New Books in Islamic Studies
712 episodes - English - Latest episode: 1 day ago - ★★★★★ - 26 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Islam about their New Books
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Episodes
Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, "Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State" (Stanford UP, 2024)
April 23, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourBetween the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state. Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Muslim refugee resettlement reinvigorated regional economies, but also intensified compe...
M. A. R. Habib and Bruce B. Lawrence, "The Qur'an: A Verse Translation" (Liveright, 2024)
April 23, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn their landmark new translation of the Qur’an, The Qur’an: A Verse Translation (LIveright, 2024), M. A. R. Habib and Bruce B. Lawrence translate the entirety of the Qur’an in a fashion that beautifully and majestically captures the poetic sensibility of the Qur’an for contemporary English speakers and readers. The distinctive feature of this Qur’an translation is its close attentiveness to the literary possibilities opened by the versification of the text and to the oral and aural capacitie...
Arsalan Khan, "The Promise of Piety: Islam and the Politics of Moral Order in Pakistan" (Cornell UP, 2024)
April 19, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe Promise of Piety: Islam and the Politics of Moral Order in Pakistan (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Arsalan Khan is an incisive ethnographic study of Pakistan’s Tablighi movement. This piety movement attracts Pakistani Muslim men across class, caste, and social contexts and as such Khan is particularly attuned and reflexive as he navigates the boundaries of this community. Khan theorizes the various modalities of relationality that mark this movement from its sonic and ritual dimensi...
Egor Lazarev, "State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
April 13, 2024 08:00 - 50 minutesState-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Egor Lazarev explores the use of state and non-state legal systems by both politicians and ordinary people in postwar Chechnya. The book addresses two interrelated puzzles: why do local rulers tolerate and even promote non-state legal systems at the expense of state law, and why do some members of repressed ethnic minorities choose to resolve their everyday disputes using sta...
Eric Calderwood, "On Earth Or in Poems: The Many Lives of Al-Andalus" (Harvard UP, 2023)
April 08, 2024 08:00 - 40 minutesDuring the Middle Ages, the Iberian Peninsula was home not to Spain and Portugal but rather to al-Andalus. Ruled by a succession of Islamic dynasties, al-Andalus came to be a shorthand for a legendary place where people from the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe; Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together in peace. That reputation is not entirely deserved, yet, as On Earth Or in Poems: The Many Lives of Al-Andalus (Harvard UP, 2023) shows, it has had an enduring hold on the imagination,...
Sumita Pahwa, "Politics as Worship: Righteous Activism and the Egyptian Muslim Brothers" (Syracuse UP, 2023)
April 08, 2024 08:00 - 57 minutesDespite expectations that the deeply held political and religious organizing principles at the heart of the Muslim Brotherhood would prove incompatible and contentious should the organization ever come to power, the Brotherhood succeeded in maintaining a united identity following the 2011 ousting of Hosni Mubarak and the election of a Brotherhood-majority government. To understand how the movement threaded these disparate missions, Politics as Worship: Righteous Activism and the Egyptian Mus...
Esra Mirze Santesso, "Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing" (Ohio State UP, 2023)
April 07, 2024 08:00 - 40 minutesRecent decades have seen an unprecedented number of comics by and about Muslim people enter the global market. Now, Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing (Ohio State UP, 2023) offers the first major study of these works. Esra Mirze Santesso assesses Muslim comics to illustrate the multifaceted nature of seeing and representing daily lives within and outside of the homeland. Focusing on contemporary graphic narratives that are primarily but not exclusively from the Middle East--from blockbuste...
Annika Schmeding, "Sufi Civilities: Religious Authority and Political Change in Afghanistan" (Stanford UP, 2023)
April 07, 2024 08:00 - 59 minutesAnnika Schmeding’s new book Sufi Civilities: Religious Authority and Political Change in Afghanistan (Stanford UP, 2023) is a deeply sensitive and rich study of a variety of facets of Sufism in contemporary Afghanistan. Focused on the intersection and interaction of Sufism and Afghan civil society, this book simultaneously offers a layered and often moving account of Sufism in Afghanistan, while also presenting an excellent critique of Western NGO driven understandings of civility and civil s...
Loren D. Lybarger, "Palestinian Chicago: Identity in Exile" (U California Press, 2020)
April 03, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourChicago is home to one of the largest, most politically active Palestinian immigrant communities in the United States. For decades, secular nationalism held sway as the dominant political ideology, but since the 1990s its structures have weakened and Islamic institutions have gained strength. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interview data, Loren D. Lybarger's book Palestinian Chicago: Identity in Exile (U California Press, 2020) charts the origins of these changes and the multiple effects...
Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, "Merits of the Plague" (Penguin, 2023)
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourSix hundred years ago, the author of this landmark work of history and religious thought—an esteemed judge, poet, and scholar in Cairo—survived the bubonic plague, which took the lives of three of his children, not to mention tens of millions of others throughout the medieval world. Holding up an eerie mirror to our own time, he reflects on the origins of plagues—from those of the Prophet Muhammad’s era to the Black Death of his own—and what it means that such catastrophes could have been wil...
Financial Access and Socio-Economic Development in Indonesia
March 19, 2024 08:00 - 29 minutesGlobally, 1.4 billion people are considered to be “financially excluded,” meaning they cannot safely access appropriate and affordable financial services. Muslim communities have particularly high levels of financial exclusion – for example, Muslim-majority countries have 24% lower participation rates in active borrowing from banks, and 29% lower rates of bank account ownership compared to other countries. In Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim majority country, the vast majority of financi...
Jörg Matthias Determann and Shoaib Ahmed Malik, "Islamic Theology and Extraterrestrial Life: New Frontiers in Science and Religion" (I. B. Tauris, 2024)
March 19, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourOver the last thirty years, humanity has discovered thousands of planets outside of our solar system. The discovery of extraterrestrial life could be imminent. This book explains how such a discovery might impact Islamic theology. It is the foundational reference on the subject, comprising a variety of different insights from both Sunni and Shi'i positions, from different Muslim contexts, and with chapters that compare and contrast Islamic perspectives with Christianity. Together, they addres...
Umme Al-wazedi and Afrin Zeenat, "Veil Obsessed: Representations in Literature, Art, and Media" (Syracuse UP, 2024)
March 17, 2024 08:00 - 50 minutesIn their edited volume Veil Obsessed: Representations in Literature, Art, and Media (Syracuse University Press, 2024), Umme Al-wazedi and Afrin Zeenat complicate discussions of the veil and highlight the prevalent anxieties surrounding it. The edited volume is unique in its focus and engagement of the veil as it appears in various literary, artistic, and popular cultures, such as of historical Algeria and contemporary Iranian television series, Bollywood films, and street art in Europe. The b...
SherAli Tareen, "Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire" (Columbia UP, 2023)
March 15, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourFriendship—particularly interreligious friendship—offers both promise and peril. After the end of Muslim political sovereignty in South Asia, how did Muslim scholars grapple with the possibilities and dangers of Hindu-Muslim friendship? How did they negotiate the incongruities between foundational texts and attitudes toward non-Muslims that were informed by the premodern context of Muslim empire and the realities of British colonialism, which rendered South Asian Muslims a political minority?...
Legal Cultures in the Russian Empire
March 13, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourLaw. How does the state form and use it? How do people use and shape it? How does law shape culture? How does the practice of law change over time in a modernizing colony? What was stable and what was malleable in the application of law in early modern Russia versus its Central Asian colony in the Empire’s final century? What’s the difference between a bribe and a gift? These are some of the questions at the heart of this fascinating conversation about two books that probe the theoretical and...
Sofia Rehman, "Gendering the Hadith Tradition: Recentering the Authority of Aisha, Mother of the Believers" (Oxford UP, 2024)
March 12, 2024 08:00 - 42 minutesGendering the Hadith Tradition: Recentering the Authority of Aisha, Mother of the Believers (Oxford UP, 2024) presents for the first time a partial translation and study of Imam Badr al-Din al-Zarkashi's work, al-Ijaba li-Iradi ma Istadraktahu Aisha Ala al-Sahabah-"The Corrective: Aisha's Rectification of the Companions. "It critically analyses from the perspective of hadith criticism a number of sections presenting Aisha's refutations and corrections of key Companions including, Umar b. al-K...
Emily Lynell Edwards, "Digital Islamophobia: Tracking a Far-Right Crisis" (de Gruyter, 2023)
March 07, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn Digital Islamophobia: Tracking a Far-Right Crisis (De Gruyter, 2023), Emily Lynell Edwards explores this virtual and vicious threat, analyzing how these networks grow, develop, and circulate Islamophobic hate-speech on Twitter. Edwards details how far-right discourse is not merely national, or even transatlantic, but increasingly transnationalized among American, German, as well as Indian and Nigerian digital networks. By tracking and tracing the contours of these far-right digital communi...
