Jean Batou is professor of modern international history at the University of Lausanne.
For half a millennium, modern-day Spain was mostly ruled by Muslim kingdoms that presided over an extraordinary cultural experiment. The key to understanding Al-Andalus lies in its unorthodox social structure and its political location between two worlds.
French historian Maxime Rodinson transformed our understanding of the Muslim world with books like Muhammad and Islam and Capitalism. Rodinson’s pathbreaking work, based on the creative use of Marxist ideas, is still an invaluable guide to the politics of the Middle East today.
The demand for recognition of the Armenian Genocide is inseparable from the defense of democratic freedoms in Turkey.