New Books In Islamic Studies

Of the many differences between the West and the rest of the world the issue of religiosity is one of the most striking. In the West ever fewer people belong to a religion – the number for the UK is now around 50% - and in the US around a third of people are religiously unaffiliated. But elsewhere in the world religions are growing – and in the world as a whole nearly 90% of people are religious. Robin Dunbar – Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Oxford University has been thinking about the reason for religion’s appeal for his book How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures (Oxford UP, 2022). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwor

In her latest book Journeys Toward Gender Equality in Islam (Oneworld Publications, 2022) Ziba Mir-Hosseini interviews several Muslim scholars of gender in different settings over the course of a decade. These folks are Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, amina wadud, Asma Lamrabet, Khaled Abou El Fadl, Mohsen Kadivar, and Sedigheh Vasmaghi. Mir-Hosseini is a scholar of Islam, a film-maker, an anthropologist, and an activist. She is a founding member of Musawah: Global Movement for Equality in Muslim Family Laws, and the convenor of its knowledge-building initiative to rethink the notion of male authority in Muslim family laws. Currently, Mir-Hosseini is a professorial research associate at the Centre for Islamic and Middle Eastern Law at SOAS, University of London. Her other books include Marriage on Trial: A Study of Islamic Family Law in Iran and Morocco (I. B. Tauris, 1993, 2002) and Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran (Princeton University Press, 1999). She is also co-editor of Men in Charg

Dynasties Intertwined: The Zirids of Ifriqiya and the Normans of Sicily (Cornell UP, 2022) traces the turbulent relationship between the Zirids of Ifriqiya and the Normans of Sicily during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In doing so, it reveals the complex web of economic, political, cultural, and military connections that linked the two dynasties to each other and to other polities across the medieval Mediterranean. Furthermore, despite the contemporary interfaith holy wars happening around the Zirids and Normans, their relationship was never governed by an overarching ideology like jihad or crusade. Instead, both dynasties pursued policies that they thought would expand their power and wealth, either through collaboration or conflict. The relationship between the Zirids and Normans ultimately came to a violent end in the 1140s, when a devastating drought crippled Ifriqiya. The Normans seized this opportunity to conquer lands across the Ifriqiyan coast, bringing an end to the Zirid dynasty and forming th

In his sparkling and politically urgent new book Fear in Our Hearts: What Islamophobia Teaches Us About America (NYU Press, 2021), Caleb Elfenbein shows with precision and panache the discursive, institutional, and political conditions and processes that have normalized anti-Muslim hate in the United States, especially over the last two decades. How does fear for a caricatured and dehumanized religious minority become an entrenched part of public discourse? Elfenbein engages and answers this question through a painstaking analysis of a range of actors and discourses across the political spectrum that have contributed to establishing Islamophobia as a formidably pernicious form of violence. In our conversation, we discuss the key themes and arguments of this book that is ideally suited to be taught in various undergraduate courses, especially the introductory Islam course and Islam in North America. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focus

Analysts and pundits from across the American political spectrum describe Islamic fundamentalism as one of the greatest threats to modern, Western-style democracy. Yet very few non-Muslims would be able to venture an accurate definition of political Islam. Fully revised and updated, Mohammed Ayoob and Danielle N. Lussier's The Many Faces of Political Islam: Religion and Politics in Muslim Societies (U Michigan Press, 2020) thoroughly analyzes the many facets of this political ideology and shows its impact on global relations. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. 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 Sorcery or Science? Contesting Knowledge and Practice in West African Sufi Texts (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022) Ariela Marcus-Sells examines two Sufi Muslim theologians, known as Kunta scholars, who rose to prominence in the western Sahara Desert in the late eighteenth century. Sīdi al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī (d. 1811) and his son and successor, Sīdi Muḥammad al-Kuntī (d. 1826), influenced the development of Sufi Muslim thought in West Africa. Through textual analysis of their devotional aids, such as prayers and magic squares, we are provided a picture of their understanding of “the realm of the unseen” and the resulting practices of the “sciences of the unseen.” Marcus-Sells captures how Kunta scholars engaged with contested Sufi and Islamic praxis that contained cosmology, metaphysics, magic, sorcery, and occultism. The study also contextualizes these magical and Sufi practices within social and political context of the Saharan desert, such as Transatlantic slavery, while mapping the broader l

