a. History and Politics in Eleventh-Century Baghdad Collected Studies
George Makdisi is, to start with, concerned with the growth, topography and local history of Baghdad. This is of interest in itself, as a study of one of the principal
urban centres of the medieval world, but it also has a broader significance. For Baghdad, as the seat of the Abbasid caliphate and the centre of government,
represents a microcosm of much of the Islamic world at that time: the rivalries between different rulers and their ministers and the conflicts between secular and
religious authorities find their reflection in the physical structure of the city and in the writings of those who lived there. This theme of authority and power is then
developed further in the second set of articles, concerned in particular with the relations between Caliph and Sultan after the arrival of the Seljuks.
b. Ibn Aqil: Religion and Culture in Classical Islam
This biography of the Muslim scholar and humanist Ibn Aqil 1040-1119 sheds light on one of the most important periods of classical Islam -- one which has
had a significant impact on religious and intellectual culture in the Christian Latin West.
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c. Religion, Law and Learning in Classical Islam.
This book concentrates on the schools of religious thought and legal learning in the medieval Islamic world and their defence of orthodoxy. The author aims to
review and re-assess the implications of the conflict between, first, the rationalist and the traditional theologians the one accepting the influence of Greek
philosophy, the other rejecting it, and then between one of these traditionalist schools -the Hanbali school of law -and Sufi mysticism. One of the most important
consequences of the first of these confrontations, he contends, was the emergence of the schools of law as the guardians of the faith and theological orthodoxy. The final
section of the book also looks at the structure of legal learning, at the institutions themselves, their organization and the principles upon which they operated. As well
as entering the debate over the existence of corporations and guilds of law in classical Islam - maintaining that they did exist - these articles further suggest links
between such institutions and the evolution of universities in the medieval West, and the Inns of Court in England, and discuss the Islamic and Arabic contribution to
the concepts of academic and intellectual freedom and to the development of scholasticism and humanism.
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d. The Diary in Islamic Historiography: Some Notes.
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