New Books In Islamic Studies

Over decades, the Yoruba community of southwest Nigeria has thrived as an inter-religious community, balancing Christianity, Islam, and the ways of a modern and secular globalized world. In this episode, Dr. Adeyemi Balogun, from the University of Bayreuth in Germany, explores the fabric of the Yoruba society in terms of the founding and development of the Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria, the impact of colonialism, and the transformation of Islam over the last 20 years. His discussion is based on his paper titled “‘When Knowledge is there, Other Things Follow’: The Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria and the Making of Yoruba Muslim Youths”, published in Brill’s Islamic Africa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

In his paradigm shifting book, Recalling the Caliphate: Decolonization and World Order (Hurst, 2014), which was recently translated into Arabic as Isti‘adat al-Khilafa Tafkik al-Isti‘mar wa al-Nizam al-‘Alimi, Salman Sayyid offers a breathtakingly brilliant meditation on the problem of decolonization through Muslim thought and politics. What are the foundational modern Western political and conceptual categories that inhibit and frustrate the project of decolonial thought? And through what resources and strategies might one stage and imagine alternate horizons of the political? These are among the questions that anchor this truly multivalent study that offers critical insights and theoretical dividends into a range of questions, problems, and conceptual registers. Written with exceptional clarity, Recalling the Caliphate especially raises and addresses crucial questions about the role and possibilities offered by Islamist thought in imagining a decolonial world order. This monumental book should be read and t

No contemporary figure is more demonized than the Islamist foreign fighter who wages jihad around the world. Spreading violence, disregarding national borders, and rejecting secular norms, so-called jihadists seem opposed to universalism itself. But in a radical departure from conventional efforts to explain and solve the “problem” of jihad, The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity (Stanford University Press, 2020) begins with the assertion that transnational jihadists are in fact engaged in their own form of universalism: armed transnational solidarity under conditions of American empire. Drawing on 15 years of interviews and research conducted in Arabic, Bosnian/ Serbian/ Croatian, Urdu, French, and Italian, and following the stories of former fighters across the Middle East, the Balkans, the United States, and Europe, anthropologist and attorney Darryl Li uses the lens of universalism to revisit the pivotal post-Cold War moment when ethnic cleansing in the Balkans dominated globa

In his new book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), SherAli Tareen, an associate professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College, takes us into the fascinating world of the ‘ulama (theologians) of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century South Asian Islam. Situated historically within the transitional and transformative period of the end of the Mughal era and the beginning of British colonialism, the book focuses on the native discourses, internal debates, and the ensuing logics utilized by Muslim theologians, such as Shah Muhammad Ismail and Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi. The book is divided into three sections and consists of twelve chapters. Throughout the study, Tareen thickly describes the internal debates surrounding issues of political theology (especially divine sovereignty), normativity and law (issues of bid‘a), and ritual practice (particularly of the mawlid (celebration of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday)) as a means to disrupt debates surrounding religio

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

In her intimidatingly brilliant new book Law and Politics Under the Abbasids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-Juwayni (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Sohaira Siddiqui conducts a masterful analysis of how conditions of political change and fragmentation generate intellectual debates and fermentation on the often-conflictual interaction of certainty, continuity, and community in Muslim thought and practice. Focused on the thought and career of the prominent 11th-century Muslim scholar al-Juwayni (d. 1085), Siddiqui examines the hermeneutical choices, operations, and conundrums that go into the negotiation of epistemic certainty in the realms of law and theology with the imperative of historical change and dynamism. The distinguishing hallmark of this book is the way it conducts a thoroughly interdisciplinary examination of early Muslim intellectual thought by putting Islamic law, theology, and politics into a productive and rather profound conversation. The outcome is a study that combines philological prowe

Murad Idris, a political theorist in the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics at the University of Virginia, explores the concept of peace, the term itself and the way that it has been considered and analyzed in western and Islamic political thought. War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought (Oxford University Press, 2018) traces the concept of peace, and the way it is often insinuated with other words and concepts, over more than 2000 years of political thought. Idris begins with Plato’s Laws as one of the early sources to consider the tension that seems to be constant in terms of the pursuit of violence in order to attain peace. War for Peace provides some important framing in thinking about peace, in large measure because the research indicates how rare it is for peace itself to be solitary, it is almost always lassoed to other words and concepts, and functions either as a binary opposition (e.g.: war and peace) or as part of a dyad combination (e.g.: peace and justice).

