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Forging Late Roman Italy
Read more: Forging Late Roman Italyby Jeroen Wijnendaele (This text incorporates my introduction for the book launch of Late Roman Italy at Hamburg’s RomanIslam centre […]
Palestinian lives matter
By Ronit Lentin When the announcement of the candidacy of Israeli lawmaker and retired general Efraim ‘Effi’ Eitam as director of the Jerusalem Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial was made in November 2020, many Israeli leftists and intellectuals protested, claiming it…
Opium in Afghanistan, a glimpse from the past
By Sara Peterson In recent years, the cultivation of opium poppies in Afghanistan has become a news item, with reports from the United Nations and the United States Government documenting record highs (no pun intended) in opium production. Now we…
The Future of the Energy Transition for Middle East Gulf Economies Post Pandemic
By Jamil Hijazi, Jessica Obeid and Michel-Ange Medlej Jamil Hijazi and co-authors (Jessica Obeid and Michael-Ange Medlej) navigate the future of the Energy Transition in the Middle East Gulf Economies Post COVID-19 ahead of their upcoming article in the Global…
Three Ways to Counter a Propaganda Narrative (and How Iraqi Writers under Saddam Hussein Did it)
When I first started my research on propaganda and culture in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, the study of propaganda was considered rather dated, or was relegated to the study of European fascism, Stalinism or dictatorships in post-colonial nation states. Even…
George Strachan of the Mearns: A Historian’s Biography
Biography is a dangerous genre for any historian. Inevitably it has to be set in the history of the subject’s time and place, but it is driven by the obsession engendered in the writer by the subject. This has been…
Five Essentials of Muslim Preaching
To celebrate the release of Muslim Preaching in the Middle East and Beyond: Historical and Contemporary Case Studies, editors Simon Stjernholm and Elisabeth Özdalga take us through five essential things you should know about Muslim preaching. 1. Synchronised sermons When…
Why has the EU been so obsessed with the Israeli–Arab conflict?
The past years have seen many commemorations in the Israeli–Arab conflict: 100 years since the Balfour Declaration (2017), seventy years since Israel was created (2018), fifty years since the 1967 war (2017), thirty years since the first intifada (2017), and…
Introducing Edinburgh Studies in Islamic Scripture and Theology
Series Editor Ramon Harvey introduces our latest Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies series, Edinburgh Studies in Islamic Scripture and Theology. He deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical…
My First Day in Camp with the Piruzai – Afghanistan, 1971
By Nancy Lindisfarne-Tapper In 1971 and 1972 Richard Tapper and I lived with Afghan villagers for nearly a year. The Piruzai, some 200 families, lived in two small settlements near the town of Sar-e Pol in northern Afghanistan. They were…