Concubines and Courtesans

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
Islamic History ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Female Slaves ◽  
Late Ottoman

Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History contains 16 essays that consider, from a variety of viewpoints, enslaved and freed women across medieval and premodern Islamic social history. The essays bring together arguments regarding slavery, gender, social networking, cultural production (music, poetry, and dance), sexuality, Islamic family law, and religion in the shaping of Near Eastern and Islamic society over time. They range over nearly 1,000 years of Islamic history—from the early, formative period (7th–10th century CE) to the late Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal eras (16th–18th century CE)—and regions from al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) to Central Asia (Timurid Iran). The close, common thread joining the essays is an effort to account for the lives, careers, and representations of female slaves and freed women participating in and contributing to elite urban society of the Islamic realm. Interest in a gendered approach to Islamic history, society, and religion has, by now, deep roots in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies. The shared aim of the essays collected here is to get at the wealth of these topics and to underscore their centrality to a firm grasp on Islamic and Middle Eastern history.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew S. Gordon
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Islamic History ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Female Slaves ◽  
Late Ottoman ◽  
Classical Arabic ◽  
Early Training

Concubines and Courtesans examines the intersection of slavery, gender, social networking, cultural production (music, poetry, and dance), sexuality, Islamic family law, and religion. The essays that make up the volume range over nearly a thousand years of Islamic history—from the early, formative period (7th–10th century CE) to the late Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal eras (16th–18th century CE)—and regions from al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) to Central Asia (Timurid Iran). The close, common thread is an effort to account for the lives, careers, and representations of female slaves participating in and contributing to elite, mostly urban, Islamicate society. The classical Arabic sources evince a trajectory from enslavement and early training of these women to a status as mature and dynamic social actors. Sources in other Near Eastern languages, notably Ottoman Turkish and Persian, provide much the same kind of evidence.

scholarly journals Women Album Makers from the Canterbury Region of New Zealand, 1890-1910, and Their Photographic Practices

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Victoria Annabel Hearnshaw
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Social History ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Close Association ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
Photograph Albums ◽  
Published Evidence ◽  
Object Of Study

<p>This thesis examines the photograph albums created by fifteen women born during the reign of Queen Victoria living in the Canterbury region of New Zealand between the years 1890-1910. It will investigate how it was that these women, often working in close association with other members of their family, became involved in photography as an amateur recreational pastime. It will pursue this investigation within the conceptual and structural framework in which these women’s photographs were produced, collected or processed, and organized into albums, arguing that the making of such albums was as much a cultural and social practice as a representational one.  Photograph albums are often considered to be generic objects. However this study will treat albums as distinctive and unique documents, comparable to other more-widely consulted primary sources such as letters and diaries. In particular, it will explore the capacity of the album to be a pictorial artefact that provides its own conditions for viewing images over time and space and contribute to a growing body of literature that insists that the photograph album is an important object of study within social history, and indeed within the history of photography in general.  In drawing attention to the album making as a gendered pastime I am acknowledging the significance of this activity for women from within the upper and middle classes as a significant aspect of feminine cultural production at this period in our colonial history. As cameras became easier to operate towards the end of the nineteenth century these improvements saw women begin to take their own photographs, and also to print and distribute them within their extended families and beyond. This reflects the extent to which the practices of photography and album-making had become integrated practices by this date. Thus, the role of the album compiler working in the domestic sphere was effectively transformed from a passive consumer (collecting photographs) into an active producer of photographs.  However, the extent to which the practice of photography was undertaken by women within colonial New Zealand is only now beginning to be realized. To date, the published evidence for this has been slight. This thesis endeavours to shed light on the contribution of these women working within the domestic sphere, but also those of their number who subsequently ventured to use this knowledge outside this limited sphere, and on their visual legacy at this formative period in New Zealand’s history.</p>

The Changing Face of Medieval Near Eastern Studies: Challenges and Strategies

1999 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 164-168
Author(s):  
Josef W. Meri
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Islamic History ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Middle Eastern Studies ◽  
Undergraduate Enrollment ◽  
Literature History ◽  
Changing Role ◽  
Near Eastern Studies ◽  
Humanities Curriculum

As we Embrace the new millennium, the debate concerning the ever-changing role of area studies in the humanities curriculum and in funding and academic policies continues. Middle Eastern Studies is facing a new policy and funding agenda, which is forcing institutions and departments to impose changes in teaching, research and funding and meant to bring Middle Eastern Studies in line with what are perceived as more relevant fields of study. Accordingly, some Near Eastern Studies programs, which have continued to experience a decline in funding levels, have over the past decade placed greater emphasis on interdisciplinary classes in comparative literature, history and religion. Sometimes these changes have led to the marginalization of early and medieval Islamic history, culture and religion at public institutions. Why offer a class in medieval Islamic history, while classes in the modern Middle East, comparative literature, or world history might attract higher undergraduate enrollment? Faculty have not always succeeded in convincing university administration of the need to offer undergraduate seminars on various aspects of Islamic history, or devised ways of making pre-modern Near Eastern history and religion more appealing to undergraduates.

