New Books in Islamic Studies

The question of how to write the history of the modern Middle East is a much contested one. Do we write national histories, focused on modern-nation states? Do we treat the Middle East as an integrated unit? What even constitutes the Middle East? At that, how do we deal with the great changes that swept the region during the late 19th and early 20th centuries? Cyrus Schayegh in The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World (Harvard University Press, 2017) introduces the concept of transpatialization, which denotes simultaneous processes of globalization, urbanization and state formation, to present a vision of bilad al-sham, or the Levant transitioning from the rule of the Ottoman Empire to the mandatory system to independence. NA Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Within a few generations after the death of Muhammad Muslims developed complex legal and theological traditions that shaped the boundaries of what was deemed Islamic. In Coercion and Responsibility in Islam: A Study in Ethics and Law (Oxford University Press, 2017), Mairaj Syed, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at University of California, Davis, examines how the constraints of interpretive traditions were tested under questions of coercion. He demonstrates that very often theological and legal reasoning moves beyond our expectations and interpretive conclusions are contradictory within seemingly uniform schools. He shows how members of the Mu’tazila and Ashari schools of theology determine the legal and moral responsibility of individuals who have been pressured to say or do something under coercive conditions. He also explores Hanafi and Shafi’i legal definitions of coercion and the various types of reasoning principles for drawing what is licit. These conundrums are hashed out through hypothetical coerced speech acts, such as proclamations of divorce, sale transactions, or legal acknowledgement, and coerced harm, as in rape or homicide. In our conversation we discuss moral agency, the formative period of legal and theological traditions, conventional presumptions about these legal and theological schools, how tradition works, interpretive ambiguity within schools of thought, various instances of coercion, wrestling with the vast amount of hadith literature, and the fashioning of interpretive norms. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Religion is big business nowadays. Within the global context of Muslim consumers Islamic commodities have become increasingly popular over the past few decades. Faegheh Shirazi, Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, explores the industrial and discursive production of halal products in Brand Islam: The Marketing and Commodification of Piety (University of Texas Press, 2016). In the wake of increased insecurity due to the rise of anti-Muslim sentiments and policy, Islamic-branded products have become an essential means for shaping and expressing social identities. The commodification of a religious orientation has produced a halal consumerism that pervades the branding and marketing logic of several industries. In our conversation we discuss the corporatization of the halal food industry, Islamic products and non-Muslim publics, the politics of slaughtering animals, Islamic branded toys, such as hijabi dolls, cosmetic and toiletry products, and the Muslim fashion industry. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

The relationship between religion and economic activity has attracted generations of scholars working in myriad settings. In recent years, many have turned to questions of how Islamic ideas are generative of economic activity, to Islamic finance and capital, and to the relationship between contemporary Islam and capitalism more broadly. In Corporate Islam: Sharia and the Modern Workplace (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Patricia Sloane-White builds on this work by asking “not only how the spread of global capitalism transforms the lives of Muslims… but how capitalism empowers the spread of Islam.” Drawing from interviews and ethnographic fieldwork over a seven-year period, and a wealth of knowledge from over two decades of research in Malaysia, Sloane-White argues that the “sharia space” of the today’s corporate Islamic workplace is a third domain between the public and the private in which employees must submit to the guidance of their professional and personal lives by men who insist that their businesses can and must be both profitable and pious. Patricia Sloane-White joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about Malaysia’s self-styled men of the mosque and the market; the new nexus between Islamic scholars and CEOs; the decline of the bumiputera generation; sexuality, gendered divisions of labour, and the problem of patriarchy in the capitalist workplace everywhere. Listeners of this episode may also be interested in: Iza Hussin, The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority and the Making of the Muslim State Meredith Weiss, Student Activism in Malaysia: Crucible, Mirror, Sideshow Nick Cheesman is a fellow in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at [email protected] 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 inspiring new book, Muslim Women’s Quest for Justice: Gender, Law and Activism in India (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Mengia