Popular Preaching and Religious Authority in the Medieval Islamic Near East [Hardcover]

This volume examines the popular culture of religious storytelling in the medieval Islamic Near East. The author draws on chronicles, biographical dictionaries, sermons and tales, but, especially, on a number of medieval treatises critical of popular preachers, as well as a vigorous defence of them which emerged in 14th-century Egyptian Sufi circles. This book explores a number of debates in cultural and social history, such as the reality of the categories of high and low culture and the nature of the relationship between them. It also addresses concerns of a more specifically Islamic nature, such as the medieval Muslim conception of the epistemological status of received religious knowledge.This volume examines the popular culture of religious storytelling in the medieval Islamic Near East.