Descripción
Updated edition, presentation copy from the editor and his wife, inscribed on her calling card mounted to the front pastedown "With all best wishes". This new and revised edition of one of Muir's famous Middle East histories was prepared by Thomas Hunter Weir. Margaret Weir translated several books on Islamic history including the main source used to update this edition. Sir William Muir (1819-1905) first released The Caliphate in 1891, which quickly became popular and ran to many editions. This edition incorporates new scholarship, including Bell's volume of Greek papyri in the British Museum (1893) and Julius Wellhausen's Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz (1902). Margaret Weir (1865-1928), translated Wellhausen's book in 1927 under the title The Arab Kingdom and its Fall. Her translation was praised as an "excellent rendering of the German text" and "a work of high literary order" (Bukhsh, p. 40). She also proof-read the present volume and corrected the index (p. ix). Muir spent most of his career serving as a colonial administrator in India, holding the governorship of the North-Western Provinces between 1868 and 1874. His publications on Islamic history "were certainly controversial, but because he was the first British scholar to attempt a popular interpretation of Islamic history based on study of the Arabic sources, they were widely regarded as authoritative during the colonial era" (ODNB). He was elected as president of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1884 and awarded the society's triennial jubilee gold medal in 1903. This work traces the history of the Rashidun, Umayyad, and Abbasid Caliphates, from the death of Muhammad and the election of Abu Bakr in 632 to the fall of the Mamluk Sultanate in 1517. "It is, however, a really trustworthy and scholarly book. Muir sticks closely to his title-subject, the Caliphate itself, and does not allow himself to diverge to the history of the numerous Mahommedan dynasties which gradually sapped the Caliphs' power. For the first century of Moslem rule, however, it forms. the best and most readable authority we possess, and no historical library can dispense with it" (The Spectator). S. Khuda Bukhsh, Studies: Indian and Islamic, 1927; "The Caliphate: its Rise, Decline, and Fall", The Spectator, 24 June 1899, p. 12. Octavo. Four colour folding maps, diagrams in text. With 3 pp. of publisher's advertisements to rear. Original red cloth, spine lettered in gilt, covers ruled in blind, top edge brown, others untrimmed. Spine lightly sunned, spine ends bumped, maps lightly foxed, otherwise bright: a very good copy.
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