Asma Afsaruddin is Professor of Islamic Studies and former Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author or editor of seven books, including her most recent Contemporary Issues in Islam (Edinburgh University Press 2015) and the award‐winning Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought (Oxford University Press 2013). She was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2005.

Anna Ayşe Akasoy is Professor of Islamic Intellectual History at the Graduate Center and Hunter College, City University of New York. Her research interests include the intellectual culture of the medieval Muslim West and contacts between the Islamic world and other cultures. Her current research project concerns the religious functions of Alexander the Great in the Islamic tradition.

Johann P. Arnason is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, La Trobe University, Melbourne, and Professor of Historical Sociology, Charles University, Prague. His research has focused on the comparative analysis of civilizations and on theories and varieties of modernity. He has written or edited books about the Soviet model, the dual civilization of Japan, the Greek polis, and the Eurasian world in the 10th–13th centuries, as well as theoretical works such as Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions (Brill 2003).

M. Fariduddin Attar is currently pursuing his PhD at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. His main research focus is post‐Avicennian philosophy and theology in the Islamic East. He has taught philosophy in a number of universities in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Mohammed A. Bamyeh is Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh and the editor of the International Sociology Reviews. He is the author of Anarchy as Order (Rowman & Littlefield 2009), Of Death and Dominion (Northwestern University Press 2007), The Ends of Globalization (University of Minnesota Press 2000), and The Social Origins of Islam: Mind, Economy, Discourse (University of Minnesota Press 1999). He has also edited Intellectuals and Civil Society in the Middle East (I.B. Tauris 2012), Palestine America (Duke University Press 2003), and Literature and Revolution (as a special issue of the Arab‐American journal Mizna, 2012). His latest book, Lifeworlds of Islam, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Amira K. Bennison is Professor in the History and Culture of the Maghrib at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Magdalene College. Her teaching and research interests include the medieval Islamic West (Islamic Iberia and Morocco), Maghribi modes of legitimation and cultures of power, and 18th‐ to 19th‐century Muslim religiopolitical discourse and engagement with modernity. She is the author of The Almoravid and Almohad Empires (Edinburgh University Press 2016), and The Articulation of Power in Medieval Iberia and the Maghrib (Oxford University Press 2014). She has also edited The Great Caliphs: the Golden Age of the ‘Abbasid Empire (I.B. Tauris 2009), Cities in the Premodern Islamic World (with Alison L. Gascoigne; Routledge 2007), and Jihad and its Interpretations in Pre‐Colonial Morocco (Routledge 2002), as well as numerous articles.

Michele Bernardini is Professor of Persian Language, Literature, and History at the University of Naples “L’Orientale.” Among his publications are various works on the Mongol and Timurid periods, including Mémoire et propagande à l'époque timouride (Association pour l’avancement des études iraniennes 2008) and I Mongoli. Espansione, imperi, eredità (with Donatella Guida; Einaudi 2012). He is the editor‐in‐chief of the journal Eurasian Studies and a member of the editorial board of Series Catalogorum, devoted to cataloguing collections of Oriental manuscripts.

Caterina Bori received her PhD from the University of Rome La Sapienza and is currently Associate Professor in the History of Islam and Early Modern Muslim Civilizations at the University of Bologna. Before that she was Teaching Fellow in the History Department at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and Research Fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin. She has published extensively on Ibn Taymiyya and his historical milieu, and is currently exploring the transmission of the doctrines of siyasa shar‘iyya into the Mamluk and early Ottoman periods.

Rachida Chih is a Senior Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and a member of the Center for Turkish, Ottoman, Balkan, and Central Asian Studies (CETOBAC), École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris. She is currently completing a book on Sufism in Egypt in the 17th and 18th centuries. Her published works include Le soufisme à l’époque ottomane/Sufism in the Ottoman Era (with Catherine Mayeur‐Jaouen; Institut français d’archéologie orientale du Caire 2010), Le soufisme au quotidien: Confréries d’Égypte au XXe siècle; Le saint et son milieu (with Denis Gril; Sindbad/Actes Sud 2010), and Sufism, Literary Production and Printing in the Nineteenth Century (with Catherine Mayeur‐Jaouen and Rüdiger Seesemann; Ergon 2015).

