Invisible East

📚 Series launch for 'The Islamicate East: New Approaches to Texts and History' and 'Ancient and Medieval Afghanistan'

📅 Wednesday 17 June, 6.30pm

📍 Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme (FMSH) at 54 boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris, France

🔗 For full information and to reserve your place: bit.ly/ParisSeriesLaunch

Lancement de collection / book series launch Viens fêter les séries 'The Islamicate East' et 'Ancient and Medieval Afghanistan': table ronde, questions-réponses, réception et concert.

Our Programme Director, Arezou Azad, is speaking at an event hosted by Centre Camille Jullian and CPAF at Aix-Marseille Université tomorrow - all are welcome.

We are delighted to announce that Invisible East has won the 2025 Digital Humanities award! Thank you to all those who voted for us and have supported us over the years. We dedicate this prize to the people of Bamiyan, Ghorband, Panjshir, Firuzkuh, Ghur, Qom area, and other places from which the texts in the IEDC stem, and to our 40,000 users all over the world. Your trust in, and passion for, the new history that these hitherto little-known texts reveal is truly inspiring and important !

May's Document of the Month discusses a surprising phenomenon among the Cairo Geniza documents: the appearance of Muslim blessings for the prophet Muḥammad (the taṣliya) in two mercantile letters sent by twelfth-century Jewish traders in the Indian Ocean.

Read Alan Elbaum's piece now on our project website: bit.ly/DotMMay26

As many of you know, we work on documents from Ghur province, and one of our researchers is from Ghur. He has means to reach the community profiled in the heartbreaking BBC piece: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0q25dwj807o These families are suffering hunger and starvation, to the point that one father says he is willing to sell his daughter to keep the family alive. We cannot just stand by and are willing to raise funds for these families through our Crowdfunder. If you would like to donate, please do so, adding "GHUR" to the comments so we know it's for them and not for our research team. Just click here: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/invisible-east-2036 . We will make sure the money reaches the families directly.

Afghanistan humanitarian crisis: Ghor's starving families In Afghanistan today, a staggering three in four people cannot meet their basic needs.

Join us on Zoom tomorrow, from 5pm BST/6pm CEST, to hear Dr Nima Asefi speak on 'Documents from Turbulent Times: Studying Middle Persian Collections from the Late Sasanian and Early Islamic Periods-Opportunities and Challenges'.

Registration is essential: bit.ly/RethinkingHistoryZoom

Join us on Wednesday 13 May for the next seminar in the ‘Rethinking History: Returning to Archives & Documents’ series with Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies.

Dr Nima Asefi of Universität Hamburg will speak on 'Documents from Turbulent Times: Studying Middle Persian Collections from the Late Sasanian and Early Islamic Periods-Opportunities and Challenges'.

Register for the Zoom via the link in bio or use bit.ly/RethinkingHistoryZoom

Enjoying the outputs of Invisible East? Please consider supporting us so we can continue sharing with you the hidden and delightful history from below in the region that currently seems to dominate international news more than any other place outside the Euro-American sphere. Any amount, small or large, will help us to continue our work. Just click on this link and donate: https://bit.ly/3OS7bwQ. Thank you 🙏🏽

Invisible East 2036 C.I.C. In just six years, Invisible East has become an internationally-recognised research initiative. Can you back this urgent funding appeal?

Who's watching the taxman? Read the latest Document of the Month, by our Programme Director Arezou Azad, about oversight and fiscal accountability in medieval Khurasan to find out!

For a link to the piece on our project website, see bit.ly/DotMApr26



Image: By Ahmad 5shiry - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25058683