I’m a historian of Muslim – non-Muslim relations in medieval Islam. In all of my publications I've been concerned with the social intersections of different religious communities in the medieval Islamic world, whether through human agency or via institutional arrangements. My goal has been to de-center Islamic history by approaching it from its margins. Hence the choice to study the role of women as agents of religious change in my last monograph Female Power and Religious Change in the Medieval Near East. In this book I address two historical questions which I've always been passionate about, namely the Islamization of the Near East and the place of women in pre-modern Near Eastern societies.
I wrote
Female Power and Religious Change in the Medieval Near East
Giladi's Muslim Midwives takes the reader into the hidden layers of the domicile; an intimate space, where only few could participate in one of the most dramatic moments, if not the most of them, in a human's life – birth.
Midwives, although biologically apart, were assigned with a crucial place within the household, thus assuming capacities that by far exceeded their formal tasks within their respective communities.
This book reconstructs the role of midwives in medieval to early modern Islamic history through a careful reading of a wide range of classical and medieval Arabic sources. The author casts the midwife's social status in premodern Islam as a privileged position from which she could mediate between male authority in patriarchal society and female reproductive power within the family. This study also takes a broader historical view of midwifery in the Middle East by examining the tensions between learned medicine (male) and popular, medico-religious practices (female) from early Islam into the Ottoman period and addressing the confrontation between traditional…
Krakowski's Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt offers not only offers a sophisticated critique of scholarship on medieval kinship arrangements, but also casts light on the social agency of young women during the few years between the age of their formal maturity and their matrimonial engagement.
Krakowski's wonderful achievement is made possible thanks to her exceptional familiarity with the documents of the Cairo Geniza and her ability to take a step back and observe the broad social picture they reflect.
Much of what we know about life in the medieval Islamic Middle East comes from texts written to impart religious ideals or to chronicle the movements of great men. How did women participate in the societies these texts describe? What about non-Muslims, whose own religious traditions descended partly from pre-Islamic late antiquity?
Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt approaches these questions through Jewish women's adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969-1250). Using hundreds of everyday papers preserved in the Cairo Geniza, Eve Krakowski follows the lives of girls from different social classes-rich and poor, secluded and physically…
Warrior Womenof Islam opens a window into the world of medieval Muslim authors as they drew upon a mixture of fiction and reality in order to captivate the imagination of their readers/auditors.
Yet although fictitious, not to mention fantastic, Kruk demonstrates how the female protagonists of medieval Islamic epics served to promote ideals of female piety, devotion, and courage in moments of religious conflict.
Colloquial Arabic storytelling is most commonly associated with The Thousandvand One Nights. But few people are aware of a much larger corpus of narrative texts known as popular epic. These heroic romantic tales, originating in the Middle Ages, form vast cycles of adventure stories whose most remarkable feature is their portrayal of powerful and memorable women. Wildly appreciated by medieval audiences, and spread by professional storytellers throughout the cities of the Muslim world, these fictions were printed and reprinted over the centuries and comprise a vital part of Arab culture. Yet virtually none are available in translation, and so remain…
Motherhood features in diverse literary traditions, from antiquity to the present, as perhaps the most prominent aspect of female power.
Already in the womb and shortly after, during the formative stage of the child's upbringing, the mother occupied a unique, almost exclusive, position vis-à-vis its offspring, imbuing it with character and ideals. It is for this reason that maternal power and roles have been treated so extensively in diverse literary traditions and genres, constituting an object of religiously-charged imageries.
In Conceiving Identity, Keuny masters a rich Islamic literary corpus in order to show how literary images constituted a means for women to negotiate their patriarchal-designated office and imbue their office with their own set of ideals.
Urban’s Conquered Populations in Early Islam is concerned with the absorption of non-Muslims within the Muslim community during the first few centuries of its formation through an Arabian tribal mechanism of patron-client relations.
As such, it offers a first of its kinds treatment of non-Muslim slave girls and concubines, whose entry into the Muslim fold was made possible thanks to the ties of dependence they forged with their male masters and partners.
Although seemingly powerless, owing to their gender and social rank, these women were in fact in a unique position to negotiate the terms of their enslavement, livelihood, and communal affiliation thanks to their unique services vis-à-vis their patrons.
This book traces the journey of new Muslims as they joined the early Islamic community and articulated their identities within it. It focuses on Muslims of slave origins, who belonged to the society in which they lived but whose slave background rendered them somehow alien. How did these Muslims at the crossroads of insider and outsider find their place in early Islamic society? How did Islamic society itself change to accommodate these new members?
By analysing how these liminal Muslims resolved the tension between belonging and otherness, Conquered Populations in Early Islam reveals the shifting boundaries of the early Islamic…
Female Power and Religious Change in the Medieval Near East engages with two levels of scholarly discussion that are too often dealt with separately in modern scholarship: the Islamization of the Near East and the place of women in pre-modern Near Eastern societies. It outlines how these two lines of inquiry can and should be read in an integrative manner. Major historical themes such as conversion to Islam, Islamization, religious violence, and the regulation of Muslim/non-Muslim ties are addressed and reframed by attending to the relatively hidden, yet highly meaningful, role that women played throughout this period.
Rather than locating signs of female autonomy or authority in the political, intellectual, religious, or economic spheres, this book is concerned with the capacity of women to affect religious communal affiliations thanks to their kinship ties.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
