PDF The Guide to the American Revolutionary War in New Jersey: Battles; Raids and Skirmishes by Norman Desmarais in History

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The ""inquisition"" (Mihnah) unleashed by the seventh Abbasid caliph; 'Abdallah al-Ma'mun (r. 813-833); has long attracted the attention of modern scholars of the intellectual; political; and religious history of the early Abbasid era. Because this event; which began in 820 and stretched through the reigns of two of al-Ma'mun's successors; appears at a convergence of prominent currents in systematic theology; rationalist thought; theocratic politics; and nascent trends in Shiism and Sunnism; historians have seen it as the key to a wide array of puzzles and problems in early Islamic history. In this incisive study; John Nawas subjects the various proposed explanations of these events to a sober and searching analysis and; in the process; presents a new interpretation of al-Ma'mun's political and religious policies; contextualized against the background of early Abbasid intellectual and social history. Appended to the volume is a reprint edition of Walter M. Patton's Ahmed ibn Hanbal and the Mihna (Leiden 1897); which still has much that is useful for modern scholarship; including one enormous additional benefit; it contains most of the relevant passages in Arabic from the primary sources.