Near Eastern Studies

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...

Western Biblical scholarship has existed as a historical enterprise independent from church and synagogue as far back as the eighteenth century. Western study of the Qurʾān, however, has more recent roots, with interest taking hold in the early...

Is the Qurʾān an exclusively Islamic text? In this talk, Angelika Neuwirth, Member (2009) in the School of Historical Studies, contends that it is both Islamic and late antique. Before the Qurʾān was recognized as Muslim scripture it was...

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...

To what extent did Islamic freethinking contribute to the development of Western Radicalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Or how far were Islamic and European freethinking simply parallel developments on the basis of similar heritages...

In the 1660s and onward, the Radical Enlightenment pushed for full freedom of thought, religious freedom, and personal liberty together with democracy and the principle of equality. In this public lecture, Jonathan Israel, Andrew W. Mellon Professor...

Arabia seems to have been a much more developed place than most Islamicists (myself included) had ever suspected—not just in the north and south, but also in the middle. We are beginning to get a much more nuanced sense of the place, and again it is...