New Books In Islamic Studies

Muslim Women’s Rights: Contesting Liberal-Secular Sensibilities in Canada (Routledge 2019) By Tabassum Fahim Ruby follows the legal debates and public discussions that surrounded the proposed shari‘ah tribunals in Canada from 2003 to 2006. In her close readings and discourse analysis of the public and media scrutiny that followed this discussion, Ruby found that these debates existed at the nexus of complex assumptions about human rights discourses, liberal-secular sensibilities, and law, which all hinged on narratives of western modernity and progress and were set against notions of Muslim women’s rights and agency, or lack thereof. By tracing discourses surrounding Islamic family law and practices of faith-based arbitration in Canada, the study problematizes conceptions of multiculturalism, secularism, and human rights discourses, while further contributing to discussion of contemporary Islam and gender by drawing on postcolonial, antiracist, and transnational feminist studies by focusing on Muslim women’s

David Rundell brings to his book, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads (I. B. Tauris, 2020), a granular analysis and insider’s understanding of the inner workings of the kingdom garnered as a US foreign service officer who served a total of 15 years in the country. Rundell skilfully weaves history into a multi-layered portrait of the transformation for good and bad that Saudi Arabia is experiencing under King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The former diplomat illustrates Salman’s long-standing focus on combatting corruption with the picture he paints of his governing of the Saudi capital Riyadh for nearly five decades before ascending to the throne. Anti-corruption has played a dramatic role since Salman became king in solidifying and concentrating power in the kingdom and breaking with a past of slow and gradual change, introducing instead rapid reforms with little consultation. To do so, Salman picked his son, Mohammed, as crown prince because he saw in him a bulldozer with the nee

How was the relationship between Muslim and non-Muslim communities theologically and spatially imagined in the premodern world? How did religious hierarchies map onto notions of place and spatial distinction and hierarchies? In her dazzling new book Minding their Place: Space and Religious Hierarchy in Ibn al-Qayyim’s Aḥkām ahl al-Dhimma (Brill, 2020), Antonia Bosanquet addresses these questions through a detailed and theoretically charged reading of the famous and crucially important legal text/compendium Aḥkām ahl al-Dhimma by Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawzīyah (d.1350). Bosanquet forcefully argues that one must approach this text not just as a legal compendium, but as a critical repository of premodern Muslim social imaginaries on the question of interreligious difference. In our conversation, we discuss a range of issues including literary precedents for Aḥkām ahl al-Dhimma, spatial mappings and religious hierarchies, “relational” space and everyday Muslim-non-Muslim encounters, and the eschatological status of no

Over the nearly two decades that they have each been conducting fieldwork in the Arabian Peninsula, Ahmed Kanna, Amélie Le Renard, and Neha Vora have regularly encountered exoticizing and exceptionalist discourses about the region and its people, political systems, and prevalent cultural practices. These persistent encounters became the springboard for this book, a reflection on conducting fieldwork within a "field" that is marked by such representations. The three focus on deconstructing the exceptionalist representations that circulate about the Arabian Peninsula. They analyze what exceptionalism does, how it is used by various people, and how it helps shape power relations in the societies they study. They propose ways that this analysis of exceptionalism provides tools for rethinking the concepts that have become commonplace, structuring narratives and analytical frameworks within fieldwork in and on the Arabian Peninsula. They ask: What would not only Middle East studies, but studies of postcolonial soci

The Sufi Paradigm and the Makings of a Vernacular Knowledge in Colonial India: The Case of Sindh (1851-1929) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) by Michel Boivin maps the construction of a vernacular knowledge (as opposed to colonial knowledge) of a complex Sufi paradigm in Sindh by both British Orientalists, such as Richard Burton, but also Sindhi intelligentsia, like Mirza Qalich Beg. Examining the historical period from 1851-1929 during the British colonial control of the Sindh, the book argues that though the British were not interested directly in Sufism, their investment in learning languages (Sindhi) and culture, for administrative purposes, led to consequential engagement with Sufi literary traditions, especially the Shah jo Risalo by the Sindhi Sufi poet Shah Abd al-Latif. In tracing the lives of Sufi textual and print materials written by both Orientalists and indigenous Sindhi literati, Boivin captures the complex ways in which a Sindhi Sufi paradigm was constructed but also vernacularized, and how it was i

