Islamic History: A Framework for Inquiry - Revised Edition

by R. Stephen Humphreys

Book Overview

This book will be immensely helpful to those who wish to orient themselves to what has become a very large body of literature on medieval Islamic history. Combining a bibliographic study with an inquiry into method, it opens with a survey of the principal reference tools available to historians of Islam and a systematic review of the sources they will confront. Problems of method are then examined in a series of chapters, each exploring a broad topic...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691008566
• ISBN13: 9780691008561
• Release Date: August 1991
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 418 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

IMMENSELY Rewarding Purchase

This book is an essential reference for anyone with interest in doing any type of study in the history of Islam from 600-1500. Humphreys hasn't written yet another drab, stale survey book; rather, he compiled something immensely more useful. He has created a veritable inventory of scholarship, not coarsely comprehensive but pleasantly judicious, and accompanied it with a running commentary that places each work on the larger grid of modern scholarship on the subject as well and extrapolation of the various challenges realting thereto. In this way, it facilitates a critical yet broad engagement with the important scholarship hitherto written in the field helping us to refine, reconsider, and reshape the direction of future scholarship. Also, this work serves as an accessible point of entry for historians who specialize in areas other than Islamic history whom I trust will also find in plenty helpful.