New Books In Islamic Studies

Early 20th century Southeast Asia was arguably home to the once of the most vibrant and diverse caldrons of revolutionary ferment in world history. Revolts against Western imperialism and traditional socio-economic structures developed into a range of utopian experiments. In Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (Cornell UP, 2021), John T. Sidel argues that in order to understand these revolutions we must denationalize, internationalize, and transnationalism our analysis. Multiple forms of cosmopolitanism produced the Filipino revolt against Spanish rule, the Indonesian struggle from independence from the Dutch, and the Vietnamese fight against the French empire and for a Marxist utopia. Sidel highlights Southeast Asia’s often surprising global connections. Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University and was fortunate enough to have been mentored by both James C. Scott and Benedict Anderson. He is the author of

In Faith in Freedom: Muslim Immigrant Women’s Experiences of Domestic Violence (Melbourne University Press, 2019), Nafiseh Ghafournia explores questions of domestic violence in the context of Muslim immigrant women in Australia. Aiming to correct existing accounts of Muslim women’s lives and experiences particularly as immigrants, the study uses an intersectional framework to deepen our understanding of the ways that immigrant Muslim women understand, experience, and respond to domestic violence. Among the themes that the book covers are the relationships between culture, religion, gender, and immigration status in the context of domestic violence; why and when, if at all, might women leave abusive relationships; the various kinds of domestic violence that immigrant Muslim women experience, including physical, psychological, financial, spiritual, sexual, in-laws, and immigration-related violence; services available to victims and survivors of abuse; and essential information for service providers and policy m

Ahmad Ibn Tulun: Governor of Abbasid Egypt, 868-884 (Oneworld Academic, 2021), by Matthew S. Gordon (Miami University (Ohio)) is an innovative look at the Abbasid governor of Egypt from 868-884, and the short-lived dynasty that succeeded him for just two decades.  Ibn Tulun is perhaps best known for the mosque that still bears his name in Cairo--arguably the city's oldest Islamic monument that survives in its original form--which was the centerpiece of the capital city that he built. While ibn Tulun is often depicted in Egyptian historiography as an autonomous leader, aspiring toward independence away from the greater Abbasid state, Gordon makes a convincing argument that ibn Tulun--the son of a Turkic slave-soldier gifted to the Abbasid caliph--was instead a product of the political turmoil in Iraq, but that he was very much an Abbasid in spirit and politics. This intriguing and convincing reframing of ibn Tulun's life and career offers a new interpretation of this understudied period in Egyptian history, as

O Humankind Surah Ya-Sin (Fons Vitae, 2021) is compiled by Cemalnur Sargut, who is a Sufi teacher based in Turkey and has been translated into English by Victoria Rowe Holbrook. The compilation consists of a robust commentary of Surah Ya-Sin or the 36th chapter of the Qur’an and its 83 verses. The book is organized around these 83 verses, in which Sargut provides stunning in-depth commentaries on each verse by drawing from Sufi, Turkish and Islamic traditions. For instance, throughout her discussion, she draws on the teachings and literary traditions of Jalaluddin Rumi, Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi, Ahmed Rifai, Ken’an Rifai and many others. Themes that emerge throughout these commentaries include core Sufi theological, philosophical and metaphysical traditions, such as the teachings of Prophet Muhammad as the insan al-kamil, divine attributes of Allah and the Prophet Muhammad, and much more. This collection of commentaries will be of interest to those who think, write, and teach on the topics of Qur’anic Studies, Suf

In today's program, I speak with Richard E. Antaramian about his recent monograph, Brokers of Faith, Brokers of Empire: Armenians and the Politics of Reform in the Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2020).  In Brokers of Faith, Brokers of Empire, Antaramian shows that the Armenian Church and clergy--spread across the empire in a vast ecclesiastical network--played an important role in the application of Ottoman reform programs during the mid-nineteenth century. His main intervention to the scholarship is to show that Armenians were not uniformly opposed to Ottoman centralization. Furthermore, Through his study of the Armenian Church, he challenges the well-known paradigm of "center and periphery" by offering a networked model of empire. For experts and novices alike, this book will not only offer a compelling new perspective into Ottoman and Armenian history, but also surprise you with new insights on Kurdish-Armenian relations in Eastern Anatolia in the 19th century. Deren Ertas is a PhD student in t