Hong Tschalaer charts the strivings and creative struggles of Muslim women’s organizations in contemporary North India for gender justice. Carefully historicized and brimming with nuanced analysis, this book shows the discursive and political strategies through which overlapping and at times competing women’s organizations navigate a contested and complicated public sphere, as they seek to curate a gender emancipatory understanding of Islam. The major strength of this book is the way it presents a vivid picture of the quest for gender justice on the ground, leavened by such critical processes as the composition of gender-just nikah-namas. This important book will engage the interests of a range of scholars and courses on Islam, gender, South Asia, and Islamic law and society. SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available at https://fandm.academia.edu/SheraliTareen/. He can be reached at [email protected]. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Hussein Fancy’s book The Mercenary Mediterranean: Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (University of Chicago Press, 2016) begins with the description of five Muslim jenets, or cavalrymen, journeying through Spain in 1285 to serve as soldiers for the crown of Aragon. As Fancy explains, these men were not outliers, but just a few of the many thousands who were employed by successive Aragonese kings over the course of the 13th and 14th centuries, and their service challenges many of our long-held assumptions of the divide between the Christian and Islamic worlds during the Middle Ages. For the kings of Aragon, hiring jenets gave them a powerful force of light cavalry that could be used to foster their imperial ambitions, while the jenets themselves saw their service for Christian kings as fully compatible with their tradition of jihad. By describing their relationship, Fancy’s work highlights one of the many ties that linked Christian Aragon to Muslim North Africa, two regions that are usually treated separately rather than part of the interconnected Mediterranean world that emerges from his pages. 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 contemporary South Asia, the question of Muslim origins emerges in school textbooks, political dialogues, or at tourist or pilgrimage cites. The repeated narrative revolves around the foreign Muslim leader, Muhammad bin Qasim, and his conquest of Sind in the year 712. Manan Ahmed Asif, Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University, provides a critical interrogation of this narrative in A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia (Harvard University Press, 2017). The crux of this origin narrative stems from the Chachnama, a 13th-century Persian text, which purports to be a translation of an eye-witness account written in Arabic. Asif approaches the Chachnama by initially situating it within the spatial and political context of Medieval Sind. He then places it within the textual universe of the early 13th century, thinking about audience, genre, and themes. Through this process of unreading he concludes that the Chachnama is neither translation nor primarily concerned with conquest but rather provides a coherent political theory for its contemporaneous readers. Thinking about the text in this new light, Asif examines the Chachnama though the lens of advice writing, questions of governing difference, and the calibration of gender and power. Finally, he explores the afterlife of the Chachnama and determines the factors that framed the story of the conquest of Sind as the primary narrative of Muslim origins in South Asia. In our conversation we discussed what origin narratives tell us about the contemporary world, the deployment of notions of conquest and foreignness in South Asian discourse, the maritime orientation of early Sind, literary and social context of the Chachnamas production, genres of advice writing, the political organization of religious difference, the roles women played in articulating just forms of rule, the colonial reframing of Muslim origins, and the social consequences of dominant readings of the Chachnama. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected]. 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 does it mean to interpret the Qur’an? What kinds of literary genres have produced and continue to produce such inquiry? Is tafsir only a line-by-line commentary or could it be something broader, blended with genres of law, storytelling, or translation? Whose authority counts and why? Tafsir and Islamic Intellectual History: Exploring the Boundaries of a Genre (Oxford University Press, 2015) aims to address these questions in its ambitious agenda. Johanna Pink and Andreas Gorke have provided a great service to the field of Qur’anic studies by compiling this fine volume, penned by fifteen established as well as rising scholars in the field. The book is conveniently organized according to five sections, which explore the challenges of Qur’anic exegesis in modern and premodern contexts. The authors also explore a number of languages and geographical regions, which showcases the diverse expressions of exegesis that Muslims have produced over the centuries. Pink’s own chapter in the volume, for example, analyzes the exegetical works of Yemeni scholar, Muhammad al-Shawkani (d. 1835) and provocatively argues that labels (e.g., modern or Salafi) have their uses but can nonetheless introduce other problematics, and readers should be careful before assuming an easy fit. In addition to appealing to Qur’anic studies scholars of many stripes the edited volume also presents itself as a reference work, given its broad scope, meticulous notes, and extensive bibliography and should appeal to diverse readers accordingly. Elliott Bazzano is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College. His research and teaching interests include theory and methodology in the study of religion, Islamic studies, Qur’anic studies, mysticism, religion and media, and religion and drugs. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at ([email protected]). Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

