Islamic Area Studies – serie

In Sugar in the Social Life of Medieval Islam Tsugitaka Sato explores the actual day-to-day life in medieval Muslim societies through different aspects of sugar. Drawing from a wealth of historical sources - chronicles, geographies, travel accounts, biographies, medical and pharmacological texts, and more - he describes sugarcane cultivation, sugar production, the sugar trade, and sugar’s use as a sweetener, a medicine, and a symbol of power. He gives us a new perspective on the history of the Middle East, as well as the history of sugar across the world.This book is a posthumous work by a leading scholar of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies in Japan who made many contributions to this field.

This book presents a new perspective on Islamic urban society: a dynamism of social networking and justice which caused both rapid development and sudden decay in the Ṣāliḥiyya quarter. Founded in the northern suburbs of Damascus by Hanbali ulama who migrated from Palestine to Syria in the mid-12th century, the quarter developed into a city through waqf endowments. It has attracted the attention of historians and travelers for its unique location, popular movements and religious features. Through the study of local chronicles, topographies and archival sources and through modern field research, Toru Miura explores the history of the Ṣāliḥiyya quarter from its foundation to the early 20th century, comparing it to European, Chinese and Japanese cities.

In The Kazakh Khanates between the Russian and Qing Empires, Jin Noda examines the foreign relations of the Kazakh Chinggisid sultans and the Russian and Qing empires during the 18th and 19th centuries. Noda makes use of both Russian and Qing archival documents as well as local Islamic sources. Through analysis of each party’s claims –mainly reflected in the Russian-Qing negotiations regarding Central Eurasia–, the book describes the role played by the Kazakh nomads in tying together the three regions of eastern Kazakh steppe, Western Siberia, and Xinjiang.

Rashda:The Birth and Growth of an Egyptian Oasis Village is an interdisciplinary study from a multi-perspective, using various kinds of data and information. It offers a comprehensive description of Rashda, a village in Dakhla Oasis in Egypt from its beginning to the present. Key concepts are the uncertainty of the water supply, the dependence on the political regime and the rational behaviour of individuals. The villagers of Rashda have dealt with the difficult natural circumstances by creating the local customs of irrigation and cultivation. The development of village recently depends ever more on the government, as long as large amounts of finance and superior technology are necessary to dig deeper wells to secure water for cultivation.

In The Qїrghїz Baatïr and the Russian Empire Tetsu Akiyama gives a vivid description of the dynamism and dilemmas of empire-building in nomadic Central Asia from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, through reconstructing the biography of Shabdan Jantay uulu (ca. 1839–1912), a chieftain from the northern Qїrghїz (Kirghiz, Kyrgyz) tribes. Based on the comprehensive study of primary sources stored in the archives of Central Asian countries and Russia, Akiyama explores Shabdan’s intermediary role in the Russian Empire’s military advance and rule in southern Semirech’e and its surrounding regions. Beyond the commonly held stereotype as a “faithful collaborator” to Russia, he appears here as a flexible and tough leader who strategically faced and dealt with Russian dominance.