This book makes a unique and timely contribution to world/global historical studies and related fields. It places essential world historical frameworks by top scholars in the field today in clear, direct relation to and conversation with one other, offering them opportunity to enrich, elucidate and, at times, challenge one another. It thereby aims to: (1) offer world historians opportunity to critically reflect upon and refine their essential interpretational frameworks, (2) facilitate more effective and nuanced teaching and learning in and beyond the classroom, (3) provide accessible world historical contexts for specialized areas of historical as well as other fields of research in the humanities, social sciences and sciences, and (4) promote comparative historiographical critique which (a) helps identify continuing research questions for the field of world history in particular, as well as (b) further global peace and dialogue in relation to varying views of our ever-increasingly interconnected, interdependent, multicultural, and globalized world and its shared though diverse and sometimes contested history.

This book engages the diverse meanings and interpretations of Islamic and Western law which have affected people and societies across the globe, past and present, in correlation to the epistemological groundings of those meanings and interpretations. The volume takes a distinctively comparative approach, advancing dialogue on crucial transnational and global debates over the history of Western and Islamic approaches to law, politics and society and their relevance for today. It discusses how fundamental concepts are understood and even translated from one historical or political context or one semantic domain to another. The book provides focused studies of key figures and theories in a manageable, accessible format useful for specialized academic courses and research as well as general audiences.

The book traces the conceptual lens of historical-cultural 'survivals' from the late 19th-century theories of E.B. Tylor, James Frazer, and others, in debate with monotheistic 'degenerationists' and Protestant anti-Catholic polemicists, back to its origins in Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions as well as later more secularized forms in the German Enlightenment and Romanticist movements. These historical sources, particularly the 'dual faith' tradition of Russian Orthodoxy, significantly shaped both Tsarist and later Soviet ethnography of Muslim Central Asia, helping guide and justify their respective religious missionary, social-legal, political and other imperial agendas. They continue impacting post-Soviet historiography in complex and debated ways. Drawing from European, Central Asian, Middle Eastern and world history, the fields of ethnography and anthropology, as well as Christian and Islamic studies, the volume contributes to scholarship on 'syncretism' and 'conversion', definitions of Islam, history as identity and heritage, and more. It is situated within a broader global historical frame, addressing debates over 'pre-Islamic Survivals' among Turkish and Iranian as well as Egyptian, North African Berber, Black African and South Asian Muslim Peoples while critiquing the legacy of the Geertzian 'cultural turn' within Western post-colonialist scholarship in relation to diverging trends of historiography in the post-World War Two era.

This book makes a unique and timely contribution to world/global historical studies and related fields. It places essential world historical frameworks by top scholars in the field today in clear, direct relation to and conversation with one other, offering them opportunity to enrich, elucidate and, at times, challenge one another. It thereby aims to: (1) offer world historians opportunity to critically reflect upon and refine their essential interpretational frameworks, (2) facilitate more effective and nuanced teaching and learning in and beyond the classroom, (3) provide accessible world historical contexts for specialized areas of historical as well as other fields of research in the humanities, social sciences and sciences, and (4) promote comparative historiographical critique which (a) helps identify continuing research questions for the field of world history in particular, as well as (b) further global peace and dialogue in relation to varying views of our ever-increasingly interconnected, interdependent, multicultural, and globalized world and its shared though diverse and sometimes contested history.