How do Muslim Americans respond to domestic violence? What motivates Muslim individuals and organizations to work towards eradicating domestic violence in their communities? Where do Muslim providers, survivors, victims, and organizations fit into the broader, mainstream anti-domestic violence movement? How do Muslims negotiate with religious tradition in their work against domestic violence to arrive at an ethic of non-abuse? Juliane Hammer answers these and many other questions in her new brilliant, engaging, and clear new book Peaceful Families: American Muslim Efforts Against Domestic Violence (Princeton University Press, 2019). The book provides an excellent overview of the ways that Muslim Americans address domestic violence in their communities. Through rich, detailed ethnographic interviews with Muslim advocates, service providers, imams and other religious leaders, and organizations, Hammer explores the stories, struggles, and anxieties of Muslims as they face the intersections of a range of issues,

With scholarship in the discipline of history witnessing a shift toward global approaches to local historical processes, new questions are being raised about how to identify commensurate theoretical methods and conceptual frameworks for analysis – with art history being no less part of this scholarly shift. How do we strike a balance between acknowledging distinctly local historical transformations with related global ones? In what ways can we conceptualize intertwined global networks that gave rise to local phenomena without erasing local agency and uniqueness? Where do we account for power in our analyses of local and global historical developments? Modernism on the Nile: Art in Egypt between the Islamic and the Contemporary (UNC Press, 2019) by Alex Dika Seggerman deftly takes up the challenge posed by these and other questions by punctuating its mark both in the field of global modernism and in modern Arab and Islamic art history, offering the commensurate theories and frameworks necessary to help move th

America has the largest incarcerated population in the world. This staggering and troubling fact has driven a great deal of scholarship. Much of this research has shown that mass incarceration in America is facilitated by systemic racial discrimination, which disproportionately affects African-American and Latinx communities. Only recently have scholars focused on the role of religion in American prisons. In American Prisons: A Critical Primer on Culture and Conversion to Islam (First Edition Design, 2017), SpearIt, Professor in the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University, brings the subject of incarcerated Muslims into focus. The collection of essays synthesizes SpearIt’s legal and academic work on issues of conversion, radicalization, and Muslim prisoner rights. Overall, the collection demonstrates that prisons are a crucial space for understanding the history of Muslims in America. In our conversation we discussed how Muslims have shaped religious life in prisons, the everyday challeng

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same sorts of things, an easy source of advice might not be there for you. Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague

The relationship between Islam and the environment has a long and rich history across various Muslim societies. Anna M. Gade, Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, outlines several strains where these domains intersect in her book Muslim Environmentalisms: Religious and Social Foundations (Columbia University Press, 2019). Gade takes the reader through a number of literary and scriptural sources that Muslims have deployed over history but also steeps her analysis in decades of on the ground ethnographic fieldwork, especially in Southeast Asia. Specific examples reveal the interplay between local, regional, and global contexts as interpretive positions shift and realign across each theme. This combination creates a productive template for rethinking Muslim environmentalism within the larger framework of the Environmental Humanities. In our conversation we discussed Qur’anic theological resources and themes, environmentalism and development work, legal and ethical contexts, ideals of environmental j

“The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.” ― Susan Orlean, The Library Book. Benjamin Balint and Merav Mack's Jerusalem: City of the Book (Yale University Press, 2019) is a fascinating journey through Jerusalem’s libraries which tells the story of this city as a place where some of the world’s most enduring ideas were put into words. The writers of Jerusalem, although renowned the world over, are not usually thought of as a distinct school; their stories as Jerusalemites have never before been woven into a single narrative. For the first time ever the stories are told of the custodians, past and present, who safeguard Jerusalem’s literary legacies. By showing how Jerusalem has been imagined by its writers and shelved by its librarians, Mack and Balint tell the untold history of how the peoples of the book have populated the city with texts. In these authors’ hands, Jerusalem itself—perche

In her debut book, City of Black Gold: Oil, Ethnicity, and the Making of Modern Kirkuk (Stanford University Press, 2019), Arbella Bet-Shlimon explores the vibrant and often troubled history of one of Iraq’s most diverse and oil-rich cities. Bet-Shlimon begins at the twilight of the Ottoman Empire, illustrating the fluidity of identities in the multilingual and multiethnic city of Kirkuk. She then explains how ethnic identity as such was constituted and sharpened through the processes of colonialism, post-colonial state-formation, and urbanization. Throughout her sweeping account of 20th-century Kirkuk, Bet-Shlimon is sensitive to how stories about the past can speak to the present-day concerns of Kirkuk’s Arab, Kurdish, and Turkmen populations. At the same time, she is attentive to how power shapes historical narratives and has fueled competing claims about Kirkuk and its place in the modern Iraqi state. By focusing on this peripheral but important city, Bet-Shlimon’s City of Black Gold offers its readers cru

