Criticism arising from disagreement is what advances debate, making scholarship progress. A critical review therefore should leave an author unperturbed—as long as it is honest and fair. Kioumars Ghereghlou's review of my book Persia in Crisis: Safavid Decline and the Fall of Isfahan is neither. Rather than engaging in a serious and substantive discussion of the book's content and argument, it offers a string of innuendo-filled swipes and tendentious statements reflecting a prickly type of modern identity politics. I thus feel compelled to respond.

Rudi Matthee's book has several key problems, which I discussed already in my review. Here I will provide evidence for two main issues that I see in the book. These issues are the limited use of Persian primary sources, and a tendency to make very broad claims based on very limited evidence.

The August 2015 issue of IJMES reviews a ten-volume compilation of 17th-century Istanbul court records, issued between 2010 and 2013 under my editorship. The review offers useful quibbles that highlight differences between the priorities of historians and those of analytical social scientists. These comments fall within the boundaries of healthy academic discourse.

Scholars are justified in complaining that Ottoman studies, from its maturation in the 1950s until today, has been far too integrated into social science disciplines. Traditionally, political and economic history has dominated the field at the expense of cultural history, literary studies, and the history of art, architecture, and material culture. The recent juncture of social science concerns and the sensitivities of the humanities is a welcome but long overdue development. Social science disciplines have long held sway over the field, but scholars of Ottoman history have always exercised rigor and meticulous care in editing and publishing historical documents and literary texts. Editors often discuss the literary, philological, and codicological problems of historical documents in great detail, the conceptual universe in which the documents exist, and their limits and possibilities. Of course, “editing” often includes textual criticism, the conscientious work of transliteration, and, sometimes, translation. Despite numerous invaluable editions of archival and nonarchival material drawn from the Ottoman centuries, we still lack substantial statistical information and data to answer major questions that historians and social scientists have long asked. In this respect, what Timur Kuran (and his team) initiated marks an important step. They published a massive compilation of ten volumes of documents selected from the two qadi courts of Istanbul during the 17th century.

The publication year of each volume and the type of binding for volumes nine and ten were noted incorrectly. We regret these errors and any problems they may have caused.

Forced migration has come to be the defining feature of the contemporary Middle East, a region that is both the source of and host to some of the largest forcibly displaced populations in the world. In 2015, 65 percent of the world's 19.4 million refugees—including the 5.5 million Palestinian refugees—as well as 30 percent of the world's thirty-eight million internally displaced persons were in the Middle East, while one out of every four refugees worldwide was from Syria. Seeking security and stability, millions of people from the region are on the move within and across social spaces that are at once strange and familiar, and in which they themselves are familiar and strange to others. In 2015, Turkey became host to the world's largest refugee population of over two million, while Zaʿatari camp in Jordan has grown rapidly to become one of the world's largest camps since the Syrian civil war began. With 7.6 million people—or 35 percent of the population—internally displaced, Syria now has the highest number of internally displaced persons in the world. Iraq has produced multiple overlapping displacements, resulting in one of the largest refugee resettlement programs of the past decade. Thousands of Syrians, Libyans, and Iraqis have undertaken perilous journeys across the Mediterranean Sea to seek asylum in Europe and elsewhere. Palestinian refugees are now in a fourth generation of exile, making their plight the longest running unresolved refugee situation in the world.