New Books in Middle Eastern Studies
1,075 episodes - English - Latest episode: 21 days ago - ★★★★ - 28 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of the Middle East about their New Books
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Episodes
Liora R. Halperin, “Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948” (Yale UP, 2014)
September 10, 2015 13:35 - 32 minutesIn Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948 (Yale University Press, 2015), Liora R. Halperin, an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, argues that multilingualism persisted in Palestine after World War I despite the traditional narrative of the swift victory of Hebrew. Halperin looks at the intertwined nature of language, identity, and nationalism, and how language was...
Aysha Hidayatullah, “Feminist Edges of the Qur’an” (Oxford UP, 2014)
September 09, 2015 12:42 - 50 minutesWhat are some of the key features and characteristics of the Muslim feminist Qur’an exegetical tradition and what are some of the tensions and ambiguities found in that tradition? Those are the central questions addressed by Aysha Hidayatullah, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Theology at the University of San Francisco, in her path clearing new book, Feminist Edges of the Qur’an (Oxford University Press, 2014). In this shining book, Hidayatullah presents a detailed and nuanced ex...
Kecia Ali, “The Lives of Muhammad” (Harvard UP, 2014)
August 25, 2015 14:14 - 51 minutesMuhammad is remembered in a multitude of ways, by both Muslims and non-Muslims. And through each retelling we learn a great deal not only about Muhammad but about the social milieu of the authors. In The Lives of Muhammad (Harvard University Press, 2014), Kecia Ali, Associate Professor of Religion at Boston University, explores how several central components of the Muhammad biographical narrative are reframed by various authors within modern accounts. We find that biographers’ notions of hist...
Bruce B. Lawrence, “Who is Allah?” (UNC Press, 2015)
August 10, 2015 12:23 - 1 hourIn his lyrical and brilliant new book Who is Allah? (UNC Press, 2015), the legendary scholar of Islam Bruce B. Lawrence, Professor Emeritus of Religion at Duke University, wrestles with the question of Who is Allah? through a dazzling range of textual, aesthetic, and performative registers. Who is Allah? treats readers to a delectable buffet of the breadth and depth of Muslim spirituality. How do Muslims invoke, remember, define, and debate Allah, while seeking to live a life that accords wit...
James Gelvin, “The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs to Know” (Oxford UP, 2012)
August 03, 2015 13:01 - 31 minutesProfessor James Gelvin joins host Jonathan Judaken to discuss the Arab Uprisings, democratization in the Middle-East and Northern Africa, ISIS, al-Qaeda, terrorism, and America’s role imposing neo-liberal economic policies in the Middle East that have strongly shaped the political economy of the region. James Gelvin is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His most recent book is the revised and updated edition of The Arab Uprisings: What Eve...
Emran El-Badawi, “The Qur’an and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions” (Routledge, 2013)
July 17, 2015 18:28 - 1 hourThe Qur’an and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions (Routledge, 2013) written by Emran El-Badawi, professor and director of the Arab Studies program at the University of Houston, is a recent addition to the field of research on the Qur’an and Aramaic and Syriac biblical texts. Professor El-Badawi asserts that the Qur’an is a product of an environment steeped in the Aramaic gospel traditions. Not a “borrowing” from the Aramaic gospel tradition, but rather the Qur’an contains a “dogmatic re-articulati...
Ebrahim Moosa, “What is a Madrasa?” (U of North Carolina Press, 2015)
July 03, 2015 16:57 - 1 hourRecent years have witnessed a spate of journalistic and popular writings on the looming threat to civilization that lurks in traditional Islamic seminaries or madrasas that litter the physical and intellectual landscape of the Muslim world. In his riveting new book What is a Madrasa? (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), Ebrahim Moosa, Professor of History and Islamic Studies at the University of Notre Dame, challenges such sensationalist stereotypical narratives by providing a nuanced ...
