This volume approaches China's Belt and Road Initiative as a process of culturalization, one that started with the Silk Road and continued over the millennium. In mainstream literature, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been portrayed as the geo-economic vision and geo-political ambition of China's current leaders, intended to shape the future of the world. However, this volume argues that although geo-politics and geo-economy may play their part, the BRI more importantly creates a venue for the meeting of cultures by promoting people-to-people interaction and exchange. This volume explores the journey from the Silk-Road to Belt-Road by analyzing topics ranging from history to religion, from language to culture, and from environment to health. As such, scholars, academics, researchers, undergraduate and graduate students from the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Business will find an alternative approach to the Belt and Road Initiative.

As the title implies, New Approaches to Ilkhanid History explores new methodologies and avenues of research for the Mongol state in the Middle East. Although the majority of the Ilkhanate was situated in Iran, this volume considers other regions within the state and moves away from focusing on the center and the Ilkhanid court. New consideration is given to the source material, particularly how they have been composed, but also how the sources can inform on the provinces of the Ilkhanate. Several authors also examine lower-tier personages, groups, and institutions. Contributors include: A.C.S. Peacock; Kazuhiko Shiraiwa; Christopher P. Atwood; Stefan Kamola; Qiu Yihao; Koichi Matsuda; Judith Kolbas; Reuven Amitai; Na'ama O. Arom; Timothy May; Michael Hope; Pier Giorgio Borbone; Dashdondog Bayarsaikhan; Dmitri Korobeinikov.

Continuing the narrative from Volume One of: From Bharata to India, this second volume spans the years from the Muslim conquests down to the present era.

The Volume begins by contrasting the stifling theocracy of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism and Christianity), and of Islam, to the pristine ideation of compassion, love and universal wellbeing inherent in the Vedic world. The forced conversion of "pagan" peoples and their places of worship was consequently institutionalized by intolerance, savagery, barbarism, cruelty, and unparalleled brutality.

This cultural and religious Invasion shook the very foundations of the Vedic patrimony as the native Hindus adapted Alien lifestyles where Vedic values were repackaged as European and/ or Islamic. Consequently, the modern Indians began to despise what had once been their own legacy, the Cradle of civilization, and embraced imported modes of behavior. The transformed, native polity, supported by foreign vested interests, exploited their own country even more than the alien invaders.

As the Western world frees itself from the shackles of Middle Age conformism and depravity, this second volume concludes that the eternal values of Vedic Bharata are to inspire the nascent Civilization of tomorrow. Eastern introspection will replace, then, the Western tradition of a 'wholly other' divinity.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1965.

A curious figure stalks the pages of a distinct subset of mass-market romance novels, aptly called "desert romances." Animalistic yet sensitive, dark and attractive, the desert prince or sheikh emanates manliness and raw, sexual power. In the years since September 11, 2001, the sheikh character has steadily risen in popularity in romance novels, even while depictions of Arab masculinity as backward and violent in nature have dominated the cultural landscape. An Imperialist Love Story contributes to the broader conversation about the legacy of orientalist representations of Arabs in Western popular culture. Combining close readings of novels, discursive analysis of blogs and forums, and interviews with authors, Jarmakani explores popular investments in the war on terror by examining the collisions between fantasy and reality in desert romances. Focusing on issues of security, freedom, and liberal multiculturalism, she foregrounds the role that desire plays in contemporary formations of U.S. imperialism. Drawing on transnational feminist theory and cultural studies, An Imperialist Love Story offers a radical reinterpretation of the war on terror, demonstrating romance to be a powerful framework for understanding how it works, and how it perseveres.

China has had constitutional minority language rights for decades, but what do they mean today? Answering with nuance and empirical detail, this book examines the rights through a sociolinguistic study of Zhuang, the language of China's largest minority group. The analysis traces language policy from the Constitution to local government practices, investigating how Zhuang language rights are experienced as opening or restricting socioeconomic opportunity. The study finds that language rights do not challenge ascendant marketised and mobility-focused language ideologies which ascribe low value to Zhuang. However, people still value a Zhuang identity validated by government policy and practice. Rooted in a Bourdieusian approach to language, power and legal discourse, this is the first major publication to integrate contemporary debates in linguistics about mobility, capitalism and globalization into a study of China's language policy. The book refines Grey's award-winning doctoral dissertation, which received the Joshua A. Fishman Award in 2018. The judges said the study "decenter[s] all types of sociolinguistic assumptions." It is a thought-provoking work on minority rights and language politics, relevant beyond China.