Devin DeWeese is a Professor in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University. He earned his PhD at Indiana University in 1985 and has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Guggenheim Foundation, and Carnegie Scholar program. He is the author of Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (Pennsylvania State University Press 1994) and Islamization and Sacred Lineages in Central Asia: The Legacy of Ishaq Bab in Narrative and Genealogical Traditions, Vol. I: Opening the Way for Islam: The Ishaq Bab Narrative, 14th–19th Centuries (with Ashirbek Muminov; Daik‐Press 2013). His numerous articles on the religious history of Islamic Central Asia and Iran focus chiefly on problems of Islamization, on the social and political roles of Sufi communities, and on Sufi literature and hagiography in Persian and Chaghatay Turkic.

Bruce Fudge is Professor of Arabic at the University of Geneva. He is the author of Qur’anic Hermeneutics: al‐Tabrisi and the Craft of Commentary (Routledge 2011) and editor‐translator of A Hundred and One Nights (New York University Press 2016).

George Hatke received his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University and is currently Senior Lecturer in Ancient South‐Arabian History and Epigraphy at the Institut für Orientalistik, University of Vienna. His areas of research include pre‐Islamic South Arabia, ancient and medieval Ethiopia, and Indian Ocean trade.

Paul L. Heck, Professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Theology at Georgetown University, publishes on the intellectual history of Islam and the nature of Christian–Muslim relations both sociologically and theologically. His most recent monograph is Skepticism in Classical Islam: Moments of Confusion (Routledge 2014).

Ahmet T. Karamustafa is Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. His expertise is in the social and intellectual history of Sufism in particular and Islamic piety in general in the medieval and early modern periods. His publications include God’s Unruly Friends (University of Utah Press 1994) and Sufism: The Formative Period (Edinburgh University Press/University of California Press 2007). He is currently working on a book project titled Vernacular Islam: Everyday Muslim Religious Life in Medieval Anatolia (co‐authored with Cemal Kafadar) as well as a monograph on the history of early medieval Sufism titled The Flowering of Sufism.

Jamal Malik is Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Erfurt. After studying Islamic Studies and Political Science in Bonn, he received his PhD in 1988 at Heidelberg and conducted his postdoctoral studies (leading to a professorial Habilitation) in 1994 at Bamberg. Before joining the University of Erfurt in 1999, Jamal Malik worked in different positions at the Universities of Bonn, Heidelberg, Bamberg, and Derby. His current research interests focus on da‘wa movements, Sufism, and madrasas, along with Islam in South Asia and Europe.

Matthew Melvin‐Koushki received his PhD from Yale University and is Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. He specializes in early modern Islamicate intellectual and imperial history, with a focus on the theory and practice of the occult sciences in Timurid‐Safavid Iran and the broader Persianate world.

Ethan L. Menchinger is Lecturer in Early Ottoman History at the University of Michigan, where he received his PhD in Near Eastern Studies in 2014. He was a Fellow in the program “Europe in the Middle East—the Middle East in Europe” at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Toronto. He has published articles on Ottoman political thought, philosophy, and intellectual history as well as translations and is the author of First of the Modern Ottomans: The Intellectual History of Ahmed Vâsıf (Cambridge University Press 2017).

A. Azfar Moin is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Islamic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (Columbia University Press 2012).

Jane H. Murphy is Associate Professor of History at Colorado College. She is currently working on a study of the rational sciences in the life and times of ‘Abd al‐Rahman al‐Jabarti.

Naznin Patel is a graduate student at the School of Religious Studies at McGill University. Her research interests include Renaissance Italian and early modern intellectual history, with particular emphasis on its interaction with Islamic philosophy and theology.

Babak Rahimi is Associate Professor of Communication, Culture, and Religion at the Department of Literature, University of California, San Diego. He earned his PhD from the European University Institute, Florence, in October 2004. Rahimi has also studied at the University of Nottingham, where he obtained an MA in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy in 1997, and the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he was a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, 2000–2001. His book, Theater‐State and Formation of the Early Modern Public Sphere in Iran: Studies on Safavid Muharram Rituals, 1590–1641 C.E. (Brill 2011), studies the relationship between ritual, public space, and state power in early modern Iranian history.

