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Updating Roman Jakobson’s ‘Poetic Function’ with Vector Semantics
Read more: Updating Roman Jakobson’s ‘Poetic Function’ with Vector SemanticsKurzynski discusses how poetry extends beyond sound and rhythm and taps into a deeper network of meanings.
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…
Christians and Muslims: Friends or Foes?
Read on to explore the details behind writing the first and second edition of the fascinating study looking at the history of the relationship between Christians and Muslims – A History of Christian-Muslim Relations by Hugh Goddard. Twenty years ago…
Scottish Muslims: Unity and Belonging
Scottish Muslims’ lives are dressed up in tartan and play the music of Islam. The Scottish ‘Muslim community’ is made up of people of various ages, ethnicities and social classes. But what they have in common is that they identify…
How to Find Persians in Egypt: The Archaeology of Achaemenid Egypt
When I first proposed to write about the Persians in Egypt, in a seminar at the University of Michigan, my professor laughed. She laughed because it was a well-known fact among Egyptologists that there was little evidence for this period…