Prior to the nineteenth century, South Asian dictionaries, glossaries, and vocabularies reflected a hierarchical vision of nature and human society. By the turn of the twentieth century, the modern dictionary had democratized and politicized language. Compiled "scientifically" through "historical principles," the modern dictionary became a concrete symbol of a nation's arrival on the world stage.Following this phenomenon from the late seventeenth century to the present, Negotia...

**A groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East that is—decades after its first publication—one of the most important books written about our divided world. • With a new foreword by Ussama Makdisi"Intellectual history on a high order ... and very exciting." —The New York Times**In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism" to the centuries-long period during which ...

First in the comprehensive, three-volume history of Islamic culture and religion from the award-winning scholar and world historian."This is a nonpareil work, not only because of its command of its subject but also because it demonstrates how, ideally, history should be written." — The New YorkerThe Venture of Islam has been honored as a magisterial work of the mind since its publication in early 1975. In ...

In the essays collected here, Abbas Milani uses an impressive array of cross-disciplinary Western and Iranian theories and texts to investigate the crucial question of modernity in Iran today. He offers a wealth of new insights into the thousand-year-old conflict in Iran between the search for modernity and the forces of religious obscurantism. The essays trace the roots of Shiite Islamic fundamentalism and offer illuminating accounts of the work of Iranian intellectualsboth men and womenand ...

A sweeping work of history that the New Yorker says "demonstrates how history should be written"The Venture of Islam has been honored as a magisterial work of the mind since its publication in early 1975. In this three-volume study, illustrated with charts and maps, Hodgson traces and interprets the historical development of Islamic civilization from before the birth of Muhammad to the middle of the twentieth century. This work grew out of the famous cours...

The pioneering Iranian poet and filmmaker Forugh Farrokhzad was an iconic figure in her own day and has come to represent the spirit of revolt against patriarchal and cultural norms in 1960s Iran. Four decades after her tragic death at the age of 32, "Forugh Farrokhzad, Poet of Modern Iran" brings her ground-breaking work into new focus. During her lifetime Farrokhzad embodied the vexed predicament of the contemporary Iranian woman, at once subjected to long-held traditional practices and ...

Srinivas Aravamudan here reveals how Oriental tales, pseudo-ethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political satires took Europe by storm during the eighteenth century. Naming this body of fiction Enlightenment Orientalism, he poses a range of urgent questions that uncovers the interdependence of Oriental tales and domestic fiction, thereby challenging standard scholarly narratives about the rise of the novel.More than mere exoticism, Oriental tales fascinated ordinary readers as wel...

Humanism has mostly considered the question “What does it mean to be human?” from a Western perspective. Dabashi asks it anew from a non-European perspective, in a groundbreaking study of 1,400 years of Persian literary humanism. He presents the unfolding of this vast tradition as the creative and subversive subconscious of Islamic civilization.

Conflicted Antiquities is a rich cultural history of European and Egyptian interest in ancient Egypt and its material culture, from the early nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth. Consulting the relevant Arabic archives, Elliott Colla demonstrates that the emergence of Egyptology—the study of ancient Egypt and its material legacy—was as consequential for modern Egyptians as it was for Europeans. The values and practices introduced by the new science of archaeology played a k...

Everyone has a past: the question is what one does with it. If earlier scholars are to be believed, South Indian society before colonial rule showed an indifference to its past - or approached the past through myth, legend and phantasmagoria. This book sets out not merely to disprove this idea, but to demonstrate the complex forms of historiography produced in South India between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. It argues that the usual division between Indo-Persian and vernacul...

Throughout centuries of European colonial domination, the bodies of Middle Eastern dancers, male and female, move sumptuously and seductively across the pages of Western travel journals, evoking desire and derision, admiration and disdain, allure and revulsion. This profound ambivalence forms the axis of an investigation into Middle Eastern dance—an investigation that extends to contemporary belly dance.Stavros Stavrou Karayanni, through historical investigation, theoretical analys...

Looking back now, I am more than ever aware of the part that [Satyajit] Ray played in shaping the imaginary universe of my childhood and youth. I see this even in such details as my interest in science and science fiction; in ghost stories and the fantastical…When I saw Agantuk [The Stranger], in which the main character is an anthropologist, I began to wonder whether my interest in anthropology too, owed something,perhaps subconsciously, to Ray…, ruminates Amitav Ghosh in this book. Ghosh...