Essays

A cooperation between the American University in Cairo (AUC) and five academic institutions, including IAS, has seen a rare archive documenting the al-Khanji family's cultural impact on early twentieth-century Cairo transferred to AUC. The archive contains particularly valuable material for Islamic manuscript studies and provenance history.

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...

In light of more than two hundred years of scholarship, the most precise answer to this question still is: We don’t know. The tradition claims it was Moses, but the Torah itself says otherwise.

The emergence of Judaism is closely intertwined with the emergence of Samaritanism. Both are heirs of ancient Israelite traditions, and the predecessors of both shared the same religious and literary culture. 

Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan is the highly intriguing account of a boy who grows up on a remote island, alone and without contact to human civilization, and finds God solely through intellectual endeavor and spiritual exercise.

Warlord or national hero?

After seizing power on his own behalf in December 1949, Army Colonel Adib al-Shishakli effectively ruled Syria for much of the next five years, during which he wrought long-term changes in Syria’s political culture and initiated a host of policies and practices subsequently adopted by Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser, Syria’s Hafez al-Assad, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and other authoritarian rulers.

Produced by the communities who were at the heart of the events, Syriac sources compel us to reconsider what “conquests” means. Modern historians talk about the Sasanian and then Arab-Muslim conquests, but Syriac sources never use the word or concept.

From the outset, Professor Patricia Crone was intrigued by what the Iranian scholar ʿAbd al-Ḥusayn Zarrīnkūb has labeled the “two centuries of silence” in Iranian history. 

Ceremonial occasions, in that age as in our own, articulated ideological aims and made social statements. They were about wielding power and asserting authority, but they were also moments of uncertainty and negotiation.

An interview with Sabine Schmidtke, Professor in the School of Historical Studies, conducted by Haytham Samir and Ahmad Shaker and originally published in Arabic as “al-Dirāsāt al-islāmiyya fī Princeton.”

The Chief Harem Eunuch’s influence extended beyond palace politics and the holy cities. . . His activities reinforced the Ottoman sultan's religious and political authority, contributing to the promotion of Sunni Islam in general and the Hanafi legal rite in particular.

Newly discovered manuscripts reveal the arduous, and often ill-fated, efforts by scholars, typographers, and traders to print the Qurʾān.

The Yemeni manuscript collections constitute a unique treasure trove for large segments of the Islamic intellectual tradition—Sunni as well as Shii.

While traditionalist theologians considered any rational speculation over the dicta of the revealed sources to be impermissible…the issue took center stage among the rationalist theologians.

In March 1882, Iran’s newspaper readers encountered an unprecedented editorial appeal: “You, the learned of the country, who consider yourselves devoted to the progress of the country and the nation: why have you chosen to take on a seal of silence” Why did a state-sponsored newspaper like Ettela` suddenly see it as necessary to engage a readership, and why was this important?

Invented in the tenth century in Central Asia, maqāmas are collections of rhymed prose tales that recount the exploits of tricksters who travel throughout the major cities of the Muslim world and beyond. Over the course of nearly a millennium, authors composed hundreds or possibly even thousands of maqāma works and collections in Arabic in nearly every major region of the Muslim world.

The movement of religious modernism focuses on women with regard to the necessary changes in the legal system, an issue that must be revealed in the sources of Islamic thought and tradition in order to come to a modern interpretation in line with human rights.

There is also a very important mission for a Western audience, namely to show the intellectual richness of the Islamic world and make it available and not only to create awareness for this intellectual richness but also respect.

600 years, 25 languages, 8 alphabets

Why are so many languages endangered? And what needs to be done about it?

As many among us have realized the importance of past scholarship and the often strange characters of past scholars. This has led me and others to meditate on the ways in which former generations dealt with our field.

It is only inscriptions and archaeology that allow us occasionally to see the Near Easterners directly before they became Muslims.

To what extent did Islamic freethinking contribute to the development of Western Radicalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?