In celebration of the many contributions of Claude Gilliot to Islamic studies, an international group of twenty-one friends and colleagues join together to explore books and written culture in the Muslim world. Divided into three sections - authors, genres and traditions - the essays explore themes that have been of central interest and concern to Gilliot himself including the Qur'an, tafsir, hadith, poetry, and mysticism. Gilliot's detailed and extensive work on many authors and texts, literary genres, and specific case-studies on many Muslim traditions renders this volume an apt tribute to him as well as offering Islamic studies' scholars valuable research insights on these subjects. The authors of these English, French and German essays are all renowned scholars from Europe and North America, each of whom have benefitted substantially from Gilliot's work and collegiality. With contributions by: Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, Mehdi Azaiez, Anne-Sylvie Boisliveau, Abdallah Cheikh-Moussa, Jean-Louis Declais, Denis Gril, Manfred Kropp, Pierre Larcher, Michael Lecker, Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Harald Motzki, Tilman Nagel, Angelika Neuwirth, Emilio Platti, Jan van Reeth, Andrew Rippin, Uri Rubin, Walid Saleh, Roberto Tottoli, Reinhard Weipert, Francesco Zappa

The Umayyad caliphate, ruling over much of what is now the modern Middle East after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, governe from Damascus from 661 to750CE, when they were expelled by the Abbasids. Here, Mohammad Rihan sheds light on the tribal system of this empir, by looking at one of its Syrian tribes; the 'Amila, based around today's Jabal 'Amil in southern Lebanon. Using this tribe as a lens through which to examine the wider Umayyad world, he looks at the political structures and conflicts that prevailed at the time, seeking to nuance the understanding of the relationship between the tribes and the ruling elite. For Rihan, early Islamic political history can only be understood in the context of the tribal history. This book thus illustrates how the political and social milieu of the 'Amila tribe sheds light on the wider history of the Umayyad world. Utilizing a wide range of sources, from the books of genealogies to poetry, Rihan expertly portrays Umayyad political life. First providing a background on 'Amila's tribal structure and its functions and dynamics, Rihan then presents the pre-Islamic past of the tribe. Building on this, he then investigates the role the 'Amila played in the emergence of the Umayyad state to understand the ways in which political life developed for the tribes and their relations with those holding political power in the region. By exploring the literature, culture, kinship structures and the socio-political conditions of the tribe, this book highlights the ways in which alliances and divisions shifted and were used by caliphs of the period and offers new insights into the Middle East at a pivotal point in its early and medieval history. This historical analysis thus not only illuminates the political condition of the Umayyad world, but also investigates the ever-important relationship between tribal political structures and state-based rule.

This volume is dedicated to the topic of the human evaluation and interpretation of animals in ancient and medieval cultures. From a transcultural perspective contributions from Assyriology, Byzantine Studies, Classical Archaeology, Egyptology, German Medieval Studies and Jewish History look into the processes and mechanisms behind the transfer by people of certain values to animals, and the functions these animal-signs have within written, pictorial and performative forms of expression.

The purpose of this book is to illustrate that reading is a subjective process which results in multivalent interpretations. This is the case whether one looks at a text in its historical contexts (the diachronic approach) or its literary contexts (the synchronic approach). Three representative biblical texts are chosen: from the Law (Genesis 2-3), the Writings (Isaiah 23) and the Prophets (Amos 5), and each is read first by way of historical analysis and then by literary analysis. Each text provides a number of variant interpretations and raises the question, is any one interpretation superior? What criteria do we use to measure this? Or is there value in the complementary nature of many approaches and many results?

