Dhimmī or muʿāhid (معاهد) is a historical term for non-Muslims living in an Islamic state with legal protection. The word literally means "protected person", referring to the state's obligation under sharia to protect the individual's life, property, as well as freedom of religion, in exchange for loyalty to the state and payment of the jizya tax, in contrast to the zakat, or obligatory alms, paid by the Muslim subjects. Dhimmi were exempt from certain duties assigned specifically to Muslims if they paid the poll tax (jizya) but were otherwise equal under the laws of property, contract, and obligation.
In art history, literature and cultural studies, Orientalism is the imitation or depiction of aspects in the Eastern world. These depictions are usually done by writers, designers, and artists from the Western world. In particular, Orientalist painting, depicting more specifically the Middle East, was one of the many specialisms of 19th-century academic art, and the literature of Western countries took a similar interest in Oriental themes.
Bernard Lewis, was a British American historian specialized in Oriental studies. He was also known as a public intellectual and political commentator. Lewis was the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Lewis's expertise was in the history of Islam and the interaction between Islam and the West.
Abū Muḥammad ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad ibn Saʿīd ibn Ḥazm was an Arab Andalusian Muslim polymath, historian, muhaddith, jurist, philosopher, and theologian, born in the Caliphate of Córdoba, present-day Spain. Described as one of the strictest hadith interpreters, Ibn Hazm was a leading proponent and codifier of the Zahiri school of Islamic thought and produced a reported 400 works, of which only 40 still survive. In all, his written works amounted to some 80 000 pages. Described as one of the fathers of comparative religion, the Encyclopaedia of Islam refers to him as having been one of the leading thinkers of the Muslim world.
Robert Graham Irwin is a British historian, novelist, and writer on Arabic literature.
From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East is a 2004 book written by Middle-East historian Bernard Lewis. The book comprises a series of scholarly essays and speeches given by Lewis over a period of four decades on the topic of the Middle East and the Islamic world.
Criticism of Islam is the act of questioning or challenging the beliefs, practices, and doctrines of Islam. Criticism of Islam can take many forms, including academic critiques, political criticism, and personal opinions.
Islamic views on slavery represent a complex and multifaceted body of Islamic thought, with various Islamic groups or thinkers espousing views on the matter which have been radically different throughout history. Slavery was a mainstay of life in pre-Islamic Arabia and surrounding lands. The Quran and the hadith address slavery extensively, assuming its existence as part of society but viewing it as an exceptional condition and restricting its scope. Early Islamic dogma forbade enslavement of free members of Islamic society, including non-Muslims (dhimmis), and set out to regulate and improve the conditions of human bondage. Islamic law regarded as legal slaves only those non-Muslims who were imprisoned or bought beyond the borders of Islamic rule, or the sons and daughters of slaves already in captivity. In later classical Islamic law, the topic of slavery is covered at great length. Slaves, be they Muslim or those of any other religion, were equal to their fellow practitioners in religious issues.
The Quest for the Historical Muhammad (2000), edited by Ibn Warraq, is an anthology of 15 studies examining the origins of Islam and the Quran. The contributors argue that traditional Islamic accounts of its history and the origins of the Quran are fictitious and based on historical revisionism aimed at forging a religious Arab identity.
Orientalism is a 1978 book by Edward W. Said, in which the author establishes the term "Orientalism" as a critical concept to describe the West's commonly contemptuous depiction and portrayal of The East, i.e. the Orient. Societies and peoples of the Orient are those who inhabit the places of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. Said argues that Orientalism, in the sense of the Western scholarship about the Eastern World, is inextricably tied to the imperialist societies who produced it, which makes much Orientalist work inherently political and servile to power.
The concept of imagined geographies originated from Edward Said, particularly his work on critique on Orientalism. Imagined geographies refers to the perception of a space created through certain imagery, texts, and/or discourses. For Said, imagined does not mean to be false or made-up, but rather is used synonymous with perceived. Despite often being constructed on a national level, imagined geographies also occur domestically in nations and locally within regions, cities, etc.
