“... Shia family tracing its descent from the famous Ibrahim Khan Shirvanshir, ‘who had once helped Hassan Kuli Khan cut off Prince Zizianashvili’s head’. Etc, etc. Nevertheless, the hero himself, and his family, and the locale, and even the hero’s beloved Nino, a Christian girl of Georgian origin and kittenish ...”

“... for Sudan’s neighbours, was that Khartoum chose to lead with Islamism and to do so aggressively: Hassan al-Turabi and his coterie in the capital rightly believed that their revolution stood to thrive by going into expansionist mode. There have been many twists and turns as a result. One of them, in 1994, saw Isaias sending ...”

“... the ‘old opposition’ – politicians not from the Baath Party, for example – has been. Hassan Abbas, an academic sociologist, founded the Human Rights Association of Syria last year to monitor the regime’s claims. He is a veteran of the Damascus spring of 2000, when the president was new and many hoped he would ...”

“... in crossing into the Druze town of Majdal Shams in the Golan, including a 28-year-old man called Hassan Hijazi, who made it all the way to Jaffa, his ancestral city, travelling there on a bus with Israeli soldiers who had no idea they were sitting next to a ‘security threat’; he turned himself in to the Israeli police ...”

“... of the city were more gay. Plenty of beer bars and open-air coffee stalls, pastrycook shops for Hassan and balconies for Yasmin, most of them carrying colourful posters of the Rais – reading or praying, fatherly with children or dutiful in uniform. But this was April 1984, remember: confronted by so many pictures of ...”

“... persuasively realised historical fiction, and with The Strange Death of Labour Scotland by Gerry Hassan and Eric Shaw, published in 2012, which uncannily anticipates the party’s recent evaporation. Devine’s story ends at a fork in the road. Is independence imminent? Or has the collapse in the price of oil severely ...”

“... most powerful party in Lebanon, is Iran’s cherished ally. On 6 January its secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, gave a speech about Soleimani’s death from his bunker. It was broadcast on al-Manar, Hizbullah’s TV channel, to a gathering of thousands of supporters. Nasrallah said that the ‘resistance axis’ would ...”

“... including twelve civilians, and around four thousand injured. Days later, Israel killed Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hizbullah, using a bunker-busting bomb in a densely populated neighbourhood of Beirut, causing hundreds of casualties in the process. In the aftermath of these events Iran launched its ...”

“... political religious thinkers in the Islamic reformist tradition: Rachid Ghannouchi in Tunisia and Hassan al-Turabi in Sudan. Hamas wasn’t a band of criminals but a well-organised political and social force. It divided the Gaza Strip and the West Bank into districts and subdistricts, and subdivided those into local units ...”

“... the focus of her attention just before Christmas. The Sudanese Government under President Omar Hassan Ahmed el Bashir, an Islamic fundamentalist backed by the highly influential Muslim Brotherhood, served early notice of its support for Saddam Hussein. The British and Americans in Khartoum were already laying plans for ...”

“... in 1975 in pieces. The growing civil disorder of 1976-77 took its toll of his dearest pupils. When Hassan Aladpush and his wife, Mahbubeh Motahedin, were killed by the police, Shari‘ati wrote to the Motahedin parents: ‘Being alive, what a grave and unanswerable charge. It is as if we were carrying stolen goods. Oh what ...”

“... resignation, the liberals, including Khomeini’s rival protégés Sadeq Gotzbadeh and Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr, found themselves engaged in tortuous negotiations with the Americans through a number of intermediaries, principally a progressive French lawyer, Christian Bourguet, and Hector Villalon, an Argentine ...”

“... that called for the selection of a new caliph; nothing much came of them. Then in 1928, Hassan al-Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood emerged in Egypt. Banna supported the idea of the caliphate but he was also a pragmatist: given that he was operating in colonial Egypt the restoration was relegated to a long-term ...”

“... Syria we can take back Khuzestan. But if we lose Syria we won’t be able to hold Tehran.’ Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, made it very clear in a speech on 30 April that the Lebanese Shia also see Syria as a battleground where they can’t afford a defeat. ‘Syria,’ he said, ‘has real friends in the ...”

“... at the same time an uncompromising critic of the new Japan, and ridicules cultural theorist Ihab Hassan for celebrating it as ‘a society with so few visible dysfunctions, so many visible achievements’. By contrast, Miyoshi describes the Japanese as little more than well-adapted functionaries in the country’s ...”