Saudi global export of an ultra-conservative strand of Islam and its impact on Muslim countries and communities across the globe has been a hotly debate topic for more than two decades. The rise of jihadist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State and their attacks in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Africa fuelled the debate, particularly since the September 11, 2001, strikes in New York and Washington. Critics of Saudi Arabia charge that Wahhabism and Salafism, the ultra-conservative interpretations of Islam associated with the kingdom, created the theological and ideological incubator and the breeding ground for jihadism. Wahhabism and the World, Understanding Saudi Arabia’s Global Influence on Islam (Oxford UP, 2022) edited by Peter Mandaville constitutes one of the few, if not the first comprehensive, impassionate interrogations of the impact on the faith of Saudi financial and other support for the global spread of what Mandaville calls Saudi religious transnationalism and is more colloquially ref

Sylvia Chan-Malik is Associate Professor in the Departments of American and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She talks, teaches, and writes about the intersections of race, gender, and religion, with a focus on the history and cultures of Islam and Muslims in the United States. Her research highlights the lives, voices, histories, and representations of Muslim women, and reveals how critical legacies of Black freedom, women’s agency, and global liberation struggles have continually marked U.S. Muslim women’s engagements with Islam. She is the author of Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam (New York University Press, 2018). 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 Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11 published in 2022 with Broadleaf Books, Maha Hilal describes how narratives of 9/11 and the war on terror have been constructed over the last twenty years and the various ways in which they have justified state violence against Muslims. Hilal offers answers to many questions, including and especially how the war on terror started, what its impact on American Muslims and Muslims abroad has been, and how to work to dismantle it. Hilal holds a PhD in Justice, Law, and Society from American University and has received many awards, including the Department of State's Critical Language Scholarship, the Kathryn Davis Fellowship for Peace, and a Reebok Human Rights Fellowship. The book is written accessibly, making difficult concepts and themes easy to follow and understand. It is easily assignable in undergraduate and graduate courses and makes for an essential read for policymakers and for anyone interested in the

Analyzing the spread and survival of Islamic legal ideas and commentaries in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean littorals, Islamic Law in Circulation: Shafi'i Texts across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean (Cambridge University Press, 2022) focuses on Shāfiʿīsm, one of the four Sunnī schools of Islamic law. It explores how certain texts shaped, transformed and influenced the juridical thoughts and lives of a significant community over a millennium in and between Asia, Africa and Europe. By examining the processes of the spread of legal texts and their roles in society, as well as thinking about how Afrasian Muslims responded to these new arrivals of thoughts and texts, Mahmood Kooria weaves together a narrative with the textual descendants from places such as Damascus, Mecca, Cairo, Malabar, Java, Aceh and Zanzibar to tell a compelling story of how Islam contributed to the global history of law from the thirteenth to the twentieth century. Mahmood Kooria is a researcher at Leiden University (

The Jahriyya Sufis—a primarily Sinophone order of Naqshbandiyya Sufism in northwestern China—inhabit a unique religious soundscape. The hallmark of their spiritual practice is the “loud” (jahr) remembrance of God in liturgical rituals featuring distinctive melodic vocal chants. The first ethnography of this order in any language, The Sound of Salvation: Voice, Gender, and the Sufi Mediascape in China (Columbia UP, 2021) draws on nearly a decade of fieldwork to reveal the intricacies and importance of Jahriyya vocal recitation. Guangtian Ha examines how the use of voice in liturgy helps the Jahriyya to sustain their faith and the ways it has enabled them to endure political persecution over the past two and a half centuries. He situates the Jahriyya in a global multilingual network of Sufis and shows how their characteristic soundscapes result from transcultural interactions among Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and Chinese Muslim communities. Ha argues that the resilience of Jahriyya Sufism stems from the dive

