Human trauma gave birth to the Bible, suggests eminent religious scholar David Carr. The Bible's ability to speak to suffering is a major reason why the sacred texts of Judaism and Christianity have retained their relevance for thousands of years. In...

For sale in CIS only! Prior accounts have portrayed Islamic Spain either as a paradise of enlightened tolerance, or as the site where civilisations clashed. Award-winning historian Brian A. Catlos taps a wide array of original sources to paint a mor...

For sale in CIS only! Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) was an influential Egyptian ideologue credited with establishing the theoretical basis for radical Islamism in the post colonial Sunni Muslim world. Lacking a pure understanding of the leader's life and...

For sale in CIS only! Across the Muslim world, from Iraq and Yemen, to Egypt and the Sahel, new alliances have been forged between the latest wave of violent Islamist groups – – including Islamic State and Boko Haram – – and local tribes. But can on...

For sale in CIS only! There are roughly eight million Muslims in south-east Europe, among them Albanians, Bosniaks, Turks and Roma – descendants of converts or settlers in the Ottoman period. This new history of the social, political and religious t...

For sale in CIS only! Northern and central Nigeria have been engulfed in a violent insurgency campaign waged by Jama'atu Ahlis Sunnah Lidda'awati w'al Jihad, a.k.a. "Boko Haram", and for a time, its splinter group "Ansaru". From its inception an inw...

On September 25, 1890, the Mormon prophet Wilford Woodruff publicly instructed his followers to abandon polygamy. In doing so, he initiated a process that would fundamentally alter the Latter-day Saints and their faith. Trading the most integral elem...

A novel approach to Israelite kinship, arguing that maternal kinship bonds played key social, economic, and political roles for a son who aspired to inherit his father's household Upending traditional scholarship on patrilineal genealogy, Cynthia Cha...

For sale in CIS only! One of the most interesting consequences of the Arab awakening has been the central role of Salafists in a number of countries. In particular, there seems to have been a move away from traditional quietism towards an increasing...

With 1.3 billion members, the Catholic Church is the world's largest organization and perhaps its most controversial. The Church's obstinacy on matters like clerical celibacy, the role of women, birth control, and the child abuse scandal has alienate...