Through the Eyes of the Beholder: The Holy Land, 1517-1713 (Islamic History and Civilization, 97) - Hardcover

Judy A. Hayden

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9004234179 ISBN 13: 9789004234178

Publisher: BRILL, 2012

Synopsis

The collection examines the view of holiness in the "Holy Land" through the writings of pilgrims, travelers, and missionaries. The period extends from 1517, the Ottoman conquest of Syria and Palestine, to the Franco-British treaty of Utrecht in 1713 and the consolidation of European hegemony over the Mediterranean. The writers in the collection include Christians (Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic), Muslims, and Jews, who originate from countries such as Sweden, England, France, Holland, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Syria. This book is the first to juxtapose writers of different backgrounds and languages, to emphasize the holiness of the land in a number of traditions, and to ask whether holiness was inherent in geography or a product of the piety of the writers.

Contributors are: Mohammad Asfour, Hasan Baktir, Richard Coyle, Judy A. Hayden, Nabil I. Matar, Joachim Östlund, Michael Rotenberg-Schwartz, Julia Schleck, Mazin Tadros and Galina Yermolenko.

About this title

About the Author:

Judy A. Hayden, Ph.D. (2000), Professor of English at the University of Tampa, writes on the English seventeenth-century. She has recently published Of Love and War: The Political Voice in the Early Plays of Aphra Behn (Rodopi, 2010) and edited two collections on the intersection of science and literary discourse.

Nabil I. Matar. Ph.D. (1976), University of Cambridge, is Presidential Professor in the English Department at the University of Minnesota. He has published a trilogy on Islam and Britain in the early modern period, and his next publication is an annotated edition of a treatise by Henry Stubbe (Columbia UP, 2012).

Review:

"The book's value lies in the inclusion of the impressions of people coming from different religious and ethnic backgrounds, while the conclusions that can be drawn [...] can prove precious to the fields of politics, history, religion and literature." Stavros Nikolaidis in JOAS 22 (2013), 337-339.

"Edited collections tend to lack both coherence in content and consistency in quality. Not this book. Under the able direction of Judy Hayden and Nabil Matar, ..., nine original chapters in addition to a novel translation of a manuscript (with critical introduction), as well as a framing introduction and a short conclusion, hone in on the multiple connections between the two terms involved in the space called the Holy Land... Each contribution presents a fascinating facet of the question of sacred geographies, while the multiplicity of perspectives on the Holy Land offers a great added value of comparative assessment... The volume is capped by a brief though important conclusion by Nabil Matar that restates the notable difference between the European accounts and their Ottoman counterparts..." Alexis Wick in Al-Abhath 60-61 (2012-2013), p. 183-185.

About this edition

• Publisher: BRILL
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 9004234179
• ISBN 13: 9789004234178
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256