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Q&A with the author of Performing Worlds at the Baroque Court of Christine of France
Read more: Q&A with the author of Performing Worlds at the Baroque Court of Christine of FranceThis interview explores how Christine of France used Baroque court spectacles to shape political authority, global imagination, and cultures of consumption.
Tracing the life and work of Rashid al-Din
By Stefan Kamola, author of Making Mongol History: Rashid al-Din and the Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh Early in 1839, Professor of Linguistics Duncan Forbes arrived in Inverness with Mir Afzal Ali, representative of the Maharaja of Satara. They had come to visit…
How Information Warfare Shaped the Arab Spring
An interview with Nathaniel Greenberg – author of How Information Warfare Shaped the Arab Spring: The Politics of Narrative in Tunisia and Egypt – first featured on the Jadaliyya website. Read the original interview Jadaliyya (J): What made you write…
An interview with Taef El-Azhari, author of ‘Queens, Eunuchs and Concubines in Islamic History, 661–1257’
Tell us a bit about your book Queens, Eunuchs and Concubines in Islamic History, 661–1257 is the first comprehensive study of sexual politics in medieval Islamic history. While there are several books written on the Ottomans and Safavids, we do…
Finding a Language of My Own – Maya Issam Kesrouany on the Making of Modern Egyptian Literature
Much like the translators in my book (Prophetic Translation: The Making of Modern Egyptian Literature), I have also found myself speaking in languages that felt simultaneously very familiar and extremely alien. When I was in Cairo in 2006, I recognized…
Why do we call Middle Eastern dance “belly dance”?
English speakers use the term “belly dance” to describe solo, improvised dances from the Middle East and North Africa that feature intricate movements of the shoulders, chest, and hips. Where Did the Name “Belly Dance” Come From? It isn’t a…
The Art of Kharita Dispatching in the Late 19th Century Afghanistan
Kharita dispatching On 2 Ramadan 1316 AH/ 15 January 1899, Amir Abdul Rahman Khan of Afghanistan (r. 1880–1901), sent an official letter, categorised as murāsala, to Lord George Nathaniel Curzon, Viceroy of India (in office, 1898–1911). Eventually, the ceremonially-illuminated letter…
Five Reasons why the Middle East Matters for World Christianity
Events such as the Arab Spring and the civil war in Syria have brought Middle Eastern Christians into the public eye in Europe and North America. Yet the academic field of World Christianity still gives little attention to the Middle…
The “Afghan Genizah”: A New Source for the History of Pre-Mongol Bāmiyān
How did Abū Naṣr Yehuda, a Jewish landowner from 11th-century Bāmiyān, conduct his business affairs with his Muslim neighbors? What was the role of Shujāʿ al-Dīn Muḥammad in the administration of Bāmiyān prior to its destruction by Genghis Khan in…
7 things you may not know about the history of Muslims in Central Asia
By Galina M. Yemelianova 1) There are both narrow and broad notions of Central Asia. The narrow one relates to the 5 Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan, which until 1991 were part of the Soviet…