Aliya A Ali explores how kinship and marriage alliances shaped political power and governance in the early Islamic city of Kūfa.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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’ 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…
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…
From recycling to creating huge anthologies, Konrad HIrschler looks at some innovative ways that book lovers created their medieval Arabic manuscripts.
Laurence Broers writes on the 30-year Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict: one of the most embittered territorial disputes in the world.