Search results

?One Word ? Yak Kaleme? is one of the first treatises in the Middle East to demonstrate that Islam is compatible with modern western forms of government, and specifically that sharia principles can be incorporated in a codified law comparable to that found in Europe. Unlike many fellow Oriental travellers, the author observed that European dominance is not derived from a few technological advances, but primarily from the organization of society. In ?One Word?, the author argues that the principles underlying constitutional government can be found in Islamic sources. ?One Word? is a significant text during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906, but its message is relevant today

For over a hundred years, between 1507 and 1622, the island of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf was in the hands of the Portuguese. It was only under Shāh ʿAbbās I that the Safavids were able to recapture Hormuz and the neighbouring island of Qishm, under the leadership of general Imām Qulī Khān and with the unexpected help of some forces of the British East India Company that happened to be in the area at the time. The two epic poems from the 11th/17th century published in this volume, one by an otherwise unknown 'Qadrī' and the other by an anonymous author, deal with the recapture of Qishm and Hormuz under Imām Qulī Khān. While not of high literary quality, the poems show some interesting local and historical features, especially the longer one on Hormuz whose author had a great admiration of Imām Qulī Khān, whom he appears to have known personally

Claudius Ptolemy (d. ca 170 CE) was a Graeco-Roman mathematician, astronomer, geographer and astrologer who lived and worked in Alexandria. His Tetrabiblos ('Four Books', Lat. Quadripartitum ), in which he sets out the principles and practice of astrology, became a highly influential work that was also taught at the cream of European universities, well into Renaissance times. In the Islamic world, there existed an Arabic summary of this work, entitled Kitāb al-thamara ('Harvest', Lat. Liber Fructus ), erroneously ascribed to Ptolemy himself. Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī (d. 672/1274) was an influential philosopher, theologian, mathematician and astronomer, besides being the first director of the famous observatory at Marāghah near Tabriz. Author of more than 50 scholarly works, the present volume contains his Persian commentary on the Kitāb al-thamara in which he also made use of two earlier commentaries in Arabic, one by Aḥmad born Yūsuf al-Miṣrī (4th/10th century) and the other by Abu 'l-ʿAbbās al-Iṣfahānī (4th/10th century)

The author of this epic poem, Ḥakīm Zajjājī (alive in 676/1277), was a glassmaker who also had a talent for poetry. At some point, for reasons that remain unexplained, his life took a turn for the worse. He lost all his friends, and his wife became estranged from him. It is in this period of emotional distress that he decided to break with his previous life and move to the Charandāb district of Tabriz. This district was home to the famous house of Juwaynī, whose members held high administrative offices under the Saljūqs, the Khwārazmshāhs and Īl Khānids. Zajjājī hoped to attract the attention of this family with his masnavi, in order for them to get him out of his miserable situation. For twenty years he worked on this versified history of Islam from its earliest times until his own day. Edition of part one, part two having been published seven years earlier by the same scholar