Papers by John E Woods
Kadim
My acquaintance and friendship with Cornell Fleischer extended over a half-century. We were acade... more My acquaintance and friendship with Cornell Fleischer extended over a half-century. We were academic brothers in the sense that we were the devoted students of the same teacher at Princeton. Our personal relationship deepened when Cornell became my colleague at the University of Chicago, where we also developed a fruitful professional collaboration in attempting to bring the study of the Islamic world to the highest level for both undergraduates and graduate students. Whether in person or in remote conversation, we shared our ideas, thought, and feelings intimately on personal and professional matters for three decades. His loss is, for me, immeasurable.
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 2021
Journal of The Economic and Social History of The Orient, Nov 29, 2021
Harrassowitz eBooks, 2006
... Edinburgh University Library 481 Rustam with tiger-skin tunic depicted in Alexander Fights th... more ... Edinburgh University Library 481 Rustam with tiger-skin tunic depicted in Alexander Fights the Habash Monster, a page from the Abii ... Li Guo treats Mamluk society and politics by investigating Ibn Daniyal's" occasional verses." John Meloy investigates the Rajab Festival in 13th ...
Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1996
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient , 2021
The institution of the soyūrghāl, which replaced the earlier institution of the iqṭāʿ at the turn... more The institution of the soyūrghāl, which replaced the earlier institution of the iqṭāʿ at the turn of the 15th century, occupies a prominent place in the process of feudal development in Central Asia, Iran, and several other neighboring countries. Researchers have discussed the subject of the soyūrghāl;2 however,
The Timurid Century, The Idea of Iran, 2020
inth/fifteenth-century Iran-zamin produced a wealth of literature on cosmography and travel in th... more inth/fifteenth-century Iran-zamin produced a wealth of literature on cosmography and travel in the form of treatises in Persian and accounts of ambassadors, merchants and pilgrims, both foreign and domestic. In the first connection, the most important geographical work of this period is the unfinished and untitled historical geography of the Timurid courtier and chronicler Hafez-e Abru. Commissioned by Shahrokh in 817/1414, Hafez-e Abru was charged with translating Arabic works on routes and regions into Persian, supplementing his translation with data from other sources, including his own personal observations as he travelled
Indiana University, Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, Papers on Inner Asia, № 14, 1990
Intellectual Studies on Islam, 1990
Muslims in America, Opportunities & Challenges, 1996
Journal of Near Eastern Sudies, 1987
T H E study of the political, social, economic, and cultural evolution of the Chaghatayid apanage... more T H E study of the political, social, economic, and cultural evolution of the Chaghatayid apanage khanate in Transoxiana and MughiilistBn (Yedi Su and Eastern Turkistan) from the death of Chingiz Khan in 12271624 to the independence of Timiir in 13701771 is hampered by several serious problems of documentation. Principal among them is the paucity and the fragmentary nature of the indigenous written sources of information, consisting for the most part of a few scattered numismatic, epigraphic, and archival data. Thus, unlike the neighboring Tlkhanid realm in Iran, the Chaghatsyid khanate possessed no established tradition of narrative court historiography in Persian as exemplified by the writings of Juvayni (d. 1283/681), Rashid al-Din (d. 1318/718), and Vassaf (fl. ca. 13281728). As a result, only the faintest outline of the first century of Chaghatayid history may be delineated primarily from external sources, the most important of which are the Tlkhanid chronicles just mentioned. The evidential value of these works for this purpose, however, is compromised by two factors: their political orientation and their geographical perspective. In the first place, the chronicles composed under the Ilkhans exhibit a pronounced bias in favor of their Toluyid patrons and for this reason present a partisan view of Chingizid history, especially of the roles of the house of Ogeday and Chaghatay in it. In the second, they report events from the vantages of the ilkhanid administrative centers in western Iran, even when describing affairs in the important eastern province of Khurasan bordering Chaghatayid Transoxiana. Despite these limitations, the ilkhanid chronicles nevertheless illuminate such issues as the political and military confrontation of the two apanage khanates, though they do little to elucidate the Chaghatayid domestic scene. After the death of Abii Sacid Bahadur Khan in 13351736, however, the western Iranian historiographical tradition was all but swept away in the wake of the political devolution that engulfed the nkhanid state. With the disappearance of these narratives, knowledge of the history of the Chaghatayid khanate in the middle of the fourteenthleighth century must be constructed solely from the meager details provided by the geographical handbook of the Egyptian bureaucrat Ibn Fad1 Allah al-'Umari (d. 1349/750), the travelogue of the Moroccan globetrotter Ibn Battiita (d. 13691770 or 1377/779), who visited the area in the 1330s/730s, and the records of Christian communities in Central Asia. Comprehensive information on conditions in Transoxiana during the decades immediately preceding 13701 77 1 derives almost exclusively from the Timiirid sources themselves. [JNES 46 no. 2 (1987)l * Complete citations of the primary sources, which @ 1987 by The University of Chicago are abbreviated throughout, appear at the end of All rights reserved. the article, pp. 106-8. The secondary sources are 0022-2968 i 8714602-0001$1 .OO. cited in full in the footnotes.
Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 1984
Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 1979
... yasar, traditional enemy of the Safavi house but also father-in-law of Yacqib--the notorious ... more ... yasar, traditional enemy of the Safavi house but also father-in-law of Yacqib--the notorious rebellion of Shaykh HI.aydar ... of Erzincan was ultimately dissuaded from this provocative course of action by the powerful Aqquiyunlii queen-mother, Saljiiqshah Begum Bayandur.34 The ...
Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 1977
Books by John E Woods
History and Historiography of Post-Mongol Central Asia and the Middle East: Studies in Honor of John E. Woods, 2006
Edited by Judith Pfeiffer & Sholeh A. Quinn in collaboration with Ernest Tucker
More than thirty years have elapsed since the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland ... more More than thirty years have elapsed since the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland first published Persia in A. D. 1478-1490, an abridged English translation of b. RfIzbihan Tiirfkh-i 'Alam-iirii-yi AmfnfI by Vladimir Minorsky (1877-1966). Minorsky considered this monograph the twelfth of his TurkmeniCa essays.2 Representing more than two decades of scholarship, Turkmenica was his major titled series, beginning with the article 'Uzun-l;Iasan' published in the first edition of the 1
ve Yaşar Yücel'in(l) sonraki çalışmalarına karşın, merkezi İslam topraklarının, özellikle de 1ran... more ve Yaşar Yücel'in(l) sonraki çalışmalarına karşın, merkezi İslam topraklarının, özellikle de 1ran-Türk kültür bölgelerinin, 14/8. yüzyılda Moğol iktidarının çö küşünden, 16/10. yüzyılda Osmanlı, Safevi ve Özbek Imparator luklarının yükselişine dek, geç orta dönem tarihlerinin pek çok temel yönüyle karanlıkta kaldığı ileri sürülebilir. Bu şanssızlık, kısmen, 14/8. ve 15/9. yüzyıllar boyunca Doğu Anadolu ve İran ta rihinin büyük bölümünün belgelendirilmesinde de açıkça ortaya çıkan dönemin olağanüstü karmaşık adem-i merkezi'liği gerçeğiyle açıklanabilmektedir. Cami' üt-Te varih' i, Moğol 1Ihanlılar' ın evren selliği bakımından anıtsal bir değer taşır. Fars-lslam tarih-yazıcı lığının da bir dönemecini oluşturan Reşidüddin' in (ö. 131817 18) bir ardılı ise ancak 15/8. yüzyılda Hafız Ebru'nun (ö. 1430/833). kişiliğinde ortaya çıkabilmiştir. Ne ki, aradaki yüzyılda, pek çoğu, Reşidüddin ve Hafız Ebru'nun eserlerinin büyük bölümü gibi ba-'::ı c:
Book Reviews by John E Woods
Journal of Islamic Studies, 2022
Thomas Bauer originally published the work under review in German as Die Kultur der Ambiguitä t: ... more Thomas Bauer originally published the work under review in German as Die Kultur der Ambiguitä t: Eine andere Geschichte des Islams (Berlin: Verlag der Weltreligionen) in 2011. His 'alternative history of Islam' was immediately highly acclaimed as daringly original and has been compared to Edward Said's Orientalism as a work of cultural studies. A professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Mü nster, Bauer was awarded the prestigious Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize for Die Kultur der Ambiguität along with his other scholarly achievements-primarily in the field of Arabic literary studiesin 2013. Translated into Slovenian and Turkish in 2014 (the latter is currently in its fifth printing) and into Arabic in 2017, the book has now appeared as A Culture of Ambiguity: An Alternative History of Islam in a fine English translation a decade after its original publication. The English version is divided into an introduction and nine chapters. Bauer has updated his foreword to reference relevant books and articles that have been issued since 2011, revisiting many of the ideas in Culture of Ambiguity in Die Vereindeutigung der Welt: € Uber den Verlust an Mehrdeutigkeit und Vielfalt (Stuttgart, 2018). He also mentions in passing Shahab Ahmed's What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, 2016), includes it in his bibliography, but does not address it in the body of his work. While a book of this complexity does not readily lend itself to a reduction to formulas, it can be argued that the central thesis of Bauer's work as expressed in the Introduction and ch. 1 is that the investigation of cultural ambiguity-as opposed to linguistic, literary, or confessional ambiguity-is an important tool for both heuristics and hermeneutics in gaining a deeper understanding of cultures. Applying this tool to the study of 'Islam', Bauer constructs two important hypotheses that inform the book as a whole. The first proposes that premodern, post-formative 'Islam' exhibited a remarkable tolerance of 'ambiguity'; the word-sometimes qualified by the adjective 'cultural'-appears some fifty times in the introduction and the text before it is finally defined on p. 10: Ambiguity then appears whenever an action can be interpreted in different ways, according to different cultural patterns or social norms.. .We may talk of the phenomenon of cultural ambiguity if, over a period of time, two contrary, or at least competing, clearly differing meanings are associated with one and the same term, act, or object; or if a social group draws on contrary or strongly differing discourses for attributions of meaning to various realms of
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 1986
Reviews 529 Reviews 529 the mass of migrants through a persuasive formulation of local identity a... more Reviews 529 Reviews 529 the mass of migrants through a persuasive formulation of local identity and c generally accepted perception of the need for defensive measures against foreign and political intrusions, the need for a system of general education and, most imp a fairer and permeating distribution of the rewards of economic growth wo helped complete the picture of Beirut on the eve of the First World War, its cata famine, and massive European interference. These seem, to me at least, to be as to an understanding of the nineteenth-century roots of the failure of Beirut' polity which has climaxed in our times in civil war.
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Papers by John E Woods
Books by John E Woods
Book Reviews by John E Woods