New Books Network

In this episode of New Books Network, I speak with Mikhail Pelevin about his book Love, Honour and God: Pashto Writings of Early Modern Times (Iran and the Caucasus Monographs, vol. 5, Brill, 2025).

Love, Honour and God is a survey of three centuries of Pashto
literary and educational writing, from roughly 1530 to 1830,
the period Pelevin identifies as classical in the history of Pashto
letters. Moving from the earliest, now-lost administrative "Daftar" of
Shaykh Mali through the sectarian mystical poetry of Bayazid Ansari's
Roshani movement, the Sunni traditionalist manuals of Akhund Darweza,
and the towering figures of Khushhal Khan Khatak and ʿAbd al-Rahman
Momand (Rahman Baba). This
book reconstructs a written tradition that has been persistently
marginal to both regional and Western scholarship. Pelevin frames this
history through what he calls the dissolution of the Persophonie and the
slow emergence of Pashto as a written language in the shadow of, and
eventually alongside with
the dominant Persian literary cosmopolis. Rather than reading this as a
proto-nationalist story imposed retroactively, he traces a much older
and more specific discourse of Pashtun self-identity — descent,
language, custom, and religion, articulated by the authors themselves,
long before any colonial or nationalist framework existed to name it.

What
makes the book distinctive is its insistence on working from the Pashto
texts as primary sources in their own right, rather than as
illustrations for arguments made in Persian chronicles, in colonial-era
administrative writing, or in the historiography of "Pashtun tribal
society" that has tended to treat literary production as peripheral to
political and military history. Pelevin is explicit about this reversal:
he wants to shift attention from the political to the poetical.

Qaseem
Ahmadzai holds a master's degree in intellectual history from Södertörn
University, Sweden. His research focuses on postcolonial theory,
historiography, and non-Western intellectual traditions, with particular
attention to Afghanistan and the broader Pashto-Persephone worlds.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Parallel Journeys: Eurasian History through Travelers’ Eyes (Cambria Press, 2026) is a comparative history of Eurasia told through travel writing and cross-cultural encounters. In this anthology, Anthony Barbieri pairs accounts from twenty-eight travelers across different historical periods, placing side-by-side travelers looking or going East with those looking or going West. Spanning from 400 BCE through to 1936, the anthology brings together ambassadors, monks, missionaries, merchants, and journalists in order to explore how people understood the cultures, societies, and worlds that they encountered through travel.

Structured around these “parallel journeys,” the book highlights both similarities and differences in the ways travelers described foreign places and peoples. Some travelers used these encounters to criticize the societies they entered, while others turned outward observation into reflection on their own cultures. Across the anthology, travel writing emerges not simply as a way of describing a journey, but as a way of forging ideas about cultural difference, identity, religion, commerce, and political power.

This anthology will appeal to readers interested in Eurasian history, travel writing, world literature, and cross-cultural exchange. It is also a flexible and engaging anthology perfect for classroom teaching, complete with both long and short versions of each account, helpful visuals, and contextual information — an excellent way to get students thinking about what it means to do comparison effectively.

For another overview of the anthology, readers should check out Barbieri’s lecture “Beyond the Mountains and Seas,” available on YouTube here.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In
this episode of New Books Network, I speak with Nabi Sahak about his
book, Anglo-Afghan Power and Politics, 1893–1947: The Durand Line Unmasked (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025).

Anglo-Afghan
Power and Politics revisits one of the most contested borders in the
modern world. The roughly 2,640-kilometre line drawn in 1893 by Mortimer
Durand and Amir Abdur Rahman
Khan, which today divides Pashtun communities between Afghanistan and
Pakistan. Sahak's central argument is that the historical purpose of the
Durand Line has never been settled: was it a temporary
sphere-of-influence arrangement, a frontier meant to manage dissent, or a
genuine international border? The book contends that answering this
question by using long-neglected Afghan-language sources alongside the
familiar British colonial record. Anchored chronologically in the period
from Abdur Rahman
Khan's rise to Afghan independence in 1919, with earlier and later
chapters extending the frame back to 1761 and forward to 1947, the book
draws on original correspondence between the Afghan Amir and British
viceroys, the writings of Afghan historians such as Ghubar, Kakar, and
Habibi, the accounts of colonial officials like Holdich and Caroe, and a
set of original interviews with contemporary Afghan and Pakistani
scholars and politicians. What distinguishes the book is its explicit
reframing of the dispute as a matter of missing perspective. Sahak
argues that decades of scholarship on the Durand Line have been built
almost entirely
on British and Pakistani positions, leaving the Afghan and Pashtun view
including the lived experience of communities split by the line is
largely absent
from the international debate. Writing partly from personal history as
someone who grew up in Kabul during the Soviet occupation and civil war,
Sahak situates the technical and diplomatic history of the boundary
within its human cost. The author treats
the line not only as a nineteenth-century colonial artefact but as an
unresolved question still shaping Afghanistan-Pakistan relations,
Pashtun identity, and regional security today.

