New Books In Islamic Studies

In this revised edition of her classic and groundbreaking work, Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an (University of Texas Press, 2019), Asma Barlas demonstrates how a Muslim believer can fully adopt an antipatriarchal reading of the Qur’anic text while maintaining belief in its Divine Providence. The intervention she makes is thus as useful to those studying the Quran (and scriptural interpretation more broadly) in the western academy as it is to Muslims searching for renewed ways to interpret their Divine Scripture in a more egalitarian spirit. Barlas cogently argues that just as patriarchy is read into the text, it can also be unread, and provides a methodology by which this can be done. In the process, she critiques both those within her tradition who hold to fixed patriarchal or authoritarian readings of scripture and those outside of her tradition who believe that her efforts are futile. Barlas’s hermeneutic privileges the text without being strictly textualist. T

Gaurav Desai’s Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination (Columbia University Press, 2013), offers an alternative history of East Africa in the Indian Ocean world. Reading the life narratives and literary texts of South Asians writing in and about East Africa, Gaurav Desai highlights many complexities in the history of Africa's experience with slavery, migration, colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. Consulting Afrasian texts that are literary and nonfictional, political and private, he broadens the scope of African and South Asian scholarship and inspires a more nuanced understanding of the Indian Ocean's fertile routes of exchange. Desai shows how the Indian Ocean engendered a number of syncretic identities and shaped the medieval trade routes of the Islamicate empire, the early independence movements galvanized in part by Gandhi's southern African experiences, the invention of new ethnic nationalisms, and the rise of plural, multiethnic African nations. Calling attentio

In The History of the Civil War in Tajikistan (Lexington Books) Iraj Bashiri provides an overview of the Civil War in Tajikistan that emerged amidst the collapse of the Soviet Union. Based on personal observations, interviews, and a variety of primary and secondary publications, Bashiri places the conflict in a broader historical context, paying careful attention to longstanding tensions that came to the forefront in the early 1990s. These include ideology, regionalism, and, most importantly, disagreements over the role of religion in the functioning of the state. This book will be useful for students, scholars, and any others interested in the recent history of Tajikistan and Central Asia. Iraj Bashiri is one of the leading scholars in the fields of Central Asian studies and Iranian studies with a focus on Tajik and Iranian identity. Nicholas Seay is a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Unforgettable Queens of Islam: Succession, Authority and Gender (Cambridge University Press, 2020) by Shahla Haeri (Associate Professor of Anthropology at Boston University) is a captivating book on the biographies of Muslim women rulers and political leaders. Drawing from extensive historical archives as well as from ethnographic research, Haeri reflects on the legacy of the hadith that says, “never will succeed a nation as makes a woman their ruler.” The book includes stories of Muslim women leaders in classical period, such as Queen of Sheba and ‘A’isha, and in medieval era, such as Queen Arwa of Yemen and Razia Sultan of India to challenge us to rethink gendered political authority across the Muslim world. In historically situating these biographies and also the contemporary popular legacies of Muslim women who were political and at times religious rulers, Haeri showcases how such political authority did not always rest solely on religious tradition but rather hinged on dynastic power and succession,

An original, rigorously researched volume that questions long-accepted paradigms concerning land ownership and its use in Africa. Islam, Power, and Dependency in the Gambia River Basin (Rochester University Press, 2016) draws on new sources to offer an original approach to the study of land in African history. Documenting the impact of Islamization, the development of peanut production, and the institution of colonial rule on people living along the middle and lower Gambia River, the book shows how these waves of changes sweeping the region after 1850 altered local political and social arrangements, with important implications for the ability of elites to control land. Assan Sarr argues for a nuanced understanding of land and its historic value in Africa. Moving beyond a recognition of the material value of land, Sarr's analysis highlights its cultural and social worth, pointing out the spiritual associations the land generated and the ways that certain people gained privileged access to those spiritual power

Around the world Muslims praise the Prophet Muhammad through the recitation of lyrical poetry. In West Africa, Arabic praise poetry has a rich history informed by local literary, spiritual, and ritual elements. Oludamini Ogunnaike, assistant professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, explores this abundant heritage in Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: A Study of West African Arabic Madih Poetry and its Precedents (Islamic Texts Society, 2020). In this social setting praise poetry draws from traditional Islamic materials but also employs patterns and concepts from West Africa sources and practices. Ogunnaike translates numerous poems and contextualizes them within a deep intellectual well of Sufi thought. He also places these poems within the realm of lived religious practice and presents them as part of everyday contemporary life in West Africa. In our conversation we discuss the place of praise poetry as a genre, the broader literary tradition it relies on, Sufi theology, the wider

