This book examines the role of tradition and discursive knowledge transmission on the formation of the ‘ulamā’, the learned scholarly class in Islam, and their approach to the articulation of the Islamic disciplines. This book argues that a useful framework for evaluating the intellectual contributions of post-classical scholars such as Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Dardīr involves preserving, upholding, and maintaining the Islamic tradition, including the intellectual “sub-traditions” that came to define it.

An anthropological study of Syriac Orthodox Christian identity in a time of displacement, upheaval, and conflict. For some Syriac Orthodox Christians in Bethlehem, their self-articulation - the means by which they connect themselves to others, things, places and symbols - is decisively influenced by their eucharistic ritual. This ritual connects being siryāni to a redeemed community or 'body', and derives its identity in large part from the Incarnation of God as an Aramaic-speaking Bethlehemite.

Much Mediterranean migrant literature captures the Mediterranean’s fossilized binaries, North and South. But, The Two-Edged Sea also reveals that one inheres within the other. While the book explores two Mediterraneans, with asymmetrical power relations that reflect the sea’s northern and southern shores, it also delves into how they have been in dialogue with each other, effectively deconstructing the binary. Charting undocumented journeys from the Mediterranean’s southern shores, the book contributes both to discourse on migration literature and the current resurgence of the study of seas, while advancing the idea of the Mediterranean as both a dividing border and unifying contact zone.