- Quoted in an article appearing in the Wall Street Journal titled “Vienna Shooting Suspect Had Previous Terrorism Conviction,” past Program in Islamic Law fellow and professor of Islamic law at Vienna University Ebrahim Afsah takes issue with state interventions across Europe to “stop the spread of Islamism.” Afsah contends that European states create counterproductive results when they step in to create Islamic religious institutions in an effort to curb the influence of foreign preachers. According to Afsah, these interventions allow organized Islam a role in public life, which itself is anathema to a secular society.
- In “Yesterday is not Gone: Memories of Slavery in Zanzibar and Oman in Memoirs, Fiction, and Film” (Journal of Global Slavery 5, no. 3 (2020)), Emily Jane O’Dell (Sichuan University) takes a closer look at how literature and art have been used as platforms of expression to bear witness to the slave trade in Zanzibar and Oman, locations the author labels “the main slave trading point in East Africa.”
- Mayte Penelas (Autónoma University) has published a translated and edited version of Al-Maqrīzī’s al-Ḫabar ʿan al-bašar (Leiden and Boston: Brill, November 2020). The book is in the tradition of Arabic historiography on Europe and deals primarily with Romans, Greeks, Byzantines, and Goths.