Near Eastern Studies

Brill Academic Publishers has published The Yemeni Manuscript Tradition (2015), edited by Sabine Schmidtke, Professor in the School of Historical Studies, David Hollenberg of the University of Oregon, and Christoph Rauch of Staatsbibliothek zu...

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...

Sabine Schmidtke, Professor in the School of Historical Studies, and Gudrun Krämer have edited Speaking for Islam: Religious Authorities in Muslim Societies (Brill Academic Publishers, 2014). The present volume–grown out of an international...

The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism (Cambridge University Press, 2012) by Patricia Crone, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the School of Historical Studies, has received numerous major awards. The book...

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...