The caliph Al Mansur literally forged the city plan in fire in 762 CE. His Round City was an architectural symbol of order in a vast combustible empire. Ninth-century Baghdad had relations extending from the Atlantic to China, with tranches of coins found as far afield as Scandinavia. The city was by design the heart of a vast city network at a time of pronounced urbanization, an urban golden age by standard reckonings. At the height of Abbasid power its population was an estimated 840,000. It thereby stretched the geographic boundaries of time and space across Eurasia, a Silk Roads terminus in its own right. Baghdad was one of the world’s preeminent “open cities,” incubating trade, knowledge in art, astronomy, mathematics, amidst a myriad of other cross-cultural exchanges. It attracted generations of scientists, philosophers, planners, and literati, especially from Central Asia. Migratory flows included a durable revolving network linking Baghdad to Merv and other key centers of learning and trade along the Silk Roads. Rapidly expanding Islamic civilization had to develop new forms of city building to spread Dar al Islam (the realm of Islam) across vast disparate realms.

The present study examines three aspects of the political and military behavior of the general public, and more specifically that of the Ḥanābila, between 311/923 to 323/935. During those twelve years the Abbasid caliphs lost control of large parts of their empire, and their capital, Baghdad, witnessed increasing chaos. The first aspect that is examined is how the inhabitants of Iraq reacted to the Qarāmiṭa attacks. The second focuses on the Ḥanābila’s behavior during that period and the distinct mark they left on Baghdadi politics. The third looks at the way in which the ruling elite confronted the Ḥanābila. These three perspectives tell part of the story of the unravelling of the socio-political commitments in Baghdad, and the role played by the general populace, and in particular, by the Ḥanābila, in the undoing of its social cohesion.

Relying on a spectrum of sources tackling sexual practices ranging from the normative and historical to the didactic and entertaining, this chapter approaches sexuality in ninth- and tenth-century Baghdad as an organizing principle in Abbasid society. It focuses on prescriptive sexuality and sexual ethics as they were regulated and delineated in early Islamic religious texts. Sexual practices, depicted mainly in literary texts, are discussed within the context of the institution of the harem. Finally, nonconformist sexuality is addressed through the lens of an eclectic collection of genres ranging from literature and poetry to medical manuals. A comparative appraisal of the sources shows that while in the caliphal harem concubinage eventually replaced marriage, in elite and common urban households marriage appears to remain the dominant institution. Nonconformist heterosexual and homosexual behaviour was generally depicted as part and parcel of the lifestyles of the urban and ruling elite. A main conclusion is that the influx of enslaved women granted the institution of female slavery a prominent historical and discursive role in shaping the contours of normative and nonconformist sexual relations.

Arabic sources written in the Mamluk Sultanate, in the territories controlled by the Mongols, and elsewhere play an important role in reconstructing the history of the Mongol world empire and its successor states and of their relations with nearby countries. While some of these sources have been known and used since the early nineteenth century, Arabic-language works have became more significant in the study of Mongol history in the last half-century or so, and especially in the last generation, with the proliferation of proper editions of many of these texts. This article surveys the large – but perhaps not fully appreciated – corpus of Arabic works related to Mongolian studies, in the following order: works written before the establishment of the Ilkhanate (c. 1260), those composed in the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria, books originating in Arabic-speaking countries beyond the Mamluk Sultanate, and finally compositions from Mongol-controlled regions, mostly in the western Ilkhanate.

analyzes the military progress of the war in Ottoman territory and the diplomatic response. The tide turned with the British capture of Baghdad in March 1917 and the Allied entry into Jerusalem. It resulted in a war strategy that shored up control over the region’s natural resources and its peoples using soldiers and personnel largely from the British Empire.

The Sultanate drew upon concepts of martial skill, valor and aggression attributed to the Mongol Imperium and its unprecedented conquests. While idealizing these traits, Mamluk Sultans exploited them to thwart Mongol expansion into their territories. They welcomed renegades from Mongol armies (Wafidiyya) to mimic their prowess while limiting their aggression. Mamluk cadets were imported initially from the Qipjaq Steppe in Central Asia, subsequently from Circassia in the Caucasus, with numerous other regions represented. They were instructed in Arabic, Turkish and Islam prior to being trained in arms. The Mamluk military hierarchy consisted of elite Mamluks imported as cadets in the Sultan’s service, Mamluks of senior officers, soldiers of former rulers restive over their loss of status, and descendants of 1st-generation Mamluks who served as infantry and assimilated into Arabic civil society (awlad al-nas). Advancement through the military hierarchy was marked by endemic factional rivalry in which conspiracy was expected not repudiated. Whether conspiracy enhanced the Sultanate’s military prowess or destabilized its governance remains a debated issue.

