Books & More

This collection posits that the Muslim world is historically layered, shaped by centuries of regional choice, encounter, translation and experience.

Andrew Collins explores the mythmaking and historical erasure of Egypt’s first female pharaoh.

Author Paul Binski takes readers on a multisensory tour of medieval cathedrals across Europe.

The Alhambra at the Crossroads of History shows how the 13th-century Andalusi palace complex in Granada, modern Spain, generates often conflicting meanings at the same time—meanings actively constructed and sometimes misread. Edhem Eldem, an Istanbul-based history professor, traces its role in shaping social and cultural identities across imperial Europe, Arab North Africa and Ottoman Türkiye from the 18th to the early 20th centuries.

In Picturing the Beautiful Game, art historian Daniel Haxall shows readers the perspective of the artist’s psyche—one rarely depicted in discussions of sport.

Tim Bascom transforms a lifetime of playing football across five continents into a meditation on belonging, arguing that the game’s great gift is not the goals but the wordless understanding it creates among people.

Jonathan Wilson traces the World Cup’s evolution to global theater where nations negotiate identity, memory and power.

This collection, edited by Abdullah Al-Arian, explores the early history and growing influence of football throughout the region.

How often do we take nature for granted, assuming it will never vanish? In US-based folk illustrator Dinara Mirtalipova’s new children’s book, a sea is the main character: the one that provides livelihood and prosperity, until humans’ poor choices cause its demise.

What do we owe each other? What do we owe ourselves? These are the questions that Senegalese author Aminata Sow Fall has posed for nearly half a century.

In this painstaking work, Owning Books and Preserving Documents in Medieval Jerusalem, historians Said Aljoumani and Konrad Hirschler explore a culture in which books became woven into the fabric of daily life through the case of Burhān al-Dīn Ibrāhīm al-Nāsīrī.

What emerges from this volume by Nuha Alshaar, a professor of Arabic literature and Islamic studies, is a rounded picture of Sicily as a site of cultural exchange that shaped the medieval Mediterranean.