The AD 637 Islamic conquest of Antioch has been typically held as the city’s swan song. Conversely, this article shows that the new realities of power ushered in a new phase in the life of the city and lingered on the memory and myth of the city of Seleucus Nicator.

The history of Egypt during the first centuries of Islam comes with a striking paradox. While Upper Egypt, from Fusṭāṭ to Aswan, has received much attention due to the numerous papyri from the region, the Delta is rarely attested in these documents. This is most probably linked to the region’s humid soil, which contributed to the progressive degradation of papyri. Indeed, other than a few private letters written in Alexandria, no papyri from this period have been found in the Delta. Despite this, the Delta occupied a central place in the imperial construction of Islam, especially during the Umayyad period (40/661–132/750): it linked the new capital, Fusṭāṭ, to the Mediterranean and its main cities, was the prime locus of Arab settlement from the second/eighth centuries and was a choice transit space to Syria-Palestine and Cyrenaica. Based on narratives by Egyptian Muslim writers and papyrological documents mentioning the Delta, we can sketch the history of the administrative and fiscal management of this space, to follow the process of tribal settlement in relationship with imperial policies and to analyse the latter’s consequences on the social situation in the Delta at the end of the Umayyad period and in the early Abbasid period.

Islamic finance must follow rules developed by Islamic experts in the context of this global market. This chapter provides a description of the use of islamic finance for infrastructure projects.

The need for a new approach to peace isself-evident. A novel perspective that can go beyond systemic understanding of the behavior of human communities is required to offer new insight into the workings of peace and the outbreak of war. The Islamic gnostic outlook does exactly that. Without any claims to the political leadership of human communities and bereft of ideology and dogmatism, the mysticinquiry on war and peace turns its attention from the structural trademark of systemic approaches to the agency of the most fundamental unit, the individual. It ascertains that the roots of all good and evil are found within ourselves; we hold the key to understandingthe defects of our outward social and political behavior. In this essay, Idescribe Islamic mysticism and discuss its importance for peace and peace processes. I next discuss mysticism and the idea of self-negation, and I comparemysticism’s notion of peace with the concept of peace embodied in several theoretical schools. Iexamine the rather dismal prospect for peace engendered by Western paradigms and demonstrate how Islamic mysticism holds greater promise for achieving positive peace.

The Conclusion summarizes the book’s arguments about Muslim and Western countries’ comparative conditions of development and their historical origins. It emphasizes that these countries are similar, at least comparable. It reiterates that neither Islam nor Western colonialism can simply explain the problems of violence, authoritarianism, or socioeconomic underdevelopment in Muslim countries. Thus, both essentialist and post-colonial explanations are unsatisfactory. Instead, the ulema–state alliance, which emerged in the eleventh century and marginalized intellectual and bourgeois classes, has been the main reason for Muslims’ long-lasting problems. At the end, the book recommends that Muslims pursue a political and socioeconomic reform to revive the intellectual and economic dynamism they had in early Islamic history. For such a reform to take place, Muslims need creative intellectuals and an independent bourgeoisie, who can balance the power of the ulema and state authorities.

This chapter begins by examining Muslims’ military, commercial, and intellectual achievements between the seventh and eleventh centuries. At that time, most of Islamic scholars (ulema) were funded by commerce, while only a few of them served the state. The merchants flourished as an influential class. The chapter goes on to analyze the beginning of the intellectual and economic stagnation in Muslim lands in the eleventh century. It explains how, gradually, the ulema became a state-servant class and the military state came to dominate the economy. The alliance between the ulema and the military state diminished the influence of philosophers and merchants. This changing distribution of authority led to the long-term stagnation, if not the decline, of Muslim intellectual and economic life. This gradual process began in the eleventh century and continued for centuries, as subsequent chapters elaborate.