In an era of rampant Islamophobia, literary representations of Muslims and anti Muslim bigotry tell us a lot about changing concepts of cultural difference. In Islamophobia and the Novel (Columbia University Press, 2018), Peter Morey, Professor at the University of Birmingham, analyzes how recent works of fiction have framed and responded to the rise of anti-Muslim prejudice, showing how their portrayals of Muslims both reflect and refute the ideological preoccupations of media and politicians in the post-9/11 West. Morey discusses novels embodying a range of positions—from the avowedly secular to the religious, and from texts that appear to underwrite Western assumptions of cultural superiority to those that recognize and critique neoimperial impulses. Contemporary literature’s capacity to unveil the conflicted nature of anti-Muslim bigotry expands our range of resources to combat Islamophobia. This, in turn, might contribute to Islamophobia’s eventual dismantling. In our conversation we discussed anti-Musli

Todd H. Weir and Hugh McLeod, two leading historians of religion, have teamed up to edit a volume in the Proceedings of the British Academy that explores how conflicts between secular worldviews and religions shaped the history of the 20th century. With contributions considering case studies relating to Judaism, Christianity, Islam, atheism and communism, and from several continents, Defending the Faith: Global Histories of Apologetics and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Oxford UP, 2020) offers to re-shape the conceptual tools by which the history of religious politics and politicised religion will be shaped. What happens to the history of the "short 20th century" when the concept of apologetics is put at its centre? We discover that politics and religion are categories that overlap, and that actors in disputes between religions, and in disputes between religions and political entities, are constantly learning from each other. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn

In his majestic and magisterial new book Law, Empire, and the Sultan: Ottoman Imperial Authority and Late Hanafi Jurisprudence (Oxford UP, 2020), Samy Ayoub examines and demonstrates the entanglement of Islamic law and imperial political authority in the early modern period. Focused on the incorporation of Ottoman imperial authority and edicts in the late Hanafi jurisprudential tradition, this brilliant book interrupts and questions widely held assumptions about the separation between the domains of imperial politics and the Islamic legal tradition in the premodern period. The strength of this book lies in the way it provides a meticulous and dazzling intellectual history of the Hanafi legal tradition showing its internal dynamism and nuanced forms of reasoning while constantly connecting that intellectual history to broader theoretical questions about the interaction of law, juridical authority, and empire. Combining philological rigor with razor sharp conceptual dexterity, this book fundamentally reorients

Eric Schluessel’s Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia (Columbia UP, 2020) looks at what happened when, at the end of the Qing, Chinese Confucian revivalists gained control of the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang and sought to transform it. Yet this is not a book about high politics or discourse — far from it. This is a book about what this civilizing project looked like on the ground, how it played out in “everyday politics,” and how Turkic-speaking Muslims felt about and responded to attempts to transform them into Chinese-speaking Confucians. Centering on the voices and experiences of ordinary people in the oasis of Turpan, Land of Strangers is filled with stories of prostitution, human trafficking, venereal disease, families divided by war, and so much more. Reading across the Turpan archive this book combines records in both Chinese and Chaghatay, laying bare the difficulties revivalists encountered in educating children and showing how interpreters went about 'translating' or

In a global context of widespread fears over Islamic radicalization and militancy, poor Muslim youth, especially those socialized in religious seminaries, have attracted overwhelmingly negative attention. In northern Nigeria, male Qur'anic students have garnered a reputation of resorting to violence in order to claim their share of highly unequally distributed resources. Drawing on material from long-term ethnographic and participatory fieldwork among Qur'anic students and their communities, Quranic Schools in Northern Nigeria: Everyday Experiences of Youth, Faith, and Poverty (Cambridge University Press, 2018) offers an alternative perspective on youth, faith, and poverty. Mobilizing insights from scholarship on education, poverty research and childhood and youth studies, Hannah Hoechner, lecturer at the School of International Development, University of East Anglia, describes how religious discourses can moderate feelings of inadequacy triggered by experiences of exclusion, and how Qur'anic school enrollmen

