by Nadje Al-Ali & Kathryn Spellman Poots It has been over 10 years that we have seen uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, although protests and uprisings predate the recent wave that started in Tunisia in December 2010.…
by Ahmet Erdi Öztürk Religion and belief are two of humanity’s oldest identity codes. Identity is intertwined with religion and, with or without it, is an indicator of humanity’s ego, strengths and weaknesses. If we examine it through this lens,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
When we first thought about translating The Sorrowful Muslim’s Guide by Hussein Ahmad Amin, it was not just because the book had generated so much heated discussion locally as well as regionally in the Arab world. Nor that the book is…