Mark S. Wagner, “Jews and Islamic Law in Early 20th-Century Yemen” (Indiana UP, 2015)
June 20, 2015 19:30 - 56 minutesDuring the early twentieth century, Yemeni Jews operated within a legal structure that defined them as dhimmi, that is, non-Muslims living as a protected population under the sovereignty of an Islamic state. In exchange for the payment of a poll tax, the jizya, and the acknowledged of supremacy of Islam, their lives and property were to be inviolable. Although this framework burdened Jews with some legal disadvantages, for example a Muslim’s witness testimony was worth double that of a Jew’s ...
M. Alper Yalcinkaya, “Learned Patriots: Debating Science, State, and Society in the 19th-Century Ottoman Empire” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
June 15, 2015 12:30 - 1 hourWhat were Ottomans talking about when they talked about science? In posing and answering that question (spoiler: they were talking about people), M. Alper Yalcinkaya‘s new book Learned Patriots: Debating Science, State, and Society in the 19th-Century Ottoman Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2015) introduces the history of science as discussed and debated by nineteenth-century Turkish-speaking Muslim Ottomans in Istanbul. The book compellingly argues that these discussions and debates we...
Asaad al-Saleh, “Voices of the Arab Spring: Personal Stories from the Arab Revolutions” (Columbia UP, 2015)
May 16, 2015 20:30 - 53 minutesAsaad al-Saleh is assistant professor of Arabic, comparative literature, and cultural studies in the Department of Languages and Literature and the Middle East Center at the University of Utah. His research focuses on issues related to autobiography and displacement in Arabic literature and political culture in the Arab world. His Book Voices of the Arab Spring: Personal Stories from the Arab Revolutions (Columbia University Press, 2015) is narrated by dozens of activists and everyday indivi...
Jamal Elias, “Aisha’s Cushion” (Harvard UP, 2012)
April 23, 2015 16:42 - 52 minutesIn his remarkable new book Aisha’s Cushion: Religious Art, Practice, and Perception in Islam (Harvard University Press, 2012), Jamal Elias, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, presents a magisterial study of Muslim attitudes towards visual culture, images, and perception. Through meticulous historical and textual analysis, Elias successfully unravels the stereotype that there is no place for visual images in Islam, or that calligraphy represents the only normativ...
Lital Levy, “Poetic Trespass: Writing Between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine” (Princeton UP, 2014)
April 06, 2015 23:39 - 58 minutesSince the beginning of the 20th century, Jewish settlement in Palestine and the revival of Hebrew as a national language have profoundly impacted the relationship between Arabic and Hebrew. In a highly contentious political environment, the two languages have been identified with opposing national movements – Hebrew associated with Jews and Arabic with Palestinians. Lital Levy’s book destabilizes this categorization. Highlighting the space between these two languages, Levy asks not what it me...
M. Brett Wilson, “Translating the Qur’an in an Age of Nationalism: Print Culture and Modern Islam in Turkey” Oxford University Press, 2014
April 06, 2015 06:00 - 57 minutesMuslim debates regarding the translation of the Qur’an are very old. However, during the modern period they became heated because local communities around the globe were rethinking their relationship to scripture in new social and political settings. M. Brett Wilson, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Macalester College, provides a rich history of how this conversation unfolding with the late Ottoman period and Republic of Turkey in Translating the Qur’an in an Age of Nationalism: Pr...
Aristotle Tziampiris, “The Emergence of Israeli-Greek Cooperation” (Springer, 2015)
March 30, 2015 06:00 - 26 minutesAristotle Tziampiris is The Emergence of Israeli-Greek Cooperation (Springer, 2015). Tziampiris is Associate Professor of International Relations and Director of the Center for International and European Affairs at the Department of International and European Studies at the University of Piraeus. The recent fiscal debt crisis in Greece has drawn world attention to the country’s position in global affairs. Rather than pursue the financial situation, Tziampiris investigates the foreign policy ...
Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, “The Myth of the Taliban/Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan, 1970-2010” (Oxford UP, 2014)
March 05, 2015 11:44 - 1 hourAlex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn‘s An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban/Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan, 1970-2010 (Oxford University Press, reprint edition 2014) offers what is in many ways is an untold, insider’s account of the birth of the Taliban and Al Qaeda during the anti-Soviet jihad, and their subsequent cooperation (or indeed lack thereof) in the pre- and post-9/11 world. By living first in Kabul, and then Kandahar, Afghanistan, the authors gained more privileged ac...
Bedross Der Matossian, “Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire” (Stanford UP, 2014)
February 24, 2015 18:14 - 56 minutesThe Young Turk revolution of 1908 restored the Ottoman constitution, suspended earlier by Sultan Abdul Hamid II, and initiated a new period of parliamentary politics in the Empire. Likewise, the revolution was a watershed moment for the Empire’s ethnic communities, raising expectations for their full inclusion into the Ottoman political system as modern citizens and bringing to the fore competitions for power within and between groups. In Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violen...
Christian C. Sahner, “Among the Ruins: Syria Past and Present” (Oxford University Press, 2014)
February 12, 2015 12:00 - 40 minutesChristian C. Sahner‘s Among the Ruins: Syria Past and Present (Oxford University Press, 2014) resists easy categorization into genre: it as at once a travel log, an impassioned lecture on Syrian antiquity, and a commentary on Syria’s long journey into its present disaster. Sahner offers a unique perspective as an academic with a strong grasp of Levantine geopolitics and archaeology alike, and ably traces back the fault lines of modern Syria to the events of the region’s late antique period. H...
Gohar Homayounpour, “Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran” (MIT Press, 2012)
December 19, 2014 06:00 - 55 minutesIn Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran (MIT Press, 2012) — part memoir, part elegy, and part collection of clinical vignettes — Gohar Homayounpour takes a defiant position against the Orientalizing gaze of Western publishers, editors, and journalists who search in her book for the exotic Iranian subject and the trauma of the Eastern Other. She turns a critical eye on the expectation that she perform an unveiling and reveal knowledge about the Other’s otherness. Insisting that “pain is pain” everyw...
General Daniel Bolger, “Why We Lost” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014)
December 12, 2014 14:20 - 1 hourDuring the past several years, numerous books and articles have appeared that grapple with the legacy and lessons of the recent U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This development should surprise few. The emergence of the jihadist group ISIS in Iraq and Syria raises profound questions about what the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 accomplished. It also raises important questions about the manner in which the United States left Iraq, including the decision to evacuate all American troops from th...
Shane Bauer, Joshua Fattal, and Sarah Shourd, “A Sliver of Light” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014)
November 10, 2014 12:14 - 53 minutesIn the summer of 2009, Shane Bauer, Joshua Fattal, and Sarah Shourd were hiking in Iraqi Kurdistan when they unknowingly crossed into Iran and were captured by a border patrol. Accused of espionage, the three Americans ultimately found themselves in Tehran’s infamous Evin Prison, where they discovered that pooling their strength of will and relying on each other were the only ways they could survive. In their poignant memoir, A Sliver of Light: Three Americans Imprisoned in Iran (Houghton Mi...
Jonathan A. C. Brown, “Misquoting Muhammad” (Oneworld Publications, 2014)
October 30, 2014 06:00 - 59 minutesMany people have described Muslims modernities as being fundamentally disrupted by individual and civilizational encounters with western society. Wether rejecting or accepting alternative modes of thinking Muslims have responded to these new challenges with increasing regularity for over 200 years. Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy (Oneworld Publications, 2014) focuses on one of the central tasks for Muslims in the contemporary period, namely ...