Razak Khan, "Minority Pasts: Locality, Emotions, and Belonging in Princely Rampur" (Oxford UP, 2022)
March 06, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourRazak Khan's Minority Pasts: Locality, Emotions, and Belonging in Princely Rampur (Oxford UP, 2022) explores the diversity of the histories and identities of Muslims in Rampur-the last Muslim-ruled princely state in colonial United Provinces and a city that is pejoratively labelled as the center of "Muslim vote bank" politics in contemporary Uttar Pradesh. The book highlights the importance of locality and emotions in shaping Muslim identities, politics, and belonging in Rampur. The book show...
Vernon James Schubel, "Teaching Humanity: An Alternative Introduction to Islam" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)
February 27, 2024 09:00 - 52 minutesIn his splendid new book, Teaching Humanity: An Alternative Introduction to Islam (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), Vernon Schubel makes a compelling case for taking seriously the foundational importance of humanity and moral pedagogy to the venture of Islam, especially in relation to introductory books on this topic. Through a finely layered yet always engaging and accessible examination of a panoply of Muslim intellectual traditions and lived practice, Schubel offers an alternative to introductor...
Jonathan A. C. Brown, "Slavery and Islam" (Oneworld Academic, 2019)
February 21, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn his majestic and encyclopedic new book Slavery and Islam (Oneworld Academic, 2019), Jonathan A. C. Brown presents a sweeping analysis of Muslim intellectual, political, and social entanglements with slavery, and some of the thorniest conceptual and ethical problems involved in defining and writing about slavery. Self-reflective and bold, Slavery and Islam also offers a remarkable combination of intellectual and social history, anchored in layers of complex yet eminently accessible textual ...
Christiane Gruber, “The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Images" (Indiana UP, 2019)
February 18, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn our most recent public memory, images of the Prophet Muhammad have caused a great deal of controversy, such as satirical cartoons of Muhammad in French magazine Charlie Hebdo, or Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. The sometimes violent backlash to these images has reinforced the popular narrative that Islam is aniconic and iconoclastic. In The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Images (Indiana University Press, 2019), Christiane Gruber, Professor in the History of A...
Adam Bursi, "Traces of the Prophets: Relics and Sacred Spaces in Early Islam" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)
February 17, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesAdam Bursi’s Traces of the Prophets: Relics and Sacred Spaces in Early Islam (Edinburg University Press, 2024) uses writings by early Muslims to map a history of material objects, relics, and tombs of prophetic figures as they were conceptualized in the 8th and 9th centuries. The book draws from various genres of writings, including biographies and hadith of the Prophet Muhammad and Qur’an commentaries and juristic compilations to capture the tensions and practices around tomb and relic vener...
The Future of Afghanistan: A Discussion with Kate Clark
February 17, 2024 09:00 - 40 minutesEver since the Taliban victory in 2021 there has been very little prospect of significant change in Afghanistan. There is no rival to the Taliban and no prospect of them losing power at least for the foreseeable future - but within that framework what does the future hold for the country? There is no one better able to answer that than Kate Clark who used to report from Kabul for the BBC under the first Taliban government and who has remained working on Afghanistan ever since. Listen to her i...
Amira Mittermaier, "Giving to God: Islamic Charity in Revolutionary Times" (U California Press, 2019)
February 12, 2024 09:00 - 57 minutesIn her stunning new book, Giving to God: Islamic Charity in Revolutionary Times (University of California Press, 2019), Amira Mittermaier, Associate Professor of Religion and Anthropology at the University of Toronto, conducts a dazzling and at many times moving ethnography of an Islamic economy of giving and charity in Egypt. By presenting an intimate portrait of a range of actors and organizations, who both give and receive charity, Mittermaier highlights often unrecognized political practi...
Merin Shobhana Xavier, "The Dervishes of the North: Rumi, Whirling, and the Making of Sufism in Canada" (U Toronto Press, 2023)
February 02, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourThe thirteenth-century Muslim mystic and poet Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207–1273) is a popular spiritual icon. His legacy is sustained within the mystical and religious practice of Sufism, particularly through renditions of his poetry, music, and the meditation practice of whirling. In Canada, practices associated with Rumi have become ubiquitous in public spaces, such as museums, art galleries, and theatre halls, just as they continue to inform sacred ritual among Sufi communities. The Dervishes ...
