Reinterpreting the history of Scotland's northern islands.
by Elisabeth Özdalga The core of her new book Pulpit, Mosque and Nation, author Elisabeth Özdalga explores five key aspects of Turkey’s Friday preaching. 1. A Secular State Housing Thousands of Mosques and Pulpits Every Friday, millions of Muslims all…
by Ramon Harvey Ramon Harvey introduces his approach to Islamic theology in his new book Transcendent God, Rational World: A Māturīdī Theology. Thinking today has become dizzying. Attention spans are diminished. No sooner does someone have an idea, but it…
By Ronit Lentin When the announcement of the candidacy of Israeli lawmaker and retired general Efraim ‘Effi’ Eitam as director of the Jerusalem Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial was made in November 2020, many Israeli leftists and intellectuals protested, claiming it…
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…
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 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…
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…