Oxbow Spring 2013.pdf - Oxbow Books

The Principles of Arab Navigation
William Facey (Editor); Anthony R. Constable (Editor)
Throughout History, the Indian Ocean has been a zone of interaction between
far-flung civilizations served by ports, and connected with the Mediterranean by
the Gulf and Red Sea. Bringing together six scholars specializing in the maritime
history and culture of the Arabs this book makes a new and vital contribution
to the study of a nautical culture that has hitherto not received its due share
of attention, and which is vital to an understanding of Indian Ocean history.
Drawing on source material such as the guides by the renowned southern
Arabian navigators Ahmad ibn Majid and Sulayman al-Mahri in the 15th and 16th
centuries AD, as well as surviving logbooks of dhow captains in the early 20th, the
volume covers the principal ideas, techniques, instruments and calculations used,
deploying astronomy, geometry and mathematics to explain their methods.
Islamic World
9780957106017, £35.00, February 2013
HB, full col throughout; 11 maps, Arabian Publishing Ltd
Studies in the Islamic Arts of the Book
Robert Hillenbrand (Author)
The studies collected in this volume, some of them rather difficult to access, date
mostly from the last fifteen years and focus primarily on Persian book painting
of the 14th to the early 16th centuries. In this period, Iran dominated the art
of book painting in the Islamic world. Two major leitmotifs are explored in this
selection of essays. One is provided by the constantly varying interpretations
of the Shahnama (The Book of Kings), the Persian national epic, and especially
the tendency of painters to interpret this familiar text in terms of contemporary
politics. The other is the interplay of text and image, which highlights the tendency
of painters to strike out on their own and to leave the literal text progressively
further behind while they develop plots and sub-plots of their own. These
enquiries are set within the context of a concerted effort to explore in detail
how Persian painters achieved their most spectacular visual effects.
9781904597490, £150.00, Available Now
HB, 556p, 258 illus., Pindar Press
Libertinism in Medieval Muslim Society and Literature
Zoltan Szombathy (Author)
This book is about an aspect of medieval Arabic culture and literature known in
Arabic as mujūn (roughly ‘libertinism, licentiousness, frivolity, indecency, profligacy,
shamelessness, impertinence’, etc.), a concept that students of medieval Arabic
texts may find rather hard to define but which is a recurrent term and a widespread
phenomenon in medieval Arabic literature, and probably common in real life. The social
implications and the background of mujūn are focussed on in an attempt to learn what
the popularity of mujūn during a specific period of the medieval Middle East can tell us
about the society and the culture that produced such works. It is a study of the society
in which such literature flourished, of the values and norms of that society, and of the
mājin (the man who does or writes mājin) rather than of mujūn in itself. The author uses
many excepts from primary source texts to explore the nature, concepts and content
of mujÙn. It provides a critical inventory of the varied motifs of mujūn in literature so
as to define this elusive term by way of an accumulation of concrete examples.
9780906094617, £45.00, 30 July 2013
HB, 256p, 170 x 240 mm, Gibb Memorial Trust
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