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Books > Humanities > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history > General
Sovereign Attachments rethinks sovereignty by moving it out of the
exclusive domain of geopolitics and legality and into cultural,
religious, and gender studies. Through a close reading of a
stunning array of cultural texts produced by the Pakistani state
and the Pakistan-based Taliban, Shenila Khoja-Moolji theorizes
sovereignty as an ongoing attachment that is negotiated in public
culture. Both the state and the Taliban recruit publics into
relationships of trust, protection, and fraternity by summoning
models of Islamic masculinity, mobilizing kinship metaphors, and
marshalling affect. In particular, masculinity and Muslimness
emerge as salient performances through which sovereign attachments
are harnessed. The book shifts the discussion of sovereignty away
from questions about absolute dominance to ones about shared
repertoires, entanglements, and co-constitution.
The renaissance of Arabic Papyrology has become obvious by the
founding of the International Society for Arabic Papyrology (ISAP)
at the Cairo conference (2002), and by its subsequent conferences
in Granada (2004), Alexandria (2006), Vienna (2009), Tunis/Carthage
(2012), Munich (2014), and Berlin (2018). This volume collects
papers given at the Munich conference, including editions of
previously unpublished Coptic, Arabic and Judeo-Arabic documents,
as well as historical studies based on documentary evidence from
Achaemenid Bactria, Ancient South-Arabia, and Early Islamic,
Fatimid and Mamluk Egypt. Contributors: Anne Boud'hors; Ursula
Bsees; Peter T. Daniels; Maher A. Eissa; Andreas Kaplony; W. Matt
Malczycki; Craig Perry; Daniel Potthast; Peter Stein; Naim
Vanthieghem; Oded Zinger
From the Greeks to the Arabs and Beyond written by Hans Daiber, is
a six volume collection of Daiber's scattered writings, journal
articles, essays and encyclopaedia entries on Greek-Syriac-Arabic
translations, Islamic theology and Sufism, the history of science,
Islam in Europe, manuscripts and the history of oriental studies.
It also includes reviews and obituaries. Vol. V and VI are
catalogues of newly discovered Arabic manuscript originals and
films/offprints from manuscripts related to the topics of the
preceding volumes.
Commissioned by the Qianlong emperor in 1751, the Qing Imperial
Illustrations of Tributary Peoples (Huang Qing zhigong tu ), is a
captivating work of art and an ideological statement of universal
rule best understood as a cultural cartography of empire. This
translation of the ethnographic texts accompanied by a full-color
reproduction of Xie Sui's ( ) hand-painted scroll helps us to
understand the conceptualization of imperial tributary
relationships the work embodies as rooted in both dynastic history
and the specifics of Qing rule.
The boat journey is central to the narrative of Mediterranean
migration of the undocumented. The boat itself is flimsy, fragile,
unstable, and easily breakable. It is trifling and insubstantial.
But it has captured the attention of the world - after all, the
boat and its aftermath have produced recurring images of migrants
washing up along southern Europe's picturesque beaches in the
visual archive of undocumented migration. But the boat has also
sharply put into relief the divides of the Mediterranean. After
all, the few miles of the Mediterranean separating Africa's
northern shore and Europe's southern shore is a common observation
in migrant narratives. At the same time, they also reflect on how
the Mediterranean has been imagined as starkly divided into two
incommensurable spaces and civilizational models - North and South
(in actuality, by colonial powers in the modern period). Much
Mediterranean migrant literature indeed captures the
Mediterranean's fossilized binaries, North and South. But, The
Two-Edged Sea also reveals that one inheres within the other. While
the book explores two Mediterraneans, with asymmetrical power
relations that reflect the sea's northern and southern shores, it
also delves into how they are and have been in dialogue with each
other, effectively deconstructing the binary.
By looking at China from the periphery, this study shows how
European sources offer a unique way of expanding the knowledge
about the gazette of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its
interconnected history illustrates how the Chinese gazette, as
translated by European missionaries, became a major source for
reflections on state and society by Enlightenment thinkers.
Divining with Achi and Tara is a book on Tibetan methods of
prognostics with dice and prayer beads (mala). Jan-Ulrich Sobisch
offers a thorough discussion of Chinese, Indian, Turkic, and
Tibetan traditions of divination, its techniques, rituals, tools,
and poetic language. Interviews with Tibetan masters of divination
introduce the main part with a translation of a dice divination
manual of the deity Achi that is still part of a living tradition.
Solvej Nielsen contributes further interviews, a mala divination of
Tara and its oral tradition, and very useful glossaries of the
terminology of Tibetan divination and fortune telling. Appendices
provide lists of deities and spirits and of numerous identified
ritual remedies and supports that are an essential element of a
still vibrant Tibetan culture.
The three-volume series titled The Presence of the Prophet in Early
Modern and Contemporary Islam, is the first attempt to explore the
dynamics of the representation of the Prophet Muhammad in the
course of Muslim history until the present. This first collective
volume outlines his figure in the early Islamic tradition, and its
later transformations until recent times that were shaped by
Prophet-centered piety and politics. A variety of case studies
offers a unique overview of the interplay of Sunni amd Shi'i
doctrines with literature and arts in the formation of his image.
They trace the integrative and conflictual qualities of a
"Prophetic culture", in which the Prophet of Islam continues his
presence among the Muslim believers. Contributors Hiba Abid, Nelly
Amri, Caterina Bori, Francesco Chiabotti, Rachida Chih, Adrien de
Jarmy, Daniel De Smet, Mohamed Thami El Harrak, Brigitte Foulon,
Denis Gril, Christiane Gruber, Tobias Heinzelmann, David Jordan,
Pierre Lory, Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, Samuela Pagani, Alexandre
Papas, Michele Petrone, Stefan Reichmuth, Meryem Sebti, Dilek
Sarmis, Matthieu Terrier, Jean-Jacques Thibon, Marc Toutant,
Ruggiero Vimercati Sanseverino.
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