In her new book Under Siege: Islamophobia and the 9/11 Generation (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022) Jasmin Zine explores the experiences of Canadian Muslim youth as they navigate the landscape of Islamophobia, anti-Muslim racism, global war on terror, and the security industrial complex. By centering the voices of Muslim youth in Canada from the 9/11 generation, the study captures the complex nexus of oppressions experienced by racialized Muslims as they navigate government policies of securitization, university campus culture, news media, and popular culture. Zine also examines how Muslim youth storytellers are creating intentional and resistant counterpublics through artistic and creative productions to disrupt reductive portrayal of Muslims in Canada. The book will be of interest to those who think and write about Islamophobia, Muslim youth, and Islam in Canada, but it will also be of interest to the general reader, particularly those who work in the civic and public sectors, such as educators. Shobh

Ibn Babawayh – also known as al-Shaykh al-Saduq – was a prominent Twelver Shi'i scholar of hadith. Writing within the first century after the vanishing of the twelfth imam, al-Saduq represents a pivotal moment in Twelver hadith literature, as this Shi'i community adjusted to a world without a visible imam and guide, a world wherein the imams could only be accessed through the text of their remembered words and deeds. George Warner's book The Words of the Imams: Al-Shaykh Al-Saduq and the Development of Twelver Shi'i Hadith Literature (I. B. Tauris, 2021) examines the formation of Shi'i hadith literature in light of these unique dynamics, as well as giving a portrait of an important but little-studied early Twelver thinker. Though almost all of al-Saduq's writings are collections of hadith, Warner's approach pays careful attention to how these texts are selected and presented to explore what they can reveal about their compiler, offering insight into al-Saduq's ideas and suggesting new possibilities for the wi

I am very pleased to host on the podcast Raffaello Pantucci, one of the authors of Sinostan: China's Inadvertent Empire [Oxford University Press 2022]. This great new book approaches through a very novel lens one of the most talked-about issues in Eurasian Studies: China's role in Central Asia. Pantucci and his co-author, the late Alexandros Pedersen, travel around the vast Chinese territory, Central Asia and Afghanistan to document the intensification and the multiplication of China's political, military, and economic linkages with its western neighbours. The narrative woven by Pantucci and Pedersen focuses on the people they encounter through almost a decade of travelling across this immensely interesting region: conversations with truck drivers, merchants, politicians, diplomats and ordinary people helped the authors of Sinostan to present us with an incredibly intriguing picture of China's growing influence in Central Asia. This book is more than a travelogue, however: Pantucci and Pedersen master differe

In Owning the Secular: Religious Symbols, Culture Wars, Western Fragility (Routledge, 2021), Matt Sheedy, Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Bonn, Germany, examines three case studies dealing with religious symbols and cultural identity. Drawing on theories of discourse analysis and ideology critique, this study calls attention to an evolution in how secularism, nationalism, and multiculturalism in Europe and North America are debated and understood as competing groups contest and rearrange the meaning of these terms. This is especially true in the digital age as online cultures have transformed how information is spread, how we imagine our communities, build alliances, and produce shared meaning.  From recent attempts to prohibit religious symbols in public, to Trump’s so-called Muslim bans, to growing disenchantment with the promises of digital media, Owning the Secular turns the lens how nation-states, organizations, and individuals attempt to "own" the secular to manage cultural differences

