The Modern Muslim World

How was the past imagined by Hui Muslims in late nineteenth and early twentieth century China? Chen argues that this was a productive time for historical thought, bookended by the establishment of a robust Sino-Islamic knowledge base by Liu Zhi on one end and Republican China on the other end. This book explores histories that unify vast stretches of time and place: from genesis to the modern era, from Arabia to China. Hui historians create narratives that transform China into an Islamic space and Islam into a Chinese religion.

This book explores the process, effects, and results of codification of Egyptian personal status laws as seen through the eyes of the ‘ulamā’. The codification process began in the mid-1800s and continued until the abolishment of the Sharī‘a courts in 1955 with the absorption of personal status statutes into the newly drafted civil code and the national courts that administered them.

This groundbreaking study investigates theories of Islamic constitutionalism as expressed and implemented throughout the history of Islam. To achieve this, it first traces the roots of caliphate embedded within the seminal legal and political works of classical and modern Muslim thinkers. In its concluding chapters, the study maps out and discusses the subsequent transition of Islamic and Muslim governance into twentieth-century approaches to constitutionalism. Longo's resourceful and meticulous approach sheds new light on constitutionalism within the contemporary Muslim world and how it continues to be informed by, or departs from classical theories of Islamic and Muslim governance.

An English translation of the Letters from Salonika by Jelena Dimitrijević, accompanied by a substantial critical introduction and a commentary. The book comprises author’s impressions from Salonika in the summer of 1908, in the midst of the Young Turk Revolution. The narrative focuses on the question of the “unveiling” of Muslim women, but also vividly portrays the vanished cityscape of Ottoman Salonika and gives accounts of the city’s Turkish, Jewish, Mu’min, and Greek communities.

An anthropological study of Syriac Orthodox Christian identity in a time of displacement, upheaval, and conflict. For some Syriac Orthodox Christians in Bethlehem, their self-articulation - the means by which they connect themselves to others, things, places and symbols - is decisively influenced by their eucharistic ritual. This ritual connects being siryāni to a redeemed community or 'body', and derives its identity in large part from the Incarnation of God as an Aramaic-speaking Bethlehemite.

Middle Eastern Minorities and the Arab Spring: Identity and Community in the Twenty-First Century examines eleven minority groups in the early years of the so-called Arab Spring. Wide-ranging in scope, minorities of diverse religious and ethno-linguistic backgrounds are included from North Africa, the Levant, and the Arabian Peninsula. Each has experienced the Arab Spring differently and uniquely depending upon their context. Of particular concern to the international team of scholars involved in this volume, is the interaction and reaction of minorities to the protest movements across the Arab World that called for greater democratic rights and end to respective autocratic regimes. While some minorities participated in the Arab Spring, others were wary of instability and the unintended effects of regime change – notably the rise of violent Islamism. The full effects of the Arab Spring will not be known for years to come, but for the minorities of the Middle East, the immediate future seems certainly tenuous at best.