Who Created ISIS?

Robert McMullen was working as a Presbyterian missionary in eastern China when Japan invaded the country in 1937. His letters describing the chaotic period that followed are presented in a new book by Charles Bright and Joseph Ho. Its title is War and Occupation in China: The Let ...  Show more

Vasudha Narayanan discusses how Hindu temples are transformed by the minority status of Hinduism in America. Temple practices preserve many traditions while also helping Hindus assimilate to American culture. We also discuss the idea of a "dialogue of action" between Hindu temple ...  Show more

Why are Western societies so fearful of Islam and Muslims? One can answer this question by examining history, particularly that of European colonial powers, and the ways in which they justified their actions in the Global South by painting its peoples and religions as alien and i ...  Show more

Nicholas Morton’s The Crusader States and their Neighbours: A Military History, 1099-1187 (Oxford UP, 2020) explores the military history of the medieval Near East, piecing together the fault-lines of conflict which entangled this much-contested region. This was an area where eth ...  Show more

Saleh, the narrator of Out of Mesopotamia (Akashic Books, 2020), is a middle-aged Iranian journalist who moonlights as a writer for one of Iran's most popular TV shows but cannot keep himself away from the front lines in neighboring Iraq and Syria. There, the fight against the Is ...  Show more

In this Mujalasa interview, we talked to Eugene Rogan his research on modern middle eastern history. Rogan is the author of The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914-1920 (2015) and The Arabs: A History (2009, 2018) which has been translated to 18 langua ...