Dossier

Medieval Islam

What did the medieval world look like outside of Christian Europe? This dossier explores the world of medieval Islam, how medieval people experienced and thought about the divine, their religion and sacred texts.

Blogs

Burn after Reading: Epistolary Heresy in Tenth-Century Baghdad

A police raid, a cache of letters, an inquisition, an execution. Sometimes you have to be careful what you write.

Edmund Hayes • 24-10-2025

Echoes of the Divine: Auditory Perception in Sufi Mysticism

How does mysticism transform sensory perception into a gateway to the Divine?

Siavash Rafiee Rad • 24-01-2025

ʿAṭṭār, Khayyām & Ghazāli: Scholars of the Past, Influencers of Today?

In the whirlwind of modern life and the ceaseless march of technology, universities and prospective students grapple with the question: do classical works still resonate in our contemporary world?

Siavash Rafiee Rad • 07-06-2024

Arabian Monotheism before Islam: Some Reflections on the Pagans of the Qurʾan

The religious and philosophical landscape in Arabia before the advent of Islam remains, for the most part, uncharted territory. This post sheds light on how the new Islamic dispensation of the seventh century AD came to see the Arabian pagans and their worldview.

Ahab Bdaiwi • 23-06-2022

Cultural History · Art History · Literature

Rumi and the Hollywood Stars: The Source of Brad Pitt’s Tattoo

It is almost hard to find a celebrity without a tattoo, but why should the tattoo be from a Persian mystic poet from the thirteenth century? How should we look at such texts?

Asghar Seyed Gohrab • 25-01-2019

Literature

There was a Door to which I found no Key

The quatrains of Omar Khayyam, in Edward FitzGerald’s adaptation, have a special appeal worldwide. In this blog, the English adaptation of one of the most popular quatrains is compared to the original Persian. How has Khayyam’s worldview been translated?

Asghar Seyed Gohrab • 31-08-2018