India is home to more than 200,000 refugees in India today including Afghans, Tibetans, Sri Lankan Tamils, Rohingya and more. Yet almost counterintuitively, the Indian government is highly skeptical of international refugee mechanisms designed to help conditions for refugees. India has not signed the 1951 Refugee Convention and has been widely criticized for its treatment…
Surrounded by much larger powers throughout its history, Korea is often overlooked by regional experts and observers. But despite being located between and having had to fend off at various periods China and Japan, and even the Mongols, Korea has managed to endure, albeit split into two nations in the modern era. Eugene Y Park’s…
Sometimes the further away in time you get from an event, the clearer it becomes. Time often enables historians to learn more facts and circumstances about, and fosters a more dispassionate view of, historical events like wars. The Vietnamese wars against France in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and against the United States in…
China Through European Eyes is a very helpful and well-presented annotated anthology of extracts from European writers on China. The authors presented range from Marco Polo to Roland Barthes, which gives readers wide and various perspectives on the subject; some see China as a threat, others romanticize it, and still others find inspiration in its…
“Ancient Iran and the Classical World”, an exhibition currently running at the J Paul Getty Museum, is the second in a series that examines how ancient Greece and Rome interacted with the other civilizations of the Mediterranean, the Middle East and beyond. A sequel to the inaugural exhibition, “Beyond the Nile”, the current exhibition considers…
In the spacious courtyard of Istanbul’s Suleymaniye Mosque, public storytellers regale and instruct their miniscule but attentive audiences with the deeds of the mosque’s founder, Suleyman the Magnificent, the 10th Ottoman Sultan, the conqueror of Belgrade, Budapest and Baghdad. Christopher de Bellaigue, who has paid his dues listening to his sources in Kurdistan (Rebel Land,…
Given the likely plight of the many interpreters left to the tender mercies of the Taliban in the recent Afghan conflict, this book is timely, because it highlights the fact that historically interpreters have taken risks or been exposed to dangers not of their own making. They’re not just anonymous or culturally liminal figures hovering…
I was reading Worlds of Knowledge in Women’s Travel Writing on an airplane when the pilot suddenly announced that we would be returning to our airport of origin due to a possible issue with the plane’s de-icing system. It was only my third flight since the onset of the pandemic and things were not going…
In Matthew Teller’s new travelogue, Nine Quarters of Jerusalem: A New Biography of the Old City, he explains that while Jerusalem’s Old City is known for its four quarters—Muslim, Christian, Armenian, and Jewish—this is a simplification that doesn’t recognize the many other ethnic and religious groups that make this city so unique. As the title…
In one sense, this book is the story of Agnès Benoit’s decades-long fascination with a princess, whose statue of chlorite and steatite beguiles us from a distance of 4,000 years. Her mysterious sisters began to appear in antique shops in Kabul in the 1960s. In the beginning, we knew little to nothing about the civilization…
Visitors from the Arab world flock to Istanbul today, enjoying the city’s cosmopolitan vibe alongside its comfortingly familiar culinary and architectural riches. Turkey’s accelerating pivot towards the Arab world has renewed old connections. Ottoman Sultan Selim the “Grim” conquered Syria and Egypt in 1517. For the next 400 years, Arabs frequented Istanbul as loyal Ottoman…
According to Cambodian lore, the ocean was once ruled by the king of the Naga empire. The Naga were an amphibious people who made their home between land and water. A prince discovered this underworld when he traveled to an island and met its princess on the shore. Naturally, they fell in love. After the…
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Dilnoza Duturaeva, an Uzbek historian at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales challenges the conventional narrative that the Silk Road declined following the collapse of the Tang dynasty in 907, and remained in eclipse until the establishment of the Mongol empire 250 years later. While…
For avid collectors during the gilded age Gentile Bellini’s portrait of a seated Turkish scribe came as a revelation, opening a window onto heretofore unfamiliar elegance, hinting at a connection between their beloved Italian Renaissance and the magnificence of contemporary Ottoman court. This same generation read and swooned over Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam….
In 2019, that watershed year just before the onset of Covid-19, a protest movement erupted on the Indian subcontinent in response to two new laws introduced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government. The first, a revision to the Citizenship Act of 1955, with changes to conditions for asylum conditions designed to specifically exclude Muslims; the…