Podcasts about fatimid

Ismaili Shia Islamic caliphate

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Best podcasts about fatimid

Latest podcast episodes about fatimid

Abbasid History Podcast

Born 1004CE in present-day Tajikistan then under control of the Ghaznavid dynasty, Abū Muʿīn al-Dīn Nasir Khusraw was an Ismaili convert and missionary who became better known for his poetry.    To discuss with us today the life, works and legacy of Nasir Khusraw is Ali Hammoud. Ali Hammoud is a PhD candidate at Western Sydney University. He is broadly interested in Shīʿīsm and Islamicate intellectual history. Welcome Ustad Ali!   Q1. I think it's important we set the scene for the socio-political dynamics in which Nasir Khusraw lived. There were two major competing polities claiming to be the ultimate representatives of the Prophet's legacy: the Ismaili Shia Fatimid caliphate in Cairo and the Sunni Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad. We can imagine it as a kind of Cold War era that existed between the Soviet and the US after WWII with smaller entities in between them having to choose a loyalty or hedge their bets.   Q2. Nasir Khusraw lived in Merv in present day Turmenistan and he worked for the Sunni Turkic Seljuk administration before his conversion to Ismailism and  joining the Fatimid court. Tell us more about his life and career.   Q3. He has a number of works philosophical and literary. Describe them for us before giving us details characterising his divan.   Q4. What further readings and resources do you recommend for us on Nasir Khusrau?    Q5 Finally before we end, give us a sample of the work of Nasir Khusrau  in the original Persian and translation.   Ali Hammoud: https://x.com/AliHammoud7777 https://alihammoud7.substack.com/    We are sponsored by IHRC bookshop. Listeners get a 15% discount on all purchases. Visit IHRC bookshop at shop.ihrc.org and use discount code AHP15 at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Contact IHRC bookshop for details. 

Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World
Nasir Khusraw 2: Fatimid Egypt

Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 18, 2025 42:01


***This episode was much delayed by my forgetting to upload it here. The next Nasir Khusraw episode will be along shortly. An 11th-century journey from Jerusalem to Fatimid Egypt. If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here. I'm on BlueSky @a-devon.bsky.social, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble. Sources: Fulton, Michael S. Contest for Egypt: The Collapse of the Fatimid Caliphate, the Ebb of Crusader Influence, and the Rise of Saladin. Brill, 2022. Gascoigne, Alison L. "The Water Supply of Tinnis: Public Amenities and Private Investments," Cities in the Pre-Modern Islamic World The Urban Impact of Religion, State and Society. Edited by Bennison, Amira K and Gascoigne, Alison L. Routledge, 2009. Hunsberger, Alice C. Nasir Khusraw, the Ruby of Badakhshan: A Portrait of the Persian Poet, Traveller and Philosopher. Bloomsbury Academic, 2002. Khusraw, Nasir. Nāṣer-e Khosraw's Book of Travels, translated by Wheeler McIntosh Thackston. Bibliotheca Persica, 1986. Thomson, Kirsten. Politics And Power in Late Fāṭimid Egypt: The Reign of Caliph al-Mustanṣir. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Muslim Footprints
S2 Ep 5: The Ismailis, From Origins To Modern Times with Dr Farhad Daftary (Part 1)

Muslim Footprints

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 26, 2024 45:13 Transcription Available


Hello again and welcome to our two-part series on The Ismailis, which features Dr Farhad Daftary, Director Emeritus of the Institute of Ismaili Studies.   The Ismailis, a branch of Shi'i Islam, emerged in 765 during the formative period of Islam. Today, the community spans more than 30 countries, embodying a global presence with rich cultural and intellectual contributions.   Dr Daftary provides insights into the community's formation, the challenges of documenting its history, and the esoteric doctrines that distinguish Ismailism. At the heart of Ismaili beliefs is its approach to religious scripture and an emphasis on both apparent and hidden meanings. In other words, while Sharia, or religious laws, evolve over time, the inner spiritual teachings remain constant. This adaptability has helped the Ismailis sustain their identity across centuries, allowing the community to thrive in diverse regions and political climates.   The first part of the series continues through the Fatimid period, when Ismailis wielded significant political power and influence.   Do subscribe to our YouTube channel, and follow us for more: https://www.instagram.com/muslimfootprints/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/muslim-footprints https://x.com/MFootprintsPod https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61557285590197 http://www.youtube.com/@MuslimFootprints https://www.threads.net/@muslimfootprints

featured Wiki of the Day

fWotD Episode 2690: Al-Musta'li Welcome to Featured Wiki of the Day, your daily dose of knowledge from Wikipedia’s finest articles.The featured article for Sunday, 15 September 2024 is Al-Musta'li.Abū al-Qāsim Aḥmad ibn al-Mustanṣir (Arabic: أبو القاسم أحمد بن المستنصر; 15/16 September 1074 – 11/12 December 1101), better known by his regnal name al-Mustaʿlī biʾllāh (المستعلي بالله, lit. 'The One Raised Up by God'), was the ninth Fatimid caliph and the nineteenth imam of Musta'li Ismailism.Although not the eldest (and most likely the youngest) of the sons of Caliph al-Mustansir Billah, al-Musta'li became caliph through the machinations of his brother-in-law, the vizier al-Afdal Shahanshah. In response, his oldest brother and most likely candidate for their father's succession, Nizar, rose in revolt in Alexandriabut was defeated and executed. This caused a major split in the Isma'ili movement. Many communities, especially in Persia and Iraq, split off from the officially sponsored Isma'ili hierarchy and formed their own Nizari movement, holding Nizar and his descendants as the rightful imams.Throughout his reign, al-Musta'li remained subordinate to al-Afdal, who was the de facto ruler of the Fatimid Caliphate. The Caliphate's core territory in Egypt experienced a period of good government and prosperity, but the Fatimids suffered setbacks in Syria, where they were faced with the advance of the Sunni Seljuk Turks. Al-Afdal managed to recover the port city of Tyre, and even recapture Jerusalem in the turmoil caused by the arrival of the First Crusade in northern Syria. Despite Fatimid attempts to make common cause with the Crusaders against the Seljuks, the latter advanced south and captured Jerusalem in July 1099, sealing their success with a major victory over the Fatimid army led by al-Afdal at the Battle of Ascalon shortly after. Al-Musta'li died in 1101 and was succeeded by his five-year-old son, al-Amir.This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:53 UTC on Sunday, 15 September 2024.For the full current version of the article, see Al-Musta'li on Wikipedia.This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.Until next time, I'm standard Kimberly.

Unleashing Intuition Secrets
Ancient Orders, Modern Conflicts: Decoding Secret Societies' Connection with the Middle East

Unleashing Intuition Secrets

Play Episode Listen Later May 29, 2024 116:36


Dive into the labyrinthine world of secret societies and ancient mysteries with Leo Zagami in his electrifying podcast, where he unveils his latest book, "Confessions of Illuminati, Volume 10." Journey with Zagami as he pulls back the veil on Islamic Freemasonry and the tumultuous Middle East conflict, offering an unflinching look at truths that many prefer to ignore. This is not a dialogue for the faint-hearted but a clarion call for honesty, challenging censorship, and embracing uncomfortable truths. In this groundbreaking episode, Zagami emphasizes the necessity of open dialogue to dismantle confusion and brainwashing, particularly within academic circles. His book, resonating in Islamic academic rankings without backlash, highlights a global hunger for understanding and truth. Through an exploration of the Muslim Brotherhood's impact, Egypt's political landscape under Mubarak, Obama's Middle East policy, and the fragmented nature of Islam, Zagami provides a nuanced view that avoids taking sides or offending any group. Zagami shares his personal experiences within the Islamic world, recounting his involvement with the Gulen Movement and the aftermath of the 2016 Turkish coup attempt. He dissects the intricate interplay of politics and religion in Islam, touching on the early fragmentation post-Prophet Muhammad, the emergence of Shia Islam, and the influence of the Fatimid dynasty. From the origins of the Illuminati and Freemasons to the controversial depiction of Baphomet, no stone is left unturned. The conversation delves into historical alliances, such as those between the Knights Templars and Assassins, and their enduring influence on events like 9/11. Zagami illuminates the evolution of holy war concepts in Christianity through Islamic encounters and traces the rise and fall of knightly orders, showcasing their contributions and ethical quandaries. Zagami highlights the flourishing of Islamic culture during its Golden Age, the vital role of knowledge centers in Cairo and Baghdad, and their impact on the European Renaissance. He examines the historical forces, including the Ottoman and British Empires, that have shaped today's Middle Eastern crises. From the British support of Wahhabism to the enduring wisdom of ancient secret societies, Zagami paints a vivid picture of historical continuity and upheaval. Listeners will be captivated by discussions of the Order of Assassins, the tactics of historical warfare, and figures like Jamaleddin Al-Afghani, who shaped modern Islamic thought and movements. The origins of the Muslim Brotherhood, its Masonic connections, and the discovery of Egypt's first Masonic sword are meticulously explored, shedding light on the deep historical roots of Freemasonry in Egypt. Zagami navigates the complex legacy of figures like Aleister Crowley, whose ties to Islamic societies and mystical brotherhoods reveal a fascinating interplay of espionage, secret rituals, and cultural fusion. From MI5 and MI6 to the Tabula Rasa Lodge, Zagami's revelations about Crowley's ambitions and connections are both intriguing and chilling. As the conversation unfolds, the intricate web of historical events, conspiracy theories, and cultural interconnections becomes apparent. Zagami urges listeners to confront their own cultural histories critically, moving beyond blame to understand the multifaceted influences that shape our world. Through examining alliances, political manipulations, and historical research, Zagami calls for a deeper, more accurate engagement with the past to foster understanding and prevent future conflicts. Join Leo Zagami in this epic podcast adventure, where history, mysticism, and geopolitics intertwine in a narrative that challenges, enlightens, and compels. It's a journey into the heart of darkness and light, revealing the truths that lie hidden within the annals of time. Join host Michael Jaco, Ex-Navy Seal, who teaches you how to tap into your Intuition and Unleash the Power within, so you can become the Master of your Reality. Connect with Michael Jaco at his website - michaelkjaco.com Leo Zagami - leozagami.com Amazon: Confessions Of Illuminati 10 Leo's Books: https://cccpublishing.com

'tis but a scratch: fact and fiction about the Middle Ages
Crusading Warfare in the East, 1099-1187

'tis but a scratch: fact and fiction about the Middle Ages

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 26, 2024 69:14


My guest for this episode is Dr. Nicholas Morton, whom you may remember from our first episode about the Mongols. Today Nick and I will be talking about crusading warfare, in particular, about the military activities and challenges faced by the Crusader States established in the Levant by the First Crusade.  Among the topics we will discussing are the different approaches to warfare practiced by the European Crusaders and their Turkish and Fatimid adversaries; how the crusaders and the leaders of the Latin Crusader states adjusted--or failed to adjust--to the novel challenges presented by warfare in the Middle East; why the First Crusade succeeded while the others failed; and whether, militarily, the Crusader states were doomed from the start.Recommended reading:Nicholas Morton. The Crusader States & Their Neighbours: A Military History, 1099-1187. Oxford University Press, 2020.R.C. Smail. Crusading Warfare, 1097-1193. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 1995 (originally published 1956)Christopher Marshall. Warfare in the Latin East, 1192-1291. Cambridge University Press, 1992.John France. Victory in the East: A Military History of the First Crusade. Cambridge University Press, 1994.John France. Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades: 1000-1300. Cornell University Press, 1999. David Nicolle.  Crusader Warfare Volume I: Byzantium, Western Europe and the Battle for the Holy Land. Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2007.David Nicolle.  Crusader Warfare Volume II: Muslims, Mongols and the Struggle Against the Crusades. Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2007.John Gillingham, “Richard I and the Science of Warfare” - from War and Government: Essays in Honour of J.O. Prestwich (1984); "William the Bastard at War," in Studies in Medieval History Presented to R. Allen Brown, ed. c. Harper-Bill, C. Holdsworth, and J. Nelson (1989); "War and Chivalry in the History of William the Marshal." Thirteenth Century England v.2 (1991); "'Up with Orthodoxy': In Defense of Vegetian Strategy." Journal of Medieval Military History, vol. 2 (2004): 21-41." Clifford Rogers. "The Vegetian 'Science of Warfare' in the Middle Ages." Journal of Medieval Military History, vol. 1 (2002): 1-19.Stephen Morillo. "Battle-Seeking: The Contexts and Limits of Vegetian Strategy." Journal of Medieval Military History, vol. 1 (2002): 149-58.Listen on Podurama https://podurama.com Intro and exit music are by Alexander NakaradaIf you have questions, feel free to contact me at richard.abels54@gmail.com

Art Informant
Al-Andalus and the V&A with Mariam Rosser-Owen

Art Informant

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 16, 2023 89:22


For the 30th episode of the ART Informant, Isabelle Imbert travels to mediaeval Spain with Dr Mariam Rosser-Owen, curator of the Middle Eastern Section in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Al-Andalus, Muslim Spain and Portugal, is particularly recognised for its rich production of carved ivory objects and its architecture, which Mariam and Isabelle talk about at length in the episode. They also discuss Mariam's role as a curator in the Victoria and Albert museum in London, the ongoing changes in the museum, and Mariam fascinating collaborations with contemporary artists.If you've liked this episode and want to support the Podcast, buy me a coffee!Mentioned in the Episode and Further LinksFollow the Art Informant on Instagram and TwitterFollow Marian Rosser-Owen on Instagram and AcademiaArticulating the Ḥijāba: Cultural Patronage and Political Legitimacy in al-Andalus, Brill, 2021Mariam's publications on the V&A blogMosque of Cordoba, information and pictures (Archnet)The Ardabil Carpet, Persia, 16th c. (V&A)Fatimid rock crystal ewer, Egypt, 10th-11th c. (V&A)Book of Gifts and Rarities: Selections Compiled in the Fifteenth Century from an Eleventh-Century Manuscript on Gifts and Treasures, trans. Ghada Hijjawi-Qaddumi, Harvard, 1997Ivory Act 2018Abbas AkbariMalek GnaouiShahpour PouyanSphero-Conical Vessels: Evidence from Baalbek (Lebanon), Valentina Vezzoli (Khamseen)Click here for more episodes of the ART Informant.Click here to see the reproductions of artifacts discussed in the episode.

featured Wiki of the Day
Fatimid conquest of Egypt

featured Wiki of the Day

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 19, 2023 3:59


Episode 2297: Our featured article of the day is Fatimid conquest of Egypt.

