Islamic Studies

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...

To outsiders, the contentiousness, divisiveness, and downright un-neighborliness evident in the small Spanish town of Deza by the autumn of 1607 might well have seemed a tempest in a teapot. Those living in the newer Upper Neighborhood had been...

In this Friends Talk held at the Institute on October 13, 2017, Sabine Schmidtke, Professor in the School of Historical Studies, explores the world heritage of Islamic literature and the efforts to salvage the manuscripts of the Zaydi community in...

In the preface to her last book, The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran,1 the late IAS Professor Patricia Crone (1945–2015) relates when and how she became interested in Iranian Studies. It was early on during her time at Oxford that her...

This interview with Sabine Schmidtke, Professor in the School of Historical Studies, was conducted by Haytham Samir and Ahmad Shaker and originally published in Arabic as “al-Dirāsāt al-islāmiyya fī Princeton,” Markaz Namāʾ li-l-Buḥūth wa-l-Dirāsāt...

Reducing the intellectually rich and diverse Islamic literary heritage to a bare minimum of what is seen as allegedly authentic is a strategy that is characteristic of Wahhabism, Salafism, and jihadism and their respective proponents. Whatever goes...

As Alastair Hamilton stated in 2008 in The Forbidden Fruit: The Koran in Early Modern Europe, “few books were as feared and coveted, as abhorred and desired, as the Qurʾān in early modern Europe.” Religious polemics, trading activities, and...

In this video, Columba Stewart, George William Cottrell, Jr. Member (2016–17) in the School of Historical Studies, a Benedictine monk, and Executive Director of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, explains how a Benedictine monastery in Minnesota...

Glen Bowersock, Professor Emeritus in the School of Historical Studies, has authored The Crucible of Islam (Harvard University Press, 2017), which seeks to illuminate the most obscure and yet most dynamic period in the history of Islam—from the mid...

Sabine Schmidtke, Professor in the School of Historical Studies, has authored Al-Sāhib Ibn ʿAbbād Promoter of Rational Theology (Brill, 2016), which contains critical editions of the extant parts of two hitherto unknown theological works by the Būyi...