Byzantium in Early Islamic Syria

This is a collection of papers from a conference entitled “Political Identity in the Arab East in the Twentieth Century," hosted by the Center for Arab and Middle East Studies of the American University of Beirut. Scholars and students alike with an interest in the Middle East will find the topics treated, the perspectives adopted, and the conclusions of continuing interest and pertinence. The volume includes contributions from the following authors: Ahmad Dallal, David Commins, Thomas Philipp, Samir Seikaly, Rashid Khalidi, Fred Lawson, Aziz Al-Azmeh, Roger Owen, and Hazem El-Beblawi.

​​Over the last two centuries, the French dimension of Arab history has loomed large. The Arab world equally has played a major role in recent French history. Franco-Arab Encounters treats the many aspects of this interaction, tracing not just the political, but also the cultural, social, and intellectual. Twenty authors present these “encounters" in seven sections covering the Arab world, from Morocco to Saudi Arabia, over the past two hundred years. The book is dedicated to the memory of David C. Gordon, a pioneer and leader in this field of scholarship, who taught history at AUB from 1949 to 1955 and 1958 to 1975.

Kamal Salibi is primarily renowned for his monumental contributions to the history of Lebanon. Yet his scholarly legacy extends well beyond Lebanon to topics that span the Middle East from biblical to contemporary times. This collection of twenty-three papers, written in Dr. Salibi's honor and memory, similarly covers a range of subjects that touch upon his interests. They include aspects of ancient, medieval, and modern Arabic/Islamic and Middle Eastern history, literature, and art, and are arranged in four sections: (a) Kamal Salibi as Teacher and Historian; (b) Lebanese, Ottoman, and Arab History; (c) Islamic Studies; and (d) Syriac Studies.

​Some aspects of the intellectual and social history of the Arab East between 1890 and 1939 are considered in these seminar proceedings. A review in the International Journal of Middle East Studies commented that this is an “indispensable work for scholars interested in the crosscurrents of intellectual, political, and social thought." There is an emphasis on dimensions not previously explored, such as nationalism, relations with the West, political and social reform, and the role of literature. Thirteen papers examine various aspects of the political aspirations and ideals of the times in Cairo, Beirut, Jebel Lubnan, and Jebel ʿAmel, Damascus, Baghdad, and Sanʿa.

This volume provides the first comprehensive survey of land tenure in the Middle East over several millennia up to modern times. Its thirty-two papers bring to this theme an interdisciplinary approach and enable the reader to follow the various threads – historical, social, economic, political, legal – related to the evaluation and development of land tenure systems in the Middle East. Land tenure is a vital element in social transformation; it is quite literally the backdrop to history. Where the Middle East is concerned this theme has not received the concentrated and collective treatment it richly deserves. This volume is of great importance to all who are interested in the history, society, economy, and agriculture of the Middle East, and scholars of land tenure in other regions of the world will find in it ample material for comparative interpretation.

​​​This is a collection of papers presented at a 2008 conference sponsored by the American University of Beirut's Sheikh Zayid bin Sultan Chair of Islamic Studies of the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies and the Margaret Weyerhaeuser Jewett Chair of Arabic of the Department of Arabic and Near Eastern Languages. The volume includes sixteen articles by scholars from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Lebanon, and is divided into two parts: the first dealing with classical and premodern poetry, and the second with modern and contemporary poetry, with three articles focusing on the work of the poet Mahmoud Darwish. It serves to better illuminate some aspects of the relationship between the fields of poetry and history, and represents a significant contribution to the field of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies.

​The author examines the rural politics of the provinces of Damascus and Tripoli in Ottoman Syria in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He considers the various kinds of rural leadership as represented by the most powerful dynasties that dominated various regions of the Ottoman Empire, and focuses on six specific Syrian dynasties, from origin to decline. This work draws on archival material from Istanbul and Damascus, together with Ottoman and Syrian chronicles, biographical and travel literature, and other Turkish, Arabic, and Western contemporary sources. The first two centuries of the Ottoman period in Syria have been little known before the publication of this work, which sheds important light on Syria at that time.