Islamic Studies

A cooperation between the American University in Cairo (AUC) and five academic institutions, including the Institute for Advanced Study, has seen a rare archive documenting the al-Khanji family's cultural impact on early twentieth-century Cairo transferred to AUC. The unique collection, consisting of thousands of documents, reveals the family's significant role in the trade and publishing of manuscripts, offering unprecedented insights into the intellectual networks of the time.

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...