Amanullah De Sondy, “The Crisis of Islamic Masculinities” (Bloomsbury, 2014)
October 27, 2014 12:17 - 1 hourWhat gets to count as Islam? In the current political climate this question is being repeated in a variety of contexts. The tapestry of various Islamic identities is revealed in an investigation of gender. In The Crisis of Islamic Masculinities (Bloomsbury, 2014), Amanullah De Sondy, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Miami, tackles the construction of Muslim manhood in several interpretive traditions. These forms of masculinity – both ideal & reviled – are taken ac...
Carlotta Gall, “The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014)
October 23, 2014 15:37 - 1 hourPulitzer-prize winning New York Times reporter Carlotta Gall reported from Afghanistan and Pakistan for almost the entire duration of the American invasion and occupation, beginning shortly after 9/11. In her new book The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), Gall combines searing personal accounts of battles and betrayals with moving portraits of the ordinary Afghans who endured a terrible war of more than a decade. Her firsthand accounts of Taliba...
Sarah Bowen Savant, “The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran: Tradition, Memory, and Conversion” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
October 16, 2014 13:37 - 58 minutesSarah Bowen Savant, Associate Professor at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations at the Aga Khan University in London, addresses important questions about conversion among Persian peoples from the ninth to eleventh century CE in her work The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran: Tradition, Memory, and Conversion (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Memory is the centerpiece of her study. In the first half of her work, Savant’s analysis of memory, known as mnemohistory, coalesces aro...
Joel Migdal, “Shifting Sands: The United States and the Middle East” (Columbia UP, 2014)
October 10, 2014 13:44 - 1 hourAny person who turns on CNN or Fox News today will see that the United States faces a number of critical problems in the Middle East. This reality should surprise few. Stunned by the Al-Qaeda attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001, the George W. Bush administration sent U.S. troops to Afghanistan as part of a larger “war on terror” and invaded Iraq in 2003 to “disarm” Saddam Hussein. At this very moment, the United States still has troops in Afghanistan and continues to employ drones to kill “ter...
Mariam al-Attar, “Islamic Ethics: Divine Command Theory in Arabo-Islamic Thought” (Routledge, 2010)
October 02, 2014 18:15 - 49 minutesMariam al-Attar, Islamic Ethics: Divine Command Theory in Arabo-Islamic Thought (Routledge, 2010) explores the meaning, origin and development of “Divine Command Theory” in Islamic thought. In the process, al-Attar underscores the philosophical bases of religious fundamentalism that hinder social development and hamper dialogue between different cultures and nations. Challenging traditional stereotypes of Islam, the book refutes contemporary claims that Islam is a defining case of ethical v...
Nabil Matar, “Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam: The Originall and Progress of Mahometanism” (Columbia UP, 2013)
September 18, 2014 17:50 - 55 minutesIn Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam: The Originall and Progress of Mahometanism (Columbia University Press, 2014), Nabil Matar masterfully edits an important piece of scholarship from seventeenth-century England by scholar and physician, Henry Stubbe (1632-76). Matar also gives a substantial introduction to his annotated edition of Stubbe’s text by situating the author in his historical context. Unlike other early modern writers on Islam, Stubbe’s ostensible goals were not to cast Isl...
William Chittick, “Divine Love: Islamic Literature and the Path to God” (Yale UP, 2013)
September 02, 2014 17:44 - 1 hourWhere does love come from and where will it lead us? Throughout the years various answers have been given to these questions. In Divine Love: Islamic Literature and the Path to God (Yale University Press, 2013), William Chittick, professor at Stony Brook University, responds to these queries from the perspective of the rich literary traditions of Islam. He reveals how some Muslims explained the origins, life, and goal of love through a detailed investigation of authors writing in Persian and ...
Ovamir Anjum, “Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment” (Cambridge UP, 2012)
August 22, 2014 12:31 - 1 hourIn Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Ovamir Anjum explores a timely topic, even though his focus is hundreds of years in the past. In order to present his topic Professor Anjum asks a series of foundational questions, such as: How have Muslims understood ideal government and political theology? What is the role of rulers in those politics? And what does it even mean to talk about “politics” as a category? In Anjum’s words...