Karen Ruffle's Everyday Shi'ism in South Asia (John Wiley & Sons, 2021) is an introduction to the everyday life and cultural memory of Shi’i women and men, focusing on the religious worlds of both individuals and communities at particular historical moments and places in the Indian subcontinent. Ruffle draws upon an array primary sources, images, and ethnographic data to present topical case studies offering broad snapshots Shi'i life as well as microscopic analyses of ritual practices, material objects, architectural and artistic forms, and more.  Focusing exclusively on South Asian Shi'ism, an area mostly ignored by contemporary scholars who focus on the Arab lands of Iran and Iraq, the author shifts readers' analytical focus from the center of Islam to its periphery. Ruffle provides new perspectives on the diverse ways that the Shi'a intersect with not only South Asian religious culture and history, but also the wider Islamic humanistic tradition.  Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life

In this ground-breaking work, Michael Sells (the Barrows Professor Emeritus of the History and Literature of Islam and Professor emeritus of comparative literature at the University of Chicago) translates sixty-one poems that form the Tarjuman al-ashwaq or The Translator of Desires by Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi (Princeton University Press, 2021). The poems are presented here both in Arabic and English, and are accompanied by an introduction and commentary. The masterful and accessible translations are truly a thrilling literary experience. Ibn ‘Arabi’s poems evoke numerous themes, such as of flora and fauna, nature, sacred spaces, especially of the Kaaba, love, longing, and grief. For instance, the longing of a lost beloved, which Sufis would have read as the Divine, is a central thematic thread woven throughout the collection of poetry, and is gendered feminine. The collection of poems along with Sells critical introduction and notes provides stunning insights to both the tradition of Arabic love poetry and to the

Jacqueline Fewkes and Megan Adamson Sijapati edited volume Muslim Communities and Cultures of the Himalayas: Conceptualizing the Global Ummah (Routledge, 2020) explores individual perspectives and specific iterations of Muslim community, Muslim practice and experience of Islam in the Himalayan region as well as the concept of the general Islamic community the Ummah. A multidisciplinary analysis of Muslim communities and historical and contemporary Islamicate traditions, the book shows how Muslims understand and mobilize regional identities and religious expressions. Moreover, it assesses regional interactions, the ways in which institutions shape Muslim practices in specific areas and investigates the notion of the Himalayas as an Islamic space. The book suggests that the regional focus on the Himalayas provides a site of both geographic and cultural crossroads where Muslim community is simultaneously constituted at multiple social levels. As a result, chapters document a wide range of local, national, and gl

In today’s episode, we speak with Ayesha Chaudhry about her new book, The Colour of God (Oneworld Publications, 2021). The book describes Chaudhry’s personal, spiritual, and professional journey as she navigates her life as a South Asian immigrant Muslim girl raised in Canada. Rich in its analysis of its major themes – such as patriarchy, religion, colonialism, Islamophobia, the family, grief – it pushes us to think more deeply about the choices we make in response to various traumas, such as death or the violence of racism. Readers will appreciate the unapologetic rawness, its very personal but also academic nature, the ways Chaudhry weaves Islamic and Qur’anic themes and narratives into her own. Written in an accessible and engaging way, the book will interest academics and non-academics; it will make for an excellent read for both undergraduate and graduate courses in Women’s and Gender Studies, English courses, Islamic and Religious Studies courses, any courses on Migration, and Theory and Methods Courses

Christine M. Philliou's Turkey: A Past Against History (University of California Press, 2021) challenges conventional understandings about the transition from the Ottoman Empire to Republic of Turkey. From its earliest days, the dominant history of the republic was told as a triumphant narrative of national self-determination and secular democratic modernization. In that officially sanctioned account, the years between the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the formation of the Turkish state marked an absolute rupture, and the Turkish nation formed an absolute unity. In recent years, this hermetic division has begun to erode--but as the old consensus collapses, new histories and accounts of political authority have been slow to take its place. In this richly detailed alternative history of Turkey, Philliou focuses on the notion of political opposition and dissent--muhalefet--to weave together the Ottoman and Turkish periods. Taking the perennial dissident Refik Halid Karay (1888-1965) as a subject, guide, and int

