Starting in the 1960s, the Palestinian revolution was galvanised by the production of protest posters which depicted a united people and a hopeful future. As the liberation movement fractured, such visions disappeared. In 1968, Fatah, the Palestinian political party, published its first series of protest posters. Clenched fists, raised arms, ammunition belts, bayonets, rifles – these posters were statements of defiance. In one design, by an unknown artist, a man brandishes a gun and wears the kufiya, the headscarf worn by Palestinian farmers. The Arabic above his head reads ‘the storm’. Fatah had a revolution to advance, and sought to do…

Simplistic analogies shed far more heat than light Ali Ansari, Professor of Modern History, University of St Andrews   There are lessons to be learnt from our collective historical experience but what we are witnessing at the moment, in our febrile political atmosphere, is the reckless conscription of narratives to ideological purposes. This is not at all uncommon in many countries where history and politics remain unsettled and narratives are fiercely contested. But in Britain we have become used – some might say to the point of complacency – to a gentler politics and more settled history. The politics of the…

The Indian subcontinent got partitioned in 1947 when the British colonial rule came to an end. India was divided into two new independent states: India and Pakistan. The reason for the division was the Indian National Congress’ (INC’s) adamant refusal to share power with the Indian Muslim League (IML) headed by Muhammad Ali Jinnah who was himself a non-practicing Muslim with a secular vision. Muslims represented over 25% of the then total Indian population. The partition was gory and bloody; in excess of a million people were killed. Also, millions of Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan and Muslims in India, migrated to areas cohabited by their…

  Hiero II, the ruling general of the Greek city-state of Syracuse, led a campaign in 265 BC north towards a coastal Sicilian city, Messana, held by a group of Campanian mercenaries known as the Mamertines. The Campanians were part of a vast Oscan tribal group originally from the Apennine mountains, who had now settled in the southern Italian region of Campania. By the end of the fifth century BC the hill tribes had invaded the nearby plains, displacing the Etruscan and Greek inhabitants of the region, taking control of nearly all of the land between Salerno and Cumae. As…

  he Mamluks ruled Egypt and Syria from 1250 until 1517, when their dynasty was extinguished by the Ottomans. But Mamluks had first appeared in the Abbasid caliphate in the ninth century and even after their overthrow by the Ottomans they continued to form an important part of Egyptian Islamic society and existed as an influential group until the 19th century. They destroyed the Crusader kingdoms of Outremer, and saved Syria, Egypt and the holy places of Islam from the Mongols. They made Cairo the dominant city of the Islamic world in the later Middle Ages, and under these apparently…