Muhammad's Body: Baraka Networks and the Prophetic Assemblage by Michael Muhammad Knight (UNC Press, 2020) joins the emerging subfield of literature in Islamic Studies exploring embodiment and materiality as concepts for making sense of the spatial and temporal developments of Muslim subjectivities. Knight’s monograph is the first to delve into these themes as it concerns the Prophet Muhammad’s body and its functions, relationships, representations, symbolism, and postmortem contestations within Islamic literature. Knight analyzes Sunni hadith and sira texts from the eighth through the eleventh centuries CE to understand how conceptions of the Prophet’s body—from its physical features to its metaphysical qualities—shaped constructions of masculinity, authority, and power for the Prophet’s Companions as well as for those who followed in the centuries after them. By foregrounding his analysis in the Islamic concept of baraka—a kind of beneficent force of divine origin—and drawing from contemporary theoretical i

Ibn Taymiyya is one of the most prolific and influential Islamic thinkers to date, and was even the only pre-modern Muslim author cited in the 9/11 Report. His supporters and detractors alike have engaged his scholarship extensively for hundreds of years, and Hoover’s monograph, Ibn Taymiyya (2020), in English, as part of Oneworld’s “Makers of the Muslim World” series therefore offers an invaluable contribution to existing literature on Ibn Taymiyya. In our interview, Professor Hoover and I discuss the reasons for Ibn Taymiyya’s popularity, including his time in prison and controversial views on marriage, interfaith relations, and mysticism. Hoover’s monograph goes beyond a simple introduction to Ibn Taymiyya’s life and works and instead explores the prolific thinker in great detail, in terms of his own scholarship as well as reception history. Unsurprisingly, Hoover’s previous scholarship on Ibn Taymiyya (including a monograph on theodicy, as well several articles that explore Ibn Taymiyya’s thought broadly)

John Tolan’s latest book Faces of Muhammad: Western Perceptions of the Prophet of Islam from the Middle Ages to Today (Princeton UP, 2019) is a fascinating and rich survey of the complex perceptions of Muhammad as understood by Christian Europeans. Using sources that range from art to literature to history to theater to religion, Tolan shows that portrayals of Muhammad are varied and complex – indeed contradictory – and reveal more about the context in which these images appear than about Muhammad or Islam. In other words, the non-Muslim European discourse on Muhammad reflects the writers’ own preoccupations at home. Views about Muhammad are varied and complex, Tolan argues, and not always negative as is often highlighted. Sure, Muhammad is a false prophet, a heretic, a trickster, an idol, in some cases, but he’s also a role model, a hero, a great leader in others, sometimes in the same time period. For instance, while during the Crusades, Muhammad is a false prophet and the primary opponent of the Christian

In many popular accounts of contemporary “Western” society there is an inherent contradiction between the principles underlying liberal secularism and Islam. This type of binary discourse about “religion” and “secular” naturalizes these differences and promotes the seeming rigidity of the two categories. But secularism is much messier than that. Danielle Haque, Associate Professor at Minnesota State University, Mankato, questions this simplistic narrative in her new book Interrogating Secularism: Race and Religion in Arab Transnational Art and Literature (Syracuse University Press, 2019). She deconstructs liberal accounts of secularism through an examination of the work of authors and artists from ethnic and religious minorities. The literary and visual economies that inform their art demonstrates that secular values are not always neatly distinguished from religious principles nor are spiritual forms necessarily steeped in tradition. In our conversation we discuss secular ideologies, contemporary orientalism

