Popular Preaching and Religious Authority in the Medieval Islamic Near EastIslamic popular preachers and storytellers had enormous influence in defining common religious knowledge and faith in the medieval Near East. Jonathan Berkeys 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 a vigorous defense of them which emerged in fourteenth century Egyptian