This is an Urdu translation of the work “Pakistan’s Blasphemy Law and Non-Muslims”

English translation of Midhat Sertoğlu, İlk Milletlerarası Dili Bir Türk İcat Etmişti, originally published in Hayat Tarih Mecmuası 1 (1966): 66–68

Given the degree of popular fascination with Gnostic religions, it is surprising how few pay attention to the one such religion that has survived from antiquity until the present day: Mandaism. Mandaeans, who esteem John the Baptist as the most famous adherent to their religion, have in our time found themselves driven from their historic…[Read more]

Qurʾān in Hebrew script produced for a students’ exercise in a seminar entitled “One Language, Many Scripts: Allographic Traditions Used for Writing Arabic” with reference to Johannes den Heijer, Andrea Schmidt and Tamara Pataridze (eds.), Scripts Beyond Borders: A Survey of Allographic Traditions in the Euro-Mediterranean World (Louvain: P…[Read more]

Undotted consonantal skeleton of the Quranic text produced for a students’ exercise. The display is constrained by the limitations of the font and by no means meant to reproduce scribal practices of early Qurʾān manuscripts! Full document available on request (gs50[at]soas.ac.uk).

In the area of dispute resolution, the U.S. FTAs with Arab countries share some commonalities. However, the US – JO FTA clearly differs from other U.S. FTAs with Arab countries. Areas of difference include treatment of perishable goods, appeal, panel report, and implementation of panel report. The dispute settlement mechanism in the US – JO FTA…[Read more]

Arab countries are attempting to broaden their engagement in the multilateral trading system in a manner that has many implications. Not only have some Arab countries either acceded or are in the pipeline of acceding to the World Trade Organization (WTO), but their new commitments coincide with reorientations in their economic strategies. The…[Read more]

This essay examines the development of prison memoirs in modern Iranian prose, with a focus on how literary texts function as a tribunal, delivering forms of justice missing from the existing legal system. It constructs from the prison memoirs of a range of dissident writers (Dashti, ʿAlavi, and Baraheni) a genealogy of prison consciousness in…[Read more]

Section 295-C of Pakistan’s penal code prohibits insulting the Prophet and carries a mandatory death penalty. This law was passed based on a claim of ijma‘ (consensus among Islamic scholars) that such an offense is subject to a hadd (divinely fixed) punishment. Nearly half of those charged under this statute crimes of hadd are Christians, who mak…[Read more]