Maryam Kashani, "Medina by the Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival" (Duke UP, 2023)
January 31, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourFrom the Black Power movement and state surveillance to Silicon Valley and gentrification, Medina by the Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival (Duke UP, 2023) examines how multiracial Muslim communities in the San Francisco Bay Area survive and flourish within and against racial capitalist, carceral, and imperial logics. Weaving expansive histories, peoples, and geographies together in an ethnographic screenplay of cinematic scenes, Maryam Kashani demonstrates how sociopolitical forces and...
Amanda Lanzillo, "Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India" (U California Press, 2024)
January 27, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourPious Labour: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India (University of California Press, 2023) focuses on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries northern India and working-class people who asserted Islamic piety through their trade while responding to industrial change, especially the development of new technologies and state and colonial projects. Indian Muslim artisans, such as those who worked in electroplating, or as stonemasons, tailors, carpenters, or woodworkers, ...
Amar Sohal, "The Muslim Secular: Parity and the Politics of India's Partition" (Oxford UP, 2023)
January 24, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourConcerned with the fate of the minority in the age of the nation-state, Muslim political thought in modern South Asia has often been associated with religious nationalism and the creation of Pakistan. Amar Sohal's book The Muslim Secular: Parity and the Politics of India's Partition (Oxford UP, 2023) complicates that story by reconstructing the ideas of three prominent thinker-actors of the Indian freedom struggle: the Indian National Congress leader Abul Kalam Azad, the popular Kashmiri poli...
Nicholas Morton, "The Crusader States and their Neighbours: A Military History, 1099-1187" (Oxford UP, 2020)
January 22, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourNicholas Morton’s The Crusader States and their Neighbours: A Military History, 1099-1187 (Oxford UP, 2020) explores the military history of the medieval Near East, piecing together the fault-lines of conflict which entangled this much-contested region. This was an area where ethnic, religious, dynastic, and commercial interests collided and the causes of war could be numerous. Conflicts persisted for decades and were fought out between many groups including Kurds, Turks, Armenians, Arabs, an...
Karen C. Pinto, "Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration" (U Chicago Press, 2016)
January 16, 2024 09:00 - 53 minutesThe history of Islamic mapping is one of the new frontiers in the history of cartography. Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration (University of Chicago Press, 2016) offers the first in-depth analysis of a distinct tradition of medieval Islamic maps known collectively as the Book of Roads and Kingdoms (Kitab al-Masalik wa al-Mamalik, or KMMS). Created from the mid-tenth through the nineteenth century, these maps offered Islamic rulers, scholars, and armchair explorers a view of the physical and...
Matthew Levitt, "Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad" (Yale UP, 2008)
January 14, 2024 09:00 - 36 minutesThe world is reeling from the savage terror attack that brutalized, raped, murdered and kidnapped Israelis and civilians from at least 25 other countries, continuing to hold many of them hostage – and from the ongoing war that followed. After Hamas took over Gaza in 2007, some thought it would become more moderate. That was wishful thinking. The barbaric massacre of October 7, 2023 made it clear that Hamas is a terrorist group intent on destroying Israel and hoping to spark a regional – and e...
Rishad Choudhury, "Hajj Across Empires: Pilgrimage and Political Culture After the Mughals, 1739-1857" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
January 14, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn Hajj Across Empires: Pilgrimage and Political Culture After the Mughals, 1739-1857 (Cambridge UP, 2023), Rishad Choudhury presents a new history of imperial connections across the Indian Ocean from 1739 to 1857, a period that witnessed the decline and collapse of Mughal rule and the consolidation of British colonialism in South Asia. In this highly original and comprehensive study, he reveals how the hajj pilgrimage significantly transformed Muslim political culture and colonial attitudes ...
Judith Surkis, "Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930" (Cornell UP, 2019)
January 12, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourJudith Surkis's Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930 (Cornell UP, 2019) traces the intersection of colonialism, law, land expropriation, sex, gender, and family during the century after the French conquest of Algeria in 1830. Seeking to assimilate Algerian land while differentiating Algerian Muslims from European settlers, colonial authorities developed a system that confined Muslim law to family matters while subjecting Algerian property to French Civil law. Securing and ex...
