Helen Pfeifer

No space​ has elicited more lurid Orientalist fantasies than the harem, once found in elite residences across the Islamic world. In practice, most harems (haram in Persian) were unremarkable sites of domestic labour. What caught the attention of Western Europeans were the enslaved women, as well as the social mores dictating that respectable women rarely appear in public. Early travellers...

In​ the early 11th century, at Nandana, a fort in the mountains of northern Punjab, the polymath Abu Rayhan al-Biruni realised his dream of measuring the size of the earth. Two centuries earlier, the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun had sent a group of astronomers into the desert for the same purpose. The advantage of Biruni’s method was that it ‘did not require walking in...

On one page​,​ a bee, meticulously painted, down to the individual hairs; on another page, a diagram of planetary motion, glittering with gold leaf; on another, the soft-legged men of Zanzibar, who live in trees and propel themselves forwards by dropping onto the shoulders of passing travellers. These disparate images confront readers of one of the most successful natural histories of...

For​ most of the Ottoman Empire’s existence, the crossing from day into night was unmistakeable, as it was in much of the world. In cities and towns, the process began with the adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, which echoed through the streets just as the sun disappeared on the horizon. Markets and inns closed. Neighbourhood and courtyard gates were shut. Noise died down as people and...

The​ defeat of the Mamluk Empire in 1516-17 is the most significant conquest most people have never heard of. In the space of six months, Ottoman armies marched from Aleppo to Cairo, routed the Muslim Mamluk dynasty and seized territory that is now Syria, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Egypt and (parts of) Saudi Arabia. One moment the Ottomans were a regional power, the next they had an empire...