The term ‘sectarianism’ has dominated much of the discourse on the Middle East and dictates that much of the unrest in the region is due to religious and cultural differences stemming back centuries. However, with Sectarianization:Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2017), Nader Hashimi and Danny Postel have sought to redefine the term, locating the manifestation of sectarian differences in sectarianization, a process utilized by a variety of regional actors in political power plays. Featuring a host of historians, anthropologists, and political scientists, the edited volume intends to push back against careless usage of the term and redefine the histories of sectarian violence in the Middle East. NA Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Few images attached to Islam and to the Islamic legal tradition (the Sharia) in particular are more often and more disturbingly sensationalized than that of the stoning punishment. In her riveting new book Shari’ah on Trial: Northern Nigeria’s Islamic Revolution (University of California Press, 2017), Sarah Eltantawi, Assistant Professor of Comparative Religion at Evergreen State College, offers a dazzlingly nuanced and lucid account of the past and present of the stoning punishment in Northern Nigeria. Effortlessly moving between pre-modern and contemporary archives and contexts, Eltantawi traces the shifting meanings and political projects that have been invested into the stoning punishment over time. Historically grounded, theoretically exciting, and lucidly composed, this book is sure to spark important conversations and debates in multiple fields. It will also make a wonderful text for undergraduate and graduate seminars for courses on Islam, Islamic Law, Gender and Sexuality, and on Islam in Africa. SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available at https://fandm.academia.edu/SheraliTareen/. He can be reached at [email protected]. Listener feedback is most welcome. 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 mid-March, Europeans observed the Dutch national elections with intense interest. Onlookers believed that a victory of the Party for Freedom led by Geert Wilders will influence the results of coming elections in France, the UK, and Germany. It was thought that it would impact these countries immigration policies, and shape their attitudes to their Muslim population. The media coverage stressed the racist and xenophobic rhetoric of Wilders and his supporters, and emphasized the growing tensions between the Netherland’s Muslim and non-Muslim citizens. In Amplifying Islam in the European Soundscape: Religious Pluralism and Secularism in the Netherlands (Bloomsbury Press, 2017) anthropologist and scholar of religion Pooyan Tamimi Arab uses sound to suggest a counter-narrative about the state of the Dutch nation. This exceptional monograph looks at debates over the azan, the Muslim call to pray, to reveal the civic negotiations between Muslim and non-Muslim citizens. Tamimi Arab looks to local town halls meetings where community representatives work to find a compromise between the wish for public worship and demands for a discreet practice. By focusing on the sonic dimensions of public worship, Tamimi Arab can expose hidden power struggles. He finds for example, that a dual desire to belong in the nation and to keep a connection to their countries of origin motivates many of those demanding the use of loudspeakers for the azan. In his field work, Tamimi Arab observed how although conflicting needs pose challenges to religious tolerance, tensions were often mitigated on the ground. His account of the process results in a more optimist portrayal of a society in influx than the standard narrative of Europe in the twenty-first century. This makes Amplifying Islam a useful example for scholars who aspire to challenge the privileged status of the text in current scholarship. Tal Zalmanovich is a historian of modern Britain and media. She’s currently researching the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain, and its activists impact on domestic politics in Britain. Prior to being an academic, Tal was a journalist. Podcasting is the fruitful convergence of the two. You can contact Tal at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Iranian cinema has close connections to the 1979 Islamic revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini , explicitly pointed to the uses of cinema for religious and revolutionary political purposes. But Iranian films and the means of film production gradually changed in the post-Khomeini period. In Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic (Columbia University Press, 2016), Blake Atwood, Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, explores the trajectories of Iranian cinema within the transforming cultural and political landscapes of the 1990s. Many of these changes were fostered by the leader of the Reformist Movement and then Iranian president, Mohammad Khatami. Atwood explores documentary and narrative films, political speeches, and institutional policies to determine how reform cinema shaped public opinion, social practices, and political sensibilities. During this period, there are observable changes in industrial and aesthetic cinematic practices that solidify into many of the characteristic features of Iranian film. In our conversation we discuss reform politics, spectatorship, new political opportunities for filmmakers, famous directors such as Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Abbas Kiarostami, campaign films, technological changes and video, documentaries, popular Filmfārsi, Iran’s Cinema Museum, and the legacy of reform cinema today. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected]. 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 new book, Islamophobia and Racism in America (New York University Press, 2017), Sociologist Erik Love provides a historical and current snapshot of civil rights issues surrounding people from the “middle east” in America. Much like other racial and ethnic categorizations, Middle Eastern is a term that does not fit quite right and is also so broad it is vague, but the concept is used widely in the mainstream media and literature and so Love uses it here to help the reader connect to current events and the language used to talk about this particular demographic group. Love starts off by providing the reader with a clear understanding of the social construction of race and how we see and do not see race as tied to Islamophobia. Relying on sociological concepts and theory, Love uses historical information and examples from other racial groups to shine a light on the civil rights issues for people from the middle east in America, as well as those who are categorized as Middle Eastern even when they are not. The discussion in chapter three would be an excellent excerpt to use in any Sociology classroom to learn and talk more about the social construction of race. In his interview with advocates, Love learns about the strategies and history of these organizations and speaks about the struggles and successes they have had. Through the voices of the advocates, we learn more about the links between other civil rights issues and Islamophobia. This book is clearly written and provides the reader with a solid Sociological understanding of the issues surrounding race and Islamophobia in America. This book will be enjoyed by Sociologists broadly, but especially those studying Race, Ethnicity, or Religion, as well as Civil Rights advocates. This book would be well suited for a sociology of race or religion graduate course, especially at the beginning of the semester because it does a through and clear job of defining concepts and uses clear language to connect ideas. Sarah Patterson is a Family Demographer and is ABD at Penn State. You can tweet her at @spattersearch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Michael Muhammed Knight writes this book from a first-person perspective, as a piece of creative non-fiction. The book includes a liberal amount of swearing and sexual references, and Knight’s writing style is raw, sometimes jarring, but smart and sophisticated. Indeed by pushing boundaries, it offers the reader an experience and angle that many authors prefer to avoid. Tripping with Allah: Islam, Drugs, and Writing (Soft Skull Press, 2013) includes personal, autobiographical reflections as well as detailed cultural and political histories of the many interactions between drugs and religion, specifically Islam. From the beginning of the book the reader expects the story to culminate in the author’s experiential encounter with a visionary plant brew called ayahuasca, indigenous to South America and now popular throughout the globe, as a portal into the spiritual world. The twists and turns leading up to this encounter give the book some amount of narrative suspense, but it’s a page-turner in any case. The reader, during her journey through Knight’s narrative, will learn about how coffee was initially banned by Muslims and how socio-economics allowed wine–although explicitly forbidden by authoritative religious texts–a status over marijuana, which was not explicitly forbidden but still seen as a drug for the lower classes. The reader also learns about philosophical debates over authority to interpret Islamic metaphysical doctrines and how the world of academia functions. That the book’s subtitle includes writing makes itself clear throughout the text as well, and readers who enjoy reflecting on the recreational as well as existential dramas of written language will find themselves gripped by Knight’s process. He wrote the book, moreover, during his transition into a PhD program in religious studies, after already making a name for himself as a successful author of several books. Because of the liminal space from which he writes Tripping with Allah, as well as its artistic precision, the book should appeal to broad audiences and Islamic studies specialists alike. Elliott Bazzano is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College. His research and teaching interests include theory and methodology in the study of religion, Islamic studies, Quranic studies, mysticism, religion and media, and religion and drugs. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at ([email protected]). Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Ever since their composition in the 13th century the poems of the Persian writer Rumi have enthralled millions of readers around the world. In Rumi’s Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love (Harper, 2017), Brad Gooch describes the life of their author and the path that took him from scholarship to poetry. The son of a scholar and cleric, Rumi traveled extensively as a child and enjoyed a wide-ranging education that prepared him for a life as a teacher and jurist. His meeting with the traveling mystic Shams of Tabriz transformed Rumi’s life, as he soon abandoned his education and responsibilities in favor of immersion into a life of aestheticism. As Gooch explains, it was this relationship which sparked Rumi’s development into the poet he became, as his deep and passionate relationship with Shams created a wellspring of emotions that were subsequently embodied in some of the most enduring verses ever written. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Armando Salvatore’s (Professor Global Religious Studies, McGill University) formidable new book Sociology of Islam: Knowledge, Power, Civility (Wiley, 2016) is a dense yet delightful meditation on the concept of sociology of Islam. Building on the work of the towering Marshall Hodgson, this book combines intellectual, social, and institutional history with remarkable nimbleness. Among the signature contributions of this book is the theorization of Islamic conceptualizations and articulations of civility in a manner that help provincialize Eurocentric understandings of this concept. Salvatore also traces ways in which pre-modern Islamic articulations of civility transformed in the conditions of colonial modernity. Sure to spark debate, this book will also enliven upper level undergraduate and graduate seminars in the study of religion and Islam. SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available at https://fandm.academia.edu/SheraliTareen/. He can be reached at [email protected]. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Jeanette Jouili‘s fascinating new book Pious Practice and Secular Constraints: Women in the Islamic Revival in Europe (Stanford University Press, 2015) navigates practices and challenges of living pious ethical lives in inhospitable conditions. Through a finely textured analysis of quotidian practices of piety among conservative Muslim women in France and Germany, this book offers a nuanced and analytically rich examination of the intersection of ethics, secular conditions, and religious normative imaginaries. The strength of this book lies in the way it brilliantly hues the tensions of everyday life with sharp theoretical reflections on questions of ethics, moral agency, and gender. Although a commentary of aspirations of piety among Muslim women in Europe, this book also shows fractures in European promises of pluralism. SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available at https://fandm.academia.edu/SheraliTareen/. He can be reached at [email protected]. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Almost daily in popular media the Muslim World is pinpointed as a homogeneous entity that stands separate and parallel to the similarly imagined West. But even scratching the surface of the idea of a Muslim World reveals the geographic, social, linguistic, and religious diversity of Muslims throughout the world. So what work is performed through the employment and use of this phrase? And in what context did the idea of the Muslim World emerge? Cemil Aydin, Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, tackles these questions in his wonderful new book The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Harvard University Press, 2017). It in he weaves distant and interconnecting social, intellectual, and political histories of modern Muslims societies with clarity and detail. Altogether, he reveals the complex story of how the concept is constructed as a device intended to point to a geopolitical, religious, and civilizational unity among Muslims. The term is defined and employed by Muslim and non-Muslim actors alike across imperial and national contexts over the past nearly 150 years. In our conversation we discussed the justifications for imperial conflicts, the effects of Christian nationalistic liberation and the colonization of Muslims, orientalism, social Darwinism, the racialization of Muslims, the global role of the Ottomans, European and Russian imperialism, Muslim modernists thinkers, the effects of the World Wars, and the changing political landscape of the late 20th century. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected]. 