On October 5, 2023, Ubisoft Entertainment SA (Ubisoft) released Assassin’s Creed Mirage, the thirteenth installment in its video-game series launched in 2007. Since its inception, the Assassin’s Creed franchise has engaged hundreds of millions of players around the world; the most recent estimates indicate that Mirage players number in the millions.1 Set in 9th-century Baghdad, the game centers on Basim Ibn Ishaq, a character introduced in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (2020). The authors of this article served as consultants and collaborators for the game, under the auspices of the Digital Lab for Islamic Culture and Collections (DLIVCC), based at the University of Edinburgh. As such, we were among the external historians and institutions who helped create and contribute to the game’s educational feature.2 This article offers reflections on our collective experiences working on Assassin’s Creed Mirage, reviews historical representation of Islamicate cultures in video games, discusses the remit of the DLIVCC consultancy, and identifies some structural challenges to diversifying and decolonizing video games and game-development processes.3 Lastly, we propose steps for scholars and institutions wishing to broaden the impact of their research through decolonization work across the academic, video games, and GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) sectors.

This article examines the Wadi Salib protest that erupted in Haifa in the summer of 1959 against the background of the history of the children in the neighborhood during the 1950s. One of the main causes of the protest, which was led by Jewish migrants from Morocco, was the educational and social condition of the children in Wadi Salib. During the Mandate period, Wadi Salib and the surrounding areas had already emerged as a focus of poverty and deprivation. Among other aspects, the article examines the changes that occurred in the character of the neighborhood after 1948 and the essence of Wadi Salib, with its street steps, as a liminal space between downtown Haifa and the Hadar HaCarmel neighborhood. The liminal character of Wadi Salib was manifested in its status as an impoverished migrant area, in the participation of children in the protest of the summer of 1959, and in the educational, social, and health problems that faced the children. This character was also manifested in the manner in which the children of Wadi Salib challenged the physical and symbolic boundaries that enclosed the neighborhood.

The period of struggle over hydrocarbon sovereignty in the Arab world –the 1950s-1970s– saw a spate of periodicals in Arabic about oil. These included periodicals produced by the public relations departments of Euro-American oil companies, as well as monthlies, weeklies and quarterlies produced by Arab journalists, experts, and former oil revolutionaries in Cairo, Baghdad, Beirut and Kuwait. This essay argues that the trajectory of these latter publications –both their context and content– traces the massive political transformations that saw a shift of power in the region, alongside a radical transformation in the representation of oil from a public good into a private property.

In January 1935, Palestinian Islamic thinkers, in conversation with counterparts elsewhere in the Middle East and South Asia, concluded that those who sold or facilitated the sale of land to the Mandate Jewish community must be excommunicated. This article explores the emergence of such religious excommunication (takfīr) in Mandate Palestine between 1929 and 1935 based on a wide range of periodicals and pamphlets from this period. It argues that, far from a story of an underlying “Islamic radicalism” which reemerged in a time of pressure, this is a case in which internal and external political and economic pressures necessitated a drastic solution which could distinguish Muslims committed to the Palestinian nationalist project from those who were not. In doing so, the article contributes to scholarship on both Modern Islam and Mandate Palestine.

Using the concept of the carceral state, this article articulates how Israel’s control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip has shifted to a nondemocratic one-state paradigm. While, initially, Israel operated a separate military carceral system for these areas, between 2000 and 2006 it dismantled the military system, transferred most Palestinian prisoners into Israel, and rebranded its civilian prison service as the National Prison Authority, making it the sole agency responsible for the incarceration of Palestinians. This reorganization consolidated a single carceral system inside Israeli territory—the one carceral state— which serves as crucial evidence of the de facto one-state paradigm and forms a centerpiece of this new regime in Israel/Palestine. By analyzing a broad range of archival and administrative documents and 168 Supreme Court decisions on the management of prisons and Palestinian prisoners, this study reveals how the massive “exclusionary inclusion” of the Palestinian prisoner population in Israeli state law and its administrative mechanisms changes the entire landscape of the Israeli settler-colonial citizenship regime. Palestinian prisoners become “carceral citizens” of the “one state” and are subject to a parallel, alternate legality, in which they expand their repertoire of resistance against the wider racialized and repressive regime across Palestine/Israel.

From the early years of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, observers predicted that their de facto annexation might occur. Fifty-seven years later, it has happened. Although governed differently than other zones within the Israeli state, neither territory can be separated from Israel. Yet, the territories’ official status is that they are not part of the state. We offer four reinforcing analyses—legal, historical, discursive, and political—of this sustained discrepancy between what is and what is officially said to be. By analyzing Israel’s juridical techniques for regularizing the incorporation of territories occupied beginning in 1948, we show that de facto annexation has been Israel’s predominant form of territorial expansion. This helps account for the failure to implement de jure annexation, the intensity of conflict over attempts to overhaul the Israeli judiciary, and debates over the future of postwar Gaza.

The present article is a study of Ottoman military recruitment attempts of Circassians in the northwestern Caucasus. It examines the process of realizing a Circassian highlander army and the administration of the Anapa fortress during the time of two different fortress commanders. Focusing on the deeds of these two pashas regarding Circassian recruitment and their social background, this study highlights the Ottoman-Circassian relations and the dynamics of loyalty and pragmatism. Specifically, the role of provincial networks in ruling the border fortresses and regional politics in the Eastern Black Sea have been underlined within the context of the Russian-Ottoman rivalry over the Caucasus. Rebutting the importance of the origins of Ottoman officers for Ottoman borderland politics, this study argues that the contribution of provincial notables to the Ottoman civilizing mission and the Circassian army project in the early nineteenth century has been indispensable to the realization of Ottoman establishment in the Caucasus.