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Originality and Artistic Impulse: From a Medieval Scottish Friar to Malevich’s Black Square
Read more: Originality and Artistic Impulse: From a Medieval Scottish Friar to Malevich’s Black SquareIs there any such thing as a new idea? Bryony Coombs discusses similarities in artistic expression, centuries apart.
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…
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…
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…
Introducing The Great Seljuk Empire
The collapse of the Ottoman empire in the wake of the First World War a century ago did not merely redraw the political map of the Middle East in its modern form – itself so hotly contested today by forces…