Islam in Historical Perspective provides readers with an introduction to Islam, Islamic history and societies with carefully selected historical and scriptural evidence that enables them to form a comprehensive and balanced vision of Islam's rise and evolution across the centuries and up to the present day. Combining historical and chronological approaches, the book examines intellectual dialogues and socio-political struggles within the extraordinary rich Islamic tradition. Treating Islam as a social and political force, the book also addresses Muslim devotional practices, artistic creativity and the structures of everyday existence. Islam in Historical Perspective is designed to help readers to develop personal empathy for the subject by relating it to their own experiences and burning issues of today. It contains a wealth of historical anecdotes and quotations from original sources that are intended to emphasize its principal points in a memorable way. This new edition features a thoroughly revised and updated text, new illustrations, expanded study questions and chapter summaries.

In the last three decades, the human body has gained increasing prominence in contemporary political debates, and it has become a central topic of modern social sciences and humanities. Modern technologies - such as organ transplants, stem-cell research, nanotechnology, cosmetic surgery and cryonics - have changed how we think about the body. In this collection of thirty original essays by leading figures in the field, these issues are explored across a number of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, including pragmatism, feminism, queer theory, post-modernism, post-humanism, cultural sociology, philosophy and anthropology. A wide range of case studies, which include cosmetics, diet, organ transplants, racial bodies, masculinity and sexuality, eating disorders, religion and the sacred body, and disability, are used to appraise these different perspectives. In addition, this Handbook explores various epistemological approaches to the basic question: what is a body? It also offers a strongly themed range of chapters on empirical topics that are organized around religion, medicine, gender, technology and consumption. It also contributes to the debate over the globalization of the body: how have military technology, modern medicine, sport and consumption led to this contemporary obsession with matters corporeal? The Handbook's clear, direct style will appeal to a wide undergraduate audience in the social sciences, particularly for those studying medical sociology, gender studies, sports studies, disability studies, social gerontology, or the sociology of religion. It will serve to consolidate the new field of body studies.

Uniting Thomas Lawson's essays on the cognitive science of religion, this volume explores theoretical issues in the study of cultural phenomena such as religion, the role of imagination, and the experiments that emerge from these theories. The book begins with Lawson's influential essay “Towards a Cognitive Science of Religion,” which was the first to employ the phrase, and has since become widely adopted in many different disciplines. It signals to scholars in the humanities that the cognitive revolution has finally reached them and serves to introduce them to the world of science. The rest of the book focuses on theoretical issues in the study of cultural phenomena and describes experiments by scholars working on the connections between cognition and culture. Described as "the grandfather of the cognitive science of religion," Lawson offers a unique perspective on the development of the field and the principles that underlie it, which will be relevant to both newcomers and established scholars.

This 9th edition of Martin Gilbert’s Atlas of Jewish History spans over four thousand years of history in 196 maps, starting with the worldwide migration of the Jews from ancient Mesopotamia and coming up into the first decades of the twenty-first century. It presents a vivid picture of a fascinating people and the trials and tribulations which have haunted the Jewish story, as well as Jewish achievements. The themes covered include: Prejudice and Violence – from the destruction of Jewish independence between 722 and 586 BC to the flight from German persecution in the 1930s. Also covers the incidence of anti-Semitic attacks in the Americas and Europe. Migrations and Movements – from ancient dispersals from the promised land, to new maps on the ingathering of exiles from Arab and Muslim lands from 1948, and from the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1992. Society, Trade and Culture – from Jewish trade routes between 800 and 900, the geography of the Jews of China, of India, to communal life in the ghettoes and the situation of world Jewry in the opening years of the twenty-first century. Politics, Government and War – from the Court Jews of the fifteenth century to the founding and growth of the modern State of Israel. This new edition now includes an additional 39 of Martin Gilbert’s maps, across the whole range of Jewish history, originally published across a range of publications, now gathered in this one volume for the first time. Over 50 years on from its first publication, this book is still an indispensable guide to Jewish history.