Qaseem
Ahmadzai holds a master's degree in intellectual history from Södertörn
University, Sweden. His research focuses on postcolonial theory,
historiography, and non-Western intellectual traditions, with particular
attention to Afghanistan and the broader Pashto-Persephone worlds.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The history of sports in Turkey is deeply contested. Over the
decades, journalists, pundits, non-professional historians, sports
scholars, and everyday people have offered competing narratives about
the origins of modern sports in the late Ottoman Empire. In The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul (University
of Texas Press, 2026), Murat Cihan Yıldız tells the story of how
Istanbul’s Muslims, Christians, and Jews—gymnastics teachers, football
coaches, weightlifters, journalists, athletes, and fans—created a
gendered and class-stratified civic project that promoted athletics as a
source of fun, beauty, and moral education. Influenced by the emerging
global vogue for organized sports, all boys from the expanding middle
class of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperial
capital were expected to exercise and compete on the playing field in
order to develop into moral men. Yet even as the embrace of modern
athletics transcended ethnoreligious divisions, it did not erase them.
Drawing on a wide range of archival research in multiple languages,
Yıldız shows that sportsmen created new communal boundaries in team
affiliations, fandom, and sports media. Adeptly reconstructing
Istanbul’s imperial culture as it was experienced more than a century
ago, The Ottoman World of Sports recovers a lived imperial
culture whose defining features were shaped by its multiethnic,
multireligious, and multilingual sportsmen.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The Ancient Israelite World (Routledge, 2024) presents a collection of studies by international experts on various aspects of ancient Israel’s society, economy, religion, language, culture, and history, synthesizing archaeological remains and integrating them with discussions of ancient Near Eastern and biblical texts. Driven by theoretically and methodologically informed discussions of the archaeology of the Iron Age Levant, the 47 chapters in The Ancient Israelite World provide foundational, accessible, and detailed studies in their respective topics. The volume considers the history of interpretation of ancient Israel, studies on various aspects of ancient Israel’s society and history, and avenues for present and future approaches to the ancient Israelite world. Accompanied by over 150 maps and figures, it allows the reader to gain an understanding of key issues that archaeologists, historians and biblical scholars have faced and are currently facing as they attempt to better understand ancient Israelite society. The Ancient Israelite World is an essential reference work for students and scholars of ancient Israel and its history, culture, and society, whether they are historians, archaeologists or biblical scholars. Chapter 42 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF here under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. Dr. Nathaniel E. Greene is a distinguished international scholar closely associated with the European Hebrew Journal (EHJ), an international double-blind peer-reviewed academic journal.

Dr. Greene serves as a member of the Editorial Board of the European Hebrew Journal. In addition to contributing to the supervision of the scholarly quality of submitted articles, the Institute for Hebrew Language and Literature in Belgrade, the journal’s publisher, has released an official academic interview with him as part of its series of scholarly conversations.

His publication and interview, entitled “Scribes, Scripts, and State Formation in Ancient Israel,” were produced in collaboration with Željko Stanojević, the journal’s Managing Editor.

About Dr. Nathaniel E. Greene

Dr. Greene is a lecturer in Hebrew Bible and Old Testament at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, United Kingdom. He received his PhD from the prestigious University of Wisconsin–Madison in the United States.

His principal areas of scholarly expertise and the fields he represents within the journal include:

Biblical Hebrew and Philology: The study of the historical development and linguistic structure of ancient Hebrew.

Northwest Semitic Languages and Epigraphy: The analysis of ancient inscriptions on stone, clay, and other materials from the Levant.

Palaeography: The historical development of ancient scripts and manuscript traditions.

The Formation of the Ancient Israelite State: Anthropological and sociological approaches to the emergence of institutions during the Iron Age, with particular attention to the role of scribes in the formation of biblical texts, including the Deuteronomistic History.

In his research, Dr. Greene also employs modern digital technologies, including advanced Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), to analyse damaged ancient inscriptions and reconstruct patterns of literacy in the Iron Age Near East.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network