Oriental studies is the academic field that studies Near Eastern and Far Eastern societies and cultures, languages, peoples, history and archaeology. In recent years, the subject has often been turned into the newer terms of Middle Eastern studies and Asian studies. Traditional Oriental studies in Europe is today generally focused on the discipline of Islamic studies, and the study of China, especially traditional China, is often called Sinology. The study of East Asia in general, especially in the United States, is often called East Asian studies.
Talal Asad is a Saudi-born cultural anthropologist who is currently a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. His prolific body of work mainly focuses on religiosity, Middle Eastern studies, postcolonialism, and notions of power, law and discipline. He is also known for his writing calling for an anthropology of secularism. His work has had a significant influence beyond his home discipline of anthropology. As Donovan Schaefer writes:
The gravitational field of Asad’s influence has emanated far from his home discipline and reshaped the landscape of other humanistic disciplines around him.
Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm was a Professor Emeritus of Modern European Philosophy at the University of Damascus in Syria and was, until 2007, a visiting professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. His main area of specialization was the work of German philosopher Immanuel Kant, but he later placed a greater emphasis upon the Islamic world and its relationship to the West, evidenced by his contribution to the discourse of Orientalism. Al-Azm was also known as a human rights advocate and a champion of intellectual freedom and free speech.
Black orientalism is an intellectual and cultural movement found primarily within African-American circles. While similar to the general movement of Orientalism in its negative outlook upon Western Asian – especially Arab – culture and religion, it differs in both its emphasis upon the role of the Arab slave trade and the Coolie slave trade in the historic relationship between Africa and the Arab – and greater Muslim – world, as well as a lack of colonial promotion over the Middle East region as was promoted by European orientalism in the same region. The term "black orientalism" was first used by Kenyan academic Ali Mazrui in his critique of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s documentary Wonders of the African World. Supporters of this movement include writers such as Chinweizu.
Edward Wadie Said was a Palestinian American professor of literature at Columbia University, a public intellectual, and a founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies. Born in Mandatory Palestine, he was a citizen of the United States by way of his father, a U.S. Army veteran.
Daniel Martin Varisco, is an American anthropologist and historian.
The Snake Charmer is an oil-on-canvas Orientalist painting by French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme produced around 1879. After it was used on the cover of Edward Said's book Orientalism in 1978, the work "attained a level of notoriety matched by few Orientalist paintings," as it became a lightning-rod for criticism of Orientalism in general and Orientalist painting in particular, although Said himself does not mention the painting in his book. It is in the collection of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, which also owns another controversial Gérôme painting, The Slave Market.
The Ottoman decline thesis or Ottoman decline paradigm is an obsolete historical narrative which once played a dominant role in the study of the history of the Ottoman Empire. According to the decline thesis, following a golden age associated with the reign of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, the empire gradually entered into a period of all-encompassing stagnation and decline from which it was never able to recover, lasting until the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1923. This thesis was used throughout most of the twentieth century as the basis of both Western and Republican Turkish understanding of Ottoman history. However, by 1978, historians had begun to reexamine the fundamental assumptions of the decline thesis.
Al-Khilafa aw al-Imama al-ʿUzma was an Islamic political treatise published by Syro-Egyptian Salafi Islamist theologian Rashid Rida in 1923. The book initially had appeared as a series of articles in Rida's Al-Manar Islamic magazine throughout the winter of 1922-1923 during the tumultuous events of the abolition of Ottoman Sultanate. The book became the first substantial Islamic scholarly treatise of the 20th-century which elucidated the theological basis of a Khilafah and advocated the religious obligation of establishing a pan-Islamic supra-state. The treatise gave an in-depth explanation of the governance and working of the Caliphate system through precedents from Islamic history and decried the newly emerging trends that downplayed the orthodox Sunni doctrines on Caliphate; and equated the absence of Islamic state with the era of Jahiliyya. Rida produced the theoretical framework for an international Islamic order that enforced Sharia, cementing his scholarly status as "the founding theoretician" for Islamist and Jihadist movements of the contemporary era.