Ronen Shamir, “Current Flow: The Electrification of Palestine” (Stanford UP, 2013)
July 23, 2014 14:45 - 1 hourRonen Shamir‘s new book is a timely and thoughtful study of the electrification of Palestine in the early twentieth century. Current Flow: The Electrification of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2013) makes use of Actor-Network Theory as a methodology to trace the processes involved in constructing a powerhouse and assembling an electric grid in 1920s Palestine. The book brilliantly shows how electrification “makes politics” rather than just transmitting it: under the auspices of British...
John P. Turner, “Inquisition in Early Islam” (I.B. Tauris, 2013)
July 23, 2014 12:32 - 1 hourScholars of Islam and historians have frequently pointed to the Miḥna, translated as ‘trial’ or ‘test,’ as a crossroad in the landscape of Islamic history. Professor John P. Turner of Colby College is among those who challenge the long held assumption that the Miḥna was a uniquely pivotal event in his work Inquisition in Early Islam: The Competition for Political and Religious Authority in the Abbasid Empire (I. B. Tauris, 2013). In his book, Turner explores issues of heresy, orthodoxy, a...
J. Matthias Determann, “Historiography in Saudi Arabia: Globalization and the State in the Middle East” (Tauris, 2014)
June 20, 2014 14:12 - 57 minutesSaudi Arabia is, for most Westerners, a mysterious place. It’s home to one of the most conservative forms of Islam around and ruled by one of the least democratic regimes in the world. Yet it’s a great friend of the liberal, democratic Western powers, the United States in particular. That’s odd. As J. Matthias Determann shows in his fascinating book Historiography in Saudi Arabia: Globalization and the State in the Middle East (Tauris, 2014), Saudi Arabia is something of a mysterious–or at le...
Hugh Talat Halman, “Where The Two Seas Meet” (Fons Vitae, 2013)
June 10, 2014 15:08 - 1 hourIn Where The Two Seas Meet (Fons Vitae, 2013), Hugh Talat Halman unpacks one of the most provocative narratives in the Islamic tradition. In the 18th chapter of the Qur’an, Surat al-Kahf (The Cave), a mysterious figure named Khidr (the “Green Man”), guides Moses through a series of seemingly criminal acts. These events turn out to be, rather, tests to try Moses’ patience, each with divine purpose and knowledge behind it. Because of Khidr’s special knowledge and status–even immortal according ...
Najam Haider, “The Origins of the Shia: Identity, Ritual, and Sacred Space in Eighth-Century Kufa” (Cambridge UP, 2011)
May 23, 2014 15:03 - 42 minutesWhen did groups in Kufa begin forming unique identities leading to the development of Shiism? Najam Haider, professor of Religion at Barnard College of Columbia University, answers this question in his book, The Origins of Shia: Identity, Ritual, and Sacred Space in Eighth-Century Kufa (Cambridge University Press, 2011). This study is a boon for those with research interests in early Shiism, or the history of Islam prior to the ninth century. In the first section of his book, Haider announce...
Marwa Elshakry, “Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
May 23, 2014 14:15 - 59 minutesThe work of Charles Darwin, together with the writing of associated scholars of society and its organs and organisms, had a particularly global reach in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Marwa Elshakry‘s new book offers a fascinating window into the ways that this work was read and rendered in modern Arabic-language contexts. Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2013) invites us into a late nineteenth-century moment when the notions of “science” a...
Sean Anthony, “Crucifixion and Death as Spectacle” (American Oriental Society, 2014)
May 12, 2014 12:17 - 1 hourCrucifixion is one of the most widely envisioned symbols in history. So much so, that for a contemporary reader the notion almost immediately plants an image of Jesus on the cross. Sean Anthony, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Oregon, argues that an assumption of uniformity in the role of crucifixion hinders our understanding of it, which is especially true when looking at crucifixion as a cross-cultural category during the Late Antique period. In Crucifixion and Death as ...
Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, “Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East” (Yale UP, 2014)
May 11, 2014 05:00 - 1 hourThis book tells a remarkable and–to me at least–little known but very important story. In Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East(Yale UP, 2014), Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz trace the many connections between Germany–Imperial and Nazi–and the Arab world. Their particular focus is on a fellow named Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem between from 1921 to 1948. Both Al-Husseini and, a bit later, Hitler inherited a project hatched by the German officials i...
Sa’diyya Shaikh, “Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn Arabi, Gender and Sexuality” (University of North Carolina Press, 2012)
April 29, 2014 12:00 - 55 minutesMany Muslim debates regarding women are solely situated in legal or political frameworks. For example, we often find this tendency in conversations about women’s leadership in the mosque or the politics of veiling. Sa’diyya Shaikh, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town, provides a unique approach to these discussions that puts feminist hermeneutics in dialogue with the thought of the prolific Muhyi al-Din ibn al-‘Arabi (1165-1240). In Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn A...
Ayesha Chaudhry, “Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition” (Oxford University Press, 2013)
March 29, 2014 11:39 - 47 minutesHow do people make sense of their scriptures when they do not align with the way they envision these texts? This problem is faced by many contemporary believers and is especially challenging in relation to passages that go against one’s vision of a gender egalitarian cosmology. Ayesha Chaudhry, professor in the Department of Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies and the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia, examines one such pa...
Ahmad Atif Ahmad, “The Fatigue of the SharÄ«’a” (Palgrave, 2012)
March 01, 2014 12:17 - 1 hourIn the book, The Fatigue of the SharÄ«’a (Palgrave, 2012), Ahmad Atif Ahmad explores a centuries-old debate about the permanence, or impermanence, of God’s law, and guidance, in the lives of Muslims. Could God’s guidance simply cease to be accessible at some point? Has such a “fatigue” already taken place? If so, how could one know for sure? What kinds of Muslims, and non-Muslims, have contributed to this debate? Ahmad ambitiously tackles these questions, and many more, in his meticulously re...
Rebecca Williams, “Muhammad and the Supernatural: Medieval Arab Views” (Routledge, 2013)
February 03, 2014 11:53 - 1 hourRebecca Williams‘ book Muhammad and the Supernatural: Medieval Arab Views (Routledge, 2013) is one of the newest additions to the Routledge Studies in Classic Islam series. Despite the Qur’anic proclamation that the only “miracle” which served as proof of Muhammad’s propethood was the Qur’an itself, miracles and supernatural events have been ascribed to Muhammad in numerous Islamic literary and intellectual genres. Professor Williams, of the University of South Alabama, delivers a unique and ...
Joshua Mitchell, “Tocqueville in Arabia: Dilemmas in a Democratic Age” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
January 20, 2014 04:42 - 24 minutesJoshua Mitchell is the author of Tocqueville in Arabia: Dilemmas in a Democratic Age (University of Chicago Press 2013). Mitchell is professor of political science in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. He has written several previous books including: The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and the American Future (University of Chicago Press, 1995). Mitchell writes as a political theorist but also as a memoirist. He weaves his personal history in the...
Joshua Mitchell, “Tocqueville in Arabia: Dilemmas in a Democratic Age” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
January 20, 2014 04:42 - 24 minutesJoshua Mitchell is the author of Tocqueville in Arabia: Dilemmas in a Democratic Age (University of Chicago Press 2013). Mitchell is professor of political science in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. He has written several previous books including: The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and the American Future (University of Chicago Press, 1995). Mitchell writes as a political theorist but also as a memoirist. He weaves his personal history in the...
