was inevitable. But what is less inevitable is the subsequent collusion of historians in this, a (neo-) colonial dynamic. The continued collusion of modern historians with racial and cultural notions concerning the rationale of European rule in Palestine has postcolonial implications. It drags these old notions into the present where their iniquitous barbarity continues to manifest. This study identifies the symbolism of British officials'discourse and intertwines it with the symbolism and imagery of the natives'own discourse (from oral interviews and private family papers). At all times, it remains allied to those writers, philosophers and chroniclers whose central preoccupation is to agitate and challenge authority. This, then, is a return to the old school, a revisiting of the optimistic, vibrant rhetoric of those radicals who continue to inspire post and anti-colonial thinking. In order to dismantle, and to undo and unwrite, A Discourse on Domination in Mandate Palestine holds a mirror up to the language of the Mandatory by counteracting it with its own integrally oppositional discourse and a provocative rhetoric.

This volume utilises the personal papers of Sir Ronald Storrs, as well as other archival materials, to make a microhistorical investigation of his period as Governor of Jerusalem between 1917 and 1926.It builds upon Edward Said's work on the Orientalist ‘determining imprint'by arguing that Storrs took a deeply personal approach to governing the city; one determined by his upbringing, his education in the English private school system and his service as a British official in Colonial Egypt. It recognises the influence of these experiences on Storrs'perceptions of and attitudes towards Jerusalem, identifying how these formative years manifested themselves on the city and in the Governor's interactions with Jerusalemites of all backgrounds and religious beliefs. It also highlights the restrictions placed on Storrs'approach by his British superiors, Palestinians and the Zionist movement, alongside the limitations imposed by his own attitudes and worldview. Placing Storrs'personality at the centre of discussion on early Mandate Jerusalem exposes a nuanced and complex picture of how personality and politics collided to influence its everyday life and built environment.The book is aimed at historians and students of the late-Ottoman Empire and British Mandate in Palestine, colonialism and imperialism, and microhistory.

This book arises from papers presented at the first international academic conference by the Middle East and Central Asia Research Center (MECARC) at Ariel University, Israel. It compiles works that address gaps in academic literature, focusing on the influence of communities and leaders on socio-political identities. While much literature on the Middle East often centers on politics and security from a state-centric perspective, this book emphasizes the importance of identities and narratives within cultural, religious, and social contexts. The chapters explore diverse actors shaping identities, highlighting their impact across local, national, regional, and global levels. Aimed at specialists, advanced and undergraduate students in Middle Eastern Studies, Israel Studies, and comparative political science, this volume also appeals to a broader readership interested in the formation of collective identities, especially in the Mediterranean region. It offers insights that are accessible and engaging for those interested in popular social science.

This volume in The Medieval Globe Books series surveys the distinctive but also shared rhetorical practices that characterize written requests for intercession, support, and patronage across many languages, cultures, and forms of interaction. Examples range from mundane requests to diplomatic negotiations, preserved in a variety of material media: potsherds, papyrus, paper, administrative handbooks, chronicles, and letter collections. Each contribution focuses on one textual sample or corpus of letters, providing new English translations as well as editions of the original texts in cases where no previous edition is available. Together, they represent the textual conventions and innovations of learned and vernacular epistolary traditions from many regions of North Africa and Eurasia, from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries CE.

The newly discovered papers and colourfully-written letters of Anglo-Irish Sir Henry Dobbs, which form the backbone of this book, reveal his importance in the development of the modern Middle East. An influential civil servant and Britain's longest serving High Commissioner in Iraq at a time when the British empire was facing increasing challenges to its once dominant position, he describes the difficulties of governing first in India then in the formerly Ottoman Mesopotamia during WW1. Here, Dobbs had to devise administrative systems while often at odds with his superior, Sir Percy Cox. In the discussions that followed the Third Afghan War, Dobbs manoeuvred between the different views in London and Delhi with great dexterity to negotiate alone with the Amir of Afghanistan the enduring 1921 Anglo-Afghan treaty. Having accepted from the League of Nations the responsibility for taking the newly-created Iraq to sustainable independence in the aftermath of WW1, the cash-strapped British government came under great domestic pressure to abandon it. Key to British support continuing was Iraqi acceptance of the controversial 1922 treaty with Britain. This Dobbs achieved by disregarding the unhelpful approach recommended by London and, risking his career, he pressed on with his own wholly unauthorised tactics. In other initiatives, Dobbs ensured that Mosul province remained within Iraq. Dobbs consistently pressed for Iraq's early independence – granted in 1932, the first territory in the former Ottoman Empire to gain it.An early advocate of self-determination Dobbs was frequently at odds with the more traditional imperial approach of his superiors. He always endeavoured to balance the aspirations and needs of overseas communities for whom he was responsible with the interests of Britain which he represented.