The Technique of Islamic Bookbinding is the first monograph dedicated to the technical development of the bookbinding tradition in the Islamic world. Based on an assessment of the extensive oriental collections in the Leiden University Library, the various sewing techniques, constructions and the application of covering materials are described in great detail. A comparative analysis of the historic treatises on bookbinding provides further insight into the actual making of the Islamic book. In addition, it is demonstrated that variations in time and place can be established with the help of distinctive material characteristics. Karin Scheper's work refutes the perception of Islamic bookbinding as a weak structure, which has generally but erroneously been typified as a case-binding. Instead, the author argues how diverse methods were used to create sound structures, thus fundamentally challenging our understanding of the Islamic bookbinding practice. Karin Scheper has been awarded the De La Court Award 2016 by The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences for her study of the bookbinding tradition in the Islamic world.

Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Occupied Palestinian Territory has been the subject of extensive international peacebuilding and statebuilding efforts coordinated by Western donor states and international finance institutions. Despite their failure to yield peace or Palestinian statehood, the role of these organisations in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is generally overlooked owing to their depiction as tertiary actors engaged in technical missions. In Palestine Ltd., Toufic Haddad explores how neoliberal frameworks have shaped and informed the common understandings of international, Israeli and Palestinian interactions throughout the Oslo peace process. Drawing upon more than 20 years of policy literature, field-based interviews and recently declassified or leaked documents, he details how these frameworks have led to struggles over influencing Palestinian political and economic behaviour, and attempts to mould the class character of Palestinian society and its leadership. A dystopian vision of Palestine emerges as the by-product of this complex asymmetrical interaction, where nationalism, neo-colonialism and `disaster capitalism' both intersect and diverge. This book is essential for students and scholars interested in Middle East Studies, Arab-Israeli politics and international development.

This study argues that, in early medieval South India, it was in the literary arena that religious ideals and values were publicly contested. While Tamil-speaking South India is today celebrated for its preservation of Hindu tradition, non-Hindu religious communities have played a significant role in shaping the religious history of the region. Among the least understood of such non-Hindu contributions is that of the Buddhists, who are little understood because of the scarcity of remnants of Tamil-speaking Buddhist culture. However, the two exant Buddhist texts in Tamil that are complete - a sixth-century poetic narrative known as the Manimekalai and an eleventh-century treatise on grammar and postics, the Viracoliyam - reveal a wealth of information about their textual communities and their vision of Buddhist life in a diverse and competitive religious milieu. By focusing on these texts, Monius sheds light on their role of literature and literary culture in the information, articulation, and evolution of religious identity and community.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This monograph uses a medieval Arabic chronicle, the Chronicle of Seert, as a window into the Christian history of Iraq. The Chronicle describes events that are unknown from other sources, but it is most useful for what it tells us about the changing agendas of those who wrote history and their audiences in the period c.400-800. By splitting the Chronicle into its constituent layers, Philip Wood presents a rich cultural history of Iraq. He examines the Christians' self-presentation as a church of the martyrs and the uncomfortable reality of close engagement with the Sasanian state. The history of the past was used as a source of solidarity in the present, to draw together disparate Christian communities. But it also represented a means of criticising figures in the present, whether these be secular rulers or over-mighty bishops and abbots. The Chronicle gives us an insight into the development of an international awareness within the church in Iraq. Christians increasingly raised their horizons to the Roman Empire in the West, which offered a model of Christian statehood, while also being the source of resented theological innovation or heresy. It also shows us the competing strands of patronage within the church: between laymen and clergy; church and state; centre and periphery. Building on earlier scholarship rooted in the contemporary Syriac sources, Wood complements that picture with the testimony of this later witness.

COLONIAL MIXED BLOOD The navies built by the Arabs and King Solomon plied the oceans long ago. The Portuguese, Dutch, and British followed suit, and eventually the oceans were mastered. The colonial age came into being and brought with it increased movements of people and the mixing of genes. In Colonial Mixed Blood, author Allan Russell Juriansz, who was born in Sri Lanka, provides an account of this occurrence with reference to the Portuguese, Dutch, and British who colonized Sri Lanka for the period of the past five hundred years. The story begins in Riga, Latvia, in the late 1400s and centres on the Ondatjes and the Juriansz clan, their love story, their immersion in Christianity, and their struggles to survive the forces of colonialism and find happiness. A blend of history and fiction, Colonial Mixed Blood provides a background of the religious forces at work during this time in Europe and outlines the genealogy and life experiences of Juriansz's family as part of the colonial activity of the Dutch East India Company in Sri Lanka. They inherited an adventurous spirit from their first Dutch ancestors, and this spirit inspired their diaspora. But it was one hundred and fifty years of intense British influence that transformed them into loyal British subjects.

