Adam Sabra – författare

The study of poverty and charity in Islamic history has made significant advances and Adam Sabra's book represents a full-length treatment of the subject. By focusing on Mamluk Cairo, the author explores the attitude of medieval Muslims to poverty - why and how did they give alms - and the experience of being poor in an Islamic society. He also considers the role of pious endowments (waqfs) in providing food, education and medical care to the poor of medieval Egypt. This is a fascinating account of a world far removed from the affairs of emirs and ulama usually the traditional province of Mamluk studies. This trend, in conjunction with the comparisons the author affords of poverty and destitution in Europe and China during the same period, will entice a broad range of scholars from within the field and beyond.

The study of poverty and charity in Islamic history has made significant advances and Adam Sabra's book represents a full-length treatment of the subject. By focusing on Mamluk Cairo, the author explores the attitude of medieval Muslims to poverty - why and how did they give alms - and the experience of being poor in an Islamic society. He also considers the role of pious endowments (waqfs) in providing food, education and medical care to the poor of medieval Egypt. This is a fascinating account of a world far removed from the affairs of emirs and ulama usually the traditional province of Mamluk studies. This trend, in conjunction with the comparisons the author affords of poverty and destitution in Europe and China during the same period, will entice a broad range of scholars from within the field and beyond.

These two volumes offer a collection of the short treatises of two influential Egyptian religious scholars of the sixteenth century. Abū al-Ḥasan Muḥammad al-Bakrī (898-952/1492-1545) and his son Muḥammad ibn Abī al-Ḥasan al-Bakrī al-Ṣiddīqī Sibṭ Āl al-Ḥasan (930-94/1524-86), who lived between Cairo and Mecca, authored numerous texts on Sufism and Ḥadīth. Abū al-Ḥasan’s works include forty-eight collections of forty ḥadīths, a work on voluntary poverty, an early defense of the consumption of coffee in Sufi ritual, his Ḥizb and his Waṣīya. Muḥammad al-Bakrī’s treatises focus on spiritual instruction, the ritual of samāʿ, Sufi theology, including the author’s rejection of waḥdat al-wujūd, commentary on poems by Ibn al-Fāriḍ and ʿAlī Wafā, and a number of prayers, especially for the Prophet, among other topics. Together they provide insights into the religious trends current in the Arabophone provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. Furthermore, since the Bakrīs were revered from West Africa to South Asia, these texts are important for the study of the early modern Islamic cosmopolis.

This is the first publication of the official correspondence of the leading religious scholar and literary figure, Shaykh Muhammad ibn Abi al-Hasan al-Bakri al-Siddiqi al-Shafi''i Sibt Al al-Hasan. It provides a window into the world of an influential religious scholar in sixteenth century Cairo and his network of contacts in the Ottoman Empire and beyond. Muhammad al-Bakri corresponded with Sultan Murad III, the grand vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, and with various officials in Mecca, including the sharifian ruler of Mecca, al-Hasan ibn Abi Numayy. The collection also contains two letters addressed to Sa''di rulers of Morocco and one to the Mughal Emperor Akbar, as well as letters to a variety of lesser Ottoman officials. It is an important source for the history of Ottoman Egypt and the Hijaz.

For four decades Abraham L. Udovitch has been a leading scholar of the medieval Islamic world, its economic institutions, social structures, and legal theory and practice. In pursuing his quest to understand and explain the complex phenomena that these broad rubrics entail, he has published widely, collaborated internationally with other leading scholars of the Middle East and medieval history, and most saliently for the purposes of this volume, taught several cohorts of students at Princeton University. This volume is therefore dedicated to his intellectual legacy from a uniquely revealing angle: the current work of his former students. The papers in this volume range chronologically from the period preceding the rise of Islam in Arabia to the Mamluk era, geographically from the Western Mediterranean to the Western Indian Ocean and thematically from the political negotiations of Christian and Islamic Mediterranean sovereigns to the historiography of Western Indian Ocean port cities.