Sajjad Rizvi is Associate Professor of Islamic Intellectual History at the University of Exeter. An intellectual historian trained at Oxford and Cambridge, he has published extensively on the course of philosophy in the Islamic East in the early modern period and is currently writing a monograph on the intellectual history of Islamic philosophical traditions in 18th‐century North India and Iran.

Armando Salvatore is a sociologist and a scholar of comparative religions. He is the Keenan Chair in Interfaith Studies and Professor of Global Religious Studies (Society and Politics) at the School of Religious Studies, McGill University. He has taught and researched at Humboldt University Berlin, the University of Naples “L’Orientale,” the National University of Singapore, and, more recently, the Australian National University and the University of Leipzig. He is the author of The Sociology of Islam: Knowledge, Power and Civility (Wiley Blackwell 2016).

Jakob Skovgaard‐Petersen is Associate Professor of Islamic and Arabic Studies at the Department of Cross‐Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. His field of research is contemporary Islam, with a particular focus on the establishment of a modern Muslim public sphere, the role of the Muslim ‘ulama’ in modern Arab states, and the articulation of Islamic topics in the new pan‐Arab television networks. Key publications include Defining Islam for the Egyptian State: Muftis and Fatwas of the Dār al‐Iftā (Brill 1997), Global Mufti. The Phenomenon of Yusuf al‐Qaradawi (co‐edited with Bettina Gräf; Hurst/Columbia University Press 2009), and Arab Media Moguls (co‐edited with Donatella della Ratta and Naomi Sakr; I.B. Tauris 2015).

Devin Stewart earned a PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991. He has been teaching in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies, Emory University, since 1990. His research has focused on the Qur’an, Shi‘i Islam, Islamic legal theory, institutions, and education, and other topics in Arabic and Islamic studies. He is the author of Islamic Legal Orthodoxy: Twelver Shiite Responses to the Sunni Legal System (Utah University Press 1998) and editor and translator of Disagreements of the Jurists (New York University Press 2015).

SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He has published extensively on various aspects of Muslim reform, colonial modernity, and secularism, with a focus on South Asia.

Isabel Toral‐Niehoff studied History and Arabic Studies in Tübingen where she earned her PhD in 1997 with a thesis titled Kitab Ǧiranīs. Die arabische Übersetzung der ersten Kyranis. Herausgegeben, übersetzt und Kommentiert. She acquired her professorial habilitation in 2008 at Free University, Berlin. Her main research and publishing fields are Arabia and the Near East in Late Antiquity, cultural identity, cultural transfer processes, Arabic occult sciences, and classical Arabic literature and historiography. She has published the monograph Al‐Ḥīra: Eine arabische Kulturmetropole im spätantiken Kontext (Brill 2014).

Roberto Tottoli is Professor of Islamic Studies at the Department of Asian, African, and Mediterranean Studies, University of Naples “L’Orientale.” He was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 2016–2017. He has published studies on the Biblical tradition in the Qur’an and Islam such as Biblical Prophets in the Qur’an and Muslim Literature (Routledge 2002) and The Stories of the Prophets of Ibn Mutarrif al‐Tarafi (Klaus Schwarz 2003), and on medieval Islamic literature. His most recent publications include Ludovico Marracci at Work: The Evolution of His Latin Translation of the Qur’ān in the Light of His Newly Discovered Manuscripts (co‐authored with Reinhold F. Glei; Harrassowitz 2016), and Books and Written Culture of the Islamic World. Studies Presented to Claude Gilliot on the Occasion of His 75thBirthday (co‐edited with Andrew Rippin; Brill 2015).

John O. Voll is Professor Emeritus of Islamic History at Georgetown University. He is a past president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, and the author of Islam: Continuity and Change in the Modern World (Syracuse University Press 1994) and numerous other books and articles on Islamic and world history.

Ali Yaycioglu is a historian of the Ottoman Empire and the early modern Muslim world at Stanford University. His book, Partners of the Empire: Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions (Stanford University Press 2016) is an attempt to rethink the Ottoman experience within the global context of the revolutionary age of the 18th and early 19th centuries.

