Working with Collections
Fragments of letters on paper, potsherds, shards of stone. Documents piled in stacks, heaps, dumps. Inserted into a story, cited, copied, forged. Words passed from mouth to mouth, then crafted as booklets, scrolls, rolls, books. Bits of words compressed into…
Religious extremism is not limited to Islam or to the present.
By Said Reza Huseini This blog from our Emco member Reza Huseini, also appeared on the Leiden Islam Blog The latest wave of Islam-inspired violence in Europe, makes Islamic extremism seem like a seasonal flu without a cure. Certainly, extremism is a…
The Idea and Practice of Justice represented in Bactrian Documents
By Said Reza Huseini This text first appeared in AIS Newsletter | Volume 41, Number 2 | October 2020 What do we know about the idea and practice of justice in Bactria in late antiquity? The short answer is: not…
Fighting for wealth, power and prestige: Elites in the Early Muslim Caliphate
By Alon Dar Patricians, upper stratum, ruling class, notables, and elite. These are only some of the terms that we come across when reading about the upper classes in the Medieval Caliphate. But does it make sense to use this…
Cooperating on Contesting Empires
On September 17 and 18, 2020 we as EMCO Team organized our first online conference: Contesting Empires: Sogdiana, Bactria and Gandhara between the Sasanian empire, the Tang dynasty and the Muslim Caliphate (ca. 600-1000 CE). In preparing for the event we…
Playing the CyberSultan: Videogames and the Islamic Empire
I have been thinking a lot about representation of the early Islamic empires lately, and this has led me down a series of interesting rabbit holes that have distracted me from my research, but have enriched what I am doing….