Reading the Past, Writing the Future

CHINA’S MUSLIMS & JAPAN’S EMPIRE: CENTRING ISLAM IN WORLD WAR II, by Kelly A. Hammond. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 200. ISBN: 9781469659657

THE STORY OF RUFINO: SLAVERY, FREEDOM, AND ISLAM IN THE BLACK ATLANTIC, by Joao Jose Reis, Flavio Dos Santos Gomes, Marcus J. M. De Carvalho. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 319. ISBN: 9780190224363

POLYMATHS OF ISLAM: POWER AND NETWORKS OF KNOWLEDGE IN CENTRAL ASIA, by James Pickett. New York: Cornell University Press, 2020. Pp. 447. eISBN: 9781501750830

THE ROHINGYA CRISIS: A PEOPLE FACING EXTINCTION, by Muhammad Abdul Bari. Markfield: Kube Publishing, 2018. Pp. 104. ISBN: 9781847741240

‘[T]hese models and preconceptions … will themselves tend to act as determinants of what we think or perceive. We must classify in order to understand, and we can only classify the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar’ Quentin Skinner, Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas