The “Spanish influenza” pandemic that struck Egypt in fall 1918 resulted in the death of eleven out of every one thousand people. Despite the mass suffering caused by the pandemic, it has been largely ignored by historians. I describe how the Egyptian public health service was unprepared for a major health crisis because resources were red…[Read more]

The article offers a detailed analysis of the debates at the All-Russian Democratic Conference and in the Provisional Council of the Russian Republic (the Pre-Parliament), which followed the proclamation of the republic on September 1, 1917, and predated the Bolshevik-led insurgency on October 25. The two assemblies were supposed to help resolve…[Read more]

Are you tripping over your own feet, incapable of advancing even a single metre, when it comes to understanding the technicalities of the feet and metres of pre-modern Islamicate poetry? Then you should probably not consult Nevāʾī’s Meter of Meters, since you are better off with the works of a Wheeler Thackston or a Finn Thiesen… If, howe…[Read more]

This article focuses on historical and contemporary connotations of the Intermarium concept-Ukrainian and Polish academic and political thought on how to organize and govern the space between the Baltic and Black seas-employing the ideas of Józef Piłsudski, Józef Beck, Michał Czajkowski (Mykhailo Chaikovs’kyi), Mykhailo Drahomanov, members of the…[Read more]

This article examines the unpublished memoirs of Sevim Sertel O’Brien, a journalist and daughter of prominent journalists and intellectuals Sabiha and Zekeriya Sertel. The memoirs, written in English and told as bedtime stories to O’Brien’s Turkish-American children in the 1950s and 1960s, provide a unique lens on the early history of the Turkish…[Read more]

With the introduction of the horse-drawn tramway in 1871, the citizens of Istanbul were forced to reckon with a new type of public space—the crowded confines of the tramcar. This article focuses on the removal of a curtain that separated men and women on public transit in 1923, analyzing the discourses that shaped the decision and the way in w…[Read more]

پروین اعتصامی (۱۲۸۵ـ ۱۳۲۰)، شاعر نامدار معاصر، در شعرهایش از منابع متعددی بهره برده‌است؛ اما نکته­ جالب توجه این است که او در تمام این برداشت‌های ادبی، اشعار خود را کاملاً از آثار پیشین متمایز می‌کند. پروین عناصری را که از آثار دیگران وام گرفته ­است‌ هنرمندانه با عناصر شعر خود و سنت ادبی فارسی درمی‌آمیزد و آن را از آن خود می‌کند؛ به ­گ…[Read more]

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), importante escritor y disidente soviético, a través de su experiencia vital y de su producción literaria, no sólo describe y denuncia la barbarie totalitaria de los campos de concentración soviéticos, sino que, por encima de todo ello, testimonia cómo es posible no sucumbir ante la “putrefacción del alma y es…[Read more]

Parvin Iʿtisami (1907–1941), the first important twentieth-century woman poet of Iran, was well versed in classical Persian poetry. Her knowledge of English language and education at the American school for girls as well as her father’s translations from foreign literature contributed to her appreciation of modern ideas, including women’s rights…[Read more]

Purportedly in response to a request by his unnamed beloved one, the late 18th-century Ottoman poet Ḥasan-i Yāver wrote Poetry’s Artistry, a 441-verse mathnawī that offers some hands-on advice for trying one’s hand at poetry. As tashbīh, jinās, kināya, taḍādd, taḍmīn, ilmām, iltifāt, tardīd, ishtibāh, tawriya, īhām, takhmīs, tarkīb-band,…[Read more]

The chapter opens the “Meandering in Transition” collection. It presents contributors and outlines reasons why some of the Central and Eastern European states accomplished a decisive break with the Communist past and became members of European and transatlantic structures, while some opted for pseudo-transition and fostered hybrid political…[Read more]

Through offering an ethnography of a group of educated, middle-class women who “had been attending weekly Qur’an and classical poetry classes for years” (xii), the volume shows that poetry and prayer are companions in the cultural history of Iran. It attempts to answer the question, “What does this companionship mean for forms of religio…[Read more]

Building on the author’s PhD thesis on “the British cultural and imaginative engagements with Persia in the nineteenth century” (vi), the volume charts “the diversity of perceptions associated with Persia in Victorian literary culture” (2). It focuses on poetry as the medium through which to survey the Victorian conception of Persia. It consists…[Read more]

The Cairo Genizah is a repository of texts spanning more than a millennium of Jewish history, including thousands of Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts now held in collections around the world. Among these are fragments from at least 25 separate Qur’an manuscripts in Arabic script, all of which lack any traces of Hebrew writing. Their…[Read more]

Drawing on archival research, this article introduces several Russian poems by the Arabic mahjar poet and writer Mikhail Naimy (Mīkhāʿīl Nu’aymah) (1889-1988) for the first time to scholarship. By examining the influence of Russian literature on Naimy’s literary output, we shed light on the role of multilingualism in generating literary identit…[Read more]

This article compares three key texts in Daghestani Islamicate literature by Persian Azeri writer Bākīkhānūf (d. 1847), Lezgi polymath al-Alqadārī (d. 1910), and Qumyq (Turkic) biographer al-Durgilī (d. 1935), with a view to understanding how their authors conceptualized their role as chroniclers of times past. I draw in particular on Italia…[Read more]

The study focuses on the position of female deputies of non-Russian descent in parliamentary debates of the Perestroika period in the Soviet Union. The key issues the author examines concern the grievances which these female deputies were pointing out, and the potential solutions they were proposing to mitigate or eliminate them. The most…[Read more]

This paper provides updated digital images of four Qurʾān fragments from Chicago’s Oriental Institute Museum (OIM) that appeared in Nabia Abbott’s Rise of the North Arabic Script, and calls attention to features of their paleography and vocalization which are not apparent from her original black-and-white plates. In doing so, it demonstrates tha…[Read more]