Scholars of Daoism in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) have paid particular attention to the interaction between the court and certain Daoist priests and to the political results of such interaction; the focus has been on either emperors or Daoist masters. Yet in the Ming era a special group of people patronized Daoism and Daoist establishments: these were the members of the imperial clan, who were enfeoffed as princes. In addition to personal belief and self-cultivation, a prince had other reasons to patronize Daoism. As the regional overlords, the Ming princes like other local elites saw financing and organizing temple affairs and rituals, patronizing Daoist priests, or collecting and producing Daoist books as a chance to maintain their influence and show off their power. The prosperity of Daoist institutions, which attracted many worshippers, also demonstrated the princes' political success. Locally the Ming princes played an important cultural role as well by promoting the development of local religions. This book is the first to explore the interaction between Ming princes as religious patrons and local Daoism. Barred by imperial law from any serious political or military engagement, the Ming princes were ex officio managers of state rituals at the local level, with Daoist priests as key performers, and for this reason they became very closely involved in Daoist clerical and liturgical life. By illuminating the role the Ming princes played in local religion, Richard Wang demonstrates in The Ming Prince and Daoism that the princedom served to mediate between official religious policy and the commoners' interests.

Largely overshadowed by World War II's "greatest generation" and the more vocal veterans of the Vietnam era, Korean War veterans remain relatively invisible in the narratives of both war and its aftermath. Yet, just as the beaches of Normandy and the jungles of Vietnam worked profound changes on conflict participants, the Korean Peninsula chipped away at the beliefs, physical and mental well-being, and fortitude of Americans completing wartime tours of duty there. Upon returning home, Korean War veterans struggled with home front attitudes toward the war, faced employment and family dilemmas, and wrestled with readjustment. Not unlike other wars, Korea proved a formative and defining influence on the men and women stationed in theater, on their loved ones, and in some measure on American culture. In the Shadow of the Greatest Generation not only gives voice to those Americans who served in the "forgotten war" but chronicles the larger personal and collective consequences of waging war the American way.

This book discusses the transformation of southeast Anatolia during the 19th century. The analysis, which revolves around cotton production in the Adana Plain, enriches our knowledge of how people from different backgrounds came together to build a new social milieu in the late Ottoman period. Through the analysis of the dynamics between the multi-layered processes of sedentarization, Egypt s experience with cotton cultivation, the extension of the cultivated area via large scale landholding patterns, and the establishment of the brand new port-city of Mersin, this book shows how former nomads and settlers, many of whom had arrived there only recently, created a commercially viable region almost from scratch in an age of changing state-society relations.

The history of Singapore has been widely conflated with the history of its economic success. From its heyday as a nexus of trade during the imperial era to the modern city state that boasts high living standards for most of its citizens, the history of Singapore is commonly viewed through the lens of the ruling elite. Published in two volumes in 1998 and 2000, Lee Kuan Yew's memoirs The Singapore Story epitomizes this top-down definitive narrative of the nation's past. The history of post-war Singapore has largely been reduced to a series of decisions made by the nation's leaders. Few existing studies explore the role and experiences of the ordinary person in Singapore's post-war history. There are none that do this through ethnography, oral history, and collective biography. In a critical study that has no parallel among existing works on Singapore history, this book dispenses with the homogenous historical experience that is commonly presumed in the writing of Singapore's national past after 1945 and explores how the enforcement of a uniform language policy by the Singapore government for cultural and economic purposes has created underappreciated social and economic divides among the Chinese of Singapore both between and within families. It also demonstrates how mapping distinct economic, linguistic, and cultural cleavages within Singaporean Chinese society can add new and critical dimensions to understanding the nation's past and present. Chief among these, the author argues, are the processes behind the creation and entrenchment of class structures in the city state, such as the increasing value of English as a form of opportunity-generating capital.