This book will be immensely helpful to those who wish to orient themselves to what has become a very large body of literature on medieval Islamic history. Combining a bibliographic study with an inquiry into method, it opens with a survey of the principal reference tools available to historians of Islam and a systematic review of the sources they will confront. Problems of method are then examined in a series of chapters, each exploring a broad topic in the social and political history of the Middle East and North Africa between A.D. 600 and 1500. The topics selected represent a cross-section of Islamic historical studies, and range from the struggles for power within the early Islamic community to the life of the peasantry. Each chapter pursues four questions. What concrete research problems are likely to be most challenging and productive? What resources do we possess for dealing with these problems? What strategies can we devise to exploit our resources most effectively? What is the current state of the scholarly literature for the topic under study?

PRAISE FOR THE FIRST EDITION: "Humphreys brings a historian's deep and dispassionate perspective to the modern Middle East. In Between Memory and Desire, he poses incisive questions, elaborates convincing arguments and does not shy from tackling the prickliest of topics. All this is achieved with an eye for telling detail and a concise style that is rare in academic writing. . . . Humphreys's work is in the best tradition of writing on foreign cultures. Objective yet sympathetic, scholarly yet accessible, his book ends up revealing as much about our own society as about those it describes."--Max Rodenbeck, "New York Times Book Review ""In this sober and highly informative book, Humphreys introduces educated readers to the nuances of Middle Eastern political and social discourse. He goes behind the headlines and offers a sophisticated and yet accessible analysis of Islamic polity for Western readers."--"Library Journal ""'People know a lot of things that aren't so, ' warns Stephen Humphreys, and then he tells us all we should really know about the Middle East--a vast, complex, and frequently misunderstood universe. It is a rare achievement that combines erudition, compelling writing, and personal experience."--Meron Benvenisti, author of "City of Stone"