Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Usman Butt
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The Ottoman Scientific Heritage
The Ottoman Scientific Heritage is a three-volume tour de force that will prove to be a key reference point for historians of science and Ottomanists alike. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, a former Secretary-General of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, has spent a lifetime dispelling a common trope that, after the sacking...
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Memory Makers
Historical memory is at the forefront of Russia’s wars in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere. However, this historical memory is not about things in the past that actually happened, or real history, it is a constructed past to fit the Kremlin’s objectives. Memory serves in place of ideology to give...
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George Orwell and Russia
The 20th century had no more prolific writer on the dangers of authoritarianism than Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name, George Orwell. Orwell’s writings continue to impact us today and, in Russia, his works continue to have a special resonance as Masha Karp explores in her...
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Disenchanting the Caliphate: The Secular Discipline of Power in Abbasid Political Thought
Did secularism in the Arab world only really begin in the 20th century after European colonisation? Historians in both the Arab World and the West have long argued that secularism is a uniquely European phenomenon that was exported to the rest of the world through empires. There is no...
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Authoritarian Century
Could the end of liberalism be the end of diverse multi-ethnic states, from Indonesia to the United States? Azeem Ibrahim seems to think so and aims to make the case that a post-liberal world is not only authoritarian, but also dangerous to the internal harmony of many countries throughout...
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Discover Cappadocia, Turkiye
Located at the heart of the Tarus Mountains Cappadocia offers visitors stunning views and ancient history...
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Taming the Messiah: The Formation of an Ottoman Political Public Sphere, 1600-1700
“Arabic is eloquence, Persian is wittiness, Turkish is abomination, and the rest is filth,” Evliya Celebi, the 17th century Ottoman travel writer, is reported to have remarked. The high regard for Persian was not merely linguistic appreciation, but also speaks to a school of thought, culture, belief system and...
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In the Shadow of the Prophet: Essays in Islamic History
Few can claim to have produced a wealth of scholarship and achieved mastery over Middle Eastern history, but Roy Mottahedeh’s insatiable curiosity for the past has left us with a treasure trove of works. Reading essays that he has written over the past fifty years and collected together in...
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Unknowing and the Everyday: Sufism and Knowledge in Iran
A group of men and women have gathered with an instructor to partake in a religious ceremony which, aside from worship, represents something broader in their lives: how to take the experiences from the session and apply them to everyday life. “I was in another world during Fana [a...
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The Neoconservatives who paved the road to invading Iraq
For Neoconservatives, Iraq was about a vision for a new world based on aggressive and interventionist US foreign policy...
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Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic
In 2020, with the full extent of the coronavirus outbreak still unknown, Chris Buckley of the New York Times received a phone call from a woman at the Wuhan Foreign Affairs Office in the People’s Republic of China. It was a few days into the lockdown. “We know you...
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Discover the Great Mosque of Xi’an, China
Located in the central Chinese province of Shaanxi and in the same city as the terra-cotta army, the Great Mosque of Xi’an is believed to have been built in 742 during the Tang dynasty...
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Inventing Laziness: The Culture of Productivity in Late Ottoman Society
Locals and foreigners alike often ask why people in the Middle East are “so lazy”. While such a view held by people from outside the region has its roots in racist stereotypes, many within the region hold a similar opinion, regardless of whether or not there is any merit...
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Discover Tabriz, Iran
Today Tabriz is the capital of the Iranian province of East Azerbaijan and boasts a population of 1.7 million....
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Markets of Civilisation: A Review
Muriam Haleh Davis’s new book Markets of Civilization: Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria explores the colonial roots of Algeria’s transition into a modern capitalist economy. But it is more than that; it is a critical examination of how race and racialisation by French authorities formed the development of...
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‘We’ve got the largest climate conference to which nobody was able to get to by sustainable methods’
Dan Hodd travelled from Europe to COP27 in Egypt without stepping foot on a plane to highlight the case for environmental travel, MEMO caught up with him along the way...
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The Lebanon Uprising of 2019: Voices from the Revolution
This new book edited by Jeffrey G. Karam and Rima Majed seeks to make sense of the October 2019 uprising that shook Lebanon. The Lebanon Uprising of 2019: Voices from the Revolution pulls together experts from political science, sociology, economics, the arts and other fields with the objective of...
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The North Caucasus Borderland: Between Muscovy and the Ottoman Empire, 1555-1605
Regions such Dagestan, Chechnya and the Caucasus tend to make us think of territories that are firmly under Moscow’s control as part of the Russian Federation. However, Russian control only stretches back a few hundred years. Large parts of the region came under the Ottoman Empire and in the...
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Putin’s War in Syria: Russian Foreign Policy and the Price of America’s Absence
“It turned out that Syria is our sacred land,” wrote a Russian blogger sarcastically in 2016 following attempts by some public figures to recast Syria as part of Russia following Moscow’s military intervention in the country’s civil war in 2015. Before then, the idea of Syria being part of...
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Fixing Stories
Arjomand takes us into the critical and largely invisible work of the media fixer. Defining what fixers do is difficult as their role can be quite fluid but, essentially, the general idea is when a journalist visits a country or an area they are not local to or familiar...
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In the Labyrinth of the KGB: Ukraine’s Intelligentsia in the 1960s-1970s
A popular Russian-speaking Jewish satirist from Kharkiv, Leonid Osmolovskyi, had become a shadow of his former self by the 1980s. Once famed for his witty essays and part of a generation of radical thinkers, artists, journalists, poets, writers and historians who came up in the eastern Ukrainian city in...
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MENA, China and the great human rights trade off
'Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world'. ...
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Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt
In his new book Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture In Modern Egypt, Andrew Simon recounts how, on 12 June, 1974, US President Richard Nixon landed in Cairo for a “tour of peace” in the Middle East. Embroiled in the Watergate scandal at home, many American media outlets branded...
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Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and the Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire
“From a deep history perspective, Ottoman rule in Iraq — the land of ancient Babylonia — was a political oddity,” writes Faisal Husain in Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates In the Ottoman Empire. “In its millennia-long history, Iraq was never ruled from Istanbul before the sixteenth...
