Documents and the History of the Early Islamic World

Historians have long lamented the lack of contemporary documentary sources for the Islamic middle ages and the inhibiting effect this has had on our understanding of this critically important period. Although the field is richly served by surviving evidence, much of it is hard to locate, difficult to access, and philologically intractable. Presenting a mixture of historical studies and new editions of Greek, Arabic and Coptic material from the seventh to the fifteenth century C.E. from Egypt and Palestine, Documents and the History of the Early Islamic World explores the untapped wealth of documentary sources available in collections around the world and shows how this exciting material can be used for historical analysis.Contributors include: Hugh Kennedy, Anne Regourd, Jairus Banaji, Alain Delattre, Shaun O’Sullivan, Anna Selander, Frédéric Bauden, Mostafa El-Abbadi, Rachel Stroumsa, Sebastian Richter, Tascha Vorderstrasse, Matt Malczycki, R.G. Khoury, Nicole Hansen, and Alia Hanafi.For more titles about Papyrology, please click here.

“This is a concise book worth both for its amount and variety of information, addressing a surprisingly wide range of scientific questions regarding the possibility of using material and textual evidence in the search of information on either the intellectual, or cultural, economic, and political history of Egypt and Palestine; furthermore, it offers a kick off for an in depth research to students of maritime history, to researchers of the social history of the Middle East, of the fiscal policy of the era in the region as well as to students of the history Quran researching for the nihil obstat and imprimatur of the suras, to archeologists assessing cultural artifacts, to sociolinguists working on multilingualism in the Mediterreanean and papyrologists trying to link to all these fields of reseach.” Stavros Nikolaidis

Alexander T. Schubert received his Ph.D. in ancient history from Cornell University in 2000. He is currently the executive director of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology.Petra M. Sijpesteijn holds the Chair of Arabic Language and Culture at Leiden University and is Chargée de recherche at the Institut de Recherche et Histoire des Textes at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris. She obtained her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 2004, and was a junior research fellow at Christ Church, Oxford (2003-2007). She is the author of The Formation of a Muslim State in late Umayyad Egypt (Oxford 2013).