Graeme Wood’s recent Atlantic essay on “What ISIS Really Wants” is an exceptionally thoughtful assessment of Islamic State as a group bent on “medieval” violence. It should be required reading, and ...

No contemporary historian who wished to remain in the good graces of his colleagues would marvel about the way in which Spanish conquistadors lifted the Aztecs and Incas from their dark ages of ...

Medicine was an important part of medieval Islamic life; both rich and poor people were interested in health and diseases. Islamic doctors and a number of scholars wrote profusely on health and ...

Intricate decorative tilework found in medieval architecture across the Islamic world appears to exhibit advanced decagonal quasicrystal geometry -- a concept discovered by Western mathematicians and ...

(THE CONVERSATION) The war with Iran is not just a geopolitical conflict. We see religious rhetoric used to cast strategic interests as a moral or sacred matter. U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson ...

The medieval English allegorical poem Piers Plowman described the birth of Islam as the result of a clever hoax. Muhammad, it asserted, was a former Christian who had made a failed attempt to become ...

Ceramic vessels originating in the Islamic world once adorned the facades of churches and other Christian monuments, while Christian symbols such as the cross embellished columns, slabs, and other ...

Over recent weeks there has been a constant background noise that Islamic State and its ideology are some sort of throwback to a distant past. It is often framed in language used last week by the ...

The Taliban are back in the saddle and, with them, the dreadful spectre of the harsh punishments meted out in their previous time in power: public hangings and stonings, amputation of hands and public ...

When condemning the hideous acts of the Islamic State, many Western politicians have trotted out a familiar line: The Sunni fundamentalist terror group is "barbaric ...

Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine? The medieval English allegorical poem Piers Plowman described the birth of ...