DANIEL WOOLF | Such beliefs were often strongly felt, Gaskill is at pains to argue, not because his subjects were silly superstitious clods with little education. In fact, magical thinking transcended social and economic status, as many figures we now associate with science and enlightenment engaged in it.

YANIV FELLER | Good Jews was completed less than a year after Hamas’s attack and the war in Gaza, but Cohen’s work suggests that the pillars of philosemitism were already teetering.

Advocates of identity politics on both the left and the right often insist that we are inescapably situated beings, marked by what has been given to us by history, culture, our bodies, and the power relations in which we are enmeshed. We are never free of givens, never purely self-determining.

Frank Griffel is the Professor in the Study of Abrahamic Religions at the Faculty of Theology and Religion at Oxford University and Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall. This is a forum on his book, The Formation of Post-classical Philosophy in Islam (Oxford University Press). Part one.