Jewish-Muslim Intellectual History Entangled: Textual
Materials from the Firkovitch Collection, Saint Petersburg,
edited by Camilla Adang, Bruno Chiesa, Omar Hamdan, Wilferd Madelung,
Sabine Schmidtke, and Jan Thiele,
has been published by the...
The conversion of Hagia Sophia, then the greatest church of
Christianity, into a mosque in 1453 by Mehmet the Conqueror was not
a historical paradox. Over the centuries, places of worship often
passed from one religious community to another, hosting...
On the occasion of the spring meeting of the IAS Board of
Trustees in May 2019, Sabine
Schmidtke, Professor in the School of Historical Studies,
speaks on the vast, global, and indispensable Islamic manuscript
tradition, a world heritage that is...
Who wrote the Torah? In light of more than two hundred years of
scholarship and of the ongoing disputes on that question,[1] the most
precise answer to this question still is: We don’t know. The
tradition claims it was Moses, but the Torah itself...
Western—European and North American—historiography generally
portrays the years between the death of Louis XIV in 1715 and the
Congress of Vienna in 1815 as having given birth to the modern
world—a republican world founded on rational discourse and...
In his award-winning novel Life of Pi, published in 2001, the
French-Canadian writer Yann Martel relates the fantastic adventure
of a boy from India who survives a shipwreck and spends 227 days in
the Pacific Ocean, sharing a lifeboat with a Bengal...
Most scholarship on Ottoman art takes the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries as their focus, the glorious periods of the
building of the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, the well-known domed
mosques of the architect Sinan, the Iznik pottery, the
floral...
Sabine Schmidtke, Professor in
the School of Historical Studies, and Hassan Ansari, Member in the
School, have coauthored Studies in Medieval Islamic Intellectual
Traditions (Lockwood Press, 2017), which focuses on aspects of
Islamic thought in Iran...
As recent events have demonstrated, one of the most significant
phenomena of the Arab World’s modern history is the persistence and
resilience of undemocratic government. Syria has enjoyed the
dubious distinction of leadership in this respect, its...
Monotheism constitutes one of the central doctrines of
Islam. The notion is again and again voiced in the Qurʾān,
thus for example in sūra 112 (entitled “Sincere Religion”)
which, in the translation of Arthur Arberry, reads “Say: ‘He is
God, One (ah...
