Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds

Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds
Author: Hyunhee Park
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2012-08-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139536621

Long before Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope en route to India, the peoples of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia engaged in vigorous cross-cultural exchanges across the Indian Ocean. This book focuses on the years 700 to 1500, a period when powerful dynasties governed both regions, to document the relationship between the Islamic and Chinese worlds before the arrival of the Europeans. Through a close analysis of the maps, geographic accounts, and travelogues compiled by both Chinese and Islamic writers, the book traces the development of major contacts between people in China and the Islamic world and explores their interactions on matters as varied as diplomacy, commerce, mutual understanding, world geography, navigation, shipbuilding, and scientific exploration. When the Mongols ruled both China and Iran in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, their geographic understanding of each other's society increased markedly. This rich, engaging, and pioneering study offers glimpses into the worlds of Asian geographers and mapmakers, whose accumulated wisdom underpinned the celebrated voyages of European explorers like Vasco da Gama.

Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds

Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds
Author: Hyunhee Park
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2012-08-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107018684

This book documents the relationship and wisdom of Asian cartographers in the Islamic and Chinese worlds before the Europeans arrived.

The Cambridge World History

The Cambridge World History
Author: Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 749
Release: 2015
Genre: Cities and towns, Ancient
ISBN: 0521190746

The most comprehensive account yet of the human past from prehistory to the present.

The Cambridge World History: Volume 5, Expanding Webs of Exchange and Conflict, 500CE–1500CE

The Cambridge World History: Volume 5, Expanding Webs of Exchange and Conflict, 500CE–1500CE
Author: Benjamin Z. Kedar
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 749
Release: 2015-04-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316297756

Volume 5 of the Cambridge World History series uncovers the cross-cultural exchange and conquest, and the accompanying growth of regional and trans-regional states, religions, and economic systems, during the period 500 to 1500 CE. The volume begins by outlining a series of core issues and processes across the world, including human relations with nature, gender and family, social hierarchies, education, and warfare. Further essays examine maritime and land-based networks of long-distance trade and migration in agricultural and nomadic societies, and the transmission and exchange of cultural forms, scientific knowledge, technologies, and text-based religious systems that accompanied these. The final section surveys the development of centralized regional states and empires in both the eastern and western hemispheres. Together these essays by an international team of leading authors show how processes furthering cultural, commercial, and political integration within and between various regions of the world made this millennium a 'proto-global' era.

Medieval Islamic Maps

Medieval Islamic Maps
Author: Karen C. Pinto
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2016-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 022612696X

The history of Islamic mapping is one of the new frontiers in the history of cartography. This book offers the first in-depth analysis of a distinct tradition of medieval Islamic maps known collectively as the Book of Roads and Kingdoms (Kitab al-Masalik wa al-Mamalik, or KMMS). Created from the mid-tenth through the nineteenth century, these maps offered Islamic rulers, scholars, and armchair explorers a view of the physical and human geography of the Arabian peninsula, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, Spain and North Africa, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, the Iranian provinces, present-day Pakistan, and Transoxiana. Historian Karen C. Pinto examines around 100 examples of these maps retrieved from archives across the world from three points of view: iconography, context, and patronage. By unraveling their many symbols, she guides us through new ways of viewing the Muslim cartographic imagination.

Maps

Maps
Author: James R. Akerman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN:

Introducing readers to a wide range of maps from different time periods and a variety of cultures, this book confirms the vital roles of maps throughout history in commerce, art, literature, and national identity.

The History of Cartography: Cartography in prehistoric, ancient, and medieval Europe and the Mediterranean

The History of Cartography: Cartography in prehistoric, ancient, and medieval Europe and the Mediterranean
Author: John Brian Harley
Publisher:
Total Pages: 664
Release: 1987
Genre: Cartography
ISBN:

By developing the broadest and most inclusive definition of the term "map" ever adopted in the history of cartography, this inaugural volume of the History of Cartography series has helped redefine the way maps are studied and understood by scholars in a number of disciplines. Volume One addresses the prehistorical and historical mapping traditions of premodern Europe and the Mediterranean world. A substantial introductory essay surveys the historiography and theoretical development of the history of cartography and situates the work of the multi-volume series within this scholarly tradition. Cartographic themes include an emphasis on the spatial-cognitive abilities of Europe's prehistoric peoples and their transmission of cartographic concepts through media such as rock art; the emphasis on mensuration, land surveys, and architectural plans in the cartography of Ancient Egypt and the Near East; the emergence of both theoretical and practical cartographic knowledge in the Greco-Roman world; and the parallel existence of diverse mapping traditions (mappaemundi, portolan charts, local and regional cartography) in the Medieval period. Throughout the volume, a commitment to include cosmographical and celestial maps underscores the inclusive definition of "map" and sets the tone for the breadth of scholarship found in later volumes of the series.

The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
Author: Samuel P. Huntington
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 553
Release: 2007-05-31
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1416561242

The classic study of post-Cold War international relations, more relevant than ever in the post-9/11 world, with a new foreword by Zbigniew Brzezinski. Since its initial publication, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order has become a classic work of international relations and one of the most influential books ever written about foreign affairs. An insightful and powerful analysis of the forces driving global politics, it is as indispensable to our understanding of American foreign policy today as the day it was published. As former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski says in his new foreword to the book, it “has earned a place on the shelf of only about a dozen or so truly enduring works that provide the quintessential insights necessary for a broad understanding of world affairs in our time.” Samuel Huntington explains how clashes between civilizations are the greatest threat to world peace but also how an international order based on civilizations is the best safeguard against war. Events since the publication of the book have proved the wisdom of that analysis. The 9/11 attacks and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated the threat of civilizations but have also shown how vital international cross-civilization cooperation is to restoring peace. As ideological distinctions among nations have been replaced by cultural differences, world politics has been reconfigured. Across the globe, new conflicts—and new cooperation—have replaced the old order of the Cold War era. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order explains how the population explosion in Muslim countries and the economic rise of East Asia are changing global politics. These developments challenge Western dominance, promote opposition to supposedly “universal” Western ideals, and intensify intercivilization conflict over such issues as nuclear proliferation, immigration, human rights, and democracy. The Muslim population surge has led to many small wars throughout Eurasia, and the rise of China could lead to a global war of civilizations. Huntington offers a strategy for the West to preserve its unique culture and emphasizes the need for people everywhere to learn to coexist in a complex, multipolar, muliticivilizational world.

Monsoon Islam

Monsoon Islam
Author: Sebastian R. Prange
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2018-05-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108342698

Between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, a distinct form of Islamic thought and practice developed among Muslim trading communities of the Indian Ocean. Sebastian R. Prange argues that this 'Monsoon Islam' was shaped by merchants not sultans, forged by commercial imperatives rather than in battle, and defined by the reality of Muslims living within non-Muslim societies. Focusing on India's Malabar Coast, the much-fabled 'land of pepper', Prange provides a case study of how Monsoon Islam developed in response to concrete economic, socio-religious, and political challenges. Because communities of Muslim merchants across the Indian Ocean were part of shared commercial, scholarly, and political networks, developments on the Malabar Coast illustrate a broader, trans-oceanic history of the evolution of Islam across monsoon Asia. This history is told through four spaces that are examined in their physical manifestations as well as symbolic meanings: the Port, the Mosque, the Palace, and the Sea.

Mapping Intellectual Building and the Construction of Thought and Reason

Mapping Intellectual Building and the Construction of Thought and Reason
Author: Fathi Hasan Malkawi
Publisher: International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT)
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2020-09-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1642053481

The subject of this work is thought, a distinguishing characteristic of human beings that the Creator has dignified humankind with. The book attempts to provide an in-depth conceptualization of intellectual building. Man’s intellect is awoken by his/her surroundings, by his need to make sense of reality, his own existence, and a desire to know. How he articulates this reality to himself, interprets, and organizes information as it presents itself to his conscience, makes decisions, takes action, and draws conclusions based on whatever framework he gives value to, whether spiritual or other, is the subject of this book. The work reflects on many interesting aspects of human inner communication, including the workings of logic, and in today’s information age, the control and manipulation of information by others for personal gain. What is meant by the concept of ‘thought’? What place does it hold, and in what relation does it stand to the concepts of knowledge, culture, philosophy, literature, and fiqh (deep understanding, jurisprudence)? These are some of the issues addressed.