English Pages []. When Mohammed died, the Christians and Jews of Arabia had been totally subjugated. The history of his relations with the. This book offers a fresh perspective on religious culture in the medieval Middle East. It investigates the ways Muslims. Explores the construction of sanctity and its manifestations in the medieval Muslim Middle East Draws on a wide variety.
This book stresses the need for unity among the believers of God: Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Al-Andalus, the Arabic name for the medieval Islamic state in Iberia, endured for over years following the Arab and. Islamic Jerusalem has a special place in the hearts of the three monotheistic religions. Throughout its history it has b. In this instance, it is with a question initially posed by an earlier generation of Western Islamicists, but then set aside when consensus drained the life out of what had once been a lively debate about the history of Islamic Jerusalem.
Piqued by renewed interest in the Holy Land and its holiest city, a number of archaeologists, historians, and art historians have turned once again to a question first raised by scholars of the nineteenth century: When and in what circumstances did Jerusalem, a city long venerated by Jews and Christians, become a hallowed place for Muslims? The story of how Jerusalem became a holy site for the Muslims remains puzzling even as historians are now able to wield, as never before, the tools of modern archaeology, art historical analysis, and not the least, highly sophisticated approaches to reading medieval Arabic texts.
Part of the problem is the paucity of reliable evidence. In contrast, I have generally opted for modest claims that are expressed whenever possible in language marked by considerable circumspection. In addition, the pages that follow attempt to situate Jerusalem within the larger urban landscape of medieval Islam with a decided emphasis on developments during the first three Islamic centuries, a time frame that corresponds to the seventh to ninth centuries CE.
Probing the history of Islamic cities, one invariably confronts the lingering influence of widely acclaimed authorities of the past, scholars of previous generations whose views remain firmly anchored in a burgeoning historical literature. Well into the latter part of the twentieth century, the received wisdom of historians old and new was to speak of the Islamic city as if all the urban centers of the medieval Near East, no matter how different their origins and growth, shared elements of a common profile.
