This article examines the historical work of the ninth-century Muslim scholar Abū anīfa al-Dīnawarī. Adopting the format of universal history, al-Dīnawarī constructed a historical narrative beginning with the first human Adam, continuing through the rise of Islam and culminating in the Caliphate. This paper argues that al-Dīnawarī’s work, appropriately entitled Longer narratives, represented an attempt to configure Islamic polity into world history through a reorientation of Sasanian imperial ideology and geographical consciousness in order to fit Islamic sensibilities. As an early example of belles-lettres (adab) oriented (belletrist, adabī) universal historiography, al-Dīnawarī’s work comes across as a perceptive outlook on history, which proved relevant to dynasties of diverse origins struggling to carve a space for themselves in the Persianate political landscape of the late and post-‘Abbāsid world.

This article explores how the Muslim inhabitants of the Iberian peninsula, known in Arabic as al-Andalus, located themselves in space and time in relation to other ‘Europeans’. It has been asserted that Muslims did not show much interest in the peoples living beyond the boundaries of the Islamic world before European imperialism impacted upon them, and that much of what they did write was formulaic and predicated on the primordial religious enmity which existed between Muslims and non-Muslims. While true up to a point, this article attempts to nuance this argument, and point to ways in which the Muslims of al-Andalus did refer to other peoples and other epochs, and incorporate them into their worldview, thereby positioning themselves not only within the dār al-islām but also within a Mediterranean historical trajectory. It also looks at the ways in which northerners did participate in and shape Andalusi society, despite the reluctance of much Arabic writing to fully record or recognize this phenomenon.

The study proposes an approach to the history of literacy in the Islamic world that uses a flexible and gradated definition of literacy. It goes on to propose some factors that lay behind the acquisition of certain forms of literacy and of the way that they were put into practical use. Among these factors were the religious factor, which had consequences on a broad region; commercial conditions, which were an impetus to make use of the written word; and the development of a legal culture.

The Moriscos were nominally Christian after enforced conversions at the beginning of the sixteenth century, but they mainly clung to their Islamic ancestral faith, and they were expelled from Spain in 1609–14. This was a huge operation, as 300,000 Moriscos were expelled, most of them in the space of a few months. For it to succeed, the Spanish authorities deemed it necessary to resort to lies and subterfuges. Not many Moriscos resisted expulsion, even though few of them wanted to leave. The majority settled in North Africa, adapted quickly to new circumstances, and did not attempt to avenge their expulsion, for instance by resorting to corsair activities. Despite its scale, the event did not have major immediate political consequences, but it can now be seen as a tragic tale of mistaken assumptions and enmity on the Spanish side, an unexpected socio-economic opportunity for North Africa, and an enduring element in Christian-Muslim perceptions of each other’s faiths.

The Khanate of Khoqand emerged, flourished and collapsed during the era of Chinese and Russian imperial expansion into Central Asia. While eighteenth-century Central Asia has long been considered to have been an unimportant backwater ‘on the margins of world history’, this essay juxtaposes focused research in local primary sources with a world historical perspective in an effort to illuminate some of the ways in which the region remained interactively engaged with its neighbours and, through them, with historical processes unfolding across the globe. The essay argues that these interactions were substantial, and that they contributed to Khoqand’s emergence as a significant regional power and centre of Islamic cultural activity in pre-colonial Central Asia.

This article examines boundary disputes between Qajar Persia and the emerging state of Afghanistan in the nineteenth century. It argues that disputes between these two Islamic polities were central to the creation of modern states through the territorialization of political identity, in the form of border delineation. The demarcation of territorial boundaries represented the ‘indigenization’ of Western norms of statehood. Indigenous political actors increasingly understood and envisaged their political communities in terms of territorial states, reinterpreting and redeploying European political concepts in indigenous spaces. The Perso-Afghan case exemplifies the assimilation of ideas of political territoriality, central to the construction of a modern state-based international order, in Muslim regions outside direct colonial control.