The continuing crisis in Xinjiang has, thanks to the work of many scholars and reporters, led to greatly increased awareness of the region's history and Uyghur population among publics outside China. But so far less appreciated have been the specific ways in which the targeted regime of Uyghur imprisonment operates, and its creeping emergence over the course of the 2010s. Darren Byler’s Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Duke UP, 2022) is therefore a vital addition to our understanding of this emergency. Based on long-term fieldwork in Urumqi and elsewhere, this is a chilling and deeply moving portrait of processes of dispossession and ‘reeducation’ whose advance has intensified since the 2014 onset of what the Chinese government calls the ‘People’s War on Terror’. Combining ethnographic nuance with piercing insight into grand colonial processes, Byler both offers an encompassing theory of the technological, economic and political forces which have brought this situatio

In his fascinating and riveting new book Soundtrack to a Movement: African American Islam, Jazz, and Black Internationalism (NYU Press, 2021), historian Richard Brent Turner tells a moving though rarely discussed narrative of the intersection and cross-pollination between Jazz and African American Islam from the 1940s to the 1970s. How did Islam and conversion to Islam inform the lives, careers, and musical productions of prominent jazz musicians in this period? And how did jazz spaces and culture provide the fodder for important African American Muslim movements and figures, such as the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X? Turner addresses these and other questions with profound historical depth and analytical ingenuity. Over the course of this book, the reader learns about such enormously interesting themes as the landscape of African American politics during the interwar period and beyond in major Northeastern cities (especially Boston), the intimate relationship between Jazz and the Ahmadiyya, the relationship

In his new book, Hajj to the Heart: Sufi Journeys Across the Indian Ocean (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) and is available as an open-access enhanced edition, Scott Kugle follows the life and legacy of the influential Sufi scholar of Arabic, hadith, and scriptural hermeneutics shaykh ‘Ali Muttaqi. ‘Ali Muttaqi left South Asia for hajj (Mecca) where he eventually settled as an exile. Kugle provides a microscopic history of this figure by engaging a wealth of diverse Arabic and Persian manuscripts, such as his devotional writings or political orientations. This story also maps the legacy of ‘Ali Muttaqi via his disciples or the Muttaqi lineage across the Indian Ocean world into three generations that lead us into political contestations and courtly intrigue, such as with the Mughals in Gujarat, debates of the authoritative roles and legitimacy of saints and the mahdi (messiah) in Sufism, relationship between Sufism and jurisprudence, and scholarship of hadith. The story told here of the journeys by 1

Gender and sexuality in modern Iran are frequently examined through the prisms of nationalist symbols and religious discourse. In Revolutionary Bodies: Technologies of Gender, Sex, and Self in Contemporary Iran (Bloomsbury, 2020), Kristin Soraya Batmanghelichi, Associate Professor at the University of Oslo, Norway, takes a different approach, by interrogating how normative ideas of women's bodies in state, religious, and public health discourses have resulted in the female body being deemed as immodest and taboo. Through a diverse blend of sources, including a popular women's journal, a red-light district, cases studies of temporary marriages, iconic public statues, and an HIV-AIDS advocacy organization in Tehran, Batmanghelichi argues that conceptions of gender and sexuality have been mediated in public discourse and experienced and modified by women themselves over the past thirty years of the Islamic Republic. In our conversation we discuss the regulation of gender & sexuality through bodily technologies,

Rivals in the Gulf: Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, Abdullah Bin Bayyah, and the Qatar-UAE Contest Over the Arab Spring and the Gulf Crisis (Routledge, 2021) goes to key questions of governance at the heart of developments in the Muslim world. Warren looks at the issue through the lens of two of the foremost Middle Eastern religious protagonists and their backers: Egyptian-born Qatari national Yusuf a Qaradawi, widely seen as advocating an Islamic concept of democracy, and UAE-backed Abdullah Bin Bayyah who legitimizes in religious terms autocratic rule in the UAE as well as the Muslim world at large. In doing so, Warren traces the history of the relationship between the two Islamic legal scholars and their Gulf state sponsors, their influence in shaping and/or legitimizing polices and systems of governance, and their vision of the proper relationship between the ruler and the ruled. He also highlights the development by Qaradawi and Bin Bayyah of new Islamic jurisprudence to religiously frame their differing approaches t