Topics in methodology and narrative strategies form the focus of several articles in the medieval period, including the use of biblical metaphors and the portraiture of a courtesan to competing paradigms of legitimacy in the mid-eighth century.

These essays were written by colleagues and former students of Richard Bulliet, the scholar and mentor whose "most important contribution remains his extraordinary imagination in the service of history." The hallmark of Views from the Edge, then, is innovative scholarship in all periods of Islamic history. Its authors share a commitment to asking original historiographical questions, with an overall orientation toward issues in social history. Topics in methodology and narrative strategies form the focus of several articles in the medieval period, including the use of biblical metaphors and the portraiture of a courtesan to competing paradigms of legitimacy in the mid-eighth century. European encounters with Islam in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries and the contemporary practice of horsemanship pertain to the early modern period, while reactions to the Balfour Declaration, Islamism in the early twentieth century, the Middle East in crime fiction, and the use of the pre-Islamic past as nationalist propaganda are among the themes dealing with recent history.