Between Muslims Religious Difference in Iraqi Kurdistan (Stanford UP, 2020) by J. Andrew Bush asks what it means to be Muslim, yet not pious, in Iraqi Kurdistan. Though Islam is often represented in terms of either daily devotion, such as prayer and fasting, or abandonment of faith, there are many who turn away from tradition without departing from Islam. J. Andrew Bush offers us a new way to understand religious difference in Islam, one that invites questions about divine texts and rejects easy answers about political or sectarian identities.  Exploring the lives of irreligious Muslims, Bush highlights the paradoxes of their ethical orientation. While profoundly averse to many aspects of Islamic traditions, irreligious Muslims nonetheless harbor attractions to other aspects--such as Sufi poetry. Exploring this complex weave of attraction and aversion, the book provides intimate portraits of irreligious Kurdish Muslims in everyday life and the historical conditions that have allowed such paradoxical religious

For more than three decades now, Carl Ernst, through his scholarship and his public engagement on the study of Islam and Muslim societies, has modeled the finest form of intellectual inquiry and performance. The imprints of his work extend from the study of Sufism, South Asia, the Qur’an, arts and aesthetics, and more recently, Islamophobia in North America. Words of Experience: Translating Islam with Carl W. Ernst (Equinox, 2020), edited by Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst and Brannon Wheeler, honors Carl Ernst’s scholarly prowess and promise not through hagiography but by bringing together 13 essays that chart and direct a robust intellectual agenda for the future of Islamic Studies. The wide ranging essays in this volume serve as testament not only to the variety of ways in which Carl Ernst has shaped and informed the field of Islamic Studies, but also to his contribution in placing the study of Islam firmly in the broader field of Religion Studies. In this conversation, we discuss salient aspects of this book, an

The Muslim world is not commonly associated with science fiction. Religion and repression have often been blamed for a perceived lack of creativity, imagination and future-oriented thought. However, even the most authoritarian Muslim-majority countries have produced highly imaginative accounts on one of the frontiers of knowledge: astrobiology, or the study of life in the universe. Islam, Science Fiction and Extraterrestrial Life: The Culture of Astrobiology in the Muslim World by Jörg Matthias Determann (I.B. Tauris, 2020) argues that the Islamic tradition has been generally supportive of conceptions of extra-terrestrial life, and in this engaging account, Jörg Matthias Determann provides a survey of Arabic, Bengali, Malay, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu texts and films, to show how scientists and artists in and from Muslim-majority countries have been at the forefront of the exciting search.  Determann takes us to little-known dimensions of Muslim culture and religion, such as wildly popular adaptations of Star

In Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam (Duke UP, 2021), Evren Savcı analyzes the travel and translation of Western LGBT political terminology to Turkey in order to illuminate how sexual politics have unfolded under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's AKP government. Under the AKP's neoliberal Islamic regime, Savcı shows, there has been a stark shift from a politics of multicultural inclusion to one of securitized authoritarianism. Drawing from ethnographic work with queer activist groups to understand how discourses of sexuality travel and are taken up in political discourse, Savcı traces the intersection of queerness, Islam, and neoliberal governance within new and complex regimes of morality. Savcı turns to translation as a queer methodology to think Islam and neoliberalism together and to evade the limiting binaries of traditional/modern, authentic/colonial, global/local, and East/West—thereby opening up ways of understanding the social movements and political discourse that coalesce around sex

In his new book Esoteric Islam in Modern French Thought: Massignon, Corbin, Jambet (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2021) Ziad Elmarsafy maps the intellectual and personal genealogies of three French specialists of Islam, Louis Massignon, Henry Corbin, and Christian Jambet and the ways in which esoteric Islam, be it Sufism, Shi‘ism and/or Islamic philosophy informed their academic projects and worldviews. The first chapter situates Massignon’s travels (i.e., Iraq) and his studies of Arabic and Sufism (especially of Mansur al-Hallaj), which defined his conceptualizations and embodiments of hospitality and desire. Massignon’s student Corbin would also turn to the traditions of Sufism, Shi‘a thought, and metaphysics to grapple with notions of vision or theophany in his intellectual work. Finally, Christian Jambet, a student of Corbin, and a Maoist atheist would turn to the revolutionary history of the Alamut and Nizari Ismailis, as well as Mulla Sadra, to think through ideas of political change, eschatology, and resu