From their foundational era in 1097 to Saladin's conquest of Jerusalem almost a century later, the Crusader States transformed the Middle Eastern world. In an era shaped by many conflicts, this was not simply a war between Christianity and Islam, but an epic contest among multiple rival empires, dynasties, and cultures. Nicholas Morton's The Crusader Storm: A Global History of the Wars for the Middle East (Pegasus, 2026) unfolds through a kaleidoscope of perspectives: a Byzantine renegade, a crusader princess, a Turkish matriarch, a young Arab nobleman, a Syriac archbishop, Saladin's leading commander, and the vizier of Egypt. Between them, information, technologies, and ideas—as well as weapons—crossed borders at astonishing speed as their societies fought, allied, and traded. Their entangled fates reshaped not only the Middle East, but the medieval world itself. Drawing on sources from Arabic, Greek, Syriac, Armenian, Latin, and Hebrew traditions, Nicholas Morton's enthralling panorama transforms our understanding of the Crusades, revealing these wars not as a single clash of faiths, but as a dynamic era of war, commerce, innovation, and exchange that defined the course of history.

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The French Médersa: Islamic Education and Empire in Northwest Africa (Cornell UP, 2026) explores how the French state pursued a century-long project of bicultural Franco-Muslim education in its northwest African colonies, resulting in a new type of school, the médersa, that combined French and Islamic curricula. French officials frequently described these schools and their students as "hyphens," drawing connections between larger French and Islamic forces. Samuel D. Anderson highlights this hyphenating idea, situating Franco-Muslim education between beliefs about not only France and Islam but also about tradition and modernity and about North and West Africa.

The médersa project had two goals: to create an elite class of Muslims friendly to the French imperial project and, subsequently, to mold Islam into a form that could be more easily controlled. A total of ten médersas opened across Algeria, Senegal, French Soudan, and Mauritania and closed only in the 1950s. The graduates of these schools, the medérsiens, went on to shape their societies profoundly but not always in the ways the French anticipated.

Drawing on archival and oral sources from Algeria, Mauritania, Senegal, and France, The French Médersa proposes new ways to approach trans-Saharan history. Anderson argues that across northwest Africa, and for more than a century, Franco-Muslim education was central to the history of the French empire and Islamic education alike.

Samuel D. Anderson is history teacher at Polytechnic School in Pasadena, California.

Madina Thiam is Fannie Gaston-Johansson Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

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In this episode, hosts Claudia Radiven and Amina Easat-Daas were joined by Farid Hafez to discuss his most recently published book Governing Islam in Austria and Germany: From Colonial Times to the Present (Oxford UP, 2026). Hafez’s recent work centres on the comparative analysis of the Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the German rule in Tanzania, Togo and Cameroon, and in particular their respective treatment of Muslims in each case to then in turn shed light on the current governing of Muslimness in both. Farid Hafez is an assistant professor in International Relations at William and Mary, and also a senior researcher at Georgetown University.

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