Another Look at Congolese History: Arabic and Swahili Documents in the Belgian Archives (Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer, 2020), edited by Xavier Luffin, unlocks an unprecedented journey through the tapestry of Congo's past in Central Africa and the Indian Ocean world. This meticulously compiled collection unveils a trove of Arabic and Swahili archi ... Show More
Aug 20
David Commins, "Saudi Arabia: A Modern History" (Yale UP, 2025)
A major new history of Saudi Arabia, from its eighteenth-century origins to the present day Saudi Arabia is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, a major player on the international stage and the site of Islam’s two holiest cities. It is also one of the world’s only absol ... Show More
29m 8s
Aug 16
Adriana Carranca, "Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims" (Columbia UP, 2024)
US-born Protestant evangelicalism has gone global to an extent of which many of us might be unaware. Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims (Columbia Global Reports, 2024) tells the story of Americans’ colossal mobilization to proclaim Christianity ... Show More
55m 37s
Dec 2023
Xavier Luffin, "Another Look at Congolese History: Arabic and Swahili Documents in the Belgian Archives" (Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer, 2020)
Another Look at Congolese History: Arabic and Swahili Documents in the Belgian Archives (Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer, 2020), edited by Xavier Luffin, unlocks an unprecedented journey through the tapestry of Congo's past in Central Africa and the Indian Ocean world. T ... Show More
1h 9m
Dec 2023
Nur Sobers-Khan et al., "Beyond Colonial Rupture: Print Culture and the Emergence of Muslim Modernity in Nineteenth-Century South Asia" (2023)
Scholarly discussions on Islam in print have focused predominantly on the role of Urdu in the development of North Indian Muslim publics (Dubrow, 2018; Robb, 2020), ʿulama and Islamic jurisprudence (Tareen, 2020) and relations between Islam and colonial modernity (Robinson, 2008; ... Show More
39m 21s
Nov 2023
Sayan Dey, "Performing Memories and Weaving Archives: Creolized Cultures across the Indian Ocean" (Anthem Press, 2023)
Usually, discourses on the planetary evolution and the movements of slaves remain restricted within the narratives and scholarships of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and hardly engage with the evolution, movements, and shifts about the Indian Ocean World (IOW) slave trade. But mu ... Show More
45m 29s
Oct 2023
James White, "Persian and Arabic Literary Communities in the Seventeenth Century: Migrant Poets between Arabia, Iran and India" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
A wealth of scholarship has highlighted how commercial, political and religious networks expanded across the Arabian Sea during the seventeenth century, as merchants from South Asia traded goods in the ports of Yemen, noblemen from Safavid Iran established themselves in the court ... Show More
1h 9m
Jun 2020
Lara Harb, "Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
Lara Harb’s Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a delightful and formidable study on the details and development of poetics and aesthetics in medieval Arabic literature. The central theme of this splendid book ... Show More
1h 4m
Jul 20
M’hamed Oualdi, "A Slave between Empires: A Transimperial History of North Africa" (Columbia UP, 2020)
In light of the profound physical and mental traumas of colonization endured by North Africans, historians of recent decades have primarily concentrated their studies of North Africa on colonial violence, domination, and shock. The choice is an understandable one. But in his new ... Show More
41m 41s
Jul 2021
Ryan J. Lynch, "Arab Conquests and Early Islamic Historiography: The Futuh Al-Buldan of Al-Baladhuri" (I. B. Tauris, 2021)
Of the available sources for Islamic history published before the 9th century of the Christian Era, few are of greater importance than Kitab Futuh al-Buldan (The Book of the Conquest of Lands), by al-Baladhuri, a ninth-century administrator at the Abbasid court. The text has been ... Show More
1h 13m
May 2014
Marwa Elshakry, “Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
The work of Charles Darwin, together with the writing of associated scholars of society and its organs and organisms, had a particularly global reach in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Marwa Elshakry‘s new book offers a fascinating window into the ways that thi ... Show More
59m 49s
Jul 2021
Ryan J. Lynch, "Arab Conquests and Early Islamic Historiography: The Futuh Al-Buldan of Al-Baladhuri" (I. B. Tauris, 2021)
Of the available sources for Islamic history published before the 9th century of the Christian Era, few are of greater importance than Kitab Futuh al-Buldan (The Book of the Conquest of Lands), by al-Baladhuri, a ninth-century administrator at the Abbasid court. The text has been ... Show More
1h 13m