History

Were Humanity’s Oldest Monumental Religious Sites Erected in NW Saudi Arabia? 1,000 ‘Rectangles’ Older than Stonehenge

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Hugh Thomas and a team of Australian researchers have just published a groundbreaking article in the journal Antiquity describing their research into the mysterious “Rectangles” (mustatīl) dotting Northwest Arabia. This region lies due south of Israel-Palestine and Jordan. Rectangles. h/t ‘Antiquity.’ The Rectangles date from roughly 7,500 years before present, […]

Archaeology

The Catholic Reconquista in Spain outlawed Islam in 1502, but Secret Muslims kept their culture — and Cuisine — Going

The Conversation

By Aleks Pluskowski, Guillermo García-Contreras Ruiz, and Marcos García García | – Granada, in southern Spain’s Andalusia region, was the final remnant of Islamic Iberia known as al-Andalus – a territory that once stretched across most of Spain and Portugal. In 1492, the city fell to the Catholic conquest. In the aftermath, native Andalusians, who […]

Cold War

Why the Suez Canal, now blocked, is so Important to the Global Economy and World History

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The super-super tanker Ever Given is stuck kitty-corner in the Suez Canal, having apparently run up on a sand bar. It is blocking dozens of other ships from going through the canal. The ship, one of the largest in the world, is a quarter of a mile long and can […]

History

A New History of the Prophet of Islamﷺ – Juan Cole interviewed by Hamza Yusuf

Juan Cole

Juan Cole interviewed by Hamza Yusuf at Renovatio about the book: Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires Available at Nicola’s Books in Ann Arbor And Hachette And Barnes and Noble And Amazon Renovatio writes: Can those working in the field of modern academic historical method contribute to new ways of viewing an […]

censorship

International Statement of Solidarity with Decolonial Academics and Activists in France

contributors

By Paola Bacchetta (Professor, University of California, Berkeley), Azeezah Kanji (Legal Academic and Journalist, Toronto) and David Palumbo-Liu (Professor, Stanford University) | – Earliest Signatories: 1. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor, Columbia University, USA 2. Gina Dent, Associate Professor, Feminist Studies, History of Consciousness, and Legal Studies. University of California, Santa Cruz 3. Angela Y […]

Far Right

The Byzantine Empire was Multicultural, So why are QAnon and White Supremacists Idolizing it?

The Conversation

By Roland Betancourt | – From Charlottesville to the Capitol, medieval imagery has been repeatedly on show at far-right rallies and riots in recent years. Displays of Crusader shields and tattoos derived from Norse and Celtic symbols are of little surprise to medieval historians like me who have long documented the appropriation of the Middle […]

Archaeology

40,000 BC: Earth’s magnetic field flipped, causing massive sudden climate change and Extinction of Neanderthals

The Conversation

By Chris Fogwill, Alan Hogg, Chris Turney, and Zoë Thomas | – The world experienced a few centuries of apocalyptic conditions 42,000 years ago, triggered by a reversal of the Earth’s magnetic poles combined with changes in the Sun’s behaviour. That’s the key finding of our new multidisciplinary study, published in Science. This last major […]

Archaeology

Were the Canaanites from Iran? Genomic History Shows that Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese have Zagros Ancestry

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – There are no races. Human beings are all mixed up, and genomic history demonstrates this principle better than any other approach. So much of Middle Eastern politics depends on a kind of “sleeping beauty” nationalism (in Ernest Gellner’s phrase) in which it is alleged that there was an ancient race […]

Archaeology

Israeli Archeologists find 7th Century Mosque and Evidence of Tolerance in Early Islam at Tiberias

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Israeli archeologists have made two extremely important finds recently that have implications for our image of early Islam. Katia Cytryn-Silverman, an Israeli archeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has concluded that the remains of a mosque in Tiberias, on the western shores of the Sea of Galilee, is seventh […]