scholarly journals The Islamic Scholarly Tradition

2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 120-124
Author(s):  
Dale J. Correa
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Activity ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Islamic History ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Mamluk Period ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Early Islamic

This collection comprises fourteen papers delivered at a December 2010 conference held at Princeton University in honor of Michael A. Cook, as well as a preface and an introduction. Its four sections are designed to reflect the prin- cipal areas of Near Eastern and Islamic studies to which Cook has contributed: “Early Islamic History,” “Early Modern and Modern Islamic History,” “Juridical and Intellectual History,” and “Reinterpretations and Transformations.” The papers cover a broad geographic range from al-Andalus to Central Asia, and an extensive disciplinary range, with studies of calendars, conquest, fatāwā, tafsīr, and logic, among other subjects. Part 1 begins with Michael Bonner’s “‘Time Has Come Full Circle’: Markets, Fairs, and the Calendar in Arabia before Islam,” which addresses the intercalation of Arabia’s pre-Islamic calendar and the utility of sources for social history in dealing with this topic. He extends his confirmation of intercalation to a discussion of trade and social activity, noting that the shift to the Islamic lunar calendar indicated a shift to a new moral and social order and a true “revolution” in breaking with the past. In “The Wasiyya of Abū Hāshim: The Impact of Polemic in Premodern Muslim Historiography,” Najam Haider focuses on reports of the alleged testament (in 98/716-17) of Abu Hashim in which, written just before his death, he transferred his imamate and leadership to the Abbasid Muhammad ibn Ali ibn Abdullah. Relying primarily on Jacob Lassner’s approach to early material of this kind, which focuses on political propaganda and ideological debates, the author highlights the competition among reports of this testament and, later on in the Mamluk period, the processes of crafting a historical narrative that removed the polemical aspects. His study exemplifies the use of an alternative approach to early Islamic history, one that focuses on what compilations of historical reports tell us about contemporaneous political situations and religious doctrine, as well as about the historiographic methods of pre-modern historians ...

scholarly journals Women Album Makers from the Canterbury Region of New Zealand, 1890-1910, and Their Photographic Practices

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Victoria Annabel Hearnshaw
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Social History ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Close Association ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
Photograph Albums ◽  
Published Evidence ◽  
Object Of Study

<p>This thesis examines the photograph albums created by fifteen women born during the reign of Queen Victoria living in the Canterbury region of New Zealand between the years 1890-1910. It will investigate how it was that these women, often working in close association with other members of their family, became involved in photography as an amateur recreational pastime. It will pursue this investigation within the conceptual and structural framework in which these women’s photographs were produced, collected or processed, and organized into albums, arguing that the making of such albums was as much a cultural and social practice as a representational one.  Photograph albums are often considered to be generic objects. However this study will treat albums as distinctive and unique documents, comparable to other more-widely consulted primary sources such as letters and diaries. In particular, it will explore the capacity of the album to be a pictorial artefact that provides its own conditions for viewing images over time and space and contribute to a growing body of literature that insists that the photograph album is an important object of study within social history, and indeed within the history of photography in general.  In drawing attention to the album making as a gendered pastime I am acknowledging the significance of this activity for women from within the upper and middle classes as a significant aspect of feminine cultural production at this period in our colonial history. As cameras became easier to operate towards the end of the nineteenth century these improvements saw women begin to take their own photographs, and also to print and distribute them within their extended families and beyond. This reflects the extent to which the practices of photography and album-making had become integrated practices by this date. Thus, the role of the album compiler working in the domestic sphere was effectively transformed from a passive consumer (collecting photographs) into an active producer of photographs.  However, the extent to which the practice of photography was undertaken by women within colonial New Zealand is only now beginning to be realized. To date, the published evidence for this has been slight. This thesis endeavours to shed light on the contribution of these women working within the domestic sphere, but also those of their number who subsequently ventured to use this knowledge outside this limited sphere, and on their visual legacy at this formative period in New Zealand’s history.</p>

scholarly journals Histories of the Middle East

2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 105-108
Author(s):  
Yasmin Amin
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
New Techniques ◽  
Islamic History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Social Actions ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
Economic Exchanges

