Claudius Ptolemy’s second-century Geography places the name Macoraba in the west of the Arabian Peninsula. There is a consensus in Orientalist scholarship that Macoraba is Mecca, and to a lesser extent that the name derives from an Ancient South Arabian word for “temple.” This paper traces the identification of Macoraba as Mecca back to Samue…[Read more]

Persian translation of “The Kite Runner Critiqued: New Orientalism Goes to the Big Screen,” which is a brief critique of Khaled Hosseini’s novel, “The Kite Runner,” as an important example of the New Orientalist narrative on the Middle East and Islamic world.

Brief critique of Khaled Hosseini’s novel “The Kite Runner” as prominent example of New Orientalist narrative on the Middle East.

The Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI) team—building on the foundational opensource OCR work of the Leipzig University (LU) Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Digital Humanities—has achieved Optical Character Recognition (OCR) accuracy rates for printed classical Arabic-script texts in the high nineties. These numbers are based on our tes…[Read more]

Yvonne Seale on a bizarre and fanciful piece of genealogical scholarship and what it tells us about identity in late 19th-century America.