Harun Al-Rashid: The Life and Legacy of the Abbasid Caliph During the Islamic Golden Age

Name: Harun Al-Rashid: The Life and Legacy of the Abbasid Caliph During the Islamic Golden Age
Brand: Charles River Editors
SKU: 41370766835882
Price: 9.99 USD
Availability: InStock

By: Charles River Editors

ISBN: 9781092955911

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Description

*Includes pictures
*Includes medieval accounts
*Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading
Like many historical figures, Harun al-Rashid’s biography has become part reality and part myth. A real individual and the fourth caliph of the Abbasid Caliphate, Harun al-Rashid is best known to many individuals because of his role in famous literature like One Thousand and One Nights, not necessarily because of his policy decisions. This is unusual because Harun al-Rashid was perhaps the most influential of the Abbasid caliphs due to his role in bringing economic prosperity, destroying one of the most powerful Islamic families of the 9th century CE, and ending the Abbasid Dynasty for good.
The reputation of Harun al-Rashid is a controversial one over 1,000 years later. Although historians are often loathe to admit it, they understand that history, like other social and cultural subjects, is subject to the opinions and influences of the society in which it was written, and for centuries, numerous cultures in the Western world (primarily Europe, Australasia, North America, and sometimes Latin and South America) insisted that Islamic societies could not possess the intellectual progress and discourse Western society attributed to itself. According to Amira Bennison, “It was a commonplace of the European imperial age that the Islamic world was intellectually backward and that Muslims not only could not have produced the Enlightenment and Industrial Evolution but also required European tutelage.” In short, European intellectuals believed Muslims, due to their religious, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds, lacked the capacity to be progressive – as determined by European standards – and were thus intellectually and culturally backwards.

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