CITIES AND TOWN The medieval city.pdf

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Series Foreword
the Prophet Muhammad (c. 570–c. 632) on the Arabian Peninsula. From
Muhammad’s birth in an environment of religious plurality—Christianity,
Judaism, and Zoroastrianism, along with paganism, were joined by
Islam—to the collapse of the Islamic empire in the early tenth century,
Gordon traces the history of the Islamic community. The book covers
topics that include the life of the Prophet and divine revelation (the
Qur’an) to the formation of the Islamic state, urbanization in the Islamic
Near East, and the extraordinary culture of Islamic letters and scholarship.
In addition to a historical overview, Gordon examines the
Caliphate and early Islamic Empire, urban society and economy, and the
emergence, under the Abbasid Caliphs, of a “world religious tradition”
up to the year 925 c.e.
As editor of this series I am grateful to have had the help of Benjamin
Burford, an undergraduate Century Scholar at Rice University assigned
to me in 2002–2004 for this project; Gina Weaver, a third-year graduate
student in English; and Cynthia Duffy, a second-year graduate student in
English, who assisted me in target-reading select chapters from some of
these books in an attempt to define an audience. For this purpose I would
also like to thank Gale Stokes, former dean of humanities at Rice University,
for the 2003 summer research grant and portions of the
2003–2004 annual research grant from Rice University that served that
end.
This series, in its mixture of traditional and new approaches to medieval
history and cultures, will ensure opportunities for dialogue in the
classroom in its offerings of twelve different “libraries in books.” It should
also propel discussion among graduate students and scholars by means of
the gentle insistence throughout on the text as primal. Most especially,
it invites response and further study. Given its mixture of East and West,
North and South, the series symbolizes the necessity for global understanding,
both of the Middle Ages and in the postmodern age.
Jane Chance, Series Editor
Houston, Texas
February 19, 2004