Muslim Footprints
Ep 4: The Fatimids: Founders of Cairo, with Dr Shainool Jiwa

Muslim Footprints

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 25, 2023 38:11


The Fatimids were an Ismaili dynasty that reigned over a diverse religious and ethnic population for about 200 years, emerging from the vibrant 10th century world of the Mediterranean. At its height, the Fatimid Empire stretched across the length of the southern Mediterranean and down the Red Sea coast – what we know as Algeria today all the way to the Levant, and along the west coast of Arabia – and included the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, as well as Jerusalem, Damascus, and even Sicily. The authority of its Imam-Caliphs was recognised as far as present-day Iran, Central Asia, Yemen, and India. The story of how the dynasty came about, is as remarkable as some of its achievements.  Dr Shainool Jiwa is Senior Research Fellow at The Institute of Ismaili Studies, and has lectured and published on Fatimid Studies for over three decades. She has published The Fatimids 1: The Rise of a Muslim Empire (2018) and co-edited The Shi'i World: Pathways in Tradition and Modernity (2015) and The Fatimid Caliphate: Diversity of Traditions (2017) as well as translating key medieval Arabic texts relating to Fatimid history. She holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, UK.   Listen now to this episode, and subscribe to Muslim Footprints.

Cities and Memory - remixing the sounds of the world

Eid ul-Fitr is one of the biggest celebrations in Egypt - in reality, it is a three day holiday in the country. The word Eid (from the Arabic language) suggests celebration, feast, and lifelong joy. If you were to mention Eid to any Egyptian, he would react with a sense of delight, musing a heart full of joy as if they were still a child.  The best place to immerse yourself in the celebrations is to head to one of the three Fatimid gates that remain standing nowadays. Bab Zuwayla is the most dramatic, with its crowning fifteen-century minarets. It leads partygoers to a bazaar quarter that is as full of life today as it was in the Middle Ages. Recorded by Rafael Diogo as part of the Cities and Memory Cairo city sound guide. 

Historia del arte con Kenza
#94 El elegante arte de los Fatimid

Historia del arte con Kenza

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 2, 2022 18:33


#94 El elegante arte de los Fatimid - Historia del arte con Kenza El arte del Imperio Fatimid (909-1171) conocido por sus espiritualidad y su exquisitez. Historia del arte con Kenza - Obras que encienden el asombro. Una serie sobre el arte a través de la historia y las culturas. Se presentarán obras que trascienden el tiempo por su belleza y por lo que nos cuenta. Nos puedes seguir a través de la cuenta Instagram Historia.del.arte.con.kenza, para descubrir las obras del podcast y muchas más. Producido por @RojoVenado Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

History of Modern Greece
058: Fatimid Caliphate

History of Modern Greece

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 25, 2022 35:57


A new Caliphate is born in the Northern territories of Africa, and the island of Sicily. These Arabs follow a different teacher in Islam and are on a quest to become the new dominant power.The History of Modern Greece Podcast covers the events of the Greek People from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the Greek War of Independence in 1821-1832, through to the Greco-Turkish War from 1919 to 1922 to the present day.Website: www.moderngreecepodcast.comMusic by Mark Jungerman: www.marcjungermann.com

Well That Aged Well
Episode 90: The Fatimid Caliphate. With Jennifer Pruitt

Well That Aged Well

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 18, 2022 52:59


In this episode we visit The 10th Century Islamic world, and the Fatimid Caliphate. We discuss how they rose to power, and their height and fall, and what their rule was like, from their arcitecthure and their rivalry with the Abbasid Caliphate. This week on "Well That Aged Well", With "Erlend Hedegart"- Links where you can find professor Pruitt here: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/khamseen/short-form-videos/2020/al-aqmar-mosque/https://wisc.academia.edu/JenniferPruitthttps://arthistory.wisc.edu/staff/jennifer-pruitt/Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/well-that-aged-well. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Seekers of Unity
Maimonides: the Genius who Reshaped Judaism

Seekers of Unity

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 9, 2022 18:11


Introducing the genius philosopher, torah scholar and physician, the man whose books were banned and burned and still went on to change the face of Judaism; Moses Maimonides, the Rambam. Maimonides timeline: 1138 Born in Cordoba, Spain under Almoravid rule. 1148 Cordoba invaded by the Almohades. Maimonides flees. 1158 Maimonides starts work on intercalation and Astronomy 1160 Family surfaces in Fez, the Almohad capital in Morocco. 1165 Family spends 6 months in Acre before leaving for Cairo 1168 Maimonides finishes his commentary on the Mishna 1170 Writes the Sefer haMitzvot on the 613 commandments. 1171 He is appointed the Head of Jews in Fostat, Cairo. 1171 Saladin/Ayyubids replace the Fatimid dynasty in Egypt. 1180 Finishes the Mishneh Torah, his legal magnum opus. 1185? Maimonides becomes doctor of al-Fadil, Saladin's vizier. 1190 Finishes the Moreh Nevuchim (Guide for the Perplexed). 1204 Maimonides passes away. Maimonides works (selection): Treatise on Logic, Millot ha-Higayon Commentary on the Mishna, Pirush HaMishnayot Book of the Commandments, Sefer haMitzvot Mishneh Torah, Yad HaChazakah The Guide for the Perplexed, Moreh Nevuchim Letter to the Jews of Yemen, Iggeret Teiman Treatise on Resurrection, Maamar Tekhiyat HaMetim Iggeret HaShmad, Maamar Kiddush HaShem Mark Daniels, The Perplexing Nature of the Guide for the Perplexed, Philosophy Now, Issue 50

Ottoman History Podcast
Locating the Lost Islamic Archive

Ottoman History Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 1, 2022


with Marina Rustow hosted by Chris Gratien | State archives that function as a site of history scholarship are generally a modern creation. But in this episode, we discuss how past Islamic empires, while not necessarily leaving behind an organized archive used by scholars today, had much more sophisticated documentary practices than often assumed. As our guest Marina Rustow has recently shown in a new book entitled The Lost Archive, the relative absence of extant documentation, in the case of the Fatimid Caliphate of Cairo, belies a long paper trail. Using fragments of Fatimid documents surviving in the storeroom (genizah) of a Cairo synagogue, Rustow has identified traces of a lost Fatimid archive. In part one of this two-part interview with Professor Rustow, we explore how she followed a trail of scrap paper and scholarship to locate the lost archive of a medieval Islamic dynasty. « Click for More »

Ottoman History Podcast
Locating the Lost Islamic Archive

Ottoman History Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 1, 2022


with Marina Rustow hosted by Chris Gratien | State archives that function as a site of history scholarship are generally a modern creation. But in this episode, we discuss how past Islamic empires, while not necessarily leaving behind an organized archive used by scholars today, had much more sophisticated documentary practices than often assumed. As our guest Marina Rustow has recently shown in a new book entitled The Lost Archive, the relative absence of extant documentation, in the case of the Fatimid Caliphate of Cairo, belies a long paper trail. Using fragments of Fatimid documents surviving in the storeroom (genizah) of a Cairo synagogue, Rustow has identified traces of a lost Fatimid archive. In part one of this two-part interview with Professor Rustow, we explore how she followed a trail of scrap paper and scholarship to locate the lost archive of a medieval Islamic dynasty. « Click for More »

IHSHG Podcast
The First Shia Caliphate: Fatimid Egyot, 909-1171 (287-549 AH)

IHSHG Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 6, 2021 34:41


With Peter Bayes

One Friday in Jerusalem Podcast
Israel's Diverse Population

One Friday in Jerusalem Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 28, 2021 20:38


For Free Zoom Lessons RSVP and click the following website: www.walkingtheholyland.com   Episode 48 Israel's Diverse Population   Total  9.1 Million   79 % Jewish 17% Muslim 2% Christians 2% Mosaic of religions – Bahai – Druze – Samartins etc   Secular Jew They hold on to their identity as a Jewish culture mixed in with modern society, without the faith of their ancestors. Jews who partake in modern secular society and are not religious Makeup over 40% of the Jewish population.   Ultra-Orthodox Jew Jews that are pro-religious and emphasize studying the Torah and Talmud. Called in Hebrew Haredi Jews, they regard themselves as the most religiously authentic group of Jews. (13% of Israel's population) They have a high birth rate, the Haredi population is growing rapidly Some of them do not recognize the State of Israel as legitimate and do not join the IDF.    They mostly are located in the following Four religious cities in Israel. Safed, Jerusalem, Hebron and Tibereas.   National Religious Jew Recognize the modern state as a legitimate entity yet still desire for Israel to become a religious state. is an ideology that combines Zionism and Orthodox Judaism. the two main ultra-Orthodox parties in the parliament  are the Sephardic Shas Party and United Torah Judaism.   Immigrant Jews Jews from all over the world who made Aliyah to Israel, 37% of the population. Aliyah is the immigration of Jews from all over the world to the modern State of Israel.  Also defined as "the act of going up"—that is, towards Jerusalem—"making aliyah" by moving to the Land of Israel.   Palestinian Jew Jews that lived in the land before the foundation of the State of Israel and speak Arabic fluently. After the establishment of Israel in 1948, the Jews of Mandatory Palestine became Israeli citizens, and the term "Palestinian Jews" has largely fallen into disuse and is somewhat defunct, in favor of the term Israeli Jews.     Muslims Population Arab Muslim 17% of the population in Israel. Sunni Muslim is by far the largest branch of Islam, followed by almost 90% of the world's Muslims. Its name comes from the word Sunnah, referring to the behaviour of Muhammad or in others words following the directions of the profit, and According to Sunni traditions, Muhammad designated Abu Bakr as his successor (the first caliph).   But in contrasts the Shiaa view is different    , which holds that Muhammad announced his son-in-law and cousin Ali ibn Abi Talib as his successor and according to shiaa view that the successor should be from the family and blood line of Mouhamad and not through his successors like the chaliph     Arab Israelis Arabs who own an Israeli ID. Most self-designate themselves as Palestinians by nationality and Israeli by citizenship, while others prefer “Israeli Arab.” This name refers to the fact that after the Nakba, these are the Palestinians that remained within Israel's 1948 borders. Many have family ties to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as well as to Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. The Arabs living in East Jerusalem and the Druze in the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967 and later annexed, were offered Israeli citizenship, but most have refused, not wanting to recognize Israel's claim to sovereignty. They became permanent residents instead. They have the right to apply for citizenship, are entitled to municipal services and have municipal voting rights.   Minorities in Israel Arab Christian less than 2% Around 175,000 Arab Christians live in Israel. They are from a variety of denominational back- grounds such as Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Melchite, Anglican, and others.   Some 42% of all Christians are affiliated with the Melkite Greek Church, and 30% with the Orthodox Church; smaller numbers are split between Latin Rite Catholics with 13% of Christians, we have Less than 10,000 Maronites lives in Israel belongs to the Maronite Catholic Church, who reside in Israel and some of whom self-identify as Arameans. 1,000 Assyrians belongs to the Assyrian Churches, also known as Arameans or Chaldeans are an ethnic group indigenous to the Middle East. They are speakers of the Aramaic branch of Semitic languages.   Coptic community of around 1,000 Copts, Coptic Christians trace their founding to the apostle St. Mark. Tradition holds that Mark brought Christianity to Egypt and founded the Coptic church during the first century. It is one of the oldest Christian churches in the Middle East and was the first founded in Africa.   We have small branches of Protestants, evangelical Christian churches mostly Baptist denomination.     Armenians Part of the Armenian Diaspora, around 400 Armenian families live in the Armenian quarter of the Old City and 10,000 in Israel.   Other minorities Such as: Bedouin are nomadic Arab Tribes who have historically inhabited the desert regions in the Middle East. followers of Islam. Traditionally they live in tents, or Shakes or even houses the modern ones they used to move with their herds across vast areas of arid land in search of grazing areas. Bedouin society is patrilineal. They are renowned for their hospitality, honesty and fierce independence. 200,000 is the population of the Bedouins.     Samaritans Israel's smallest religious minority and own an Israeli ID. 731 Samartains Samaritans claim descent from the tribe of Ephraim and tribe of Manasseh (two sons of Joseph). Assimilated descendant of the Assyrians and residents of the district of Samaria who consider themselves the original Jews and recognize their own version of the Pentateuch plus the book of Joshua.   The present-day population has been consistently divided between the West Bank and Israel. Samaritans in the West Bank live in Mount Gerizim area, while those in Israel are concentrated in the city of Holon, just outside Tel Aviv.     Druze is a monotheistic and Abrahamic religion based on the teachings of the Fatimid caliph, al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, and Ancient Greek philosophers.   An offshoot of Islam whose people have a secret religion and are loyal to the State of Israel. Jethro of Midian is considered an ancestor of the Druze, who revere him as their spiritual founder and chief prophet.   105,000 in population, most in northern Israel.      

Sistory Untold
A (sort of) Matriarchal Dynasty: Asma and Arwa al-Sulayhi

Sistory Untold

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 19, 2021 64:40


It's rare to come across a dynasty that was ruled entirely by women, but we were lucky enough to find one for this episode!  Asma Bint Shihab al-Sulayhi and Arwa al-Sulayhi ruled Yemen alongside and often in place of their husbands, the king. Asma was Arwa's cousin, mentor, teacher, mother-in-law and guardian. In other words, she was the best big sister a queen-to-be could ask for.  We hope you enjoy our first episode of season two as we learn about the Fatimid caliphate of the medieval Middle East and North Africa, discuss the role of women in medieval Arab culture, and, as always, explore history through the eyes of sisterhood! For more information about this episode and to stay up to date about the podcast, follow us at @sistoryuntold on Instagram and Twitter. Make sure to also check out our blog on sistoryuntold.com for our sources and pictures to go along with the episode!

