In the Islamic tradition, Jesus is revered as a prophet to the Israelites, not as divine himself. The Qur’an selectively adopts Christian narrative lore about Jesus and Mary, omitting key gospel narratives like the passion. Jesus’s miraculous conception is acknowledged, paralleling Christian tradition without implying divinity, while his death on the cross is recast as a divine deliverance of Jesus from his enemies. The post-Qur’anic tradition portrays Jesus as a world-renouncing ascetic and stresses his humanity and subordination to God.

This chapter examines the social and legal position of Jews in the medieval Muslim world as determined by readings of the Qur'an and Hadith.

The introduction briefly surveys Alexander’s historical career before going on to describe the development of his legend in the various Greek and Latin versions of the Alexander Romance, which continued to be rewritten (as the Historia de Proeliis) to the end of the Middle Ages. It also provides the context for the contributions surveying the Jewish, Persian, Arabic, Spanish, Slavic, French and German receptions of Alexander in literature, as well as his impact as a political role model in the Crusades, Muslim expansion and the world-dominating ambitions of early modern Europe. It concludes with a glance at the contested figure of Alexander and his homeland of Macedonia, in the present-day Balkans.

In the Islamic Ecumene shared religious principles intertwined with other foundational beliefs, which harkened back to the Turkic-Mongol tradition of the Islamic empires, providing cultural unity. The Islamic World constituted an international society despite the absence of a clear hegemonic power. Institutions, laws, and collective beliefs embodied in everyday practices, rituals, and even the design of buildings and cities provided unity in a heterogeneous and diverse Islamic ecumene.

When discussing violence in the Islamic milieu, the word jihad inevitably comes to mind, especially in the contemporary world. Jihad is almost invariably translated as “armed combat” or “fighting” in both academic and non-academic circles; and even as “terrorism” in politically-charged contexts. Such a monovalent understanding of jihad emerges primarily through consultation of the juridical literature and official histories that were produced after the eighth century of the Common Era and that are unduly privileged in academic discussions of this subject.

Jihad however emerges as a much more complex term when a broader range of primary Arabic sources are consulted. Such sources include the Qur’an and Qur’an commentaries (tafsir), collections of hadith, which refer to the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, as well as legal works.The central premise of this essay is that a closer study of relevant Qur’anic verses and a comparison of early and late extra-Qur’anic sources drawn from the above genres allows one to chart both the constancies and shifts in the spectrum of meanings assigned to the term jihad.This in turn allows us to better understand how changing socio-political circumstances affected the way Muslim scholars of different stripes conceived of the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate violence over time.