The Court Of The Caliphs

Author : Hugh N. Kennedy
Publisher : Weidenfeld & Nicolson Limited
ISBN 13 : 9780297830009
Total Pages : 326 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Court of the Caliphs written by Hugh N. Kennedy and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson Limited. This book was released on 2004 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professor Hugh Kennedy makes no apology for the 'fair share of booze and sex' involved in The Court of the Caliphs. Every element of his story is drawn from the original Arabic texts: 'the writers of the ninth and tenth centuries knew their rulers had their fair share of human frailties and were quite happy to describe them. To produce a sanitized and whitewashed version of history does no service to our understanding of the caliphate.' In this fast-paced and colourful narrative, Professor Hugh Kennedy takes us back to Baghdad and Samarra and the glory days of the Caliphate. From a rebellion planned in a remote desert town to the founding of Baghdad in AD 762, the rule of the Abbasid dynasty was looked back on as the golden era of the Islamic Conquest. The muslim world was ruled by a single sovereign, who waged holy war against the Byzantines and protected the holy cites of Mecca and Medina. For what was to be the last time in history, a mighty empire was based on the ancient Mesopotamian heartland that had once supported the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians. The Caliphs formed the model for succeeding muslim regimes. From military conquests to patronizing poetry, building palaces, and the formal structure of the court - harems, viziers, eunuchs and the tales of the Arabian Nights - the Abbasid Caliphate and offered a historical ideal for later empires and their rulers to aspire to. Yet the true story of this fascinating empire has been forgotten outside the academic world. And it deserves to be rescued: it is an epic story in every sense, with larger-than-life rulers, exotic slave girls, inventive tortures, and enough court intrigue to frighten a Borgia.

Author : ابن الساعي، علي بن انجب،
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1479866792
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book كتاب جهات الأئمة الخلفاء من الحرائر والإماء المسمى نساء الخلفاء written by ابن الساعي، علي بن انجب، and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consorts of the Caliphs is a seventh/thirteenth-century compilation of anecdotes about thirty-eight women who were, as the title suggests, consorts to those in power, most of them concubines of the early Abbasid caliphs and wives of latter-day caliphs and sultans. This slim but illuminating volume is one of the few surviving texts by Ibn al-Saʿi (d. 674 H/1276 AD). Ibn al-Saʿi was a prolific Baghdadi scholar who chronicled the academic and political elites of his city, and whose career straddled the final years of the Abbasid dynasty and the period following the cataclysmic Mongol invasion of 656 H/1258 AD.

Author : Hugh Kennedy
Publisher : Orion
ISBN 13 : 9780753818961
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Court of the Caliphs written by Hugh Kennedy and published by Orion. This book was released on 2005 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intrigue, debauchery and seduction in the palaces of the Middle East.

Author : Hugh Kennedy
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 0465094384
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Caliphate written by Hugh Kennedy and published by . This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a preeminent scholar of Islamic history, an authoritative history of caliphates from the seventh century to the modern day

Author : Hugh Kennedy
Publisher : Da Capo Press
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 382 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World written by Hugh Kennedy and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2005-05-10 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a history of the Abbasid dynasty, the founders of Baghdad, and discusses the politics, military conquests, court life, palace bureacracy, culture, and arts which characterized the era.

Author : ابن الساعي، علي بن انجب،
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1479866792
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book كتاب جهات الأئمة الخلفاء من الحرائر والإماء المسمى نساء الخلفاء written by ابن الساعي، علي بن انجب، and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consorts of the Caliphs is a seventh/thirteenth-century compilation of anecdotes about thirty-eight women who were, as the title suggests, consorts to those in power, most of them concubines of the early Abbasid caliphs and wives of latter-day caliphs and sultans. This slim but illuminating volume is one of the few surviving texts by Ibn al-Saʿi (d. 674 H/1276 AD). Ibn al-Saʿi was a prolific Baghdadi scholar who chronicled the academic and political elites of his city, and whose career straddled the final years of the Abbasid dynasty and the period following the cataclysmic Mongol invasion of 656 H/1258 AD.

