Histories of the Middle East: Studies in Middle Eastern Society, Economy and Law in Honor of A. L. Udovitch

For four decades Abraham L. Udovitch has been a leading scholar of the medieval Islamic world, its economic institutions, social structures, and legal theory and practice. In pursuing his quest to understand and explain the complex phenomena that these broad rubrics entail, he has published widely, collaborated internationally with other leading scholars of the Middle East and medieval history, and most saliently for the purposes of this volume, taught several cohorts of students at Princeton University. This volume is therefore dedicated to his intellectual legacy from a uniquely revealing angle: the current work of his former students. The papers in this volume range chronologically from the period preceding the rise of Islam in Arabia to the Mamluk era, geographically from the Western Mediterranean to the Western Indian Ocean and thematically from the political negotiations of Christian and Islamic Mediterranean sovereigns to the historiography of Western Indian Ocean port cities.

Roxani Eleni Margariti is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University. Born and raised in Athens, Greece, she received her B.A. in Western Asiatic Archaeology from University College London, her M.A. in Nautical Archaeology from Texas A&M University, and her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 2002. She is the author of Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade: 150 Years in the Life of a Medieval Arabian Port (University of North Carolina Press).
Adam Sabra is Associate Professor of History at the University of Georgia. He received his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 1998. He is the author of Poverty and Charity in Medieval Islam: Mamluk Egypt, 1250-1517 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), and co-editor with Richard McGregor of The Development of Sufism in Mamluk Egypt (IFAO, 2006). His research currently focuses on the social history of Sufism in Mamluk and Ottoman Egypt.
Petra M. Sijpesteijn holds the Chair of Arabic Language and Culture at Leiden University and is Chargée de recherche at the Institut de Recherche et Histoire des Textes at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. She received her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 2004, after which she was a junior research fellow at Christ Church, Oxford (2003-2007). Her forthcoming book is entitled The Formation of a Muslim State in late Umayyad Egypt. She is also one of the founders and is currently the president of the International Society for Arabic Papyrology.

Contributors include: Mark R. Cohen, Jonathan P. Berkey, Michael Bonner, Olivia Remie Constable, Hassan S. Khalilieh, Roxani Eleni Margariti, David S. Powers, Yossef Rapoport, Adam Sabra, Boaz Shoshan, Petra M. Sijpesteijn