TY - BOOK ID - 33092605 TI - The villages of the Fayyum : a thirteenth-century register of Rural, Islamic Egypt AU - Rapoport, Yossef AU - Shahar, Ido PY - 2018 SN - 2503542778 9782503542775 PB - Turnhout Brepols DB - UniCat KW - Taxation KW - History KW - Fayyūm (Egypt) KW - Antiquities. KW - Rural conditions KW - Manuscripts, Medieval KW - Manuscripts, Arabic KW - Arabic language KW - Translations into English. KW - Social life and customs. KW - Economic conditions. KW - Social conditions. KW - Sources. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:33092605 AB - Richly annotated and with a detailed introduction, this volume offers the first academic edition and translation of a first-hand account of the Egyptian countryside, offering a key insight into the rural economy of medieval Islam.0Medieval Islamic society was overwhelmingly a society of peasants, and the achievements of Islamic civilization depended, first and foremost, on agricultural production. Yet the history of the medieval Islamic countryside has been neglected or marginalized. Basic questions such as the social and religious identities of village communities, or the relationship of the peasant to the state, are either ignored or discussed from a normative point of view.0This volume addresses this lacuna in our understanding of medieval Islam by presenting a first-hand account of the Egyptian countryside. Dating from the middle of the thirteenth century, Abu ?Uthman al-Nabulusi?s Villages of the Fayyum is as close as we get to the tax registers of any rural province. Not unlike the Domesday Book of medieval England, al-Nabulusi?s work provides a wealth of detail for each village which far surpasses any other source for the rural economy of medieval Islam. It is a unique, comprehensive snap-shot of one rural society at one, significant, point in its history, and an insight into the way of life of the majority of the population in the medieval Islamic world. Richly annotated and with a detailed introduction, this volume offers the first academic edition of this work and the first translation into a European language. ER -