History

Migrations brought Pastoralists and Plague

Turkish Youth, WW I’s Gallipoli Battle, and the Secular-Religious Divide

The Secular Legacy of Kemal Ataturk is increasingly embattled in Erdogan’s Turkey

‘These are the keys of this paradise’: how 700 years of Muslim rule in Spain came to an end

By Elizabeth Drayson | (The Conversation) | – – It was the moment which set Spain on a course to become the greatest power in early modern Europe. On January 2, 1492 Abdallah Muhammad bin Ali, or Muhammad XII, known as Boabdil, the last Moorish sultan of Granada and head of the Nasrid dynasty, surrendered […]

Colonialism

British Empire’s hidden workings in India and Iran revealed in remarkable new film footage

contributors

By Jonathan Westaway | The Conversation | – – In a basement office at the Royal Geographical Society in London’s South Kensington, grainy 16mm film footage flickers silently across the screen, one of over a hundred expeditionary and travel films digitised recently by the society and the British Film Institute. They are now free to […]

Africa

What Africa taught the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – In 1957 Martin Luther King and his wife Coretta went to Ghana in connection with its independence from Britain. The British had grabbed the fabled West African Gold Coast in the nineteenth century in order to profit from its gold and other resources (after having profited […]

Authoritarianism

Putin’s Medieval Romanticism and Russia’s Lurch Right

contributors

Dina Khapaeva | (Project Syndicate) | – – As much of the world makes amends for social and political injustices of the past, Russia is lionizing its despots, raising statues to the worst of them. Behind this phenomenon is an ultra-nationalist brand of conservatism that seeks to take Russian politics back to the Middle Ages. […]

Colonialism

2017 was so Gross we even had to relitigate Evils of Colonialism

contributors

Joseph McQuade | (The Conversation) | – – Recently an academic article, asserting the historical benefits of colonialism, created an outcry and a petition with over 10, 000 signatures calling for its removal. The Case for Colonialism, published in Third World Quarterly by Bruce Gilley, argues Western colonialism was both “objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate” […]

History

Far Right’s Misuse of Knights Templar, Who were actually Sympathetic to Muslims

contributors

Patrick Masters | (The Conversation) | – – When market trader Tina Gayle was banned from selling mugs featuring Knights Templar logos in a Loughborough Market, Charnwood Borough Council ruled that they were offensive to Muslims. A story in the Daily Mail reported that Gayle had “been previously been warned by the council for selling […]

Colonialism

Abbas: British gov’t should recognize Palestine on Balfour centenary

contributors

Ma’an News Agency | – – BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — The office of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas released a statement on Thursday, the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, calling on the British government to “apologize to the Palestinian people for the suffering caused as a result of the Balfour Declaration a hundred years ago.” “The second […]