“A text that revolutionised the Shāfiʿī school of law” is the best way to characterise the law book Minhāj, the central subject of this chapter. Soon after it was written in Damascus in the thirteenth century, it acquired an immense popularity among Shāfiʿī jurists, to the extent that no other text of the school ever achieved. In the following centuries, it not only influenced but also framed the very ways in which they discoursed about their school. It inspired generations of jurists in their legal-textual praxis, leading to the production of a copious amount of commentaries, supercommentaries, abridgements, poetic renderings, etc., and that continues to today. Its story presents an interesting phenomenon in the histories of Islamic law, law and Islam at large. This chapter explores its inception and trajectories. It asks why so many jurists engaged with the text and what made it so idiosyncratic that it influenced the textual discourses of such a large community across centuries. Embedded in the larger commentarial mode of juridical advancements of the time, it argues that Nawawī codified the school’s diverse opinions while synthesising the existing divisions. His own detailed engagements with the broader textual corpus of the school in his other works provided material for him to bring out a concise, comprehensive and coherent work that would address larger pedagogical and juridical requirements.

Canonized Twelver narratives imply that the “envoys” (sufarāʾ) of the hidden Imam were recognized as key authority figures immediately after the eleventh Imam’s death. However, it is argued inthat the authority of the agents was established piecemeal, and they came to be known collectively as the “nāḥiya,” a new term for the ambiguous Occultation-era institutions. The first of the canonized envoys, ʿUthmān b. Saʿīd al-ʿAmrī, is not depicted as an active agent in the earliest layer of reports. Instead, he appears as a mere eyewitness to the hidden Imam. Meanwhile, the earliest clearly active agents included several who were not canonized as envoys, and none emerges clearly as a preeminent “envoy.” Early reports indicate a rupture in authority when the old guard agents of Imam al-Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī all died out. The office of the “envoys” was only fully established thereafter, to fill this vacuum of authority.

In the centuries after Justinian’s death, Constantinople’s bronze horseman became a defining presence on the city’s skyline. It signified imperial power and elicited competitive emulation. In the eighth–ninth centuries the lofty monument emerged as a powerful emblem in Byzantine–Abbasid relations. Abu Ja’far al-Mansur, the creator of Baghdad, placed a prominent equestrian statue atop the tallest, central dome of his new capital. This chapter discusses the so-called "crown of Baghdad," a forgotten sculptural monument which once mirrored Constantinople’s horseman in form and function. The dome and its sculpture immediately became iconic features of the city. They could be seen from the outskirts of Baghdad or even at a more distant approach to the city. The dome and its monument were calculated statements of imperial power that were deeply embedded in the Abbasid–Byzantine dialogue. I argue that this bronze, sculptural monument in the heart of Baghdad was created as a conscious and deliberate response to the bronze horseman of Constantinople. It grew in mythology, stature, and significance to rival the bronze horseman. By contextualizing the Baghdad monument within a competitive relationship, a forgotten facet of Abbasid–Byzantine cultural dialogue has emerged.

The second chapter studies the efforts of the Christian Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, whose workshop in ʿAbbāsid Baghdad translated the Galenic sources considered in this book, to enhance the respectability of the specialism of ophthalmology in his Ten Treatises on the Eye. I show that, even more so than medicine, ophthalmology was at a disadvantage in its pursuit for epistemic authority because Galen himself had attacked the sub-field as an exemplar of the worrying tendency among doctors in Rome and other cities towards specialization, which threatened the unity of the discipline and the health of patients. Concerned with his own intellectual status at court, Ḥunayn, I argue, subversively uses Galen's explanation of the Timaeus' description of the eyes' service to the rational soul to give ophthalmologists a stake in medico-philosophical controversies relating to sensation. I also expose how Ḥunayn modifies Galen’s interpretation of Plato’s teleological ocular anatomy and visual theory in order to privilege the eye over all other organs as a window to cosmic knowledge.

This chapter canvasses information available in the Arab/Islamic canon on the subject of violence exercised against women in the early Islamic period. The Qur’anic verse in Surat al-Nisa’ (4:34) which gives the husband the right to correct a disobedient or recalcitrant wife, generated a massive exegetical. This chapter begins with a discussion of the exegetical tradition pertaining to this verse and comments on the divergences between the Islamic legal schools and the differences of textual interpretations between theologians and jurisconsults. The second section refers to anecdotes that reveal the conflicts and tensions in private relations, the harmfulness of domestic intimacy, and the dynamics of household violence. The final section discusses episodes describing public violence against women, especially in the streets of Baghdad, the ʿAbbāsid capital. Beyond the rich exegetical tradition, the information tends to be scarce and fragmentary and relies mostly on literary texts makes it difficult to disentangle fact from fiction.The material draws for us, nevertheless, illustrations of certain widespread conceptions in Muslim medieval literary approaches to violence against women and the social context in which the textual edifice was constructed.