In her stunning and conceptually adventurous new book Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India: From Balance to Fervor (Oxford University Press, 2020), Margrit Pernau examines the varied and hugely consequential expressions of and normative investments in emotions in modern South Asian Muslim thought. By considering a wide array of sources including male and female reformist literature, poetry, newspapers, journals, sermons, and much more, Pernau explores the question of how the career of Islam in colonial India saw a paradigmatic shift from emphasis on balance or ‘adl to fervor and ebullience (josh). The intensification rather than the retreat of emotion represents a major feature of South Muslim scholarly thought and culture in late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Pernau convincingly demonstrates. Through the specific case study of modern South Asian Islam, she also presents and argues for novel conceptualizations of modernity as a lived and analytical category, marked not by just the disciplining o

Sir 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-European political and cultural struggles. Useful Enemies contends that ideas about the Ottomans were active ingredients in European thought, and were used to “shake things up, to provoke, to shame, to galvanise.” Discussions of Islam and the Ottoman empire were thus bound up with mainstream thinking in the West on a wide range of important topics - power, religion, society, and war. These Eastern enemies were not just there to be denounced. They were there to be made use of, in arguments which significantly contributed to

Here, There, and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World (Stanford University Press, 2020) by Tahseen Shams (Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto) reconceptualizes the homeland-hostland dyad. Drawing from the experiences of diasporic South Asian Muslim community in America, namely Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and Indians, Shams introduces an innovative conceptual notion of “elsewhere” which informs her new multicentered approach to the study of globalized immigrant identities. Using ethnographic study, social media analysis, and autoethnographic reflections, she provocatively highlights how for her varied participants, their identities as South Asian Muslim Americans were not only informed by their perception of sending and receiving countries, but also was defined by societies beyond these nation states, especially those that defined their sense of an ummatic connection, such as to countries in the Middle East. In such instances, affinities to elsewhere infor

Sayyid Fadl, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, led a unique life—one that spanned much of the nineteenth century and connected India, Arabia, and the Ottoman Empire. For God or Empire: Sayyid Fadl and the Indian Ocean World (Stanford University Press) tells his story, part biography and part global history, as his life and legacy afford a singular view on historical shifts of power and sovereignty, religion and politics. Wilson Chacko Jacob recasts the genealogy of modern sovereignty through the encounter between Islam and empire-states in the Indian Ocean world. Fadl's travels in worlds seen and unseen made for a life that was both unsettled and unsettling. And through his life at least two forms of sovereignty—God and empire—become apparent in intersecting global contexts of religion and modern state formation. While these changes are typically explained in terms of secularization of the state and the birth of rational modern man, the life and afterlives of Sayyid Fadl—which take us from eighteenth- and

Religious freedom debates set blood boiling. Just consider notable Supreme Court cases of recent years such as Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission or Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania. How can we reach any agreement between those who adhere strictly to the demands of divine law and the individual conscience and those for whom human-derived law is paramount? Is there any legal and philosophical framework that can mediate when tensions erupt between the human right of religious liberty and laws in the secular realm? In her 2019 book, The Possibility of Religious Freedom: Early Natural Law and the Abrahamic Faiths (Cambridge UP), Karen Taliaferro argues that natural law can act as just such a mediating tool. Natural law thinking can both help protect religious freedom and enable societies across the globe to maintain social peace and to function on the basis of fairness to all. Taliaferro shows that natural law is not merely a somewhat arcane legal philosophy promulgated by a subset

In the early 20th-century Muslims, primarily with roots in Lebanon, began to settle in Canada’s interior plains. In 1938, the small community in Edmonton opened the first mosque in the country, which would come to play a key role in shaping Islam's development in the Canada. Earle H. Waugh, Professor Emeritus at University of Alberta, narrates the history of this community and the place of this institution in Al Rashid Mosque: Building Canadian Muslim Communities (University of Alberta Press, 2018). The micro-history of Edmonton’s Muslim community opens up vistas on the broader Canadian history and the role of Muslims in forming national projects and identities. Waugh outlines shifts in Islamic educational programs and community leadership, as well as the political terrains Muslims needed to traverse. Overall, the book offers a readable and robust history that adds a unique story to the history of Canada. In our conversation we discuss the Muslim population in Canada during the late 19th and early 20th centur