Narges Bajoghli’s gripping new book Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic (Stanford UP, 2019) presents a riveting ethnography of pro-regime media networks in Iran, and sketches an intimate portrait of the actors, projects, and infrastructures invested in preserving and packaging the memory of the Islamic revolution 40 years later. Written with sparkling clarity, Iran Reframed provides its readers an unprecedented tour of the multiple sites, discourses, and social imaginaries that inform and define efforts of former members of the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij paramilitary organizations to forge narratives of nationalism that might connect with and affect the new generation across ideological divides. The biggest strength of this book is the layered complexity with which it presents its actors, and their conflictual aspirations and anxieties surrounding the encounter of media, memory, and revolutionary politics. This stunningly brilliant book will compel its readers to reconceptualize,

Jun Akiba, Associate Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, discusses Muslim girls’ education in Ottoman Istanbul during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Through the extensive use of archival and narrative sources, Akiba demonstrates, in his article published in the Brill journal Hawwa, that girls in pre-Tanzimat Istanbul enjoyed ample opportunities for elementary education. Listen to this podcast now! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

What happens when the digital world meets Sufism? This is the question raised in the exciting new book Cyber Sufis: Virtual Expressions of the American Muslim Experience (OneWorld Academic, 2019) by Robert Rozehnal, a professor of Islamic Studies and South Asian Religions and the founding director of the Center for Global Islamic Studies at Lehigh University. This exhilarating new book explores how the Inayati Order, the oldest Sufi community in the west, under the current leadership of Zia Inayat Khan, utilizes cyber tools in their pedagogical practices, ritual performances, and social engagement. By investigating this one particular American Sufi community’s presence in the digital world (such as on Facebook, webpages, and etc.), Rozehnal highlights how “cyber Sufis” create complex identities both on- and offline, all the while evading any easy categorizations of Sufism, Islam, and new age spirituality. Some of the noted digital transformations unfolding within the Inayati Order are in many ways, not novel,

How did Muslims respond to foreign goods in an age characterized by global exchange and European imperial expansion? What sort of legal reasoning did scholars apply in order to appropriate – or reject – items like the synthetic toothbrush, toilet paper, gramophones, photographs, railway lines, banknotes, hats, and other commodities? What role did laypeople play in shaping the contours of the scholarly debates around these items and projects? How did the entanglements of imperial power plays affect the decisions made by these scholars and laypersons? In Modern Things on Trial: Islam’s Global and Material Reformation in the Age of Rida, 1865-1935 (Columbia University Press, 2019), Leor Halevi tackles these questions by exploring how Muslim reformers employed sophisticated legal reasoning rooted in textual sources as well as social context to account for the introduction of these new commodities, technologies, and laws in their rapidly changing societies. By focusing on the works of Rashid Rida – the Syrian-Egyp

Barbara Spackman’s riveting study identifies a strand of what it calls “Accidental Orientalism” in narratives by Italians who found themselves in Ottoman Egypt and Anatolia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Relocated, or “de-toured” by historical accident, these travelers wrote about their experiences in Italian, English, and French. Crossing class, gender, dress, and religious boundaries as they move about the Mediterranean basin, the travelers’ accounts variously reconfigure, reconsolidate, and often destabilize the imagined East-West divide. Ranging widely on an affective spectrum from Islamophobia to Islamophilia, their narratives are the occasion for the book’s reflection on the practices of cultural cross-dressing, conversion to Islam, and passing and posing as Muslim on the part of Italians who had themselves the object of an Orientalization on the part of Northern Europeans, and whose language had long been the lingua franca of the Mediterranean. Listen in as we discuss Spackman's new book Ac

In Iran and Palestine: Past, Present and Future (Routledge, 2019), Seyed Ali Alavi (SOAS University of London) surveys the history of the relationship between Iran – and especially the Islamic Republic of Iran - with Palestinian organisations and leadership. It also, quite obviously, deals with Iranian views of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Analysing the connections of the Iranian revolutionary movements, both the Left and the Islamic camps’ perspectives are scrutinized. To provide a historical background to the post-revolutionary period, the genealogy of pro-Palestinian sentiments before 1979 are traced additionally. Demonstrating the pro-Palestinian stance of post-revolutionary Iran, the study focuses on the causes of roots of the ideological outlook and the interest of the state. Despite a growing body of literature on the Iranian Revolution and its impacts on the region, Iran’s connection with Palestine have been overlooked. This new volume fills the gap in the literature and enables reader