Some traditions report that the sword Dhū’l-Faqār was granted to ʿAlī by Muḥammad. Although some argue that the sword reached Muḥammad after the battle of Badr in 624, various reports claim that it was sent down from heaven. The sword was originally depicted as being double-edged, but from the medieval era onwards, that image was replaced with that of a sword with a bifurcated point, now recognizable as the sign of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib worldwide...

Engagement via digital media and technologies has transformed how scholars and activists do what they do. Digital platforms and tools have opened up new horizons for doing work – producing, analyzing, archiving, communicating – but also pose new challenges that need to be addressed when working in digital environments...

Beginning in the year 711 CE, Muslim armies based in North Africa took control of the vast majority of the Iberian peninsula, supplanting the Christian, Germanic Visigoths, who had themselves assumed power in the region in the wake of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Muslims named the land al-Andalus, and for the next five centuries, Islamic religious and legal discourse and Arabic cultural and intellectual trends were preeminent on the peninsula. By the middle of the thirteenth century, however, Christian armies had regained control of most of what is now modern Spain and Portugal...