What’s love got to do with it? Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Territory and the Future on India’s Northern Threshold (Rutgers University Press, 2020) by feminist political geographer Sara Smith tell us - everything! Smith’s book centers intimacy in the consideration of geopolitics which is otherwise only seen as a game between nation states. The accounts of realized and failed inter-faith love across generations of Ladakhi Buddhists and Ladakhi Muslims in Smith’s book become the ground for the contesting of demographic fantasies, territorial futures and generation vertigo. Written with a careful consideration of the complexities of territorial politics in Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh and their intersections, Smith’s book also provides insights into the vulnerabilities of a minority identity--Shia Muslims and Buddhists, as well as its entanglements with the scalar politics of majoritarianism. By ‘populating territory’, Intimate Geopolitics is able to make clear the interweaving of reprosexuality, aspirations and int

Muslims have lived in the Caribbean for centuries. Far From Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean (Rutgers University Press, 2020) examines the archive of autobiography, literature, music and public celebrations in Guyana and Trinidad, offering an analysis of the ways Islam became integral to the Caribbean, and the ways the Caribbean shaped Islamic practices. Aliyah Khan recovers stories that have been there all along, though they have received little scholarly attention. The interdisciplinary approach takes on big questions about creolization, gender, politics and cultural change, but it does so with precision and attention to detail. Aliyah Khan is an assistant professor of English and Afroamerican and African studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, I talk with Pernilla Myrne about her exciting and excellently researched book Female Sexuality in the Early Medieval Islamic World: Gender and Sex in Arabic Literature, published with I. B. Tauris in 2020. Pernilla Myrne is an Associate Professor of Arabic Literature and History at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, where she also earned her PhD in 2008. Her research interests include the representation of women in pre-modern Arabic literature, attitudes to sexuality in medieval Islam, and women as creative subjects. In today’s discussion, Myrne shares with us the origins of her book, some of its findings, and the process of collecting the many, many sources she used to make this book an essential resource of many a thing female sexuality, including pleasure, sexual comedy, and women’s bodies. Among Myrne’s impressive range of sources are medical, Islamic legal, literary, and entertainment sources. Contrary to popular and even scholarly expectations, medieval erotic literature emphasized

Modest fashion is a growing, global multi-billion-dollar market. As a fashion trend, it has increasingly made its way into high-profile runways, has been endorsed by celebrities, and profiled in major fashion publications and news outlets.   Hafsa Lodi’s Modesty: A Fashion Paradox (Neem Tree Press, 2020) investigates how and why modest fashion became a mainstream global retail trend. It looks at the causes and key players behind the global modest fashion trend, while also exploring the controversies that surround the concept. Lodi interviewed over 40 important actors in the modest fashion movement, including designers, models, influencers, and entrepreneurs but also drew on personal experiences from her childhood in the United States and career as a fashion journalist in the Middle East to understand its history, evolution, and contradictions.  Hafsa Lodi is an American journalist who has been covering fashion for a decade. She has a BA from the Ryerson School of Journalism in Toronto and an MA in Islamic Law

Ahmed El-Shamsy’s Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2020) is an astonishing scholarly feat that presents a detailed, sophisticated, and thoroughly enjoyable intellectual and social history of the modern publishing industry on what we today consider canonical books of Islamic thought. “Painstakingly researched” would be a description too mild for the depth and breadth of sources and analysis that El-Shamsy mobilizes in this book. Over the course of its 8 delightfully written chapters, readers meet some known and many less known book collectors, editors, Muslim reformers, early Salafis, and European Orientalists whose thought, outlook, normative agendas, and wide-ranging efforts produced a distinct corpus of classical Islamic texts. The canonization of what counted as “classical” was itself a markedly modern move and gesture, El-Shamsy argues. Populated with fascinating narratives of manuscript hunting, editorial

As Indonesia nears the 75th anniversary of its proclamation of independence this year, the socio-political debates surrounding her birth as a nation-state take on contemporary salience. In Indonesia’s Islamic Revolution (Cambridge UP, 2019), Kevin W. Fogg analyzes the religious aspirations that motivated many Muslim revolutionaries to fight the return of Dutch after the Second World War and envision a new nation-state. The book tackles this topic on both military and political fronts; paying attention not only to how Islam energized the Indonesian Revolution but also to how revolution refreshes the practice and social organization of Islam. While much of the present historiography on the Indonesian Revolution has centered on the secular nationalist leaders as primary historical actors, this book refocuses attention on how the revolutionary movement drew additional vitality from a diverse group of pious Muslims. Integrating the experiences of relatively obscure military veterans with well-known Muslim politici

Over the last couple of decades, a number of books written both by the academics and journalists  have appeared on many dysfunctions of the Pakistani state, a few of them even predicting why and how and when it is going to collapse. Against this grain, Ayesha Siddiqi’s new book, In the Wake of Disaster Islamists, the State and a Social Contract in Pakistan (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is a forceful meditation on a number of key issues around the social contract, citizenship, and state provisions such as disaster relief and social protection. The book helps understand why, despite its many limitations, Pakistani state remains central to the lives of those it seeks to govern. Through an intensive ethnography conducted in the three of the worst hit districts – in the wake of the flooding disasters of 2010-2011 – in the Southern-most region of Pakistan’s Sindh province, Siddiqi demonstrates that the state and citizenship, even when expressed in vernacular idiom which doesn’t lend itself neatly to predominan