Waldy and Bendy's Adventures in Art
Season 3, Episode 2

Waldy and Bendy's Adventures in Art

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 17, 2021 51:34


Waldy & Bendy discuss sculpture after a chat with Antony Gormley, and then entertain themselves in the lockdown by watching a terrible film about Frida Kahlo. Then Waldy chooses a Fatimid ewer for his imaginary shelf.

New Books in Medieval History
Marina Rustow, "The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue" (Princeton UP, 2020)

New Books in Medieval History

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 5, 2021 77:25


What does it mean that our single greatest source of medieval Islamic government documents comes from the attic of a Jewish synagogue in Cairo? This is the seeming paradox that Marina Rustow, director of the renowned Geniza Lab at Princeton University, has been trying to make sense of for years. In 1896, twin sisters and Scottish philologists Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson transported fragments from the geniza (or worn text repository) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo to their dear friend Solomon Schecter, a Talmud scholar at Cambridge University. The Hebrew-language fragments of the Cairo Geniza would go on to revolutionize the study of medieval Jewry: in 1970, German-Jewish Arabist Shelomo Dov Goitein dubbed the Cairo Geniza “the Living Sea Scrolls” for its remarkable insight into the social world of medieval Jews. But flip the documents over, and the world of the Geniza is hardly just a Jewish one. In her new book, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton University Press, 2020), Rustow examines the previously neglected lines of Arabic found on some of the Geniza's Hebrew-language documents: Fatimid-era petitions and decrees that defy the adage that the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents and preserved even fewer. No Fatimid state archive exists in the Middle East today. But the Cairo Geniza's fragments—which passed through the hands of tax collector and chancery secretary, paper pusher and vizier alike—force us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that the pre-Ottoman Middle East was defined by weak or informal institutions. 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 fully understand it. Listen in to learn more—and stick around to the end to hear Marina's favorite fact about daily life in medieval Cairo! Notably mentioned in this episode: Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken Books, 2011) Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Cornell University Press, 2008) Nathan Hofer, The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, 1173-1325 (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) Shelomo Dov Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Volumes I-VI (republished with University of California Press, 2000) S. M. Stern, Fāṭimid Decrees: Original Documents from the Fāṭimid Chancery (Faber & Faber, 1964) Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents from the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge University Press, 1993) Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton University, and the director of the Princeton Geniza Lab. Nancy Ko is a PhD student in History at Columbia University, where she works at the intersection of Jewish and Middle East Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Books in Islamic Studies
Marina Rustow, "The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue" (Princeton UP, 2020)

New Books in Islamic Studies

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 5, 2021 77:25


What does it mean that our single greatest source of medieval Islamic government documents comes from the attic of a Jewish synagogue in Cairo? This is the seeming paradox that Marina Rustow, director of the renowned Geniza Lab at Princeton University, has been trying to make sense of for years. In 1896, twin sisters and Scottish philologists Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson transported fragments from the geniza (or worn text repository) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo to their dear friend Solomon Schecter, a Talmud scholar at Cambridge University. The Hebrew-language fragments of the Cairo Geniza would go on to revolutionize the study of medieval Jewry: in 1970, German-Jewish Arabist Shelomo Dov Goitein dubbed the Cairo Geniza “the Living Sea Scrolls” for its remarkable insight into the social world of medieval Jews. But flip the documents over, and the world of the Geniza is hardly just a Jewish one. In her new book, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton University Press, 2020), Rustow examines the previously neglected lines of Arabic found on some of the Geniza’s Hebrew-language documents: Fatimid-era petitions and decrees that defy the adage that the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents and preserved even fewer. No Fatimid state archive exists in the Middle East today. But the Cairo Geniza’s fragments—which passed through the hands of tax collector and chancery secretary, paper pusher and vizier alike—force us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that the pre-Ottoman Middle East was defined by weak or informal institutions. 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 fully understand it. Listen in to learn more—and stick around to the end to hear Marina’s favorite fact about daily life in medieval Cairo! Notably mentioned in this episode: Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken Books, 2011) Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Cornell University Press, 2008) Nathan Hofer, The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, 1173-1325 (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) Shelomo Dov Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Volumes I-VI (republished with University of California Press, 2000) S. M. Stern, Fāṭimid Decrees: Original Documents from the Fāṭimid Chancery (Faber & Faber, 1964) Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents from the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge University Press, 1993) Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton University, and the director of the Princeton Geniza Lab. Nancy Ko is a PhD student in History at Columbia University, where she works at the intersection of Jewish and Middle East Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Books in History
Marina Rustow, "The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue" (Princeton UP, 2020)

New Books in History

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 5, 2021 77:25


What does it mean that our single greatest source of medieval Islamic government documents comes from the attic of a Jewish synagogue in Cairo? This is the seeming paradox that Marina Rustow, director of the renowned Geniza Lab at Princeton University, has been trying to make sense of for years. In 1896, twin sisters and Scottish philologists Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson transported fragments from the geniza (or worn text repository) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo to their dear friend Solomon Schecter, a Talmud scholar at Cambridge University. The Hebrew-language fragments of the Cairo Geniza would go on to revolutionize the study of medieval Jewry: in 1970, German-Jewish Arabist Shelomo Dov Goitein dubbed the Cairo Geniza “the Living Sea Scrolls” for its remarkable insight into the social world of medieval Jews. But flip the documents over, and the world of the Geniza is hardly just a Jewish one. In her new book, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton University Press, 2020), Rustow examines the previously neglected lines of Arabic found on some of the Geniza’s Hebrew-language documents: Fatimid-era petitions and decrees that defy the adage that the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents and preserved even fewer. No Fatimid state archive exists in the Middle East today. But the Cairo Geniza’s fragments—which passed through the hands of tax collector and chancery secretary, paper pusher and vizier alike—force us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that the pre-Ottoman Middle East was defined by weak or informal institutions. 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 fully understand it. Listen in to learn more—and stick around to the end to hear Marina’s favorite fact about daily life in medieval Cairo! Notably mentioned in this episode: Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken Books, 2011) Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Cornell University Press, 2008) Nathan Hofer, The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, 1173-1325 (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) Shelomo Dov Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Volumes I-VI (republished with University of California Press, 2000) S. M. Stern, Fāṭimid Decrees: Original Documents from the Fāṭimid Chancery (Faber & Faber, 1964) Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents from the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge University Press, 1993) Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton University, and the director of the Princeton Geniza Lab. Nancy Ko is a PhD student in History at Columbia University, where she works at the intersection of Jewish and Middle East Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies
Marina Rustow, "The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue" (Princeton UP, 2020)

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 5, 2021 77:25


What does it mean that our single greatest source of medieval Islamic government documents comes from the attic of a Jewish synagogue in Cairo? This is the seeming paradox that Marina Rustow, director of the renowned Geniza Lab at Princeton University, has been trying to make sense of for years. In 1896, twin sisters and Scottish philologists Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson transported fragments from the geniza (or worn text repository) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo to their dear friend Solomon Schecter, a Talmud scholar at Cambridge University. The Hebrew-language fragments of the Cairo Geniza would go on to revolutionize the study of medieval Jewry: in 1970, German-Jewish Arabist Shelomo Dov Goitein dubbed the Cairo Geniza “the Living Sea Scrolls” for its remarkable insight into the social world of medieval Jews. But flip the documents over, and the world of the Geniza is hardly just a Jewish one. In her new book, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton University Press, 2020), Rustow examines the previously neglected lines of Arabic found on some of the Geniza’s Hebrew-language documents: Fatimid-era petitions and decrees that defy the adage that the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents and preserved even fewer. No Fatimid state archive exists in the Middle East today. But the Cairo Geniza’s fragments—which passed through the hands of tax collector and chancery secretary, paper pusher and vizier alike—force us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that the pre-Ottoman Middle East was defined by weak or informal institutions. 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 fully understand it. Listen in to learn more—and stick around to the end to hear Marina’s favorite fact about daily life in medieval Cairo! Notably mentioned in this episode: Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken Books, 2011) Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Cornell University Press, 2008) Nathan Hofer, The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, 1173-1325 (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) Shelomo Dov Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Volumes I-VI (republished with University of California Press, 2000) S. M. Stern, Fāṭimid Decrees: Original Documents from the Fāṭimid Chancery (Faber & Faber, 1964) Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents from the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge University Press, 1993) Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton University, and the director of the Princeton Geniza Lab. Nancy Ko is a PhD student in History at Columbia University, where she works at the intersection of Jewish and Middle East Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Princeton UP Ideas Podcast
Marina Rustow, "The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Princeton UP Ideas Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 5, 2021 77:25


What does it mean that our single greatest source of medieval Islamic government documents comes from the attic of a Jewish synagogue in Cairo? This is the seeming paradox that Marina Rustow, director of the renowned Geniza Lab at Princeton University, has been trying to make sense of for years. In 1896, twin sisters and Scottish philologists Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson transported fragments from the geniza (or worn text repository) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo to their dear friend Solomon Schecter, a Talmud scholar at Cambridge University. The Hebrew-language fragments of the Cairo Geniza would go on to revolutionize the study of medieval Jewry: in 1970, German-Jewish Arabist Shelomo Dov Goitein dubbed the Cairo Geniza “the Living Sea Scrolls” for its remarkable insight into the social world of medieval Jews. But flip the documents over, and the world of the Geniza is hardly just a Jewish one. In her new book, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton University Press, 2020), Rustow examines the previously neglected lines of Arabic found on some of the Geniza’s Hebrew-language documents: Fatimid-era petitions and decrees that defy the adage that the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents and preserved even fewer. No Fatimid state archive exists in the Middle East today. But the Cairo Geniza’s fragments—which passed through the hands of tax collector and chancery secretary, paper pusher and vizier alike—force us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that the pre-Ottoman Middle East was defined by weak or informal institutions. 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 fully understand it. Listen in to learn more—and stick around to the end to hear Marina’s favorite fact about daily life in medieval Cairo! Notably mentioned in this episode: Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken Books, 2011) Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Cornell University Press, 2008) Nathan Hofer, The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, 1173-1325 (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) Shelomo Dov Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Volumes I-VI (republished with University of California Press, 2000) S. M. Stern, Fāṭimid Decrees: Original Documents from the Fāṭimid Chancery (Faber & Faber, 1964) Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents from the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge University Press, 1993) Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton University, and the director of the Princeton Geniza Lab. Nancy Ko is a PhD student in History at Columbia University, where she works at the intersection of Jewish and Middle East Studies.

New Books in Jewish Studies
Marina Rustow, "The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue" (Princeton UP, 2020)

New Books in Jewish Studies

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 5, 2021 77:25


What does it mean that our single greatest source of medieval Islamic government documents comes from the attic of a Jewish synagogue in Cairo? This is the seeming paradox that Marina Rustow, director of the renowned Geniza Lab at Princeton University, has been trying to make sense of for years. In 1896, twin sisters and Scottish philologists Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson transported fragments from the geniza (or worn text repository) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo to their dear friend Solomon Schecter, a Talmud scholar at Cambridge University. The Hebrew-language fragments of the Cairo Geniza would go on to revolutionize the study of medieval Jewry: in 1970, German-Jewish Arabist Shelomo Dov Goitein dubbed the Cairo Geniza “the Living Sea Scrolls” for its remarkable insight into the social world of medieval Jews. But flip the documents over, and the world of the Geniza is hardly just a Jewish one. In her new book, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton University Press, 2020), Rustow examines the previously neglected lines of Arabic found on some of the Geniza’s Hebrew-language documents: Fatimid-era petitions and decrees that defy the adage that the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents and preserved even fewer. No Fatimid state archive exists in the Middle East today. But the Cairo Geniza’s fragments—which passed through the hands of tax collector and chancery secretary, paper pusher and vizier alike—force us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that the pre-Ottoman Middle East was defined by weak or informal institutions. 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 fully understand it. Listen in to learn more—and stick around to the end to hear Marina’s favorite fact about daily life in medieval Cairo! Notably mentioned in this episode: Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken Books, 2011) Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Cornell University Press, 2008) Nathan Hofer, The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, 1173-1325 (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) Shelomo Dov Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Volumes I-VI (republished with University of California Press, 2000) S. M. Stern, Fāṭimid Decrees: Original Documents from the Fāṭimid Chancery (Faber & Faber, 1964) Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents from the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge University Press, 1993) Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton University, and the director of the Princeton Geniza Lab. Nancy Ko is a PhD student in History at Columbia University, where she works at the intersection of Jewish and Middle East Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Books Network
Marina Rustow, "The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue" (Princeton UP, 2020)

New Books Network

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 5, 2021 77:25


What does it mean that our single greatest source of medieval Islamic government documents comes from the attic of a Jewish synagogue in Cairo? This is the seeming paradox that Marina Rustow, director of the renowned Geniza Lab at Princeton University, has been trying to make sense of for years. In 1896, twin sisters and Scottish philologists Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson transported fragments from the geniza (or worn text repository) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo to their dear friend Solomon Schecter, a Talmud scholar at Cambridge University. The Hebrew-language fragments of the Cairo Geniza would go on to revolutionize the study of medieval Jewry: in 1970, German-Jewish Arabist Shelomo Dov Goitein dubbed the Cairo Geniza “the Living Sea Scrolls” for its remarkable insight into the social world of medieval Jews. But flip the documents over, and the world of the Geniza is hardly just a Jewish one. In her new book, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton University Press, 2020), Rustow examines the previously neglected lines of Arabic found on some of the Geniza’s Hebrew-language documents: Fatimid-era petitions and decrees that defy the adage that the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents and preserved even fewer. No Fatimid state archive exists in the Middle East today. But the Cairo Geniza’s fragments—which passed through the hands of tax collector and chancery secretary, paper pusher and vizier alike—force us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that the pre-Ottoman Middle East was defined by weak or informal institutions. 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 fully understand it. Listen in to learn more—and stick around to the end to hear Marina’s favorite fact about daily life in medieval Cairo! Notably mentioned in this episode: Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken Books, 2011) Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Cornell University Press, 2008) Nathan Hofer, The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, 1173-1325 (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) Shelomo Dov Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Volumes I-VI (republished with University of California Press, 2000) S. M. Stern, Fāṭimid Decrees: Original Documents from the Fāṭimid Chancery (Faber & Faber, 1964) Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents from the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge University Press, 1993) Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton University, and the director of the Princeton Geniza Lab. Nancy Ko is a PhD student in History at Columbia University, where she works at the intersection of Jewish and Middle East Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jewish History Matters
60: The Cairo Genizah with Marina Rustow

Jewish History Matters

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 3, 2021 73:34


Marina Rustow joins us to talk about her book The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue, and about the Cairo Genizah and why it matters. Listen in for an expansive conversation about how we can consider the Genizah in new ways, what it tells us about the Fatimid state in the tenth to twelfth centuries, and how this teaches us about how documents and records function in social as well as historical terms. Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East, and Professor of Near Eastern Studies and History at Princeton University, where she also runs the Princeton Genizah Lab.

