Suchergebnisse

Since this is my last gesture as President of the Association I should like to thank you all warmly for the honor you have done me in electing me as President and for the opportunity of working with the Board of Directors and with the Secretary, Michael Bonine, on your behalf. It also happens that I am just about to finish a book on the history of Islamic societies. In a very different way this project has also been a special privilege. I have been able to branch out from my basic and abiding interest in the Arab Middle East and from my studies in early Islamic history to learn something about Muslim peoples all over the world. To learn so much and to work out a way of presenting such a large subject in a coherent way has made this a wonderfully rewarding project. Like a great puzzle, it has occupied my mind for seven years. I hope that the book I am writing will return the rewards of this learning to the reader.

Islamic studies progress. In recent years a great deal of work has been done on the Umayyad period, on the early history of Shi'ism, and on the origins of the Muslim schools of law. A broader current of research has yielded numerous studies of the 'ulamâ' and their place in Muslim religious and communal life. New historical information and new points of view are gradually modifying received perspectives on Muslim religious movements and on the nature of Muslim religious elites.

Islamic society is ever intriguing. Across broad territories and over millenia of
time, it maintains a constant identity; yet it is always elusive, varied, and
changing. The study of Islamic urbanism, like so many Islamic topics, oscillates
between attempts to define what is fundamental and universal in Islamic city
life, and what is ineffably individual about each locality; the contradictory
perspectives seem equally valid. While topography, culture, and history have
given each locality a unique identity, by the middle ages, Middle Eastern towns
between the Nile and the Jaxartes—the core area of Islamic
society—shared common features of social organization. Small communities,
such as families, neighborhood quarters, and fraternities were the fundamental
units of society. Town populations were gathered into loosely organized
religious bodies, such as schools of law, Shirite sects, and Sufi brotherhoods,
who were dominated by ethnically alien elites organized into slave armies and
slave-maintained governments, and who garrisoned and extracted revenues from the
towns while remaining separate from local community life. Characteristically,
then, Middle Eastern Muslim cities operated on three levels-parochial groups,
religious communities, and imperial regimes. Organized urban life depended on
the relationships between person and groups within this three-tiered
institutional pattern.