This month sees the publishing of MEMOs 100^th blog post, and as we celebrate this landmark I wanted to take this opportunity as the Blog Editor to look back over our collection so far, and look forward to its future. The aim of our blog has been to showcase accessible research encompassing the length and breadth of medieval and early modern interactions with Islamic worlds, underlining the importance of recentring this history and centring the global voices that perform its research.

Through our blog posts so far we have travelled through space and time, traversing lands both real and imagined, discovered some startling documents, and got into some intriguing discussions along the way. We have strolled through beautiful gardens and traded in markets, paying with our distinctly-marked coins. We have watched performances about those travels (however inaccurately depicted) onstage, on sea, and in the streets. We have obsessively studied Arabic, written poetry and read about Islamic worlds in early modern newspapers, all while enjoying a cup of Turkish coffee.

It is a great privilege of mine to be the first recipient of our writers’ blog posts, and there hasn’t been a blog post that I haven’t learnt something new from. On browsing through our collection, it has struck me that I had set myself an absurdly difficult task in selecting a choice few of my own personal favourites. Just a handful that stand out for me personally are Peter Good’s dramatic vignette on the burning down of Kerman, Eva Momtaz’s cheeky take on the temptations of the early modern devil, and Murat Öğütcü's horizon-expanding three-part overview of Ottoman dramatic entertainments. I have loved our guest blogger contributions, such as Muhammad Ahmedullah’s eye-opening description of the African kings of Bengal, Sanne Steen’s analysis of illustrations of prayer from a Dutch publication of the Qur’an, and Alia Amir’s mouth-watering history of the origins of Ras Malai.

Everyone else will, of course, have their own personal favourites. What have your favourite blog posts been? Do share them with us on social media. Any comments and suggestions you have on how we could improve the blog are always welcome. If you think you would be interested in writing for our blog, please do get in touch with me via email, at [email protected]. Lastly, I wanted to thank everyone involved in the blog- our team, copyeditors, and of course, each and every one of our contributors. The blog simply does not exist without you. Thank you all for your support so far, and here’s to another 100 blog posts!

Title Image: Interior of Aya Sophia, Istanbul, accessed here