The Making of the Islamic World
Fragments of the Fatimid Caliphate

The Making of the Islamic World

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 13, 2020


narrated by Chris Gratien featuring Marina Rustow, Neelam Khoja, Zoe Griffith, and Fahad Bishara | For brief period of history, the Fatimid Caliphate based in Egypt presided over arguably the most powerful empire in the Mediterranean. Yet because the legacy of this Ismaili dynasty was erased or downplayed by its Sunni rivals and successors, the Fatimids are often misunderstood. As we show in this installment of "The Making of the Islamic World," the Fatimid period and the sources that survive from it can in fact be critical to learning more about how pre-modern Islamic polities functioned, demonstrating that the Fatimids had a much more sophisticated state apparatus than some have assumed. The statecraft of a pre-modern Islamic empire is just one of the topics we can study in the Fatimid world thanks to a rich trove of documents from the Cairo Genizah. The Genizah was a storeroom of a synagogue in Fustat that ended up containing a wealth of documents, many of them simply discarded or reused, that reveal the complexity and interconnection of the medieval Mediterranean. In this episode, we explore how scholars make use of the Genizah documents and the interconnected world stretching from Southeast Asia to Mediterranean Europe reveals in the Genizah papers. In the process, we learn about the emergence of the Fatimid Caliphate as a dynasty and state structure and the developments that took place under Fatimid rule in Cairo. « Click for More »

Ottoman History Podcast
Fragments of the Fatimid Caliphate

Ottoman History Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 13, 2020


narrated by Chris Gratien featuring Marina Rustow, Neelam Khoja, Zoe Griffith, and Fahad Bishara | For brief period of history, the Fatimid Caliphate based in Egypt presided over arguably the most powerful empire in the Mediterranean. Yet because the legacy of this Ismaili dynasty was erased or downplayed by its Sunni rivals and successors, the Fatimids are often misunderstood. As we show in this installment of "The Making of the Islamic World," the Fatimid period and the sources that survive from it can in fact be critical to learning more about how pre-modern Islamic polities functioned, demonstrating that the Fatimids had a much more sophisticated state apparatus than some have assumed. The statecraft of a pre-modern Islamic empire is just one of the topics we can study in the Fatimid world thanks to a rich trove of documents from the Cairo Genizah. The Genizah was a storeroom of a synagogue in Fustat that ended up containing a wealth of documents, many of them simply discarded or reused, that reveal the complexity and interconnection of the medieval Mediterranean. In this episode, we explore how scholars make use of the Genizah documents and the interconnected world stretching from Southeast Asia to Mediterranean Europe reveals in the Genizah papers. In the process, we learn about the emergence of the Fatimid Caliphate as a dynasty and state structure and the developments that took place under Fatimid rule in Cairo. « Click for More »

Ottoman History Podcast
Fragments of the Fatimid Caliphate

Ottoman History Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 13, 2020


narrated by Chris Gratienfeaturing Marina Rustow, Neelam Khoja, Zoe Griffith, and Fahad Bishara« Click for More »

history east turkey empire islam fragments ottoman caliphate ohp fatimid chris gratien marina rustow fahad bishara zoegriffith
Islamic History
S1- Chronology E12-1141-1187A.D.|Second Crusade| Nuruddin Zengi|Salahuddin al Ayyubi|End of Fatimids

Islamic History

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 19, 2020 7:45


1141A.D-The Kara Kitai Turkomans defeat the Seljuks at Amu Darya. 1144A.D-The Seljuks, under Zengi, recapture Edessa.Pope Eugene declares the Second Crusade.1145A.D-The Second Crusade collapses in Anatolia but succeeds in capturing Lisbon in Portugal.End of the Murabitun rule in Andalus.1146A.D-The al Muhaddithin captures Morocco.The assassins murder Seljuk Emir Zengi. 1149A.D-Al Zafir becomes the Fatimid Caliph. 1150A.D-The University of Paris is established. 1151A.D-Al Idrisi constructs a map of the then known world. 1154A.D-The Kurdish officer Nuruddin, in Seljuk service, takes Damascus.Al Faiz becomes the Fatimid Caliph in Cairo. 1157A.D-The al Muhaddithin captures Andalus. 1160A.D-Al Mustanjid becomes the Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad.Al Adid, the last of the Fatimids, becomes the Caliph in Cairo. 1163A.D-The Seljuks and the Crusaders compete for influence in Fatimid Egypt. 1166A.D-Death of Shaykh Abdul Qader Jeelani of Baghdad, called Shaykh ul Mashaiq, founder of the Qadariya Sufi order.Death of the geographer, al Idrisi.1167A.D-Establishment of Oxford University in England.1170A.D-Salahuddin takes Egypt from the Fatimids.Al Mustadi becomes the Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad. 1171A.D-End of the Fatimid era. Egypt reverts to the Abbasid Caliphate.1173A.D-Ghiasuddin Ghori established the kingdom of Ghor in Afghanistan. 1175A.D-Salahuddin consolidates his hold on Syria and Egypt.Death of Ahmed al Rifai, founder of the Rifaiyah Sufi brotherhood.1177A.D-Muhammed Ghori adds Multan, Uch, Dera Ismail Khan and Sindh to his dominions.1179A.D-Muhammed Ghori starts campaigns to capture Peshawar and Sialkot. 1182A.D-Khwaja Muhammed Ghouse of Sindh introduces the Qadariya order into India and Pakistan. 1187A.D-Battle of Hittin. Salahuddin triumphs and recaptures Jerusalem --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/history-of-islam/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/history-of-islam/support

Islamic History
S1- Chronology E8- 875-961A.D.|Decline of Abbasids|Golden Age of Islamic Spain|Rise of Turks

Islamic History

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 25, 2020 15:37


We will listen about Hamdan Qramat and the Qaramatian movement capturing Yemen and Damascus and raiding Mecca and carrying off Hajr e Aswad to Bahrain. We will know about Samanids establishing their base in Khorasan. We will know about Imam Muntazar's disappearance and the concept of hidden Imam.We will know about Dawud ibn Khalaf and the Zahiri School of Fiqh. We will see the death of Imam Tirmizi and the establishment of Zaidi state in Yemen who were the ancestors of Rassid Dynasty.The Compilation of Arabian Nights.Muslims capturing the co capital of Byzantine the "Solonika".The establishment of Fatimid state in North Africa.Ubaidullah al Mahdi becoming the first Fatimid Caliph.The death of Al Razi the famous Physician.Reign of Abdur Rahman III in Cordoba and the golden age of Islamic Spain.The death of At Tabari the famous Quranic Commentator.Buyids under Ali ibn Buya capturing Iraq and Baghdad for some time.Ikshidid's becoming the rulers of Egypt displacing the Tulunids. The death of Abdur Rahman III and the decline of Spain. The Oghuz family of Turks accepts Islam from which Ottomans and Seljuks descended. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/history-of-islam/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/history-of-islam/support

Abbasid History Podcast
EP013 Dr. Khalil Andani on a brief history of Ismailism

Abbasid History Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 15, 2020 36:45


Dr. Khalil Andani gives perhaps the most succinct introduction to the history of Ismailism. We cover their beginnings, understanding of revelation, the Qaramatians, the Fatimid caliphate and sub-sects. Sponsored by IHRC bookshop. Visit shop.ihrc.org.

Candid Insights with Sahil Badruddin
Shainool Jiwa on Lessons from the Fatimid Empire for Today

Candid Insights with Sahil Badruddin

Play Episode Listen Later May 26, 2020 21:51


Sahil interviews Shainool Jiwa -- the Head of Constituency Studies at the Institute of Ismaili Studies and a specialist of the Fatimid Empire -- on lessons from the Fatimids for today. 

Islamic Art and History
01 - History of Islamic Cairo

Islamic Art and History

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 20, 2019 45:00


Episode 1: Join Omar Sheira and me for a walk through of the history of Cairo, from its foundations a thousand years ago to present time. We discuss the Fatimid, Ayyubid (and of course Saladin) and the mighty Mamluks, the giant Ottomans before ending in the French and British rule. These podcasts will continue as we travel across the world to other Islamic ancient capitals to explore the less known history and art.