Is it possible to interpret the Qur’an using the Qur’an alone? Is a feminist interpretation of controversial verses such as 4:34, the notorious “wife-beating” verse, possible? What evidence is there for the possibility that Maryam, the mother of Isa (Jesus) was a prophet, and why does that matter? How are Islamic feminist scholars in conversation with each other, as they both draw from and challenge each other in their efforts to find meaning in gender-related verses in the Qur’an? Abla Hasan’s book Decoding the Egalitarianism of the Qur’an: Retrieving Lost Voices on Gender (Lexington Books, 2020) offers possible answers to these questions and more. Hasan is an Associate Professor in Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she teaches courses in Arabic language and culture. She received her PhD in Philosophy of Language from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research and teaching focus on Qur'anic Studies, Islamic feminism, women and gender studies, and Arabic Studies.

A sustained and compelling critique of the doubt/belief binary in the anthropology of religion and Islam, Nicholas H. A. Evans’ Far from the Caliph’s Gaze: Being Ahmadi Muslim in the Holy City of Qadian (Cornell University Press, 2020) presents a riveting ethnography of a community’s strivings to materially embody and establish the certainty of its religious identity. An organizational ethnography of the Ahmadi community in its founding city of Qadian in Panjab India, this book charts the multiple ways in which the Ahmadiyya cultivate their fidelity to the caliph that combine bureaucratic operations, polemical encounters with Muslims and non-Muslims, and the expression and dissemination of piety through technology like satellite television. In our conversation, we engage a range of themes including the Ahmadi-caliph relationship as the antidote to secular politics, “enchanting bureaucracy” and utopian counter-publics, “heroic polemicism,” the productive outcomes of ritual failures, and global outreach through

Muslims in a Post-9/11 America (University of Michigan Press, 2018) examines how public fears about Muslims in the United States compare with the reality of American Muslims’ attitudes on a range of relevant issues. While most research on Muslim Americans focuses on Arab Muslims, a quarter of the Muslim American population, Rachel Gillum includes perspectives of Muslims from various ethnic and national communities—from African Americans to those of Pakistani, Iranian, or Eastern European descent. Using interviews and one of the largest nationwide surveys of Muslim Americans to date, Gillum examines more than three generations of Muslim American immigrants to assess how segments of the Muslim American community are integrating into the U.S. social fabric, and how they respond to post-9/11 policy changes. Gillum’s findings challenge perceptions of Muslims as a homogeneous, isolated, un-American, and potentially violent segment of the U.S. population. Despite these realities, negative political rhetoric around M

Sufism in America is now a developed sub-field of study that exists at the intersection of Islamic Studies, American religions, and popular spirituality. Varieties of American Sufism: Islam, Sufi Orders, and Authority in a Time of Transition (State University of New York Press 2020) an edited volume by Elliott Bazzano (Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College) and Marcia Hermansen (Professor of Theology and Director of Islamic World Studies at Loyola University Chicago), captures these complex varieties of Sufism in America. The edited volume is organized around different case studies of Sufi communities in America, which are based on ethnographic studies completed by the contributors to the volume. Some of the Sufi communities discussed include the Inayati Order, the Golden Sufi Center, Mevlevi Order of America, Alami Tariqa, Ansari Qadiri Rifa‘i Tariqa, and the Tijani Order. Throughout the different chapters various themes emerge, some of which include questions of charismatic authority

“Consider the works of the renowned Nobel-prize-winning African American writer, literary and social critic, and activist Toni Morrison (b. 1931),” writes Majid Daneshgar. “Hers—like Said’s—are popular in the West and cover most of the principal themes covered by Orientalism, including otherness, outsider-ship, exploitation and cultural colonialism and imperialism. Yet … one would be hard-pressed to find, for instance, even a free publisher’s copy of Morrison’s essay The Origin of Others, in translation or not, on the bookshelf of one of the Muslim academy’s experts on Islam or history, or politics, or sociology.” With this provocative introductory passage to set the stage for his book, Studying the Qur’an in the Muslim Academy (Oxford University Press), Majid Daneshgar invites his readers on a journey exploring how the Muslim academy—that is, academic institutions in the Muslim-majority world—teaches Islamic Studies, with an emphasis on the Qur’an. Through his personal experience and scholarly endeavors span