Courts and the complex phenomenon of the courtly society have received intensified interest in academic research over recent decades, however, the field of Islamic court culture has so far been overlooked. This book provides a comparative perspective on the history of courtly culture in Muslim societies from the earliest times to the nineteenth century, and presents an extensive collection of images of courtly life and architecture within the Muslim realm. The thematic methodology employed by the contributors underlines their interdisciplinary and comprehensive approach to issues of politics and patronage from across the Islamic world stretching from Cordoba to India. Themes range from the religious legitimacy of Muslim rulers, terminologies for court culture in Oriental languages, Muslim concepts of space for royal representation, accessibility of rulers, the role of royal patronage for Muslim scholars and artists to the growing influence of European courts as role models from the eighteenth century onwards. Discussing specific terminologies for courts in Oriental languages and explaining them to the non specialist, chapters describe the specific features of Muslim courts and point towards future research areas. As such, it fills this important gap in the existing literature in the areas of Islamic history, religion, and Islam in particular.

Courts and the complex phenomenon of the courtly society have received intensified interest in academic research over recent decades, however, the field of Islamic court culture has so far been overlooked. This book provides a comparative perspective on the history of courtly culture in Muslim societies from the earliest times to the nineteenth century, and presents an extensive collection of images of courtly life and architecture within the Muslim realm. The thematic methodology employed by the contributors underlines their interdisciplinary and comprehensive approach to issues of politics and patronage from across the Islamic world stretching from Cordoba to India. Themes range from the religious legitimacy of Muslim rulers, terminologies for court culture in Oriental languages, Muslim concepts of space for royal representation, accessibility of rulers, the role of royal patronage for Muslim scholars and artists to the growing influence of European courts as role models from the eighteenth century onwards. Discussing specific terminologies for courts in Oriental languages and explaining them to the non specialist, chapters describe the specific features of Muslim courts and point towards future research areas. As such, it fills this important gap in the existing literature in the areas of Islamic history, religion, and Islam in particular.

While much current research on political Islam revolves around militant Islamism, the genesis of this ideology remains little understood. A System of Life is a pioneering examination of the earliest attempt at a systematic outline of Islamist ideology, namely that proposed in the 1930s and early 1940s by the renowned Indo-Muslim intellectual Sayyid Abu'l-A'la Mawdudi. Hartung reconstructs his thought in the light of the competing ideologies at play at the time, taking seriously his claim to recast Islam as an all-comprehensive, self-contained and inner-worldly system 'of life.' This analysis is embedded in an understanding of the history of ideas that has assumed an increasingly global dimension in the colonial encounter: by showing how Mawdudi has attempted to align elements of Western philosophical thought with selected traditional Islamic ideas and concepts, he is depicted as a major protagonist of this development, while 'Islamism' is established as an Islamic contribution to a universalistic notion of modernity. Besides offering a detailed portrayal of Mawdudi's system of thought, Hartung also discusses the reception and modification of his ideas in the Middle East, predominantly among intellectuals of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and among their imitators in postcolonial South Asia