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Historians examine the Mongol practice of holding interfaith court debates either with regard to the efforts of religious representatives to convert the khans, or as emblematic of the Mongols' religious pluralism. However, staging interfaith debates had other religious and political purposes as well. The debate was an arena for the religiously and ideologically charged performance of the Mongol khan's own divine-like wisdom and model of sacral, deified kingship. From the Mongol perspective, the objectives of the debate were not only different from those of its religious participants, but the debate further represented an altogether different mode of religiosity. Situating the debate in the context of the Mongol religious world view, this article proceeds to examine it in the Mongol court in medieval Iran (the Ilkhanate) shortly after its conversion to Islam. Muslim interlocutors there identified and exploited the Mongols' religious logic to reinforce the Mongol rulers' conversion. They transformed the debate into a forum for experimenting with a new synthesis of Mongol and Muslim, divinized and righteous, kingship. The continuous role of the debate in the performance of sacral monarchy among the Mongols' successors, especially the Mughals in early modern India, testifies to the enduring impact of Mongol religiosity on the Islamic world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the progress in progressive covenantalism and Christian theology professor Stephen J. Wellum's book "Kingdom Through Covenant: A Biblical-Theological Understanding of the Covenants." Topics discussed include presentation of biblical covenants by dispensational and covenant theology being wrong, and both covenant theology and dispensational theology are inaccurate in their presentation of what Scripture teaches.

This paper reexamines the sources used by N. Fancy and M.H. Green in "Plague and the Fall of Baghdad (1258)" (Medical History, 65/2 (2021), 157-177). Fancy and Green argued that the Arabic and Persian descriptions of the Mongol sieges in Iran and Iraq, and in particular, in the conquest of Baghdad in 1258, indicate that the besieged fortresses and cities were struck by Plague after the Mongol sieges were lifted. This, they suggested, is part of a recurrent pattern of the outbreak of Plague transmitted by the Mongol expansion across Eurasia. Fancy and Green concluded that the primary sources substantiate the theory driven by recent paleogenetic studies indicating that the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century set the stage for the massive pandemic of the mid-fourteenth century. The link between the Plague outbreak and the Mongol siege of Baghdad relies on three near-contemporaneous historical accounts. However, our re-examination of the sources shows that the main text (in Persian) has been significantly misunderstood, and that the two other texts (in Syriac and Arabic) have been mis-contextualized, and thus not understood properly. They do not support the authors' claim regarding Plague epidemic in Baghdad in 1258, nor do other contemporary and later Arabic texts from Syria and Egypt adduced by them, which we re-examine in detail here. We conclude that there is no evidence for the appearance of Plague during or immediately after the Mongol conquests in the Middle East, certainly not for its transmission by the Mongols.