Ahmed El Shamsy, “The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History” (Cambridge UP, 2013)
January 10, 2014 13:11 - 1 hourIn his brilliant new book, The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History (Cambridge UP, 2013), Ahmed El Shamsy, Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago, explores the question of how the discursive tradition of Islamic law was canonized during the eighth and ninth centuries CE. While focusing on the religious thought of the towering Muslim jurist Muhammad b. Idris al-Shafi’i (d. 820) and the intellectual and social milieu in which he wrote, El S...
Rumee Ahmed, “Narratives of Islamic Legal Theory” (Oxford UP, 2012)
December 20, 2013 15:25 - 1 hourHow should one understand Islamic law outside of its application? What happens when we think about religious jurisprudence theoretically? For medieval Muslim scholars this was the field where one could enumerate the meaning and purpose of Islamic law. But to the uninitiated these justifications for legal thinking are submerged in rote repetition of technical language and discourses. Luckily for us, Rumee Ahmed, professor in the Department of Classics, Near Eastern and Religious Studies at the...
Agostino Cilardo, “The Early History of Islamili Jurisprudence” (I. B. Tauris, 2013)
December 02, 2013 12:17 - 43 minutesAl-QÄá¸Ä« al-Nu῾mÄn (d. 363/974) was the primary architect of IsmÄ῾īlÄ« jurisprudence which was formed under the Fatamids. The Early History of Ismaili Jurisprudence (I. B. Tauris, 2013) provides an English translation and edited Arabic edition of a work held to be written by al-Nu῾mÄn, the MinhÄj al-farÄ’iá¸, a brief tract on inheritance law. However, author Agostino Cilardo, Professor at the ‘Orientale’ of Università degli Studi di Napoli (Naples), offers his readers much mo...
Mohammed Rustom, “The Triumph of Mercy: Philosophy and Scripture in Mulla Sadra” (SUNY Press, 2012)
October 30, 2013 18:37 - 1 hourWhat is the relationship between philosophy, mysticism, and scripture in the Islamic tradition? Mohammed Rustom, Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Carleton University, has been thinking about this question for years. His intellectual curiosity is thoroughly explored in his book The Triumph of Mercy: Philosophy and Scripture in Mulla Sadra (SUNY Press, 2012). Rustom introduces us to Muhammad b. Ibrahim al-Shirazi (d. 1640), better known as Mulla Sadra, and his theory of scriptural herm...
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, “The Devil That Never Dies” (Little, Brown and Co., 2013)
October 22, 2013 11:44 - 1 hourThere are 13 million Jews in the world today. There are also 13 million Senegalese, 13 million Zambians, 13 million Zimbabweans, and 13 million Chadians. These are tiny–a realist might say “insignificant”–nations. But here’s the funny–though that doesn’t seem like the right world–thing. One of them is the focus of a persistent, virulent, worldwide prejudice, an intense hostility that is totally out of proportion with its size and, the realist would add, significance. And you know exactly whic...
Nancy Khalek, “Damascus after the Muslim Conquest” (Oxford University Press, 2011)
September 06, 2013 16:58 - 40 minutesA top five finalist for the Best First Book in the History of Religion Award, Damascus after the Muslim Conquest (Oxford University Press, 2011) by Nancy Khalek, professor of Religious Studies at Brown University, is a study of the city of Damascus, the seat of power for the Umayyad dynasty. More specifically, this book explores the interaction between the recently arrived Muslim Arab rulers and the Byzantine-Christian peoples who made up the majority of the population in Syria. Khalek emplo...
Ronald Suny et al., “A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire” (Oxford UP, 2011)
September 02, 2013 12:17 - 52 minutesHitler famously said about the Armenian genocide “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” For much of the last 75 years, few people did in fact speak of it. When they did, the discussion largely revolved around the question of whether the killing deserved the label of genocide. Scholarly analysis did exist. But, in the public mind, it was largely swallowed up in a bitter debate about how to label, remember and interpret these events. Tuning out the vitriolic r...