Aliya A Ali explores how kinship and marriage alliances shaped political power and governance in the early Islamic city of Kūfa.
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…
From Iraq to Libya, Louise Kettles asks whether the UK has learned to learn from its past mistakes in Middle-Eastern military interventions.
An account of how bureaucratic procedures created the space for political conflict and slander in nineteenth-century Ottoman Bulgaria and what can we learn from studying them. Why would a district head administrator arrest mules, or someone slander a governor with…
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…