The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam is a collective project whose beginnings go back to the Summer of 2008, when I received an invitation to provide a proposal for such a volume to Wiley Blackwell. Ever since, the project has required an ongoing exchange with a variety of scholars of Islam with diverse disciplinary backgrounds. From the beginning, both the publisher and I shared the goal of providing a reference work based on fresh scholarly findings, while taking into account relevant research traditions and their underlying, if contended, scholarly approaches. The outcome of almost a decade of work and exchange is a volume addressed to a composite academic audience, ranging from advanced undergraduates to professionals who aspire to acquire a knowledge on the history of Islam which is comprehensive, up to date, and manageable. Yet the volume might also contribute to scholarly debates not confined to Islamic Studies: most notably through the analysis of the transformations that marked the transition of the Islamic ecumene from premodern to modern sociopolitical conditions.

Published histories of Islam are either single‐authored studies that reflect the author’s individual approach or collective works with an encyclopedic ambition and/or a multivolume range. They therefore risk overstating either the unity or the diversity of Islamic history. This volume is a cohesive collective undertaking based on an originally unitary yet articulate conception. This has been executed through distributing the task of dealing with discrete aspects and periods of Islamic history among a selected group of intellectually motivated scholars within history, Islamic Studies, and historical sociology—both within the English‐speaking academia and outside of it—who share the need for reasonable conceptual innovations. Our goal has been to strike a balance between older and younger scholars and to achieve a fair degree of geographical distribution, with one third of the contributors (and one of the main editors) coming from non‐Anglophone institutions. This diversity was also achieved in response to a specific request by the publisher, back in 2008, to provide a comprehensive representation of scholarly traditions in the study of Islam. This also includes the self‐renewal of the time‐honored continental orientalist ‘schools.’

This is why The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam can help absorb and redeploy basic analytic concepts which are mostly taken for granted by both the specialist and by a larger academic audience. We provide a well‐studied selection of key topics that are neither confined to the taste and skills of a single author nor reflective of the encyclopedic ambition of covering the entire ‘world of Islam.’ We have addressed the unity and diversity of the history of Islam, both as a religious tradition and as a civilizational process, by blending historical analysis and theoretical reflection. Our main goal has been to help our readership to understand a complex tradition‐cum‐civilization the knowledge of which is essential for making sense of the wider transcivilizational dynamics of the Afro‐Eurasian hemisphere—including the far western exceptionalism of the ‘Occident.’

Against the background of teleological assumptions concerning why the Islamic civilization finally succumbed to the hegemonic power of the ‘West,’ the book illustrates the distinctive Islamic (and Islamicate) unfolding of the dialectic of ‘commoners’ and elites across urban, agrarian, and nomadic milieus. It shows how the related patterns of life conduct were shaped in connection with highly variable and often flexible institutions of governance. The particular key to presenting an articulate yet cohesive history of Islam consists in consciously focusing on the ongoing dynamics linking religion and culture to power and civility. This focus puts a premium on a rather transcivilizational approach, whereby the Islamic ecumene is seen both in its internal articulations and in its external openness and permeability, rather than through the lens of a more narrowly conceived area study perspective.

The volume consists of seven parts. Part I deals with Islam’s overlapping, relevant ‘beginnings’ out of the older and wider dynamics of the Irano‐Semitic civilizational area. Part II covers the classic era of the caliphate from the middle of the 7th to the middle of the 10th century CE: this epoch played a formative role especially in setting the terms of the future continual interaction between the shari‘a tradition (oriented to life conduct and juridical regulation) and the adab culture (radiating from the courts of the rulers and able to shape the character of statecraft and administration, but also decisively influencing the enactment of cultured life forms): they interacted and competed in shaping key notions of the Islamicate order, ranging from the subject to the state. Part III embraces the formative epoch of what comparative civilizational analysts have called the “ecumenic renaissance” occurring throughout the Afro‐Eurasian landmass during the early second millennium CE, within which the expanding Islamic ecumene played a crucial role, notably through the spread of Sufism (from the collapse of the power of the caliphate in the middle of the 10th to the wave of Mongol conquests in the middle of the 13th century). Part IV deals with the renewal of the expanded Islamic ecumene from the Mongol capture of Baghdad of 1258 until the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople of 1453. Part V encompasses the early modern period, lasting until the end of the 17th century and the Battle of Vienna. Part VI covers the 18th and most of the 19th century, an epoch coinciding with the global rise of European powers, during which Islamic movements of revival and reform saw the light. Part VII explores the era of anti‐colonial resistance and postcolonial reorganization carried out by sociopolitical (including “Islamist”) movements and new elites, animated by a variety of patterns of mobilization and organization (both national and transnational), up to the present era.