Matthew Carr, "Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain, 1492-1614" (Hurst, 2017)
January 08, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourA centuries-old story with remarkable contemporary resonance, Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain, 1492-1614 (Hurst, 2017) is celebrated journalist Matthew Carr's riveting and "richly detailed" (Choice) chronicle of what was, by 1614, the largest act of ethnic cleansing in European history. Months after King Philip III of Spain signed an edict in 1609 denouncing the Muslim inhabitants of Spain as heretics, traitors, and apostates, the entire Muslim population of Spain was given three...
Sara Rahnama, "The Future Is Feminist: Women and Social Change in Interwar Algeria" (Cornell UP, 2023)
January 07, 2024 09:00 - 49 minutesWhen Algerians of the 1920s and 30s imagined the future of their country, women’s liberation was foundational to their vision. From the first generation of French-educated schoolteachers, to urban domestic workers who challenged spatial and economic divisions, to nationalist journalists pushing back against French colonial claims, Sara Rahnama describes how a range of Algerian actors conceived of women’s rights and responded to new developments in their own country and across the Middle East....
Noel Malcolm, "Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750" (Oxford UP, 2019)
January 03, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourSir Noel Malcolm’s captivating new book, Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750 (Oxford University Press, 2019), tells the story of Western European fascination with the Ottoman empire and Islam between the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the latter half of the 18th century. This beautifully argued, erudite monograph traces a textured encounter between two civilizational complexes and exposes the dynamic role that the Ottomans played in intra-E...
Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim, "Decolonizing Human Rights" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
January 03, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn his extensive body of work, Professor Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim challenges both historical interpretations of Islamic Sharia and neo-colonial understanding of human rights. To advance the rationale of scholarship for social change, An-Naim proposes advancing the universality of human rights through internal discourse within Islamic and African societies and cross-cultural dialogue among human cultures. This book proposes a transformation from human rights organized around a state determined ...
Khurram Hussain, "Islam as Critique: Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Challenge of Modernity" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)
January 01, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourDelighting in Khurram Hussain’s consistently sparkling prose is reason enough to read his new book Islam as Critique: Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Challenge of Modernity (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). But there is much more to this splendid book, framed around the profoundly consequential conceptual and political question of can Muslims serve not as friends or foes but as critics of Western modernity. Hussain addresses this question through a close and energetic reading of key selections from the ...
Eren Tasar, “Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia” (Oxford UP, 2017)
December 30, 2023 09:00 - 57 minutesHow was the Soviet Union able to avoid issues of religious and national conflict with its large and diverse Islamic population? In his new book, Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia (Oxford University Press, 2017), Eren Tasar argues that the Soviet Union was successful in building its relationship with Muslims in Central Asia because it created a space for Islam within the state’s ideology. Exploring sources from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, Tasar gi...
Kristian Petersen, “Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Language, and Scripture in the Han Kitab” (Oxford UP, 2017)
December 28, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesIn his monumental new book, Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Language, and Scripture in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017), Kristian Petersen takes his readers on an unforgettable journey through the layers and complexities of Sino-Muslim intellectual and social history. On the way readers meet the major scholars and texts that played a formative role in the development of the Han Kitab tradition, and revel in navigating the terms and stakes of their discourses and debates ...
David M. Freidenreich, "Jewish Muslims: How Christians Imagined Islam as the Enemy" (U California Press, 2023)
December 21, 2023 09:00 - 58 minutesUncovering the hidden history of Islamophobia and its surprising connections to the long-standing hatred of Jews. Hatred of Jews and hatred of Muslims have been intertwined in Christian thought since the rise of Islam. In Jewish Muslims: How Christians Imagined Islam as the Enemy (U California Press, 2023), David M. Freidenreich explores the history of this complex, perplexing, and emotionally fraught phenomenon. He makes the compelling case that, then and now, hate-mongers target "them" in a...
David S. Powers and Eric Tagliacozzo, "Islamic Ecumene: Comparing Muslim Societies" (Cornell UP, 2023)
December 16, 2023 09:00 - 31 minutesThe essays in Islamic Ecumene: Comparing Muslim Societies (Cornell UP, 2023) address the ways in which Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia and from sub-Saharan Africa to the steppes of Uzbekistan are members of a broad cultural unit. Although the Muslim inhabitants of these lands speak dozens of languages, represent numerous ethnic groups, and practice diverse forms of Islam, they are united by shared practices and worldviews shaped by religious identity. To highlight these commonalities, the c...
