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A Q&A with the editors of Refocus: The Films of Jane Campion
Read moreby Alexia L. Bowler and Adele Jones Refocus: The Films of Jane Campion (2023) is the first collection of scholarly […]

How to Get Banned from Teaching the Quran: Medieval Cairo Edition
by Shuaib Ally, McGill University Around the turn of the 15th century in Cairo, a hadith scholar named Salah al-Din al-Aqfahsi heard Salah al-Din al-Kalai, a scholar associated with the Sufi Shadhili order, teaching the Quran. Part of his teaching…

Situating the crusades in Syrian history: a Q&A with James Wilson
Tell us a bit about your book My book is about the situation in Syria before, during and after the first crusaders arrived in the near east. The crusader armies arrived in Syria in 1097 and immediately began interacting with…

Emotion, Mission, Architecture: Building Hospitals in Persia and British India, 1865-1914
by Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi How did patients feel when visiting mission hospitals built by British missionaries in Asia and Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? I am preoccupied with this question in my book, Emotion, Mission, Architecture:…

Writing about the People of Iraq
by Catherine Cobham and Fabio Caiani 23 March 2023 marked the twentieth anniversary of the attack on Iraq. Predictably, western mainstream media made little or no reference to contemporary Iraqi culture. Recently, however, there has been a growing interest in…

The Egyptian Social Contract – Q&A With The Author
by Relli Shechter Tell us a bit about your book The Egyptian Social Contract discusses the long-term history of the social contract in Egypt since partial independence from the British (1922) and until the Arab Uprising (2011). It focuses on…

Writing from the margins: Bosnian Hajjis’ understanding of the world
by Dženita Karić As I was doing research on the Hajj discourses in Bosnia from the 16th to the 21st century, I encountered a range of texts, published and unpublished, in Bosnian, Arabic and Ottoman Turkish languages. Some of the…

Folk Songs as Communication, Resistance, Lament, and Entertainment Among Women in Northeastern Afghanistan
By Wolayat Tabasum Niroo In the northeastern provinces of Afghanistan, talented women sing folk songs to entertain each other in female-only gatherings on happy occasions. The songs are accompanied by a diara or daff, a colorful frame drum made of…

An Interview with Warwick Ball, author of The Eurasian Steppe
In this interview, author and archaeologist Warwick Ball discusses his travels and research that led to his new book, The Eurasian Steppe. Can you tell us a bit about The Eurasian Steppe? The book started life many years ago as…

Scythian Gold: An Extract from The Eurasian Steppe by Warwick Ball
In this exclusive extract from chapter 6 of The Eurasian Steppe, author and archaeologist Warwick Ball explores the material culture of the nomadic Scythians, a cultural group that flourished in the Eurasian Steppe in the first millennium BC. What has…