Ocean State Libraries

Discover the faith, culture, and history that have shaped the modern Islamic world.

"...Senior fellow at the Cato Institute and opinion writer for The New York Times, both diagnoses "the crisis of Islam" in the modern world, and offers a way forward. Diving deeply into Islamic theology, and also sharing lessons from his own life story, he reveals how Muslims lost the universalism that made them a great civilization in their earlier centuries. He especially demonstrates how values often associated with Western Enlightenment - freedom,...

This work aims to present to the reader a narrative of the several threads of Islamic history over a period of more than 13 centuries, in an area extending from Spain and Morocco to South East Asia. In view of this enormous perspective and the fact that only two volumes must fulfil the task, the editors are naturally explicit about the book's limitations: it is intended primarily for general readers of history, for students of history, and particularly...

"Doris Behrens-Abouseif's book provides a panorama of the concepts of beauty in classical and post-classical Arabic culture through the 15th century, drawing on Arabic texts from philosophy, theology, mysticism, poetry, and literary criticism as well as historiographic sources and tales from the Thousand and One Nights. Behrens-Abouseif elucidates the ways in which beauty was measured by the degree of pleasure it elicited in the recipient, an attitude...