Author : Benson Bobrick
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1416568069
Total Pages : 366 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Caliph's Splendor written by Benson Bobrick and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-08-14 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Caliph’s Splendor is a revelation: a history of a civilization we barely know that had a profound effect on our own culture. While the West declined following the collapse of the Roman Empire, a new Arab civilization arose to the east, reaching an early peak in Baghdad under the caliph Harun al-Rashid. Harun is the legendary caliph of The Thousand and One Nights, but his actual court was nearly as magnificent as the fictional one. In The Caliph’s Splendor, Benson Bobrick eloquently tells the little-known and remarkable story of Harun’s rise to power and his rivalries with the neighboring Byzantines and the new Frankish kingdom under the leadership of Charlemagne. When Harun came to power, Islam stretched from the Atlantic to India. The Islamic empire was the mightiest on earth and the largest ever seen. Although Islam spread largely through war, its cultural achievements were immense. Harun’s court at Baghdad outshone the independent Islamic emirate in Spain and all the courts of Europe, for that matter. In Baghdad, great works from Greece and Rome were preserved and studied, and new learning enhanced civilization. Over the following centuries Arab and Persian civilizations made a lasting impact on the West in astronomy, geometry, algebra (an Arabic word), medicine, and chemistry, among other fields of science. The alchemy (another Arabic word) of the Middle Ages originated with the Arabs. From engineering to jewelry to fashion to weaponry, Arab influences would shape life in the West, as they did in the fields of law, music, and literature. But for centuries Arabs and Byzantines contended fiercely on land and sea. Bobrick tells how Harun defeated attempts by the Byzantines to advance into Asia at his expense. He contemplated an alliance with the much weaker Charlemagne in order to contain the Byzantines, and in time Arabs and Byzantines reached an accommodation that permitted both to prosper. Harun’s caliphate would weaken from within as his two sons quarreled and formed factions; eventually Arabs would give way to Turks in the Islamic empire. Empires rise, weaken, and fall, but during its golden age, the caliphate of Baghdad made a permanent contribution to civilization, as Benson Bobrick so splendidly reminds us.

Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004291962
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book New Perspectives on Power and Political Representation from Ancient History to the Present Day written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-06-07 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Perspectives on Power and Political Representation from Ancient History to the Present Day offers a unique perspective on political communication between rulers and ruled from antiquity to the present day by putting the concept of representation center stage. It explores the dynamic relationship between elites and the people as it was shaped by constructions of self-representation and representative claims. The contributors to this volume – specialists in ancient, medieval, early-modern and modern history – move away from reductionist associations of political representation with formal aspects of modern, democratic, electoral, and parliamentarian politics. Instead, they contend that the construction of political representation involves a set of discourses, practices, and mechanisms that, although they have been applied and appropriated in various ways in a range of historical contexts, has stood the test of time.

Author : Hugh Kennedy
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 0141981415
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Caliphate written by Hugh Kennedy and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2016-07-07 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is a caliphate? Who can be caliph? And how are contemporary ideologues such as ISIS reviving - and abusing - the term today? In the first modern account of a subject of critical importance today, acclaimed historian Hugh Kennedy answers these questions by chronicling the rich history of the caliphate, from the death of Muhammad to the present. At its height, the caliphate stretched from Spain to China and was the most powerful political entity in western Eurasia. In an era when Paris and London boasted a few thousand inhabitants, Baghdad and Cairo were sophisticated centres of trade and culture, and the Ummayad and Abbasid caliphates were distinguished by extraordinary advances in science, medicine and architecture. By ending with the recent re-emergence of caliphal ideology within fundamentalist Islam, The Caliphate underscores why it is crucial that we understand this form of Islamic government before groups such as ISIS distort its practice completely.

Author : Maaike van Berkel
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004252703
Total Pages : 276 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Crisis and Continuity at the Abbasid Court written by Maaike van Berkel and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-07-11 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The reign of al-Muqtadir (295-320/908-32) is a crucial and controversial epoch in the history of the Abbasid empire. Al-Muqtadir’s regime has traditionally been depicted as one of decline, when the political power of the caliphate and the lustre of its capital began to crumble. This book not only offers a substantial investigation of the idea and reality of decline, but also provides new interpretations of the inner workings of the court and the empire. The authors, four specialists of Abbasid history, explore the formal and informal power relationships that shaped politics at the court, involving bureaucrats, military, harem, courtiers and of course al-Muqtadir himself. A study of the topography of Baghdad completes this vivid picture of the court and its capital.