Qurʾanic interpretation in contemporary societies is shaped in a multitude of ways. There are educational institutions that inform how one understands the text, linguistic hurdles for readers and commentators, publicly accessible forms of media, editors and translators that shape what audiences have access to, and global interpretive positions among various Muslim denominations. In Muslim Qurʾānic Interpretation Today: Media, Genealogies and Interpretive Communities (Equinox Publishing, 2018), Johanna Pink, Professor at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, explores the rich and varied expressions of Qur’anic materials and places them within these frameworks. The volume takes a genealogical approach to numerous contemporary cases studies to see where they come together and where they diverge in their assumptions, hermeneutics, and conclusions. Pink demonstrates that tensions around the Qur’an today extend from questions of who has the authority to interpreted, what is the best method to do so, and the new expa

Lara Harb’s Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a delightful and formidable study on the details and development of poetics and aesthetics in medieval Arabic literature. The central theme of this splendid book centers on the emergence of the evocation of wonder as a key aesthetic experience and criterion connected to the beauty and eloquence of speech in medieval Muslim intellectual thought. With breathtaking clarity and painstaking elaboration, Harb charts the key literary tropes, categories, and strategies, as well as the broader intellectual and theological stakes, such as the question of the Qur’an’s inimitability, invested in how poetry was imagined, experienced, and evaluated in this context. The strength of this book lies in the meticulous care with which it walks readers through a complex yet deeply fascinating discursive arcade of thinkers, texts, and poetic registers. While focused on the thought of the preeminent eleventh century

Challenging incarceration and policing was central to the post-war Black Freedom Movement. In his new book Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State (UNC Press, 2020), Garrett Felber centers the Nation in the Civil Rights Era and the making of the modern carceral state. In doing so, he reveals a multifaceted freedom struggle that focused as much on policing and prisons as on school desegregation and voting rights. The book examines efforts to build broad-based grassroots coalitions among liberals, radicals, and nationalist to oppose the carceral state and struggle for local Black self-determination. It captures the ambiguous place of the Nation of Islam specifically, and Black nationalist organizing more broadly, during an era which has come to redefined by non-violent resistance, desegregation campaigns, and racial liberalism. By provocatively documenting the interplay between law enforcement and Muslim communities, Felber decisively shows state repress

In the early 19th century, on the floodplain of the Niger river’s inland delta in West Africa (present-day Mali), the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi emerged. The new State, locally known as the Maasina Diina, sought to consolidate its dominance over Fulani, Bamanan, and Arma military and political elites, as well as Jenne and Timbuktu’s scholarly establishment. It also attempted to reach a balance of power with neighboring Sokoto. The arsenal of tools the Caliphate deployed to achieve these goals included war, economic expansion, diplomacy, and the crafting of a historical chronicle known as the Tārīkh al-Fattāsh. In two separate strands of historiography, scholars have tackled the genesis and literary construction of the chronicle on the one hand, and the history of the Caliphate on the other. The new book Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith: Ahmad Lobbo, the Tārīkh al-fattāsh and the Making of an Islamic State in West Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2020), brings both together. Mauro Nobili argues tha

In Allah: God in the Qur’an (Yale University Press, 2020), Gabriel Said Reynolds argues that contrary to many scholarly and popular claims about the God of the Qur’an as either merciful or vengeful, God is in fact both. He suggests that God’s nature is a mystery and the descriptions of God, as both merciful and vengeful, are intended to have an impact on the audience of the Qur’an. Through productive comparisons between the Qur’an and the Bible, Reynolds also discusses the common themes and descriptions of God shared by these scriptures, such as the – of course, vengeance and mercy of God, but also divine scheming, God’s derision of unbelievers, and ideas of God as the Father, the Ruler, the Judge, and/or similar characteristics. Other themes covered in the book include heaven and hell, and the fate of sinners and unbelievers in the Qur’an and the exegetical tradition, the idea of humans as having been created in God’s image, and the idea of the Qur’an as a literary truth versus a historical truth, the latter

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020) Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanati

Challenging the geographical narrative of the history of Islam, Chiara Formichi’s new book Islam and Asia: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2020), helps us to rethink how we tell the story of Islam and the lived expressions of Muslims without privileging certain linguistic, cultural, and geographic realities. Focusing on themes of reform, political Islamism, Sufism, gender, as well as a rich array of material culture (such as sacred spaces and art), the book maps the development of Islam in Asia, such as in Kashmir, Indonesia, Malaysia, and China. It considers both transnational and transregional ebbs and flows that have defined the expansion and institutionalization of Islam in Asia, while attending to factors such as ethnicity, linguistic identity and even food cultures as important realities that have informed the translation of Islam into new regions. It is the “convergence and conversation” between the “local” and “foreign” or better yet between the theoretical notions of “centre” and “periphery” o