This collection of papers, presented at a Princeton University conference heldin May 2008, opens with an extensive bibliography of Abraham L. Udovitch’sworks and a preface detailing his scholarship on the medieval Islamic world’seconomic institutions, social structure, legal theory, and practices. The prefacealso highlights Udovitch’s role and scholarly contributions, prolific publicationsand international academic collaboration, his respect for interdisciplinaryexamination and combination of various methods, as well as the diversity ofhis intellectual pursuits and teachings. The editors praise his visionary approachof focusing on seemingly unconnected texts to uncover the past, suchas combining normative legal texts with narratives from diverse sources andgenres. His students, as demonstrated in this volume, have adopted these methods.Udovitch’s role in changing the writing of medieval Islamic history islauded, as is his encouragement to explore new techniques and methodologiesas well as his attention to the human experience within history.Mark Cohen, whose introduction examines Udovitch’s many roles (viz.,scholar, leading historian, activist, and teacher) provides a biography focusedon the professor’s life and projects. The nine essays, loosely grouped into fourunmarked categories, discuss the main areas of Udovitch’s interests: (1) “EconomicHistory” highlights the intersections between the legal theory of commerceand the commercial practices of institutions. It includes contributionsby Petra Sijpesteijn and Michael Bonner; (2) “Social History” relates economicand social actions, underlines their thematic and methodological commonalities,and comprises essays by Adam Sabra and Jonathan Berkey; (3)“Mediterranean and Indian Ocean” deals with “Middle Eastern History in itsGeographic contexts” and coalesces around what has been termed Udovitch’s“Mediterraneanist” concerns, namely, interdenominational relations and negotiationsbridging the gap between “rigid principles and supple accommodation.”This includes contributions by Olivia Remie Constable, YossefRapaport, and Hassan Khalilieh; and (4) “Urbanism,” the study of cities assites of economic exchanges and interactions between individuals and groups,combining legal, political, ideological, and intellectual dimensions to formthe realities of daily life. This includes two contributions by Boaz Shoshanand Roxani Margariti ...

Gendering Emotions: Ṭarab, Women and Musical Performance in Three Biographical Narratives from ‘The Book of Songs’

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 164-183
Author(s):  
Karen Moukheiber
Keyword(s):  
Formative Period ◽  
Musical Performance ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
Islamic History ◽  
Musical Performances ◽  
Slave Women ◽  
Social Conduct ◽  
Literary Biographies ◽  
The One ◽  
The Book Of Songs

Musical performance was a distinctive feature of urban culture in the formative period of Islamic history. At the court of the Abbasid caliphs, and in the residences of the ruling elite, men and women singers performed to predominantly male audiences. The success of a performer was linked to his or her ability to elicit ṭarab, namely a spectrum of emotions and affects, in their audiences. Ṭarab was criticized by religious scholars due, in part, to the controversial performances at court of slave women singers depicted as using music to induce passion in men, diverting them from normative ethical social conduct. This critique, in turn, shaped the ethical boundaries of musical performances and affective responses to them. Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī’s tenth-century Kitāb al-Aghānī (‘The Book of Songs’) compiles literary biographies of prominent male and female singers from the formative period of Islamic history. It offers rich descriptions of musical performances as well as ensuing manifestations of ṭarab in audiences, revealing at times the polemics with which they were associated. Investigating three biographical narratives from Kitāb al-Aghānī, this paper seeks to answer the following question: How did emotions, gender and status shape on the one hand the musical performances of women singers and on the other their audiences’ emotional responses, holistically referred to as ṭarab. Through this question, this paper seeks to nuance and complicate our understanding of the constraints and opportunities that shaped slave and free women's musical performances, as well as men's performances, at the Abbasid court.

The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-99
Author(s):  
Frederick S. Colby
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Islamic Studies ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Despite the central importance of festival and devotional piety to premodernMuslims, book-length studies in this field have been relatively rare.Katz’s work, The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad, represents a tour-deforceof critical scholarship that advances the field significantly both throughits engagement with textual sources from the formative period to the presentand through its judicious use of theoretical tools to analyze this material. Asits title suggests, the work strives to explore how Muslims have alternativelypromoted and contested the commemoration of the Prophet’s birth atdifferent points in history, with a particular emphasis on how the devotionalistapproach, which was prominent in the pre-modern era, fell out of favoramong Middle Eastern Sunnis in the late twentieth century. Aimed primarilyat specialists in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, especially scholarsof history, law, and religion, this work is recommended to anyone interestedin the history of Muslim ritual, the history of devotion to the Prophet, andthe interplay between normative and non-normative forms ofMuslim beliefand practice ...

Franz Rosenthal’s Half an Autobiography

2014 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-105
Author(s):  
Hinrich Biesterfeldt
Keyword(s):  
Geographical Location ◽  
The United States ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Islamic History ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
Turbulent Times ◽  
History Of ◽  
Near Eastern Studies

Franz Rosenthal (1914-2003), one of the outstanding scholars of Semitic languages, Arabic and Islamic history of the past century, has described himself as an Orientalist, whose task is “to look beyond the culture in which one is rooted to other cultures whatever their geographical location with respect to Europe, in order to learn about and understand them and to try to spread the knowledge thus acquired”. This simple-sounding approach is qualified by a vast knowledge of the appropriate literary sources and a keen sense for the truly significant topic that characterize all of Rosenthal’s works. His memoir discusses these aspects, as well as the profile and outlook of Near Eastern Studies, particularly in relation to neighboring disciplines, and the roles of philology and language teaching. What is at least as interesting as this discussion is an autobiographical account of Rosenthal’s family, his school and university years in Berlin, of his emigration to the United States, and his career up to his arrival at Yale University – a memoir which illuminates his work and his convictions and which tells a story of “cruelly turbulent times” that changed the lives of many scholars and opened up new ways of scholarship.


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