When Sabine Schmidtke and Hassan Ansari, an Iranian national,
met more than a decade ago in Tehran, Ansari was a student of the
traditional religious system in Qum and Tehran (the “Hawza”).
Ansari had read Schmidtke’s doctoral thesis The
Theology...
In the 1991 film Not Without My Daughter, Sally Field
plays an American woman who has a daughter with her Iranian-born
husband. When the family visits Iran, Field’s character learns that
the husband plans to stay in Iran with their daughter. To...
The Qurʾān defines itself as the last, perfect link in a chain
of progressive divine revelations. This determines the ambivalent
attitude of the Qurʾān and the Muslim tradition towards the two
earlier monotheistic religions: Judaism and Christianity...
In these turbulent times in the Middle East, I have found myself
working on the rise and fall of a late antique Jewish kingdom along
the Red Sea in the Arabian peninsula. Friends and colleagues alike
have reacted with amazement and disbelief when I...
Karl Marx linked the structure of production to the formation of
institutions. According to Marx, religion is like any other social
institution in that it is dependent upon the economic realities of
a given society, i.e., it is an outcome of its...
It has been nearly sixty years that I have been engaged in an
active scholarly life. My first article came out fifty-eight years
ago, and there are still now two or three studies in the process of
being printed or ready to appear on the Internet. In...
Jihadism today has a strong transnational and anti-Western
character, but this was not always the case. The first jihadists
were revolutionaries who fought in their home countries against
their respective governments from the 1940s onward. Only in...
In 2004, a Member of the Classics section of the School of
Historical Studies I was chatting with told me that some badly
burnt papyri dating from the sixth century had been found in a
church during excavations at Petra in Jordan. Modern
technology...
From the very beginning of its existence, the Muslim world
practiced and developed an elaborate legal system meant to control
and to judge all aspects of life . . . This system, known as
sharia, was based on the Qurʾān, an immutable divine...
