Popular Preaching and Religious Authority in the Medieval Islamic Near East (Publications on the Near East, University of Washington)

"Islamic popular preachers and storytellers had enormous influence in defining common religious knowledge and faith in the medieval Near East. Jonathan Berkey's book illuminates the popular culture of religious storytelling. It draws on chronicles, biographical dictionaries, sermons, and tales, but especially on a number of medieval treatises critical of popular preachers, and also on a vigorous defense of them that emerged in fourteenth-century Egyptian Sufi circles."--BOOK JACKET.