Outside the disciplines of communication and cultural studies, scholarly interest in television programming, especially scripted entertainment, has been overshadowed by attention to digital media, reality TV, and smart phone connectivity. A 2017 University of Maryland conference offered a reconsideration of popular Middle East-produced television dramas and their surprising impacts on national and transnational politics and culture. As conference papers showed, social and historical themes resonated in unexpected ways inside and outside national borders, with state authorities responding, not just with the usual censoring, but with investment in social and historical dramas of their own.

Until recently, studies of Islamic jurisprudence usually began and ended with the texts of medieval Islam. Apart from the Islamic modernists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the reasoning and writings of jurists of the last five hundred years failed to attract interest in their own right. Colin Imber's study of the sixteenth-century Ottoman Sheikh al-Islam, Ebu's-Su‘ud, the preeminent jurisconsult of the Ottoman Empire, is an illuminating and timely addition to a sparse, but growing, literature dedicated to this more proximate inheritance of the contemporary Islamic world.

Compared with the cottage industry that has grown up around the study of slavery in Africa and the Americas, slavery in the Ottoman East barely registers as a target of inquiry. Ottomanists and Islamicists have tended to avoid it altogether, and global comparativists have given little play to slave systems that, like the Ottoman, did not center on plantation labor. Military slaves and other varieties of “elite slaves” in the Ottoman Empire have been exceptions to the general indifference, although considering the long and complex history of elite slave (kul) manpower in the 600 years of Ottoman statehood, the pickings are slim there, as well.