Download PDF | John Joseph Saunders - A History of Medieval Islam- (1978).
237 Pages
Preface
DR. JOHNSON, commenting in one of the Ramblers on the oblivion which overtook Richard Knolles’ Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603), despite its literary merits, explained this neglect on the ground that the author ‘employed his genius upon a foreign and uninteresting subject’ and recounted ‘enterprises and revolutions of which none desire to be informed.’ Indifference to Oriental history among the educated public of the West still exists, but is diminishing, and more ‘desire to be informed’ of the relations between Europe and Islam throughout the ages.
Such recent works as Dr. Norman Daniel’s Islam and the West (1960) and Professor R.W. Southern’s Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (1962) provide striking evidence of the wider perspectives now being opened up, and as our historians cease to be Europe-centred and devote more attention to the nature and evolution of non-European societies, we may expect the history of the Muslim East to be studied with increasingly critical care. It is true that the task confronting scholars in this field is enormous.
The language barrier alone is not easily surmounted. Many relevant texts remain unpublished, and many of the problems to be solved have scarcely been formulated, much less seriously tackled. Thus, for example, the social and economic history of medieval Islam has only just begun to be investigated.
The unfamiliarity of the subject daunts some prospective students. The rhythms of Muslim history are not our rhythms. To give but one instance, the memorable struggles of Church and State, from which emerged the Western theory and practice of civil and political liberty, had no counterpart in Islam, which knows no distinction between secular and ecclesiastical, and is puzzled by our concepts of representative government and a free society. In this book I have aimed to provide a brief sketch of a vast theme, a rough outline which may serve as an introduction for those wishing to acquire a general view of the Muslim world during the Middle Ages.
It would be absurd to claim it as a work of original research; it does not profess to trace the development of Islam as a religion, and it omits all but the briefest mention of Muslim Spain and India. I have tried to indicate the main trends of Islamic historical evolution down to the Mongol conquests, to avoid a mere recital of facts and names and dates, and to explain rather than to narrate. Hence I have exercised a rigid selection of material; much of moment has been left out, and the picture presented may often be unavoidably over-simplified.
I wish to express my deep obligation to Professor C.F.Beckingham, Professor of Islamic Studies in the University of Manchester, and to Dr. J.A.Boyle, Head of the Department of Persian Studies in the same University, who kindly read the typescript and made many valuable suggestions for improving it. I am also grateful to the editors of Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale and History Today for permission to reproduce portions of articles which have appeared in these periodicals. Perhaps I may also be allowed to say how much my understanding of Islamic history has been deepened by the writings of Sir Hamilton Gibb and Professor Bernard Lewis, whose influence will be easily detected in these pages.
In facing the perennial problem of the transliteration of Oriental names, I can claim no consistency. Place-names like Mecca, Medina and Cairo have been left in their familiar English form, together with such words as ‘Koran’ and ‘Caliph’. For the rest, I have usually followed the spelling given in the Encyclopedia of Islam, omitting the diacritical points and the long-vowel markings (which are restored, however, in the index entries), and substituting ‘j’ for the Frenchified ‘dj.
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