This thesis presents a study of the social history of the group of eleventh-century Sunni religious scholars, the 'ulama', of Baghdad in the period of the transition to the madrasa system of education. Before dealing with the 'ulama' themselves, we shall describe the political, …
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Based on the premise that certain forms of the medieval Islamic genre of collective biobibliography constitute sacred history writing, this thesis undertakes an intertextual analysis of the Fihrist (Catalogue) of Abu Ja'far Muhammad b. al-Hasan al-Tusi (d. 460/1067), one of the …
The purpose of this work is to provide a political narrative of the Abbasid dynasty during the 11ᵗʰ and 12ᵗʰ centuries showing that the caliphs were key figures in the political-cultural arena rather than impotent puppets as we have often portrayed them in the secondary literatu…
Isaac ibn Khalfun (b. ca. 990) was one of the earliest of the “Golden Age” Hebrew poets in al-Andalus, and the only professional Hebrew poet known to us from this period. Though today he is perhaps best-known for the poems which he exchanged with Samuel ha-Nagid of Granada, he w…
A wide-ranging, in-depth study of the Saivite and Buddhist Tantric traditions, this dissertation in thirteen chapters covers the historical development of Tantra in the Indian context prior to the Islamic invasions, relying principally on Sanskrit texts. The dissertation provide…
Employing overseas agents was the "technically" efficient method of organizing an important transaction in "pre-modern" long-distance commerce, namely, the supply of the services required in handling a merchant's goods abroad. However, the merchant-agent relations were character…
In the late eleventh century, with the collapse of the Iberian Caliphate, the Ebro watershed came under the control of the Christian principalities which would become the 'Crown of Aragon.' The majority of the vanquished elected to remain under terms of surrender negotiated with…