by Sarah Islam For historians of the Middle East, medieval documents and manuscripts are integral resources to better understand the social and intellectual milieu of their objects of study. Islamic manuscript archives and repositories are often quite challenging to access; an even greater challenge is the ability to read and analyze the documents themselves. For…
Susynne McElrone, a historian studying late-Ottoman Palestine, is interested in rural socioeconomic history, land tenure, and the implementation of property-tenure reforms following the promulgation of the 1858 Land Code. Significantly, Ottoman property-tenure reforms in the second half of the 19th century continue to influence land tenure in the Levant today. They institutionalized individually held, centrally…
The ACOR Video Lecture Series provides accessible discussions of new research into the past and present of Jordan and the broader Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean worlds. This video, adapted from the April 2017 public lecture delivered by ACOR Associate Director Dr. Glenn Corbett, introduces a special initiative by the ACOR Library to digitize, catalog,…
Sarah Islam is a Ph.D. candidate in the History department at Princeton University and a CAORC Fellow at ACOR in the fall of 2016. Her research project, “The Evolution of Blasphemy as Legal Category in Medieval Islamic History,” examines how interpretations of blasphemy—known as sabb— in Islam have varied based on time period, geography and…