James E. Lindsay - Daily Life in the Medieval Islamic World

The Age of Charlemagne

John J. Butt

The Age of Sail

Dorothy Denneen Volo and James M. Volo

The American Revolution

Dorothy Denneen Volo and James M. Volo

The Ancient Egyptians

Bob Brier and Hoyt Hobbs

The Ancient Greeks

Robert Garland

Ancient Mesopotamia

Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat

The Ancient Romans

David Matz

The Aztecs: People of the Sun and Earth

David Carrasco with Scott Sessions

Chaucer's England

Jeffrey L. Singman and Will McLean

Civil War America

Dorothy Denneen Volo and James M. Volo

Colonial New England

Claudia Durst Johnson

Early Modern Japan

Louis G. Perez

The Early American Republic, 1790-1820: Creating a New Nation

David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler

18th-Century England

Kirstin Olsen

Elizabethan England

Jeffrey L. Singman

The Holocaust

Eve Nussbaum Soumerai and Carol D. Schulz

The Inca Empire

Michael A. Mal pass

The Industrial United States, 1870-1900

Julie Husband and Jim O'Loughlin

Maya Civilization

Robert J. Sharer

Medieval Europe

Jeffrey L. Singman

The Nineteenth Century American Frontier

Mary Ellen Jones

The Nubians

Robert S. Bianchi

The Old Colonial Frontier

James M. Volo and Dorothy Denneen Volo

Renaissance Italy

Elizabeth S. Cohen and Thomas V. Cohen

The Soviet Union

Katherine B. Eaton

The Spanish Inquisition

James M. Anderson

Traditional China: The Tang Dynasty

Charles Benn

The United States, 1920-1939: Decades of Promise and Pain

David E. Kyvig

The United States, 1940-1959: Shifting Worlds

Eugenia Kaledin

The United States, 1960-1990: Decades of

Discord

Myron A. Marty

Victorian England

Sally Mitchell

The Vikings

Kirsten Wolf

World War I

Neil M. Heyman

*Look for more books in this series in paperback from Hackett Publishing Company.

JAMES E. LINDSAY

MAPS

The Middle East on the Eve of Islam

Early Islamic Conquests

The Islamic World in 1500

The Middle East in the Late Eleventh Century

Medieval Damascus

Medieval Baghdad and Iraq

Medieval Cairo

PHOTOGRAPHS

The Harra, Jabal Says in southeastern Syria

Mud-brick house in Old Marib, Yemen

Marib Dam

The Du`an Valley of Hadramawt at the time of the summer rains

Limestone relief from a sarcophagus in the camp of Diocletian, Palmyra, depicting two caravan leaders with a camel

Zafar, in the highlands of Yemen

Early Islamic armaments

Aisha in a litter atop her camel

Seljukid Period horsemen twelfth-thirteenth centuries

Ships

Siege weapons

The Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem, ca 1870

The Umayyad Mosque, Damascus, ca. 1865

Interior of the Umayyad Mosque, Damascus, ca. 1870

Main entrance to the Azhar Mosque, Cairo, ca. 1870

Courtyard of the Azhar Mosque, Cairo, ca. 1870

Village near Pyramids at Giza during flood season, ca. 1865

Arab-Sasanian drahm

Umayyad dinar

Abbasid dirham

Shops on a Cairo street

Exterior of homes in Cairo

Bathhouse floor plan

Fountain

Courtyard of a house in Cairo

Sketch of a guest chamber

Shadhuf

The Dome of the Rock as seen from the Mount of Olives, ca. 1870

Mihrab and Minbar in the Aqsa Mosque, Jerusalem, ca. 1870

Ablution vessels

The prostrations of prayer, 1

The prostrations of prayer, 2

The Ka`ba, ca. 1870

The Haram of Mecca

The Road between Mecca and Arafat

Parade prior to a circumcision

Early nineteenth-century veils

Americans know a great deal about the European Middle Ages based on our exposure to popular literature and films depicting King Arthur, Robin Hood, foreboding castles, knights in shining armor, damsels in distress, and of course the collected works of Monty Python. A few are even lucky (or unlucky) enough to have studied Chaucer's Canterbury Tales without the benefit of a modern English translation. Despite the romantic and humorous quality of our popular understanding of the European Middle Ages, most Americans possess a range of religious, cultural, political, and even linguistic reference points from which to begin a more serious study of the history of medieval Europe. When we turn our attention to the medieval Islamic world, most of us have few, if any, points of reference at all.

Daily Life in the Medieval Islamic World is intended for such an audience. It is a general introduction to the Islamic world from the point of view of those who lived there when the Islamic world represented much of the best of what human civilization had to offer with respect to political order, military prowess, economic vitality, and civil society, as well as intellectual and scientific inquiry. As such, this book attempts to deal with a broad range of issues relevant to daily life in the many societies and regions that constituted the Islamic world from its origins in seventh-century Arabia to the end of the thirteenth century. I have chosen A.D. 1300 as the rough cutoff point for this study because the Islamic world becomes a very different place in many respects in the wake of the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258, the end of the Crusader enterprise in the Near East in the 1290s, the rise of the Ottoman house in Anatolia and Eastern Europe in the early fourteenth century, and the waning of the Mongol threat by the 1320s.1

Because the medieval Islamic world during the seven centuries covered in this study ranged from Spain and West Africa in the west to Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent in the east, one must make some choices about which regions and subjects to focus one's attention on and which perforce must be given less attention. Since Islam originated in the Arabian Peninsula and established its first cosmopolitan imperial capitals in Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo, the bulk of our attention will be given to the central Islamic lands between the Nile and Oxus Rivers. Such an approach can give the impression that the central Islamic lands are where one can find "typical" Islamic religion and culture. To a certain extent this was the view of a great many of those who hailed from the region, as evidenced by the extensive literature praising the merits (fada'il) of one's home province, city, or town that developed during the early centuries of Islamic history. In order to illustrate the continuity as well as the diversity within and among medieval Islamic societies, I will occasionally provide examples from other areas as well.