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 recent years, several scholars of religion have moved away from the examination of discursive textual domains or the meaning of ritual practices towards analyzing the material worlds in which these practices and beliefs exists. S. Brent Plate, Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Hamilton College, has been one of the forerunners of this turn and provides an accessible staring point for novices in Key Terms in Material Religion (Bloomsbury, 2015). The collected set of short essays explores new perspectives on a number of familiar themes that have been historically important within the study of religion, such as belief, magic, fetish, words, sacred, or ritual. The volume also reveals the dominant themes in the field of material religion, such as objects, senses, time and space, and new horizons like sound, smell, and taste. Overall, the authors begin from the perspective that material forms shape how we understand the world and solidify identities through physical performance. In our conversations we discussed the long history of the collection and its beginnings in the Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief, the selection of terms, what we privilege when thinking about material aspects of religion, creative ways to use the text in the classroom, material aesthetics, urban space and religion in the city, prayer as a site of materiality, exhibiting religion in museums, and where young scholars might take new research in material religion. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Among the most powerful and equally insidious aspects of the new global politics of religion is the discourse of religious moderation that seeks to produce moderate religious subjects at ease with the aims and fantasies of liberal secular politics. For Muslim communities in the US and beyond, few expectations and pressures have carried more weight and urgency than that to pass the test of moderation. In her brilliant new book, Making Moderate Islam: Sufism, Service, and the Ground Zero Mosque Controversy (Stanford University Press, 2016), Rosemary Corbett, Visiting Professor at the Bard Prison Initiative, interrogates the tensions and ambiguities surrounding the moderate Muslim discourse. Far from an exclusively post 9/11 phenomenon, she presents the long running historical and political forces that have shaped the demand for moderation, especially in the equation of Sufism with moderate Islam. The strength of this book lies in the way it combines a deep knowledge of American religious history with the historical narrative and contemporary dynamics of American Islam. Written with breathtaking clarity, this book will spark important conversations in multiple fields including the study of Islam, American Religion, and secularism studies. SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available at https://fandm.academia.edu/SheraliTareen/. He can be reached at [email protected]. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Rebecca Gould‘s Writers and Rebels: Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (Yale University Press, 2016) is the first existing comparative study of Chechen, Dagestani and Georgian literatures and a major contribution to the study of the cultures of the Caucasus. The book examines literary representations of anticolonial violence in the Caucasus across more than a century-long period of time. The monographs central focus is on the figure of abrek (bandit), prominent across all three national literatures under scrutiny. Gould explores the figure of abrek through the prism of what she calls “transgressive sanctity” –“the process though which sanctity is made transgressive and transgression is made sacred through violence against the state.” Through this process, violence is aesthetisized and aesthetics is endowed with the capacity to generate violence. Of particular interest is Gould’s approach to the study of violence an investigation in which, she suggests, literature can and should play a central role. Writers and Rebels is based on eight years of fieldwork, and the reading and analysis of many previously untapped sources, in particular, the Arabic-language texts from Dagestan. This local literacy and the diversity of sources allows Gould to challenge the postulates of existing theoretical frameworks, such as postcolonialism as it applies to the studies of the Caucasus, and search for new scholarly trajectories which take into account the utter cultural and linguistic diversity of the region. Olga Breininger is a PhD candidate in Slavic and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Her research interests include post-Soviet culture and geopolitics, with a special focus on Islam, nation-building, and energy politics. Olga is the author of the novel There Was No Adderall in the Soviet Union and columnist at Literratura. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Brandon Kendhammer takes a fresh approach to the juxtaposition of Islam and democracy in his latest book, Muslims Talking Politics: Framing Islam, Democracy and Law in Northern Nigeria (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Rather than employing a top-down approach to understanding Islam’s compatibility with democracy, Kendhammer chose to speak with blue-collar, working-class Muslims in cities across Northern Nigeria. Through this approach, Kendhammer exposes the pragmatic views of ordinary citizens more concerned with economic stability than jihadist rhetoric. As the political situation gets more violent and the idea of democracy more remote in Nigeria, Kenhammer offers a viewpoint of deep understanding for the complex situation. Based upon hundreds of conversations with ordinary citizens, he sketches a picture of how Islam and democracy can, and often is, reconciled in the neighborhoods and marketplaces of urban Nigeria’s centers, where Christians and Muslims live side-by-side. It is in the daily political and social negotiations that the way forward can be seen. However, with the increasingly violent acts of Boko Haram, it seems that the ordinary voices are being lost to unwavering religious rhetoric. While this books only tackles Northern Nigeria, the themes and lessons can be extended into the larger Muslim world grappling with the possibility of fitting Islamic values into a democratic state. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Contemporary scholarship on the Mughal empire has generally ignored the role Sanskrit played in imperial political and literary projects. However, in Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (Columbia University Press, 2016), Audrey Truschke, Assistant Professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University–Newark, demonstrates that Sanskrit was central to the process of royal self-definition. She documents how Brahman and Jain intellectuals were working closely with Persian-speaking Islamic elite around the cultural framework of the central royal court. These projects often revolved around cross-cultural textual production and translation, putting Sanskrit and Persian works in conversation. The production of Mughal-backed texts, and the literary reflection or silence about Brahman and Jain participation reveals unexplored horizons for understanding South Asia imperial history. In our conversation we discussed the dynamics of the Mughal court, the influential leaders Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan, Persian translation of Sanskrit epics, the integration of Sanskrit materials into imperial knowledge, the end of Sanskrit at the Mughal court, and the tricky reception of contested histories in contemporary India. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary (HarperOne, 2015) represents years of effort from a team of dedicated translators and editors (Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Joseph Lumbard, Maria Dakake, Caner Dagli, and Mohammad Rustom). The book is a remarkable achievement. The text features a complete new translation of the Quran as well as multiple complementary essays written by leading scholars of Quranic studies. The tome also includes over a million words of running commentary from Muslim exegetes across the centuries including contributions from Sunni, Shii, and Sufi schools of thought among others. This feature, in particular, showcases its encompassing and truly oceanic scope. The text proves noteworthy as well, given its intersection between confessional scholarship and Western academic approaches to Islamic studies. The text has already begun to make waves across North America and beyond and has set a new precedent as not only a translation but also a reference work on Quran. Its user-friendly organization, moreover, will make the text accessible to just about anyone as it offers levels of depth according to what the reader seeks. Elliott Bazzano is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College. His research and teaching interests include theory and methodology in the study of religion, Islamic studies, Quranic studies, mysticism, religion and media, and religion and drugs. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at ([email protected]). Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

American culture is ubiquitous across the globe. It travels to different social contexts and is consumed by international populations. But the relationship between American culture and the meanings attached to the United States change over time. During the 20th century, the American Century, American culture generally aided in the positive global perception of U.S. policies and governance. In After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East (Columbia University Press, 2016), Brian T. Edwards, Crown Professor in Middle East Studies and Professor of English at Northwestern University, demonstrates how this relationship altered in recent decades. Technological innovation and the emergence of the digital age have drastically changed the nature of cultural circulation and production. Edwards explores the innovative play between global culture and local subjects in Egypt, Iran, and Morocco. He explores the exchange and interpretations between multiple publics that engage culture situated within various assumptions and social expectations. What he shows is that local cultural production often creates the ends of circulation, which are not always visible to an American audience. In our conversation we discussed the relationship between culture and politics, Egyptian fiction and graphic novels, Iranian directors Asghar Farhadi and Abbas Kiarostami, Shrek, digital piracy, Moroccan film controversies, the logics of film production, interpreting audiences, American Orientalism in television, literature, and Ben Affleck’s Argo. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected]. 