Xavier Luffin, "Another Look at Congolese History: Arabic and Swahili Documents in the Belgian Archives" (Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer, 2020)
December 09, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourAnother Look at Congolese History: Arabic and Swahili Documents in the Belgian Archives (Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer, 2020), edited by Xavier Luffin, unlocks an unprecedented journey through the tapestry of Congo's past in Central Africa and the Indian Ocean world. This meticulously compiled collection unveils a trove of Arabic and Swahili archival documents nestled within Belgian archives, presenting an unparalleled lens into a transformative era. Spanning the eve of Belgian col...
Gregory J. Goalwin, "Borders of Belief: Religious Nationalism and the Formation of Identity in Ireland and Turkey" (Rutgers UP, 2022)
December 07, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourDespite theories to the contrary, religious nationalism, and the use of religion to determine membership in the national community, has continued to play a role in processes of identification in societies all around the globe ... and such processes seems likely to continue to structure the ways in which communities view themselves even in today’s globalized and seemingly secularized world. – Gregory Goalwin, Borders of Belief: Religious Nationalism and the Formation of Identity in Ireland and...
Afsar Mohammad, "Remaking History: 1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
December 06, 2023 09:00 - 40 minutesThe story Afsar Mohammad's book Remaking History: 1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad (Cambridge UP, 2023) follows begins on August 15, 1947. As the new nation-states of India and Pakistan prepared to negotiate land and power, the citizens of the princely state of Hyderabad experienced the unravelling of an intense political conflict between the Union government of India and the local ruler, the Nizam of Hyderabad. With evidence from the oral histories of various sections - both M...
Nur Sobers-Khan et al., "Beyond Colonial Rupture: Print Culture and the Emergence of Muslim Modernity in Nineteenth-Century South Asia" (2023)
December 04, 2023 09:00 - 41 minutesScholarly discussions on Islam in print have focused predominantly on the role of Urdu in the development of North Indian Muslim publics (Dubrow, 2018; Robb, 2020), ʿulama and Islamic jurisprudence (Tareen, 2020) and relations between Islam and colonial modernity (Robinson, 2008; Osella & Osella, 2008). This special issue of International Journal of Islam in Asia (Sept, 2023) instead offers fine-grained investigations on technology and labour; print landscapes, networks and actors; subaltern ...
Nader Kadhem, "Africanism: Blacks in the Medieval Arab Imaginary" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023)
November 25, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesAnti-blackness has until recently been a taboo topic within Arab society. This began to change when Nader Kadhem, a prominent Arab and Muslim thinker from Bahrain, published the first in-depth investigation of anti-black racism in the Arab world in 2004. This translation of the new and revised edition of Kadhem’s influential text brings the conversation to the English-speaking world. Al-Istifraq or Africanism, a term analogous to Orientalism, refers to the discursive elements of perceiving, i...
Konstantinos Retsikas, "A Synthesis of Time: Zakat, Islamic Micro-finance and the Question of the Future in 21st-Century Indonesia" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)
November 17, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn A Synthesis of Time: Zakat, Islamic Micro-finance and the Question of the Future in 21st-Century Indonesia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Konstantinos Retsikas has anthropological investigation into the different forms the economy assumes, and the different purposes it serves, when conceived from the perspective of Islamic micro-finance as a field of everyday practice. The book is based on long-term ethnographic research in Java, Indonesia, with Islamic foundations active in managing zakat an...
Toby Matthiesen, "The Caliph and the Imam: The Making of Sunnism and Shiism" (Oxford UP, 2023)
November 02, 2023 08:00 - 43 minutesIt was common during the years of the U.S. invasion of Iraq to talk about the Sunni-Shia split—and how the sectarian violence was the result of a “centuries-long hatred” between the two different religious schools. But seeing this divide as the result of a longstanding feud—or to see it in the model of other religious schisms, like the Catholic-Protestant split and the centuries of war that followed—would be a mistake, argues Toby Matthiesen. Toby, in his most recent book The Caliph and the I...
James White, "Persian and Arabic Literary Communities in the Seventeenth Century: Migrant Poets between Arabia, Iran and India" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
October 29, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourA wealth of scholarship has highlighted how commercial, political and religious networks expanded across the Arabian Sea during the seventeenth century, as merchants from South Asia traded goods in the ports of Yemen, noblemen from Safavid Iran established themselves in the courts of the Mughal Empire, and scholars from across the region came together to debate the Islamic sciences in the Arabian Peninsula's holy cities of Mecca and Medina. James White's book Persian and Arabic Literary Comm...