Nerds Amalgamated
Spaceport, Steam, The Boys

Nerds Amalgamated

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 18, 2019 53:24


Welcome back to the latest episode of tom foolery from the Nerds, we have another amazing showing for you this week. Starting off we have Buck telling us about Spaceport America and how Virgin Galactic has moved in and is closer to carrying passengers into space. So get those cheque books out, prepare to sell a kidney because tickets are $250,000 each. But you will need to wait in line as 600 are already sold. But hey, at least this will be a much more comfortable ride then that of Laika, the dog kidnapped from the streets of Moscow and sent into space all those years ago. This has got to be one of the coolest joy flights out there (when it finally gets airborne). Next up the Professor brings us news about Steam becoming strict in relation to release dates. That’s right folks, no longer can dodgy developer’s use Steam’s coming soon feature as free advertising. No, Steam has come out with the metaphysical switch and spanked those fiendish louts for being such naughty children. From now on if the release date needs to be changed you need to listen in to find out exactly what happens. What, you thought we would tell you everything here? Come of it, we tell you in the podcast so listen in. Then we have DJ looking into The Boys the new show from Amazon. This show is being advertised as the most successful show ever, which is saying something as they have a number of great shows. The premise of the show is a battle between the Heroes and a group fighting to bring them down. Buck gives us a heads up that one superhero dies during season one, but not how. All we know is that it is a crappy way to die. DJ is excited about the rise of indie comics and the refreshing change that is happening by using these for content rather than just relying Marvel and DC for superheroes. Want to know more? So do we, listen in and tell us what you think. We look at the games the Nerds are playing and have some discussion around them, with some interesting facts coming out. We know, sorry for educating you with random facts against your will. As normal we have the shout outs, remembrances, birthdays, and events of interest for the week, or do we? You will need to open the show and listen in to find out, also why this metaphysical question is asked. Anyway, please remember to take care of yourselves, look out for each other and stay hydrated.EPISODE NOTES:Spaceport America - https://phys.org/news/2019-08-virgin-galactic-unveiling-mission-space.htmlChanges to Steam release date system - https://www.pcgamesn.com/steam-release-date-coming-soonThe Boys and the rise of the indie comics in screen media - https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/ustv/a28666172/the-boys-amazon-most-successful-shows/Games currently playingBuck– Company of heroes 2 - https://store.steampowered.com/app/231430/Company_of_Heroes_2/Professor- Zombicide: Invader - https://cmon.com/product/zombicide/zombicide-invaderDJ– Red Dead Redemption 2 - https://www.rockstargames.com/reddeadredemption2/Other topics discussedBranson thinks Trump is not a real billionaire- https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/richard-branson-scathing-letter-president-donald-trump-virgin-billionaire-a7975706.htmlLaika (Soviet space dog to orbit the Earth.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laika2014 Virgin Galactic crash- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VSS_Enterprise_crashSuccessful Virgin Galactic after the 2014 Virgin Galactic crash- https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/05/virgin-galactic-spaceshiptwo-powered-flight-test/Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird (Mach 3+strategic reconnaissance aircraft)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_BlackbirdVirgin Galactic Purpose statement- https://www.virgingalactic.com/purpose/On August 13, 2019, NASA at the Trident Basin in Cape Canaveral, Florida, astronauts Doug Hurley, left, and Bob Behnken work with teams from NASA and SpaceX to rehearse crew extraction from SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, which will be used to carry humans to the International Space Station. The pair will fly to the space station aboard the Crew Dragon for the SpaceX Demo-2 mission.- https://i.imgur.com/7ftObLc.jpg- https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/nasa-and-spacex-dragon-crew-extraction-rehearsalSteam Greenlight closing down- https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1265922321514182595Steam Direct- https://partner.steamgames.com/steamdirectThe Steam store now lets you mark games you’ve played on other platforms- https://www.pcgamesn.com/steam-ignoreWatchmen (2009 superhero movie)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen_(film)Danger 5 (Australian Comics)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_5Doom (1996 Game comics)- https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Doom_comicDate with Danger comics- https://www.amazon.com.au/Date-Danger-Golden-Age-Comic/dp/1500809241Frankie Goes to Hollywood - Two Tribes (1984 song)- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXWVpcypf0wLyudmila Pavlichenko, Soviet sniper in the Red Army during World War II, credited with 309 kills. She is regarded as one of the top military snipers of all time and the most successful female sniper in history.- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyudmila_PavlichenkoRoza Shanina, Soviet sniper during World War II who was credited with fifty-nine confirmed kills, including twelve soldiers during the Battle of Vilnius.- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roza_ShaninaEnemy of The Gates (2001 war movie)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_at_the_GatesVasily Zaitsev, Soviet sniper and a Hero of the Soviet Union during World War II. A feature-length film, Enemy at the Gates (2001), starring Jude Law as Zaytsev, was based on part of William Craig's non-fiction book Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad (1973), which includes a "snipers' duel" between Zaytsev and a Wehrmacht sniper school director, Major Erwin König.- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Zaitsev_(sniper)Simo Häyhä aka White Death, Finnish sniper. He is believed to have killed over 500 men during the 1939–40 Winter War, the highest number of sniper kills in any major war.- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simo_H%C3%A4yh%C3%A4Deadliest Warrior (2009 TV Series)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadliest_WarriorZombicide Board games- Zombicide Season 1 - https://www.cmon.com/product/zombicide/zombicide-season-1- Zombicide: Black Plague - https://www.cmon.com/product/zombicide/zombicide-black-plagueHow to pronounce Jacque Tits properly- https://www.quora.com/Is-mathematician-Jacques-Titss-last-name-pronounced-like-the-English-word-tits-or-like-the-English-word-teatEverybody Wants to be a Cat (TNC Podcast)- https://thatsnotcanon.com/ewtbacpodcastFloof and Pupper Podcast (TNC Podcast)- https://thatsnotcanon.com/floofandpupperpodcastShoutouts10 Aug 2019 - 500th anniversary of Magellan's circumnavigation voyage. The expedition's goal, which it accomplished, was to find a western route to the Moluccas (Spice Islands). Magellan left Spain on 20 September 1519, sailed across the Atlantic, and discovered the strait that bears his name, allowing him to pass through South America into the Pacific Ocean (which he named). The fleet crossed the Pacific, stopping in the Philippines, and eventually reached the Moluccas after two years. A much-depleted crew finally returned to Spain on 6 September 1522. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magellan%27s_circumnavigation12 Aug 1099 – First Crusade: Battle of Ascalon, Crusaders under the command of Godfrey of Bouillon defeat Fatimid forces led by Al-Afdal Shahanshah. This is considered the last engagement of the First Crusade. - Believed to be the result of computer games, but unproven - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ascalon12 Aug 1952 – The Night of the Murdered Poets: Thirteen prominent Jewish intellectuals are murdered in Moscow, Russia, Soviet Union. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Murdered_Poets12 Aug 1981 – The IBM Personal Computer is released. It was created by a team of engineers and designers under the direction of Philip Don Estridge of the IBM Entry Systems Division in Boca Raton, Florida. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_ComputerRemembrances12 Aug 1848 - George Stephenson, English civil engineer and mechanical engineer. Renowned as the "Father of Railways", Stephenson was considered by the Victorians a great example of diligent application and thirst for improvement. Self-help advocate Samuel Smiles particularly praised his achievements. His chosen rail gauge, sometimes called 'Stephenson gauge', was the basis for the 4 feet 8 1⁄2 inches (1,435 mm) standard gauge used by most of the world's railways. Pioneered by Stephenson, rail transport was one of the most important technological inventions of the 19th century and a key component of the Industrial Revolution. He died from pleurisy at the age of 67 in Chesterfield, Derbyshire. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Stephenson12 Aug 1914 - John Phillip Holland, Irish engineer who developed the first submarine to be formally commissioned by the US Navy, and the first Royal Navy submarine, Holland 1. This was the first submarine having power to run submerged for any considerable distance, and the first to combine electric motors for submerged travel and gasoline engines for use on the surface. He died from pneumonia at age of 72 inNewark, New Jersey. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Philip_Holland12 Aug 1955 - James B. Sumner, American chemist. He discovered that enzymes can be crystallized, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1946 with John Howard Northrop and Wendell Meredith Stanley. He was also the first to prove that enzymes are proteins. He died from cancer at the age of 67 in Buffalo, New York. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_B._SumnerFamous Birthdays12 Aug 1887 - Erwin Schrödinger, Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist who developed a number of fundamental results in the field of quantum theory: the Schrödinger equation provides a way to calculate the wave function of a system and how it changes dynamically in time. In addition, he was the author of many works in various fields of physics: statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, physics of dielectrics, colour theory, electrodynamics,general relativity, and cosmology, and he made several attempts to construct a unified field theory. He paid great attention to the philosophical aspects of science, ancient and oriental philosophical concepts, ethics, and religion. He also wrote on philosophy and theoretical biology. He is also known for his "Schrödinger's cat" thought-experiment. He was born in Vienna - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Schr%C3%B6dinger12 Aug 1918 - Guy Gibson , was a distinguished bomber pilot in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. He was the first Commanding Officer of No. 617 Squadron, which he led in the "Dam Busters" raid in 1943, resulting in the destruction of two large dams in the Ruhr area of Germany. He was awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces, in the aftermath of the raid in May 1943 and became the most highly decorated British serviceman at that time. He completed over 170 war operations before dying in action at the age of 26. He was born in Simla - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Gibson12 Aug 1930 - Jacques Tits, a Belgium-bornFrenchmathematician who works on group theory and incidence geometry. He introduced Tits buildings, the Tits alternative, the Tits group, and the Tits metric. He was born in Uccle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_TitsEvents of Interest12 Aug 1492 – Christopher Columbus arrives in the Canary Islands on his first voyage to the New World. - https://www.thoughtco.com/first-new-world-voyage-christopher-columbus-213643712 Aug 1865 – Joseph Lister, British surgeon and scientist, performs 1st antiseptic surgery. He did it by applying a piece of lint dipped in carbolic acid solution onto the wound of a seven-year-old boy at Glasgow Infirmary, who had sustained a compound fracture after a cart wheel had passed over his leg. After four days, he renewed the pad and discovered that no infection had developed, and after a total of six weeks he was amazed to discover that the boy's bones had fused back together. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Lister12 Aug 1990 – Sue, the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton found to date, is discovered by Sue Hendrickson in South Dakota. It is one of the largest, most extensive, and best preserved Tyrannosaurus rex specimens ever found, at over 90% recovered by bulk. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sue_(dinosaur)IntroArtist – Goblins from MarsSong Title – Super Mario - Overworld Theme (GFM Trap Remix)Song Link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GNMe6kF0j0&index=4&list=PLHmTsVREU3Ar1AJWkimkl6Pux3R5PB-QJFollow us onFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/NerdsAmalgamated/Email - Nerds.Amalgamated@gmail.comTwitter - https://twitter.com/NAmalgamatedSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6Nux69rftdBeeEXwD8GXrSiTunes - https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/top-shelf-nerds/id1347661094RSS - http://www.thatsnotcanonproductions.com/topshelfnerdspodcast?format=rss

New Books in South Asian Studies
Scott S. Reese, “Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and Authority in the Indian Ocean, 1839-1937” (Edinburgh UP, 2017)

New Books in South Asian Studies

Play Episode Listen Later May 15, 2019 64:09


Religion and empire are often intertwined. Regarding Muslims there are well known dynasties like the Umayyad, the Abbasid, the Fatimid, the Ottoman, and many others. But the empire governing the largest Muslim population was, of course, the British. In Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and Authority in the Indian Ocean, 1839-1937 (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Scott S. Reese, Professor at Northern Arizona University, explores the social effects of the British empire, and its attending conditions, on Muslims in the port city of Aden. In the the late 19th/ and early 20th centuries Aden was undergoing tremendous change, which was fostered by its valuable position within the empire. Muslims from both ends of the empire were making Aden their home. The diversity of the community and technological innovations shaped the everyday lives of Muslims. Reese explores Aden’s sacred landscape by investigating how space was produced and organized. He demonstrates how unseen entities affected the activities that these spaces elicited. Questions of authority emerge through an exploration of local Islamic legal discourse, where authority was regularly asserted and contested across differing Muslim groups. The boundaries of religious practice were also being pushed through the practice of spirit possession. He also tackles the tensions between the local and the global when the Muslims of Aden reflect on transnational scripturalist or sufi movements. In our conversation we discuss how local religious actors were shaped by broader Islamic trends, emerging print technologies, maritime flows, law and adjudication, the role of mosques and cemeteries, Salafism, and popular religious practices, Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film(Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Books in British Studies
Scott S. Reese, “Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and Authority in the Indian Ocean, 1839-1937” (Edinburgh UP, 2017)

New Books in British Studies

Play Episode Listen Later May 15, 2019 64:09


Religion and empire are often intertwined. Regarding Muslims there are well known dynasties like the Umayyad, the Abbasid, the Fatimid, the Ottoman, and many others. But the empire governing the largest Muslim population was, of course, the British. In Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and Authority in the Indian Ocean, 1839-1937 (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Scott S. Reese, Professor at Northern Arizona University, explores the social effects of the British empire, and its attending conditions, on Muslims in the port city of Aden. In the the late 19th/ and early 20th centuries Aden was undergoing tremendous change, which was fostered by its valuable position within the empire. Muslims from both ends of the empire were making Aden their home. The diversity of the community and technological innovations shaped the everyday lives of Muslims. Reese explores Aden’s sacred landscape by investigating how space was produced and organized. He demonstrates how unseen entities affected the activities that these spaces elicited. Questions of authority emerge through an exploration of local Islamic legal discourse, where authority was regularly asserted and contested across differing Muslim groups. The boundaries of religious practice were also being pushed through the practice of spirit possession. He also tackles the tensions between the local and the global when the Muslims of Aden reflect on transnational scripturalist or sufi movements. In our conversation we discuss how local religious actors were shaped by broader Islamic trends, emerging print technologies, maritime flows, law and adjudication, the role of mosques and cemeteries, Salafism, and popular religious practices, Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film(Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Books in History
Scott S. Reese, “Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and Authority in the Indian Ocean, 1839-1937” (Edinburgh UP, 2017)

New Books in History

Play Episode Listen Later May 15, 2019 64:09


Religion and empire are often intertwined. Regarding Muslims there are well known dynasties like the Umayyad, the Abbasid, the Fatimid, the Ottoman, and many others. But the empire governing the largest Muslim population was, of course, the British. In Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and Authority in the Indian Ocean, 1839-1937 (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Scott S. Reese, Professor at Northern Arizona University, explores the social effects of the British empire, and its attending conditions, on Muslims in the port city of Aden. In the the late 19th/ and early 20th centuries Aden was undergoing tremendous change, which was fostered by its valuable position within the empire. Muslims from both ends of the empire were making Aden their home. The diversity of the community and technological innovations shaped the everyday lives of Muslims. Reese explores Aden’s sacred landscape by investigating how space was produced and organized. He demonstrates how unseen entities affected the activities that these spaces elicited. Questions of authority emerge through an exploration of local Islamic legal discourse, where authority was regularly asserted and contested across differing Muslim groups. The boundaries of religious practice were also being pushed through the practice of spirit possession. He also tackles the tensions between the local and the global when the Muslims of Aden reflect on transnational scripturalist or sufi movements. In our conversation we discuss how local religious actors were shaped by broader Islamic trends, emerging print technologies, maritime flows, law and adjudication, the role of mosques and cemeteries, Salafism, and popular religious practices, Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film(Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Books Network
Scott S. Reese, “Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and Authority in the Indian Ocean, 1839-1937” (Edinburgh UP, 2017)

New Books Network

Play Episode Listen Later May 15, 2019 64:09


Religion and empire are often intertwined. Regarding Muslims there are well known dynasties like the Umayyad, the Abbasid, the Fatimid, the Ottoman, and many others. But the empire governing the largest Muslim population was, of course, the British. In Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and Authority in the Indian Ocean, 1839-1937 (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Scott S. Reese, Professor at Northern Arizona University, explores the social effects of the British empire, and its attending conditions, on Muslims in the port city of Aden. In the the late 19th/ and early 20th centuries Aden was undergoing tremendous change, which was fostered by its valuable position within the empire. Muslims from both ends of the empire were making Aden their home. The diversity of the community and technological innovations shaped the everyday lives of Muslims. Reese explores Aden’s sacred landscape by investigating how space was produced and organized. He demonstrates how unseen entities affected the activities that these spaces elicited. Questions of authority emerge through an exploration of local Islamic legal discourse, where authority was regularly asserted and contested across differing Muslim groups. The boundaries of religious practice were also being pushed through the practice of spirit possession. He also tackles the tensions between the local and the global when the Muslims of Aden reflect on transnational scripturalist or sufi movements. In our conversation we discuss how local religious actors were shaped by broader Islamic trends, emerging print technologies, maritime flows, law and adjudication, the role of mosques and cemeteries, Salafism, and popular religious practices, Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film(Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Books in Religion
Scott S. Reese, “Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and Authority in the Indian Ocean, 1839-1937” (Edinburgh UP, 2017)

New Books in Religion

Play Episode Listen Later May 15, 2019 64:09


Religion and empire are often intertwined. Regarding Muslims there are well known dynasties like the Umayyad, the Abbasid, the Fatimid, the Ottoman, and many others. But the empire governing the largest Muslim population was, of course, the British. In Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and Authority in the Indian Ocean, 1839-1937 (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Scott S. Reese, Professor at Northern Arizona University, explores the social effects of the British empire, and its attending conditions, on Muslims in the port city of Aden. In the the late 19th/ and early 20th centuries Aden was undergoing tremendous change, which was fostered by its valuable position within the empire. Muslims from both ends of the empire were making Aden their home. The diversity of the community and technological innovations shaped the everyday lives of Muslims. Reese explores Aden’s sacred landscape by investigating how space was produced and organized. He demonstrates how unseen entities affected the activities that these spaces elicited. Questions of authority emerge through an exploration of local Islamic legal discourse, where authority was regularly asserted and contested across differing Muslim groups. The boundaries of religious practice were also being pushed through the practice of spirit possession. He also tackles the tensions between the local and the global when the Muslims of Aden reflect on transnational scripturalist or sufi movements. In our conversation we discuss how local religious actors were shaped by broader Islamic trends, emerging print technologies, maritime flows, law and adjudication, the role of mosques and cemeteries, Salafism, and popular religious practices, Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film(Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies
Scott S. Reese, “Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and Authority in the Indian Ocean, 1839-1937” (Edinburgh UP, 2017)

