The Institute Letter Spring 2017

Few twentieth-century historians deserve a full-scale biography more than Ernst Kantorowicz (1895–1963) on the basis both of “work” and “life.” More than fifty years after his death Kantorowicz remains one of the most influential of all medieval...

Emotions penetrate every aspect of our lives. Interwoven with memory, attention, cognition, and decision-making, they determine our interpersonal relations, our private life, the public sphere, and religious worship. Emotions are the background of...

Reducing the intellectually rich and diverse Islamic literary heritage to a bare minimum of what is seen as allegedly authentic is a strategy that is characteristic of Wahhabism, Salafism, and jihadism and their respective proponents. Whatever goes...

As Alastair Hamilton stated in 2008 in The Forbidden Fruit: The Koran in Early Modern Europe, “few books were as feared and coveted, as abhorred and desired, as the Qurʾān in early modern Europe.” Religious polemics, trading activities, and...

Such an unanticipated change in government in the United States for all its undoubted strength cannot, of course, alter overnight the entire course of international relations. The overwhelming fact is that the substance of change must answer the...

Some of the ideals of the far left are ideals that many people still cherish—the end of exploitation, racial and ethnic equality, the emancipation of women, national self-determination, etc. Believing that workers should be paid more or that...

We are a nation shaped by immigrants, as the Statue of Liberty reminds us, but now, horrifyingly, immigrants are increasingly subjected to prejudice for both their ethnic identity and their religion. Older and equally repellent anti-Semitism and...

In November, out of the blue, I received a letter from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Nothing about the envelope suggested that the letter inside would be important. It was an ordinary white office envelope with Institute for...

One rarely finds [a eunuch] who has, like him, an open forehead, a well-made nose, large, clear eyes, a small mouth, rosy lips, dazzlingly white teeth, a neck of exact proportion without wrinkles, handsome arms and legs, all the rest of his body...