Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia offers a comparative approach to understanding the spread of Islam and Muslim culture in medieval Anatolia. It aims to reassess work in the field since the 1971 classic by Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization which treats the process of transformation from a Byzantinist perspective. Since then, research has offered insights into individual aspects of Christian-Muslim relations, but no overview has appeared. Moreover, very few scholars of Islamic studies have examined the problem, meaning evidence in Arabic, Persian and Turkish has been somewhat neglected at the expense of Christian sources, and too little attention has been given to material culture. The essays in this volume examine the interaction between Christianity and Islam in medieval Anatolia through three distinct angles, opening with a substantial introduction by the editors to explain both the research background and the historical problem, making the work accessible to scholars from other fields. The first group of essays examines the Christian experience of living under Muslim rule, comparing their experiences in several of the major Islamic states of Anatolia between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, especially the Seljuks and the Ottomans. The second set of essays examines encounters between Christianity and Islam in art and intellectual life. They highlight the ways in which some traditions were shared across confessional divides, suggesting the existence of a common artistic and hence cultural vocabulary. The final section focusses on the process of Islamisation, above all as seen from the Arabic, Persian and Turkish textual evidence with special attention to the role of Sufism.

Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia offers a comparative approach to understanding the spread of Islam and Muslim culture in medieval Anatolia. It aims to reassess work in the field since the 1971 classic by Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization which treats the process of transformation from a Byzantinist perspective. Since then, research has offered insights into individual aspects of Christian-Muslim relations, but no overview has appeared. Moreover, very few scholars of Islamic studies have examined the problem, meaning evidence in Arabic, Persian and Turkish has been somewhat neglected at the expense of Christian sources, and too little attention has been given to material culture. The essays in this volume examine the interaction between Christianity and Islam in medieval Anatolia through three distinct angles, opening with a substantial introduction by the editors to explain both the research background and the historical problem, making the work accessible to scholars from other fields. The first group of essays examines the Christian experience of living under Muslim rule, comparing their experiences in several of the major Islamic states of Anatolia between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, especially the Seljuks and the Ottomans. The second set of essays examines encounters between Christianity and Islam in art and intellectual life. They highlight the ways in which some traditions were shared across confessional divides, suggesting the existence of a common artistic and hence cultural vocabulary. The final section focusses on the process of Islamisation, above all as seen from the Arabic, Persian and Turkish textual evidence with special attention to the role of Sufism.

This book presents a collection of articles that put forward original research and significant insight regarding several key issues related to knowledge and language in Middle Eastern societies. The aspects studied include: the role of knowledge and language in affirming and negating political agendas and self-identities within areas of conflict and tension; ideas regarding the usefulness and interaction of religious and secular knowledge; and the attributes that render knowledge and language, especially that which is believed to be of divine origin, outstanding and worthy of admiration. The selection of studies has been purposefully diverse to include a variety of languages, including Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew and Persian, within multiple traditions, including Hellenism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, while focussing on a range of periods, from the classical to the mediaeval to the modern, and examining a range of issues, such as methods of analysing and interpreting Persian, Turkish and Arabic literature, literary and other attributes of the Bible and the Qur'an, diglossic languages, the Turkish modernisation project, Turkish-Kurdish tensions, Andalusian music, Azerbaijani politics, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By underlining the substantial commonalities that exist between such seemingly different fields of research, the book highlights the idea-increasingly on the wane in departments of Middle Eastern Studies across many universities-that a shared area of study, viz. the Middle East, naturally and inherently entails a shared cultural, historical, and sociological milieu. It suggests that academics who engage in different branches of research related to this area should-rather than focussing singly on their own field-avail substantially and meaningfully of one another's scholarship, learn from each other's methodologies, and collectively build upon a body of knowledge that should never be seen as dissociated.

This book shows the development of women's status in the Mongol Empire from its original homeland in Mongolia up to the end of the Ilkhanate of Iran in 1335. Taking a thematic approach, the chapters show a coherent progression of this development and contextualise the evolution of the role of women in medieval Mongol society. The arrangement serves as a starting point from where to draw comparison with the status of Mongol women in the later period. Exploring patterns of continuity and transformation in the status of these women in different periods of the Mongol Empire as it expanded westwards into the Islamic world, the book offers a view on the transformation of a nomadic-shamanist society from its original homeland in Mongolia to its settlement in the mostly sedentary-Muslim Iran in the mid-13th century.