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

Play Episode Listen Later May 15, 2019 64:09


Religion and empire are often intertwined. Regarding Muslims there are well known dynasties like the Umayyad, the Abbasid, the Fatimid, the Ottoman, and many others. But the empire governing the largest Muslim population was, of course, the British. In Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and Authority in the Indian Ocean, 1839-1937 (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Scott S. Reese, Professor at Northern Arizona University, explores the social effects of the British empire, and its attending conditions, on Muslims in the port city of Aden. In the the late 19th/ and early 20th centuries Aden was undergoing tremendous change, which was fostered by its valuable position within the empire. Muslims from both ends of the empire were making Aden their home. The diversity of the community and technological innovations shaped the everyday lives of Muslims. Reese explores Aden’s sacred landscape by investigating how space was produced and organized. He demonstrates how unseen entities affected the activities that these spaces elicited. Questions of authority emerge through an exploration of local Islamic legal discourse, where authority was regularly asserted and contested across differing Muslim groups. The boundaries of religious practice were also being pushed through the practice of spirit possession. He also tackles the tensions between the local and the global when the Muslims of Aden reflect on transnational scripturalist or sufi movements. In our conversation we discuss how local religious actors were shaped by broader Islamic trends, emerging print technologies, maritime flows, law and adjudication, the role of mosques and cemeteries, Salafism, and popular religious practices, Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film(Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Books in Islamic Studies
Scott S. Reese, “Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and Authority in the Indian Ocean, 1839-1937” (Edinburgh UP, 2017)

New Books in Islamic Studies

Play Episode Listen Later May 15, 2019 64:09


Religion and empire are often intertwined. Regarding Muslims there are well known dynasties like the Umayyad, the Abbasid, the Fatimid, the Ottoman, and many others. But the empire governing the largest Muslim population was, of course, the British. In Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and Authority in the Indian Ocean, 1839-1937 (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Scott S. Reese, Professor at Northern Arizona University, explores the social effects of the British empire, and its attending conditions, on Muslims in the port city of Aden. In the the late 19th/ and early 20th centuries Aden was undergoing tremendous change, which was fostered by its valuable position within the empire. Muslims from both ends of the empire were making Aden their home. The diversity of the community and technological innovations shaped the everyday lives of Muslims. Reese explores Aden’s sacred landscape by investigating how space was produced and organized. He demonstrates how unseen entities affected the activities that these spaces elicited. Questions of authority emerge through an exploration of local Islamic legal discourse, where authority was regularly asserted and contested across differing Muslim groups. The boundaries of religious practice were also being pushed through the practice of spirit possession. He also tackles the tensions between the local and the global when the Muslims of Aden reflect on transnational scripturalist or sufi movements. In our conversation we discuss how local religious actors were shaped by broader Islamic trends, emerging print technologies, maritime flows, law and adjudication, the role of mosques and cemeteries, Salafism, and popular religious practices, Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film(Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World
The Sons of Maimon 2: What's Done is Gone

Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 8, 2019 51:40


Moses and David ben Maimon make their home in Fatimid - soon to be Ayyubid - Egypt, where the Nile and caravan routes linked the Mediterranean ports to the Red Sea and the crossing to the coast of India, a crossing David would attempt to make. If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here, my Ko-fi is here, and Paypal is here. I'm on Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, my website is www.humancircuspodcast.com, and I have some things on Redbubble at https://www.redbubble.com/people/humancircus. Sources:The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, translated by Marcus Nathan Adler.  Philipp Feldheim, inc.Judaism in Practice: From the Middle Ages Through the Early Modern Period, edited by Lawrence Fine. Princeton University Press, 2001.Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350. Oxford University Press, 1989.Bareket, Elinoar. Fustat on the Nile: The Jewish Elite in Medieval Egypt. Brill, 1999.Cooper, John. The Medieval Nile: Route, Navigation, and Landscape in Islamic Egypt. The American University in Cairo Press, 2014.Bramoullé, David. "The Fatimids and the Red Sea (969-1171)," in Navigated Spaces, Connected Places. Archaeopress, 2012.Davidson, Herbert, A. Moses Maimonides: The Man and His Works. Oxford University Press, 2004.Goitein, S.D. A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Vol. IV: Daily Life. University of California Press, 2000.Goitein, S.D. & Friedman, Mordechai A. India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza. Brill, 2007.Halbertal, Moshe. Maimonidies: Life and Thought, translated by Joel Linsider. Princeton University Press, 2014.Jacoby, David.  "The Economic Function of the Crusader States of the Levant: a New Approach," in Medieval Trade in the Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond. Routledge, 2018. Kraemer, Joel L. Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds. Doubleday, 2010.Margariti, Roxani Eleni. Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade: 150 Years in the Life of a Medieval Arabian Port. University of North Carolina Press, 2007.Peacock, Andrew & Peacock, David. "The Enigma of 'Aydhab: a Medieval Islamic Port on the Red Sea Coast," in The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, 2008.  Udovitch, Abraham L. "Medieval Alexandria: Some Evidence from the Cairo Genizah Documents," in Alexandria and Alexandrianism: Papers Delivered at a Symposium Organized by The J. Paul Getty Museum and The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities and Held at the Museum, April 22–25, 1993. Getty Publications, 1996.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hymns/Bible Study/Sermons/General Topics
عهد الدولة الفاطميه:- الجزء الأول / The Fatimid Caliphate Era: Christ the Conqueror-First Part

Hymns/Bible Study/Sermons/General Topics

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 4, 2019 47:38


Holy Family Ministry St. Mary Coptic Orthodox Church, MD سلسلة عروس الفادى القبطية-عهد الدولة الفاطميه: الفادي ينتصر لعروسه- الجزء الأول The Fatimid Caliphate Era: Christ the Conqueror-First Part By: Eng. Sherif Azmy

The Golden Age of Islam
24 - The Fatimid Caliphate

The Golden Age of Islam

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 17, 2019 50:45


A fugitive Imam in a remote prison in the Sahara was an unlikely candidate to establish the most powerful state in the Muslim world. With the Abbasid Caliphate in decline, the Isma'ili Shi'a established a rival Caliphate whose capital, Cairo, would grow to be the largest city in the world and the center of the Arab/Islamic world for centuries.  Although we associate Shi'a with Iran and Persia today, this Arab Shi'ite empire would be the foundation of the modern Arab world as we know it.  

New Books in Women's History
Eve Krakowski, “Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women's Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture” (Princeton UP, 2017)

New Books in Women's History

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 9, 2018 56:04


History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women's history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women's Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton University Press, 2017) uses Cairo Geniza documents, and Jewish and Islamic legal writings to bring us the stories of Jewish women's adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). She looks at how women functioned in a patronage culture, how women moved within society prior to being married and how that changed after becoming a wife. We talk to her about how to think of women in the pre-modern world, how her book fits into the pre-existing scholarship, what family history means in the Islamic Eastern Mediterranean, how the Cairo Geniza looms large in her work, and what her approach is to her research. Eve Krakowski is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She is a social historian of the medieval Middle East, interested especially in family life and in how law and religion worked in mundane, everyday settings. Her research focuses on urban Jews in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt (969–1250), a population who accidentally left behind some of the most detailed and varied sources about ordinary life to have survived the premodern world: the Cairo Geniza documents. She earned her BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Chicago's Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department Before going to Princeton, she spent two years as a Blaustein post-doctoral fellow in the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University, and one year as a Rabin post-doctoral fellow in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. She has an ACLS Grant and a NEH grant, with Marina Rustow. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University's Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Books in Medieval History
Eve Krakowski, “Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women's Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture” (Princeton UP, 2017)

New Books in Medieval History

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 9, 2018 56:04


History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women's history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women's Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton University Press, 2017) uses Cairo Geniza documents, and Jewish and Islamic legal writings to bring us the stories of Jewish women's adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). She looks at how women functioned in a patronage culture, how women moved within society prior to being married and how that changed after becoming a wife. We talk to her about how to think of women in the pre-modern world, how her book fits into the pre-existing scholarship, what family history means in the Islamic Eastern Mediterranean, how the Cairo Geniza looms large in her work, and what her approach is to her research. Eve Krakowski is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She is a social historian of the medieval Middle East, interested especially in family life and in how law and religion worked in mundane, everyday settings. Her research focuses on urban Jews in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt (969–1250), a population who accidentally left behind some of the most detailed and varied sources about ordinary life to have survived the premodern world: the Cairo Geniza documents. She earned her BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Chicago's Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department Before going to Princeton, she spent two years as a Blaustein post-doctoral fellow in the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University, and one year as a Rabin post-doctoral fellow in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. She has an ACLS Grant and a NEH grant, with Marina Rustow. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University's Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Books in Gender Studies
Eve Krakowski, “Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture” (Princeton UP, 2017)

New Books in Gender Studies

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 9, 2018 56:04


History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women’s history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton University Press, 2017) uses Cairo Geniza documents, and Jewish and Islamic legal writings to bring us the stories of Jewish women’s adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). She looks at how women functioned in a patronage culture, how women moved within society prior to being married and how that changed after becoming a wife. We talk to her about how to think of women in the pre-modern world, how her book fits into the pre-existing scholarship, what family history means in the Islamic Eastern Mediterranean, how the Cairo Geniza looms large in her work, and what her approach is to her research. Eve Krakowski is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She is a social historian of the medieval Middle East, interested especially in family life and in how law and religion worked in mundane, everyday settings. Her research focuses on urban Jews in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt (969–1250), a population who accidentally left behind some of the most detailed and varied sources about ordinary life to have survived the premodern world: the Cairo Geniza documents. She earned her BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Chicago’s Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department Before going to Princeton, she spent two years as a Blaustein post-doctoral fellow in the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University, and one year as a Rabin post-doctoral fellow in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. She has an ACLS Grant and a NEH grant, with Marina Rustow. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Books Network
Eve Krakowski, “Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture” (Princeton UP, 2017)

New Books Network

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 9, 2018 56:04


History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women’s history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton University Press, 2017) uses Cairo Geniza documents, and Jewish and Islamic legal writings to bring us the stories of Jewish women’s adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). She looks at how women functioned in a patronage culture, how women moved within society prior to being married and how that changed after becoming a wife. We talk to her about how to think of women in the pre-modern world, how her book fits into the pre-existing scholarship, what family history means in the Islamic Eastern Mediterranean, how the Cairo Geniza looms large in her work, and what her approach is to her research. Eve Krakowski is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She is a social historian of the medieval Middle East, interested especially in family life and in how law and religion worked in mundane, everyday settings. Her research focuses on urban Jews in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt (969–1250), a population who accidentally left behind some of the most detailed and varied sources about ordinary life to have survived the premodern world: the Cairo Geniza documents. She earned her BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Chicago’s Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department Before going to Princeton, she spent two years as a Blaustein post-doctoral fellow in the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University, and one year as a Rabin post-doctoral fellow in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. She has an ACLS Grant and a NEH grant, with Marina Rustow. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Books in Jewish Studies
Eve Krakowski, “Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture” (Princeton UP, 2017)

New Books in Jewish Studies

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 9, 2018 56:04


History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women’s history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton University Press, 2017) uses Cairo Geniza documents, and Jewish and Islamic legal writings to bring us the stories of Jewish women’s adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). She looks at how women functioned in a patronage culture, how women moved within society prior to being married and how that changed after becoming a wife. We talk to her about how to think of women in the pre-modern world, how her book fits into the pre-existing scholarship, what family history means in the Islamic Eastern Mediterranean, how the Cairo Geniza looms large in her work, and what her approach is to her research. Eve Krakowski is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She is a social historian of the medieval Middle East, interested especially in family life and in how law and religion worked in mundane, everyday settings. Her research focuses on urban Jews in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt (969–1250), a population who accidentally left behind some of the most detailed and varied sources about ordinary life to have survived the premodern world: the Cairo Geniza documents. She earned her BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Chicago’s Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department Before going to Princeton, she spent two years as a Blaustein post-doctoral fellow in the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University, and one year as a Rabin post-doctoral fellow in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. She has an ACLS Grant and a NEH grant, with Marina Rustow. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Books in Religion
Eve Krakowski, “Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture” (Princeton UP, 2017)

New Books in Religion

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 9, 2018 2:55


History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women’s history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton University Press, 2017) uses Cairo Geniza documents, and Jewish and Islamic legal writings to bring us the stories of Jewish women’s adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). She looks at how women functioned in a patronage culture, how women moved within society prior to being married and how that changed after becoming a wife. We talk to her about how to think of women in the pre-modern world, how her book fits into the pre-existing scholarship, what family history means in the Islamic Eastern Mediterranean, how the Cairo Geniza looms large in her work, and what her approach is to her research. Eve Krakowski is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She is a social historian of the medieval Middle East, interested especially in family life and in how law and religion worked in mundane, everyday settings. Her research focuses on urban Jews in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt (969–1250), a population who accidentally left behind some of the most detailed and varied sources about ordinary life to have survived the premodern world: the Cairo Geniza documents. She earned her BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Chicago’s Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department Before going to Princeton, she spent two years as a Blaustein post-doctoral fellow in the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University, and one year as a Rabin post-doctoral fellow in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. She has an ACLS Grant and a NEH grant, with Marina Rustow. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Books in History
Eve Krakowski, “Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture” (Princeton UP, 2017)

