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]

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]

Abstract
There have been numerous and extensive discussions of the role of ‘слухи’ [gossip] in
nineteenth-century Russian literature; usually gossip was viewed as a formative force be-
hind plot dynamics, and as the launching point for grotesque narrative effects. This article
attempts to frame different perceptions of gossip, treating…[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]

The chapter focuses on two new institutions, the State Duma (Gosudarstvennaia duma) and Political Consultative Council (Zizhengyuan), which were introduced in the Russian and Qing Empires, when the two imperial formations joined the global constitutional transformations. The names of the two bodies pointed to the statist (etatist) rather than…[Read more]

Focusing on the term zemskii sobor, this study explored the historiographies of the early modern Russian assemblies, which the term denoted, as well as the autocratic and democratic mythologies connected to it. Historians have debated whether the individual assemblies in the sixteenth and seventeenth century could be seen as a coherent…[Read more]

Parliaments are often seen as Western European and North American institutions and their establishment in other parts of the world as a derivative and mostly defective process. This book challenges such Eurocentric visions by retracing the evolution of modern institutions of collective decision-making in Eurasia. Breaching the divide between…[Read more]

In his 1875 description of the language, Theodor Nöldeke describes Mandaic as among the purest of the Aramaic languages and the furthest from Western Aramaic, particularly with respect to its lexicon. As Mandæans identify their faith with that of John the Baptist and his community of followers, this observation is not without relevance for a…[Read more]

The Arabic-script Qurʾān fragments of the Cairo genizah collections have not yet drawn much interest among Arabic and genizah scholars. This paper aims to bring them to the attention of a broader audience by presenting the palaeographic features (§3) and vocalisation systems (§4) of eleven Arabic-script Qurʾān fragments from the Cambridge Unive…[Read more]

This article presents new data on links between the various medieval vocalisation traditions of Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic. These include the identification of overlaps in the Aramaic terminology used by Jewish Masoretes and Syriac Christian grammarians and in the phonological theories that underlie them, as well as connections between Syriac and…[Read more]

The political system of early socialist-era Mongolia, established by the first Constitution in 1924, can be interpreted as a vernacular version of the Soviet system, in which the formally supreme representative body, the State Great Khural (“assembly”), was sidelined by the standing Presidium of the Small Khural and the Cabinet and eclipsed by the…[Read more]

In the early part of the reign of Alexander I (1801-1825), the emperor sought to reform Russia through the creation of new European-style institutions. The aim was to ensure that Russia’s great-power status would be retained through updating its institutions, in line with a reform impulse dating back to Peter the Great and before. Among the new i…[Read more]

The chapter analyzed the debates on parliamentarism in the late Russian Empire and revolutionary Russia and explored how the idea of parliament helped intellectuals locate Russia globally. The establishment of the legislative State Duma and the adoption of the Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire during the Revolution of 1905–1907 seemed to m…[Read more]

Addressing the entangled histories of deliberative decision making, political representation, and constitutionalism in several geographic and temporal contexts, this Special Issue offers nuanced political and intellectual histories and anthropologies of parliamentarism in Eurasia. It explores parliaments and quasi-parliamentary formations and the…[Read more]

“Lives in Turkish” is an ongoing research project held at Boğaziçi University Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies. We trace the journey of life-writing in Turkish, collect metadata and visuals about biographical publications and biography subjects introduced to the Turkish reader since the early 1800s. Our aim is to propose a c…[Read more]

Among the numerous Jewish uṣūl al-dīn compositions in the Second Firkovitch Collection at the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg there is one that I have labelled “A Hamaḏānian Patchwork”. You might just as well call it “A Persian Carpet”. It is another magnificent specimen of “diachronic intertextualities”.
The treatise, which is…[Read more]

This is an Urdu translation of the work “Pakistan’s Blasphemy Law and Non-Muslims”

English translation of Midhat Sertoğlu, İlk Milletlerarası Dili Bir Türk İcat Etmişti, originally published in Hayat Tarih Mecmuası 1 (1966): 66–68

In early 1918, the Bolshevik-dominated Third Congress of Soviets declared the formation of a new composite polity—the Soviet Russian Republic. The congress’s resolutions, however, simultaneously proclaimed a federation of national republics and a federation of soviets. The latter seemed to recognize regionalism and localism as organizing pri…[Read more]

Given the degree of popular fascination with Gnostic religions, it is surprising how few pay attention to the one such religion that has survived from antiquity until the present day: Mandaism. Mandaeans, who esteem John the Baptist as the most famous adherent to their religion, have in our time found themselves driven from their historic…[Read more]