Middle East

Scribal Habits in Near Eastern Manuscript Traditions, edited by Sabine Schmidtke, Professor in the School of Historical Studies, and George Kiraz past Member and current Research Associate in the School of Historical Studies, has been published by...

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...

Sabine Schmidtke, Professor in the School of Historical Studies, has edited Studying the Near and Middle East at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 1935–2018 (Gorgias Press, 2018). The volume traces the history of Near and Middle Eastern...

An arcane topic to most people, Syriac sources help shed a more complex light on the history of the Middle East from late antiquity to the Middle Ages. They reveal a non-imperial epoch and its rich contributions to the cultural and religious history...

Just before Thanksgiving last year, I sent an email to the Institute’s Director, Robbert Dijkgraaf, whom I had never met. Acknowledging that my missive was somewhat “out of the blue,” I explained that I had spent most of the previous eight years...

Although the maqāma is less familiar to Western readers than the fantastic tales of the Arabian Nights, which achieved their prominence as a result of Antoine Galland’s eighteenth-century French translation, the maqāma was long central to Arabic and...

In this public lecture, Richard Murphy draws on his experiences as U.S. Ambassador to Syria and Saudi Arabia and Assistant Secretary of State for the region to attempt a reply to this and other questions about the Middle East. What brought about the...

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...

“Freedom is the ultimate virtue of mankind”; “Democracy is the only political system of modern man and modern society”; “Therefore, Egypt must be committed to freedom and democracy.” These are the words of ‘Abbas Mahmud al-‘Aqqad in his book Hitlar...

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...