Kaveh Hemmat is Assistant Professor of History, Professional Faculty, in the Department of History, Philosophy, and Theology at Benedictine University. His research focuses on perceptions and representations of East Asia in premodern Islamicate culture.The great Persian epic known as the Kushnam
By Reyhan Durmaz, author of Stories between Christianity and Islam: Saints, Memory, and Cultural Exchange in Late Antiquity and BeyondWe all tell stories to create meaning. A far-gone event in a distant time and place often works as a lens through which we remember the past, interpret the presen
By Mark Levine, author of We’ll Play Till We Die and Heavy Metal IslamThe video, posted anonymously on Facebook, had only 300 views when I first saw it. The singer wasn’t named, and in fact wasn’t even in the video — the camera stayed steady on the crowd. The words supplied their own visuals: “A
By Brian Catlos, co-author of The Sea in the Middle: The Mediterranean World, 650–1650If Medieval Studies, as some say, has a “whiteness problem,” Mediterranean Studies does not. Recentering the narrative of the pre-Modern West on the region of the sea and the lands that surround it better refle
From metal and hip hop, to emo in Baghdad, mahraganat in Egypt, techno in Beirut, listen to the revolutionary music of the Middle East with this playlist curated by author Mark LeVine.
A pioneering work of Ottoman Turkish literature, Prisoner of the Infidels brings the seventeenth-century memoir of Osman Agha of Timişoara—slave, adventurer, and diplomat—into English for the first time. The sweeping story of Osman’s life begins upon his capture and subsequent enslavement during the