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 fascinating new book The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority, and the Making of the Muslim State (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Iza Hussin, Lecturer of Politics at University of Cambridge examines the transformation of Islamic law in colonial Malay, Egypt, and India. Combining archival, institutional, and political history, this book charts in staggering detail the centralization of Islamic Law in the shadow of colonial power during and after its attempted marginalization in Muslim societies. Much of this book is focused on explaining this apparent paradox, and a task that it achieves with convincing clarity. By presenting a nuanced and complicated picture of the interaction of colonial power and the colonized elite, Hussin offers a narrative of the making and remaking of Islamic Law in modernity that will delight the intellectual palate of specialists and non-specialists alike. SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available at https://fandm.academia.edu/SheraliTareen/. He can be reached at [email protected]. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Medieval Egypt had a rapid influx of Sufis, which has previously been explained through reactionary models of analysis. It was argued that the widespread popularity of Sufism was marked by a public adoption of practices that satisfied the masses in ways the religious elite were not fully addressing. In The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, 1173-1325 (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), Nathan Hofer, Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri, critiques the social binary that these assumptions create, as well as, rethinks the mechanisms within the social production of Sufi culture. He explores these concerns in the context of the Ayyubid and Mamluk states and their relationships with Sufi masters and communities. First, a state-sponsored Sufi lodge serves as the site for professionalization of Sufis and the public consumption of Sufi culture that aligns with state objectives. The emergence of the Shādhilīya sufi order serves as a case of the textualization of an idealized sufi identity, and its subsequent popularization through the production of a collective community. Finally, Hofer explores the unique context of Upper-Egyptian Sufism, which relied on charismatic authority and miraculous work in the creation of a community. In our conversation we discussed the notion of Popular Culture in the medieval world, hagiography and biography, miracles, the khanqah of Cairo, state religious sponsorship, professional sufis, and contemporary methods for investigating the past. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Much of the existing literature on Mandatory Palestine adheres to a dual society model which assumes that the Palestinian Arab community and the Jewish Yishuv had separate economic, social, and cultural systems, and that interaction between them was quite limited. In their new book, Oriental Neighbors: Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine (Brandeis UP, 2016), Abigail Jacobson and Moshe Naor focus on Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jews in order to challenge this model. As power shifted away from the traditional politics of notables, Sephardic and Oriental Jews attempted to position themselves as the ideal mediators between Jewish and Arab societies. Oriental Neighbors examines these attempts in the political and cultural spheres, in mixed neighborhoods, and in the security arena, to highlight Middle Eastern Jewish-Palestine interaction as a site of both cooperation and conflict. In doing so, this book calls the dual society model into question, integrates the history of Palestine into that of the greater Middle East, and makes a valuable contribution to the literatures of Middle Eastern and Israeli history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Muslims and the Making of America (Baylor University Press, 2016) offers a succinct and gripping account of Muslim presence in the United States. The book gives attention to the contemporary moment and also reaches as far back as the days of Columbus, who commissioned an Arabic translator for his potential encounters with Muslims in the New World. The book is meticulously researched and rife with concrete examples, but at just over 130 pages, Amir Hussain’s emphasis on brevity is clear, and this operates as a key strength of the text. Hussain looks not to present a comprehensive overview of Islam and Muslims in the US but instead guides the reader on a rich journey through some of the most significant ways that Muslims have contributed to the fabric of the United States. He focuses on political history, music, and sports, in order to convey that although Muslims have never made up more than a few percent of the US population, their presence has proven foundational and visible at every step of the nations development. From enslaved Africans, to convert Alexander Webb, to Muhammad Ali and beyond, Hussain demonstrates that despite popular perceptions, Islam was never foreign to the United States. As the mature work of a senior scholar, this monograph shares a personal tone, through a variety of on-point anecdotes and reflections on belonging, from an American Muslim born in Canada, with South Asian roots. Given the user-friendly and timely nature of the publication, Hussain’s book should interest students in a variety of college courses, academics looking for an accessible portrait of Islam and Muslims in the US, and also lay readers seeking to equip themselves against the barrage of misinformation perpetuated by influential politicians and main stream media outlets. