Saqi Essentials – serie

In August 1099, Abu Saad al-Harawi, a judge from Damascus, stormed into the Caliph’s court in Baghdad, condemning its luxury while Muslims in Syria and Palestine were slaughtered by the Frankish invaders.With this charged scene, Amin Maalouf opens his exhilarating narrative history of two centuries of war that, nearly a millennium later, still cast their shadow on Arab-Western relations. The Crusaders’ first major triumph came with the sack of Jerusalem in 1099. After two days of carnage, not a single Muslim was left alive within the city walls. Yet it would take another fifty years before the Arab East mounted a united resistance.Maalouf recounts in gripping detail the fall of city after city: Antioch, betrayed from within; Tripoli, besieged and stripped of its priceless library; Ma’arra, where the Franj committed unspeakable atrocities. Against this devastation, he sketches vivid portraits of the Arabs who rose in response: Nur al-Din, the ‘Saint-King’ who forged the first united defence of Muslim nations, and Saladin, the reluctant leader who would ultimately reclaim Jerusalem.

Attempts to challenge the virtual exclusion of the male prespective from Middle Eastern studies of gender. The text investigates the ways in which men are acting, reacting and adapting to the structural upheaval of the "traditional" family and to new images of virility and responsibility. Avoiding orientalist approaches, and without claiming exclusive insider knowledge, the essays seek to introduce the diversity of masculine identities in the Middle East by exploring some of the key sites where notions of maleness are constructed, reproduced and/or contested. From the symbolic dimensions of the moustache, through an investigation of transsexuality and Islamic sexual politics, through concerns with male aggression and attitudes to weaponry, to changing notions of masculinity in the Arab novel, the contributors reflect on various aspects of public, as well as private, life. The text also offers insights from the realms of the literary, the bedchambers of the brothel and the institution of family life.

Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 suddenly exposed the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire to a Europe vastly different from the one known to the Arabs of the Middle Ages. At the start of the nineteenth century, Arabs were totally unprepared for the social, economic, and political progress made in Europe. By 1870, however, their vague notions had evolved into a fairly sophisticated knowledge of the historic background and contemporary achievements of various European nations, and the new reform movements in Egypt and the Fertile Crescent had incorporated into their programs the ideological premises and political institutions of European liberalism. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod's pioneering work traces the role of the Arab intelligentsia in increasing Arab awareness of Europe and in shaping visions of Arab political futures. First published in 1963, it was hugely influential in instigating a detailed study of the Arab-European encounter in the nineteenth century using Arabic sources.

Does Islam as a religion oppress women? Is Islam against democracy? In this classic study, internationally renowned sociologist Fatema Mernissi argues that women's oppression is not due to Islam because this religion celebrates women's power. Women's oppression, she maintains, is due to political manipulation of religion by power-seeking, archaic Muslim male elites. Mernissi explains that early Muslim scholars portrayed women as aggressive hunters who forced men, reduced to weak hunted victims, to control women by imposing institutions such as veiling, which confined women to the private space. In her new introduction, she argues that women's aggressive invasion of the 500-plus Arab satellite channels in the twenty-first century, including as commanding show anchors, film and video stars, supports her theory that Islam as a religion celebrates female power.

The Druze, who can be traced back to eleventh-century Levant, have long intrigued scholars of the Middle East. Their obscure origins and blending of beliefs from Ismaili Shi'ism, animism, Greek philosophy, Jewish and Christian mysticism, Iranian Gnosticism and even Buddhism, have set them apart from their neighbours. Philip K. Hitti reveals the remarkable Druze pantheon of semi-deities and investigates their dogmas and rituals, noting the stratification between the few Uqqal (elect wise ones) and the numerous Jahil (ignorant ones). The book includes rarely-seen extracts from the sacred writings of the Druze and offers a unique insight into this fascinating religious minority.