Collectively, the papers of this volume reveal the cultural dynamism of Tibet in the period between 900 and 1400CE, when the fundamental contours of Tibetan Buddhism were still fluid and highly contested.The papers address a spectrum of issues in Tibetan religion and literature, ranging in time and space from the far eastern oasis of Dunhuang in the tenth century through ‘high classical'developments in Central Tibet in the early fifteenth century. It is divided into four parts, addressing respectively literary and religious issues in tenth-century Dunhuang, the textual history of the Old Tantric Canon (Rnying ma'i rgyud'bum), the development of Tibetan religious literature in the new translation period, and the history and transmission of several influential systems of esoteric Buddhism.

This book is a chronology of the dialogue between the colonised Palestinians and their British colonisers during the'Mandate'years from November 1917 through May 1948. It names, dates, quotes from and discusses 490 separate manifestos, letters, statements of policy, petitions, resolutions, minutes and debates going either from the British to the indigenous Palestinians or vice versa. A few examples: Samuel's The Future of Palestine, the Balfour Declaration, the League of Nations Covenant, the Report on the State of Palestine and other tracts by the Palestine Arab Congress and the Moslem-Christian Associations, the King-Crane report, the General Syrian Congress, the Palin, Haycraft, Cavendish, Shaw, Hope Simpson, Peel and Anglo-American investigations, the arguments of the Palestinian Delegations to London, the Churchill, Passfield and MacDonald White Papers, some petitions of the Arab Executive Committee to the League of Nations, various positions of the Palestine High Commissioners, protests of the Women's Delegations, debates in both Houses of Parliament, Ramsey MacDonald's Black Letter, the manifestos of several Arab newspapers and many leaders such as Musa Kazem al-Husseini, Musa Alami, Awni Abdul Hadi, Ragheb Nashashibi, Izzat Darwaza, George Antonius, Yaqub al-Ghussein, Matiel E.T. Mogannam, Jamal al-Husseini, Izzat Tannous, Emil Ghoury, Aref Abdul Razzak, Henry Cattan, Amin al-Husseini, Mohammed Zafarullah Khan and Albert Hourani, and finally the spewings of the UN General Assembly and its Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). Its main sources are: 1) records held at the National Archives at Kew, London, mainly the minutes of Cabinet meetings and material written by the Foreign and Colonial Offices; 2) other records accessible online held by universities and private historians; and 3) other books and articles about the Mandate, i.e.'secondary sources'. It thus traces the ins and outs of the three decades of robbery of Palestine by Britain from its rightful owners, preparing the ground for Palestine's takeover in 1948 by Egypt, Jordan and the Zionist state of Israel. The story is nothing if not simple: The Palestinians demanded their independence, the British denied it. The book is dedicated to the Palestinians who fought and suffered, or died, for their self-determination, and to the often-unsung Palestinian freedom fighters, resisters and historians who have related these events in their own ways.

This volume is the result of a selection of papers presented at the second conference of the School of Mamluk Studies (Liege, 2015) whose theme was'The Mamluk Sultanate and Its Periphery'. It is well known that Mamluk studies suffer from a deficit of interest for the peripheral areas because of the centripetal effect played by the main cities of the sultanate, i.e. the political centers (Cairo and Damascus), where most of the historians whose works constitute the lion's share of modern studies lived. Nevertheless, it is still possible to study aspects related to regions, cities, villages by resorting to these classical sources but also and above all to other types of sources (documents, archaeological excavations). Obviously, the concept of periphery can be interpreted in various ways. Above all, it is understood in geographic, political, or economic terms: the periphery is defined in relation to the center of power, whether central or local. It can also be interpreted in sociological and religious terms. In this case, the concept can be applied to practices or parts of the society considered borderline. The eight essays collected in this volume seek to explore this question of the periphery from these various angles.

