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Why I read Deleuze
Read more: Why I read DeleuzeFor Ronald Bogue, A Thousand Plateaus is Gilles Deleuze's finest piece of work. In this blog, he explains why it's one-of-a-kind.
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…
Interreligious Polemics as a Window into Early Modern Iran
If anyone decided to do a quick search for scholarship on interreligious polemics, especially of the Muslim-Christian kind, he or she will immediately notice a few patterns: Most of the major studies focus on the Classical period (that is, from…
Health Service Provision Challenges in 19th-century Afghanistan and Now
By Namatullah Kadrie The COVID-19 pandemic is only the latest of many public health crises that have struck Afghanistan—and that have made the country a site of international intervention by medical experts. Indeed, it was the fifth international cholera epidemic…
Remapping Persian Literary History, 1700-1900
Read the blog post to find out more about writing the newly published book Remapping Persian Literary History, 1700-1900 by Kevin L. Schwartz. Remembering Iran, Forgetting the Persianate There was a time – roughly from 1000 to 1850 – when…