This chronological subdivision represents a partial revision of the approach of the most important work in the history of Islam to date by Marshall G.S. Hodgson (see the Introduction to this volume) and of other conventional periodizations, in that it shifts the beginning and end of some epochs and intervenes in the overall logic that delimits and connects successive eras. It particularly suggests a tripartition of the larger epoch we identify with modernity into an early modern yet largely precolonial era, a colonial period, and a long (yet ongoing) phase of exit from colonial domination toward problematic attempts to reconstruct sociopolitical autonomy in the era of postcolonial nation‐states, culminating in their crisis between the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. Similarly, the unity of the seventh period cuts through the late‐colonial and postcolonial phases (a type of labeling that, if taken too literally, along with the underlying periodization, is too blatantly modeled on the Western trajectory of colonial modernity) and envisions a rather unitary epoch of movement‐based resurgence and corresponding attempts to build independent states—a period that has been increasingly characterized by centrifugal processes, especially from the 1970s until today. This tripartition of the modern age has the merit of rejecting the still dominant narrative postulating the existence of a Western monopoly on the birth of modernity from its inception, and which is based on reductive and homogenizing assumptions about linear alignments of Reformation, Enlightenment, and the commercial and industrial revolutions of Northwestern Europe.

Each of the seven parts consists of four chapters that cover the more strictly geopolitical and the wider civilizational dimensions of Islamic history, as well as the theological‐juridical field, more exclusive forms of elite culture, and the fundamental dimension of Sufi and ‘popular’ traditions and practices: sometimes representing the ‘lines of flight’ from the consensus but more often reinstituting it in new ways. This assortment is necessary to provide systematic unity to the materials, though it has been obviously molded by the specific orientations of the chapter contributors. While in some cases a certain amount of background knowledge by the reader can be assumed, the chapters are generally written to be accessible to broader audiences. Each author treats a given topic from a specific perspective, allowing a modest overlap among chapters on dealing with key events, characters, or themes. The intention has been to strike a suitable balance in preserving the scholarly autonomy of each author and chapter while guaranteeing a degree of cohesion to the volume as a whole which aims to improve on what we can find in comparable collective works, however excellent their scholarly quality.

After my proposal for the book was approved by Wiley Blackwell in late 2008, I started inviting contributors from different backgrounds, and in the years 2011 and 2014, respectively, I asked Roberto Tottoli and Babak Rahimi to collaborate in the editorship. I am grateful that they accepted and also joined the task of inviting contributors, winning over to the project a pool of authors whose chapters play a particularly critical role in the balance of the entire volume, most notably with regard to the highly contentious fields dealing with early Islam and early modernity. In the distribution of preliminary editorial work, Roberto took care in particular of Parts I and II, Babak of Parts V and VI, and I dedicated myself to Parts III and VII, while Babak and I collaborated on Part IV. On the latest stage of work, which started around 18 months ago after Roberto Tottoli had collated and ordered the individual chapter drafts, I took over the entire manuscript anew and submitted it to substantial, yet sustainable revisions.

It goes without saying that without Roberto’s and Babak’s contributions to the editing work, this volume would have never seen the light. Qualitatively, the editorship of this volume is theirs as much as it is mine, while I tried to preserve and nurture, through several ups and downs, a sense of continuity, purpose, and standard from those increasingly remote beginnings of the project. This endeavor also entailed keeping fidelity to the project as originally discussed with the publisher and further channeled by four anonymous reviewers, to all of whom I owe thanks. In the final phase I particularly benefited from an intensive six‐month collaboration with M. Fariduddin Attar and Naznin Patel at McGill University, where we all received the graceful and constant support of Professor Daniel Cere, Director of the School of Religious Studies. Farid’s and Naznin’s sharp acumen in reading and commenting on all chapters helped me in particular with the work of conceptual and architectural homogenization of the volume. Last and really not least, I have immensely benefited from the continual advice of the leading comparative historical sociologist and social theorist Johann P. Arnason, whose co‐authorship of the Introduction only partly reflects his essential contribution to shaping the volume.