This book is a chronology of the dialogue between the colonised Palestinians and their British colonisers during the'Mandate'years from November 1917 through May 1948. It names, dates, quotes from and discusses 490 separate manifestos, letters, statements of policy, petitions, resolutions, minutes and debates going either from the British to the indigenous Palestinians or vice versa. A few examples: Samuel's The Future of Palestine, the Balfour Declaration, the League of Nations Covenant, the Report on the State of Palestine and other tracts by the Palestine Arab Congress and the Moslem-Christian Associations, the King-Crane report, the General Syrian Congress, the Palin, Haycraft, Cavendish, Shaw, Hope Simpson, Peel and Anglo-American investigations, the arguments of the Palestinian Delegations to London, the Churchill, Passfield and MacDonald White Papers, some petitions of the Arab Executive Committee to the League of Nations, various positions of the Palestine High Commissioners, protests of the Women's Delegations, debates in both Houses of Parliament, Ramsey MacDonald's Black Letter, the manifestos of several Arab newspapers and many leaders such as Musa Kazem al-Husseini, Musa Alami, Awni Abdul Hadi, Ragheb Nashashibi, Izzat Darwaza, George Antonius, Yaqub al-Ghussein, Matiel E.T. Mogannam, Jamal al-Husseini, Izzat Tannous, Emil Ghoury, Aref Abdul Razzak, Henry Cattan, Amin al-Husseini, Mohammed Zafarullah Khan and Albert Hourani, and finally the spewings of the UN General Assembly and its Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). Its main sources are: 1) records held at the National Archives at Kew, London, mainly the minutes of Cabinet meetings and material written by the Foreign and Colonial Offices; 2) other records accessible online held by universities and private historians; and 3) other books and articles about the Mandate, i.e.'secondary sources'. It thus traces the ins and outs of the three decades of robbery of Palestine by Britain from its rightful owners, preparing the ground for Palestine's takeover in 1948 by Egypt, Jordan and the Zionist state of Israel. The story is nothing if not simple: The Palestinians demanded their independence, the British denied it. The book is dedicated to the Palestinians who fought and suffered, or died, for their self-determination, and to the often-unsung Palestinian freedom fighters, resisters and historians who have related these events in their own ways.

The Fifth Anatolian Iron Ages Colloquium, held at Van in 2001, brought together specialists from Turkey, Europe and America to focus on the archaeology of Anatolia in the complex period between the collapse of the Hittite empire and the Persian conquest. The papers gathered in this volume cover the area from Urartu in the east to Phrygia in the west, and range from the discussion of broad problems of chronology and cultural interaction to the presentation of new material from both major and less well known sites. Although most of the papers relate to the area of present-day Turkey, a significant feature of the Fifth Colloquium was the inclusion of papers placing Anatolian archhaeology in its wider context from Thrace, through the Black Sea area, to the Caucasus and beyond.

The present volume brings together 14 papers of a workshop organized by the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research and the Centre de recherche francais a Jerusalem. The objective of the workshop was to confront scholarly interpretations of the various transitional phases across the late 4th-3rd Millennium (Late Chalcolithic to Early Bronze I, EB I to EB II, and EB III to EB IV / Intermediate Bronze Age) in the southern Levant. The focus was on the nature of the cultural-period-defining traits and their value for distinguishing between changes related to endogenous or exogenous evolution, cultural or demic diffusion. These traits include material culture, architecture, mortuary practices as well as patterns of relationships between sites and subsistence strategies. - The traditional approach to structuring the past is based on a rigid chronological perception of time forced upon dynamic and fluidly transforming societies. The one-dimensional nature of the chronological approach results in periods of well-defined spatiotemporal cultural entities separated by'transitional'periods. These defined cultural entities are often treated as static, though we know they were not, so that we may interpret cultural, historical, sociological, and political aspects of the society. Transition periods, however, are often treated as outliers interpreted against one or both of the periods that bracket them.

This volume comprises nineteen papers presented at the 29th Congress of the Union Europeenne des Arabisants et Islamisants at the University of Munster, Germany in September 2018. The articles focus on a variety of phenomena from premodern and modern Islamicate cultures and societies. They are organized in sections on Sciences, Literature and Linguistics, Islamic Law, Theology and Philosophy, History and Society and Material Culture. The variety of approaches to the sources and methods employed represents the width of European research in this field. Thus, the volume provides an easy access to the newest European scholarship on the Islamicate Near and Middle East.

This volume collects 24 papers on the medieval Turks by one of the world's leading experts on medieval Islamic history. It covers themes such as nomadism, shamanism, clan and social structure, the role of women, military expertise, engagement with Islamic orthodoxy and the daily interface between Turks and non-Turks.

This volume collects 20 papers on the Crusades by one of the world's leading experts on medieval Islamic history. It explores the distinctive nature of Islamic jihad as expressed in poetry, sermons and inscriptions; the development of the counter-crusade; and the careers of major Muslim leaders including Zengi and Saladin.