AnyBook4Less.com	Find the Best Price on the Web Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Home  |  Store List  |  FAQ  |  Contact Us  |
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money Keyword AuthorISBN

Title: Mecca by F. E. Peters ISBN: 0-691-03267-X Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 31 October, 1994 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $60.00

Your Country USA Canada United Kingdom Australia Austria Belgium France Germany Italy Netherlands Switzerland Currency AutoUSD CAD GBP EUR AUD CHF Delivery Only cheapest delivery All delivery options Include Used Books Are you a club member of: Barnes and Noble Books A Million Chapters.Indigo.ca

Average Customer Rating: 3 (1 review)

Rating: 3
Summary: Mecca
Comment: "Mecca" is a companion volume to Peters' earlier 1994 study, "The Hajj: The Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places" (reviewed in Middle East Quarterly, September 1994). That book focuses on the experience of the pilgrimage, in Mecca and outside it; this one focuses on the geography and history of what Peters calls "the Muslim Holy Land," by which he means "Mecca and Medina and their spiritual environs." "Literary history" points to the fact that there is little or no material evidence for Islam's holy cities before 1925, this book's cut-off date, compelling the researcher to rely almost exlusively on written sources.

As in the earlier volume, Peters mixes his own scholarly findings here with long excerpts from primary sources, both Muslim and Western. Rather than impose his own schema on the materials at hand, he follows their vagaries, jumping from the early centuries of Islam to the Age of Discovery with only a few pages on the intervening centuries. The result is an unusual but highly successful mix of literary collage with academic inquiry. Subjects especially worth noting include the account of the Qarmatians' conquest of Mecca in 930 and their stealing of the Black Stone; the story of Thomas Keith, a Scotsman taken prisoner by the Ottoman forces who converted to Islam and eventually became governor of Medina in 1815; and late nineteenth-century British musings about the recruitment of spies to keep an eye on possible seditious activity during the pilgrimage activities in Mecca.

Middle East Quarterly, March 1995