New Books in History

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 9, 2018 56:04


History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women’s history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton University Press, 2017) uses Cairo Geniza documents, and Jewish and Islamic legal writings to bring us the stories of Jewish women’s adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). She looks at how women functioned in a patronage culture, how women moved within society prior to being married and how that changed after becoming a wife. We talk to her about how to think of women in the pre-modern world, how her book fits into the pre-existing scholarship, what family history means in the Islamic Eastern Mediterranean, how the Cairo Geniza looms large in her work, and what her approach is to her research. Eve Krakowski is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She is a social historian of the medieval Middle East, interested especially in family life and in how law and religion worked in mundane, everyday settings. Her research focuses on urban Jews in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt (969–1250), a population who accidentally left behind some of the most detailed and varied sources about ordinary life to have survived the premodern world: the Cairo Geniza documents. She earned her BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Chicago’s Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department Before going to Princeton, she spent two years as a Blaustein post-doctoral fellow in the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University, and one year as a Rabin post-doctoral fellow in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. She has an ACLS Grant and a NEH grant, with Marina Rustow. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies
Eve Krakowski, “Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture” (Princeton UP, 2017)

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 9, 2018 56:04


History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women’s history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton University Press, 2017) uses Cairo Geniza documents, and Jewish and Islamic legal writings to bring us the stories of Jewish women’s adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). She looks at how women functioned in a patronage culture, how women moved within society prior to being married and how that changed after becoming a wife. We talk to her about how to think of women in the pre-modern world, how her book fits into the pre-existing scholarship, what family history means in the Islamic Eastern Mediterranean, how the Cairo Geniza looms large in her work, and what her approach is to her research. Eve Krakowski is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She is a social historian of the medieval Middle East, interested especially in family life and in how law and religion worked in mundane, everyday settings. Her research focuses on urban Jews in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt (969–1250), a population who accidentally left behind some of the most detailed and varied sources about ordinary life to have survived the premodern world: the Cairo Geniza documents. She earned her BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Chicago’s Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department Before going to Princeton, she spent two years as a Blaustein post-doctoral fellow in the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University, and one year as a Rabin post-doctoral fellow in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. She has an ACLS Grant and a NEH grant, with Marina Rustow. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Flash Point History
War of the Worlds - Bonus - The First Crusade

Flash Point History

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 14, 2018 42:41


We break from the history of Al Andalus and take a quick peek on the other end of the Mediterranean. A new era in warfare begins as the Crusades would start and pit Christianity versus Islam.    ANCIENT HISTORY GUY CHANNEL: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6gQS5SByUgXeS8DwjTgSuw Contribute on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FPHx Leave some feedback: flashpointhistory@gmail.com Follow along on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FLASHPOINTHX/ Engage on Twitter: https://twitter.com/FlashpointHx YouTube Video Accompaniment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dijsGMu_4bA&t=80s   MUSIC Omri Lahav - Peak of Atlas - The Road Ahead - Honor Bound - Med Waves - Tavern in the mist Aakash Gandhi (YouTube Archive) - Eyes of Glory - Spirit of the Dead Ugonna Onyekwe (YouTube Archive) - Inescapable From http://www.purple-planet.com - Cambodean Odessy  - Warhammer   YouTube Archive  - Still Standing - Epic Battle Speech - Thunder Storm   Premium Beats - Unlimited Imagination

The History of Byzantium
Episode 143 - Strange Trajectories

The History of Byzantium

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 23, 2017 27:57


John returns home triumphant but must deal with the Fatimid attacks in the east. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Talking Geopolitics
Sunni and Shiite Nations?

Talking Geopolitics

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 22, 2017 39:05


Jacob Shapiro and Kamran Bokhari discuss some recent anomalies in the Middle East and consider the relationship between sectarianism and nationalism in the Muslim world. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0 TRANSCRIPT: Jacob L. Shapiro: Hi everyone and welcome to another Geopolitical Futures podcast. I'm sorry that we missed last week but we're back this week and I am joined once again by Kamran Bokhari, who is one of our senior analysts. Nice to have you back Kamran. Kamran Bokhari: It's good to be back Jacob. JLS: And we're going to pick up a little bit where we left off last week, or not last week, two weeks ago. Two weeks ago, we were talking about the situation between Saudi Arabia and Qatar and we thought we'd just have a more general conversation this week about the Middle East, Islam, maybe some nationalism to throw in there. And but Kamran before we get started, we just noticed a report before we were recording that the al-Nuri mosque in Mosul, Iraq apparently has been destroyed in some kind of explosion. This mosque is important because it's where the ISIS founder and leader al-Baghdadi actually declared the caliphate years ago. You were telling me that it kind of struck you as weird. Why was it weird to you, what's going on do you think with this report? KB: We've seen ISIS and other jihadist groups attack mosques of Muslims that they don't deem to be “true Muslims” or from their point of view deviant Muslims. But this is anomalous in that ISIS would actually blow up a mosque that it has been using and it's been sort of a place from where they declared their caliphate and something that they've used. Now, it could be that there may be things or something that's in that mosque that they didn't want coalition forces to get their hands on, so they decided to go ahead and destroy the facility. But it's still very odd that they would take a risk like that because they are already on the defensive and why would they do something that could potentially cause them great backlash. JLS: Yeah, I think one of the things I was thinking about though was according to the reports Iraqi security forces were approaching the mosque and they blew it up as sort of a way to defend themselves and not let the mosque fall into enemy hands, necessarily. But I think this is an example of how ISIS has a very pragmatic ideology. We think of them as religious fanatics, and they are religious fanatics, but they also deal with things pragmatically, especially the defense of the territories and places that they defend and it's something that just popped into my head. It's also strange that fundamentalist groups like this also always seem to have an aversion to anything resembling idolatry. ISIS was famous for blowing up a lot of these antiquities in Palmyra and other places that they've been or taking the antiquities and selling them on the black market. They don't really care about big beautiful structures or things like that. I think in some ways they think of structures as something that the Saudis are building. You think about the Saudis and all the stuff they are building around the Kaaba in Mecca, that sort of comes to mind. And ISIS has always been more spartan, has always been not attached to I don't know larger images or beautiful mosques, that's not really what it's about. So yeah, don't you think it could just be a symbol of their pragmatism in general? KB: I think you are onto something here that's important. I think that what you said in the beginning is that we tend to look at these groups as very rigid in their interpretation of religious text and whatnot, which is true on one level. But on another level, they display a great deal of, for lack of a better term, pragmatism or they make things up as they go and they change interpretations and they adopt interpretations that normally would not be the case. And I think that given the way that ISIS has evolved and grown, one of the key things in their toolkit has been that you don't stick with necessarily the old formulations or understandings of religious texts. As far as buildings are concerned, I think they look at it from a utilitarian point of view. And then of course, this is war, and I think that in war they tend to be a bit more casual about things and because what is at stake is being able to protect themselves as an institution and so buildings may not necessarily be of importance. And again, we're speculating because just not a whole lot of information as to how ISIS blew this up – was it booby-trapped, were there fighters holed up there and they blew themselves up because they didn't want to get caught or wanted to achieve “martyrdom” and especially given it being Ramadan or the tail end of Ramadan. And so there are just too many unanswered questions. JLS: Well another report I wanted to ask you about Kamran, and I haven't raised this with you before but we'll see what you think about it, is that I hadn't realized this but I read a report today that there are actually a number of polio cases in Deir el-Zour in particular but also in Raqqa and other places that the Islamic State and even in other places that the Islamic State is not controlling in Syria and in Iraq right now. And for some reason that really struck me on sort of a symbolic level. I think there maybe is not a better symbol for Western science than vaccines. And in some ways vaccines have had a little bit of a troubled history in the Muslim world, right? There were all those allegations of CIA agents posing in Pakistan as doctors who were giving polio vaccines and that ruining trust in Pakistan for doctors. And Pakistan remains one of the places where polio still exists and – in part because of that distrust. And I don't think that ISIS meant for polio to sprout back up in Syria. I'm not even saying that it's really their fault. We know that you know in a lot of these war-torn places, things like basic hygiene are some of the first things to go. We're seeing a cholera outbreak in Yemen right now, which is affecting tens if not hundreds of thousands of people. But I just wonder how you react to that. On the one hand, ISIS is really staked some of its legitimacy on behaving like a state and on providing basic services and the Assad regime has done some of that too. But at the same time, I think we're really beginning to see both in Syria and some parts of Iraq and Yemen where these wars have been going on for so long, we're beginning to really see the total breakdown of bureaucracy and some of the basics that we've come to expect of 21st century society. So, I just wonder what you think about all of those things that I just threw at you and whether it was as striking to you as it was striking to me. KB: It is striking, and what's striking to me is that wherever there's a jihadist entity that is taking control of an ungoverned space and set up shop and declared an emirate or a caliphate – I mean the parallel with Pakistan is very apt – that we see these diseases that we thought had been largely eradicated from the rest of the world like polio and cholera, they begin to emerge. And obviously it has a lot to do with the lack of governance, sanitation being very poor quality, hygiene not being maintained. A lot of it just may be because of the lack of resources. And it really speaks to the idea that somehow the caliphate was a place where people should migrate to in terms of the recruits of ISIS, people who were inspired by ISIS. One of the things that ISIS was saying to people all across the world was come join the caliphate, you know, you need to come to the land where the caliphate exists. And so that's really a blow to that idea that life is so harsh and we can only speculate as to the availability of food supply and other basic services that we have taken granted for in pretty much the rest of the world. I mean even in Pakistan, even in Syria, there are places that do not have this kind of situation. In fact, these are really small pockets of territory where you have the outbreak of such diseases. In Pakistan, we did have that whole thing about the CIA and the conspiracy theory amongst the jihadists, amongst the Pakistani Taliban and their supporters that we should not allow our children to be immunized by doctors because somehow this is a CIA plot to undermine fertility or trying to gain intelligence through the dispensation of vaccines. But at the same time, it really speaks about how really primitive society and governance becomes once jihadists take over. It speaks to the lack of facilities and the lack of resources and you know utter lack of sophistication when it comes to statecraft or just dispensing basic services – collecting garbage, dealing with cleanliness, having a place where people can be treated for you know injuries or wounds. After all, one of the major enterprises of groups like ISIS and the Taliban is warfare. You would think that they would invest in hospitals. But it seems like this is the place where they were at the very least cutting corners. JLS: Yeah, that's fair enough. Well that was a curve ball to start off with but I want to take us back to something that some of our readers have written in to ask us to talk about. And there's not a better person to ask this question than you Kamran. Tell us the difference in a short group of words about what is the difference between Sunnis and Shiites, what is the big deal, why are Sunnis and Shiites always fighting each other throughout the Middle East and where does this go from here? KB: So initially when it all started, it started right after the death of the prophet. And at the time, there was nothing called a Sunni or a Shia. These were categories that developed many, many years later – many decades later and became full-fledged sects, rival sects over centuries. But at the time, the question was, who is going to succeed the prophet because the prophet himself is reported to have said that when God sent one prophet to the children of Israel and would take him away then he would be replaced by another prophet but after me there are no more prophets. And then his companions and his followers asked, “Well, prophet who will guide us and who will lead us?” And he said there will be caliphs and there will be many, some of whom you would love and they would love you and some of whom would despise you and you would despise you in return and that was sort of the end of that story. But the unanswered question was, well ok, who succeeds the prophet? So those who became later on Sunnis decided to go with an individual by the name of Abu Bakr who was the closest friend of the prophet and an associate and he was an individual of advanced age. But those who later on became Shia, and much later on, said no, the cousin of the prophet and who also happened to be his son-in-law, Ali, is most deserving of the position because he spent so much time, he's young, he's energetic, he's demonstrated his capability as a top aide and also on the battlefield. And eventually that whole dispute over time led to a divide and there was a very early civil war issue on this as well during the time of the third caliph, I would say in the '50s. Eventually, jurisprudence that differed between the two sects didn't emerge until well after, I would say 300 years after, the prophet migrated from Mecca to Medina and established the first Islamic polity. But really the sect, as in full-fledged sects, they didn't emerge – the Shia and the Sunni – in the theological sense until well into the 16th century when the Safavid Empire in Iran adopted Shia Islam as a state religion and expected people to be or subscribe to what became Shia Islam and then Shia Islam is broken down into subsects just as the Sunni side is fragmented. JLS: How would you describe the relationship in terms of its relationship to nationalism currently right now? So there are a lot of different nation-states in the Middle East: there's Iraq, there's Jordan, there's Saudi Arabia, there's Egypt. There's a certain level of national pride for the different groups that live in these states. But then the sectarian stuff when you overlay it doesn't always line up exactly with it, right? Because in Iraq there's a majority Arab population and on the one hand because of the sectarianism, they feel closer to Iran. But there are also Arabs; they're not Persians so in that sense they feel closer to Arabs and it's just this whole mess of things so what do you think is the relationship between nationalism and sectarianism? KB: So I think what you're asking is sort of the geopolitics of sectarianism because when it becomes geopolitical, when you have major states or empires as we had back in the Medieval times when Shia/Sunni – I mean the Shia/Sunni conflict is not new. It's been raging and it has assumed different forms in different time periods so the geopolitics of sectarianism, when sectarianism becomes geopolitical, it's no longer simply a religious divide. It is, no you pray differently, you believe in different things and you have a different view of collective history and shared memory. It really becomes ethnic categories so it's almost like a form of nationalism where the Shia identity becomes very primary and the Sunni identity also becomes really highly sensitized and that happens because in the here and now, especially after the late '70s and early '80s, it's because of the rise of Islamism on both sides of the sectarian divide. You have Iran becaming the first Islamist regime in the Muslim world but it subscribes to Shia Islamism or it's an Islamism or Shia variant. At the same time, you have Islamism on the Sunni side and because of this heightened religiosity, the sectarian identity has become almost the primary identity for at least those people who are waging war against each other. So Saudi Arabia looks at Iran and says we don't like Iran because they're Persians but more so because they're Shia and they want to subvert Sunni orthodoxy. And conversely when the Iranians look at the Saudis they see an entity that is trying to undermine the Shia religious creed and mind you the Shia being the minority have mostly been on the receiving end throughout the history of Islam. So there is this sense of minority status that also kicks in and therefore the Iranian identity sort of gets subdued or exists parallel to the Shia identity. Likewise, on the Sunni side, yes we're Saudis, we're Arabs and people in Lebanon are Lebanese and Iraqis have their national identity but as these nation-states are in meltdown mode and there's growing geopolitical sectarianism, it's the sectarian identity that has become the primary thing. I mean those who are fighting the Assad regime in Syria, they're largely driven by the fact that they see an Alawite Shiite conspiracy to destroy Sunnism in Syria and they're defending Sunni Islam against what they deem as a form of deviants, the Alawite Shiite creed. Same thing in Yemen between the Houthis and their opponents. And so the nation-state is still in somewhere; people haven't completely discarded it. But at the same time, because the nation-state has become weak, this sectarian identity has taken center stage. JLS: Is it fair to say that there are less subcategories of Shiites than there are of Sunnis? Like there are more Sunnis in the Middle East than there are Shiites, but would it be fair to say that the Sunni community throughout the entire Middle East is actually much more fractured and has a number of different subsets? Whereas, because maybe there are less Shiites, that camp is more unified? Or would you say there are actually, when you actually look into the camps themselves, there's actually a lot of subdivisions and internal rivalries that maybe don't even bubble up to the surface or that aren't obvious to the casual observer of news in the Middle East? KB: You are absolutely right and you have pointed to a key characteristic of this sectarian conflict that's brewing. So on the Sunni side, you have not just multiple subsects but you have, as I mentioned earlier, the nation-state or the national identity hasn't completely gone away. And you have multiple claimants who represent Sunni Islam. Saudi Arabia has since its founding tried to position itself as not just a leader of the Sunni world or the Arab world but the Islamic world in general. And in recent times with Turkey moving away from a Kemalist version of secularism to a more religious version of secularism, a more religious society not necessarily a religious state, it also sees itself as the leader of the region, the Middle East and of course the wider Islamic world. And ISIS is doing the same thing; al-Qaida claims the leadership of the Islamic world, the Sunni world as well. There is no unified coherent Sunni camp if you will. Now in contrast and in sharp contrast, because the Shia are a minority, their divisions – so the Syrians aren't mainstream, the Syrian Alawites aren't mainstream Shia. They're a heterodox offshoot of mainstream Shia Islam but yet they're close with mainstream Shiites in Iran, in Iraq and in Lebanon. Likewise, you have the Houthis who are Zaidis, who are another form of Shia Islam, which in a way from a doctrinal way is actually not so close to mainstream Shia Islam. It shares a lot more with Sunni Islam, but nonetheless, it is a form of Shia Islam, so therefore we see this alignment with Iran and that Shia camp. And so what we're seeing is a more coherent Shia camp because the Shia are a minority and they have this collective memory that they hark back to, when they have historically been suppressed at the hands of Sunni powers. And now that Sunni Islam has fragmented along multiple lines and one of the things that has really accelerated this fragmentation is the so-called Arab Spring phenomenon or what we call at Geopolitical Futures the hollowing out of the Arab world. You've written about this yourself. And so that has exacerbated the fragmentation on the Sunni side and the Shia look at this and say this is a historic opportunity and I would go on to say that if we look at the history of sectarianism in the Muslim world, it runs on a 500-year cycle. So around 1000 when the Sunni world was fragmenting, we see the rise of Shia policies such as the Fatimid empire in North Africa extending into the Levant and the west coast of the Arabian Peninsula. You had the Buyid empire in what is Mesopotamia and Persia and as time goes on other Shiite polities emerge. But then the Ottomans come back and they reclaim the Sunni center and Sunni Islam once again begins to thrive until the rise of the Safavid empire, which poses a challenge to the Ottomans, and now 500 years later today, we are once again seeing the rise of Shia Islam because Sunni Islam or Sunni Muslim territories are at war with each other. JLS: Kamran on a practical level, is there any significant difference between a Shiite country and Sunni country? Is that going mean anything for the way that particular country acts? Or are those countries just going to act in their geopolitical interest and whatever sect that country happens to be really doesn't play that much into it? I guess to even sharpen the question, does Iran act the way it does in some cases because it is a Shiite country or is that not really something that you can see? KB: At a practical level, different states, different types of states, you know operate more or less the same. You know, you have interests that are material interests and it doesn't matter whether you are Shia or whether you are al-Qaida or ISIS or Sunni or Turkey or whatever. I think that from a practicality point of view, the sect doesn't matter. You have to pursue your imperatives and deal with your constraints like anybody else and actually you're very similar to your rivals. But sect does come into play in terms of behavior, so I'll give you an example. So Iran realizes that it represents a minority sect and a minority ethnicity. They're Persians and they're Shiites in a Middle East that's largely Arab and largely Sunni. And therefore, that creates limitations and so yes they want to expand into Iraq because the majority of Arabs are Shia there. It has developed and cultivated Hezbollah because a majority of Lebanese Muslims are Shia. It's aligned with the Shia because the Alawite regime or the Alawites have dominated the Syrian regime for a long time. It's playing into Yemen to a certain extent because of the Houthis. But it can't go into Saudi Arabia just yet because that's a stronghold of very hardcore Sunni identity and ideology and they won't find so many converts there or supporters. So the Shiite and the Sunni thing does place constraints and limitations in terms of behavior. For example, ISIS only recently, a few weeks ago, was able to stage an attack inside Iran. It's been cultivating, I am pretty sure that it took a long time for it to cultivate the assets to pull off that attack on the shrine of the founder of the Islamic Republic and the Iranian Parliament. But you don't see the volume of attacks that you see even next door in a Shia majority country like Iraq and of course the list goes on and on. So I think that the sect does place constraints in how far a particular power can expand its tentacles and its influence. JLS: The follow-up question to that is I mean really this sectarian battle is focused in the Middle East mainly around the Levant, maybe extending a little bit outwards. But once you get into North Africa or once you get more to South Asia, countries like Indonesia, Bangladesh, you don't have the same type of sectarian rivalry and we see IS trying to expand outwards into these regions especially as it comes under so much pressure in the caliphate itself. Do you think that IS will have trouble finding the same type of equation that allowed it to rise in Syria and Iraq because there isn't that sectarian divide to join on or is there enough subdivision within Sunni Islam and some of these other countries that those are de facto sects already, if that question makes sense? KB: No absolutely and again this is another important point that you raise. What really made ISIS into the jihadist regime it has become, and controlling territory, having a very sophisticated military force and intelligence service and wreaking havoc all across the region and beyond even in the West, is the fact that it was able to consolidate itself in Iraq and Syria because of the sectarian divide. It exploited heavily the Shia/Sunni anxieties on both sides and created space for itself and essentially took over the leadership of first the Sunnis of Iraq because they're a minority in their country and they were disenfranchised after regime change in 2003 that toppled the Saddam regime. And then in the wake of the civil war and uprising against Assad, it tried to take over the leadership of the Sunnis who were trying to battle the Assad regime and trying to topple it. And it really gave them a boost, and exponentially, we saw the growth of ISIS. Now those things as you just mentioned do not exist in North Africa, those conditions. There aren't that many Shia beyond the Levant and beyond the Arabian Peninsula and that sort of heart of the Middle East, no matter which direction you go. You can even go into Central Asia and you won't find the same sectarian polarization, much less Southeast Asia like Indonesia and the Philippines. But I think that having said that, it may not see a major boost; it may take longer for ISIS to develop itself in a place like Afghanistan and Pakistan, which are already a saturated jihadist market if you will. Much less Bangladesh and Indonesia and Malaysia and the Philippines, but there is sufficient chaos in these other countries and internal divides within Sunni Islam and the question of who speaks for the religion. I was speaking to a journalist who's been doing a lot of work in Indonesia and she was telling me about how a version of Wahhabi Islam or Salafi Islam is really growing by leaps and bounds in a country like Indonesia, which was insulated from this ideology for the longest time. And I think that political conditions, the growing religiosity in Muslim societies across the world, these provide for that fertile ground or these are the conditions with which ISIS can latch onto and then begin to expand. So the scale may be different, the timeframe may be different, but I think that there are enough conditions on the ground in these various areas where there aren't any Shiites that will allow and become enablers for ISIS or other groups to expand. JLS: I want to ask you one more question Kamran before we wrap up and it might be an involved question but I think that it's an important one and it's one that I've been thinking about a lot. The sort of smaller version of this question is: Is it possible for nationalism and Islam to coexist? Are those two ideas that can actually be held at the same time in a person's mind and that they make sense or are they mutually exclusive? And if you zoom out a little bit, I would ask that question of all religions. Do you think it's possible for all religions and nationalism to really work in the same type of way or is it that nationalism is sort of at its core, I don't want to say atheistic because it's not that nationalism is going to say that there is no God, but nationalism is going to say that the nation is the most important thing. The defense of the nation, protection of the national interest is the most important all abiding thing that a state must provide for, whereas religion, if you really get down to it and if you want to be ideologically consistent, religion is not going to tolerate anything being the most important thing besides God. They might be willing to have the nation as a subset of that or a caliphate or something like that as a subset of that, but the most important thing is going to be God and if there is a disjuncture between what is interpreted as what God wants versus what is best for the nation, you know usually what God wants is going to win out or what God wants is going to be reinterpreted such that it is in the best interest of the nation. So we started with this strange report of ISIS potentially blowing up one of their own mosques and we've danced around the subject but I wonder if you could sort of speculate for a second about whether nationalism and religion just can't actually fit together or if they can? KB: Well I mean first of all, any religion emanates from a core text or texts that are considered sacred by the believers and those texts are simply texts collecting dust unless the believers operationalize them and it depends on the context, so there is text without context. And those contexts vary over time and we've seen historically – take the case of Islam. Islam has manifested itself in very, very diverse ways and this is not in the here and now, it all goes back to the very earliest centuries of Islam and you see rival groups practicing Islam in very different ways. Yes, there is a core belief that there is no God but God and Muhammad is his last messenger and there is something called a prayer and fasting and charity and pilgrimage and the list can continue depending on what your sectarian persuasion is. But at the end of the day, if we look at the period of the Umayyads, the first dynasty to rule over the Muslim lands and this dynasty took power very early on in 661 and they ruled until the mid-700s and then beyond that in the Iberian Peninsula. That was a dynasty that was built around a clan and it never really – yes it behaved in a religious way, it was motivated by religion but what was dominate was the power of the dynasty, the ruling clan. You had to be from the Umayyad clan. It was father, son and grandson and so on and so forth and it became an imperial dominion and therefore it became a nationalistic entity in some respect. This is obviously pre-nationalism as we understand in a modern world, post enlightenment. But nonetheless, it was not very religious as we understand religion. It wasn't solely religious. And you move through history. You have the various polities that existed. They were geographic and we had multiple competing caliphates. Some of them didn't even call themselves caliphates; they were sultanates. So the Ottomans never really referred to them on a day-to-day basis; the Ottoman emperors referred to them as Sultans. They called themselves the Ottoman Empire; there was an Ottoman identity and Islam was there but it wasn't really in the forefront. And you had divisions, so there is this sort of understanding that somehow the Middle East and the wider Muslim world has adopted nationalism because of the import-export of European thought and through the vehicle of colonialism and then decolonization. Well that's true, but it's not as if the Muslim world was united on the basis of religion. I mean you had multiple competing entities, all throughout history. So I think that nationalism exists in various forms. In the contemporary world, it exists; it manifests itself as the nation-state. The nation-state is the biggest sort of or the most profound expression of nationalism as we understand it. But nationalism has evolved over time so I don't think that Islam is somehow separate or cannot exist. I think that Islam is operationalized in different spatial, temporal settings and they can vary so who is to say which one is pure Islam and which one is veering towards more nationalism. I think it's a hodge-podge and a complex mixture. JLS: I agree with you, although I think just the last thought that I'll close on which came to me as you were talking was that, and you sort of talked in the beginning about how the main split between Sunni and Shiite really happens after the prophet passes away and some people want Abu Bakr to take over as caliph but then others want Ali to take over as caliph and one of the main reasons for Ali was that he was in the family of the prophet, right? So in some ways we might say that for the Shiites the blood has always been a little bit more important than it was in the Sunnis. I know the Umayyads were also – I mean they were a Sunni type of regime if we can even talk about Sunnis existing back then. But they were on that side of the split, right? They believed the chain went through Abu Bakr and that was the legitimate right of succession.  But the Shiites think that there is something about being in the prophet's family that is very important, and there is this aspect of blood tied into the religion that maybe isn't there in Sunni Islam. KB: You are absolutely right. I would just sort of modify that quickly and say that for the Shia, leadership of the faith and the community and the Muslim community, the ummah is divinely ordained, so the imams, they are divinely ordained and they follow from the family of the prophet. Whereas Sunnis believe that this is a political position that comes about through political ways and in many ways it could be, some would argue it could be democratic, some could argue it comes with the power of who has the stronger military force. But ultimately, it's a political position for the Sunnis and a more religious position for the Shia. JLS: Yeah so if we were going to grossly over simplify, we might say something along the lines of Sunni Islam is more democratic whereas Shiite Islam tends to more nationalistic principles. KB: The Iranian government would beg to differ with us [laughs]. They would say that we have achieved a hybrid between religion and politics. We have elected officials, even our clerics have been popularly elected. I mean, they would make that assertion. JLS: Yes, but not the supreme leader, correct? KB: Not the supreme leader. Although they would argue that he could be removed by the Assembly of Experts, which is a body of popularly elected leaders or clerics. JLS: Well when they do that, we can talk about it. But in the meantime, Kamran thanks for joining us. It's always a pleasure. For listeners out there, thank you for listening. We're sorry we missed last week but we're back on and we are going to keep doing these once a week and maybe even increase them more. As always, if you have comments and critiques: comments@geopoliticalfutures.com or just leave comments here on Sound Cloud or whatever your medium you're listening to us through and we'll see you out there. Thanks.

15 Minute History
Episode 61: The Fatimids

15 Minute History

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 7, 2015


Shainool Jiwa illuminates an often overlooked chapter in the history of Islamic sectarianism, one in which religious differences were used to unify diverse populations under the rule of a minority government, rather than to divide and alienate them.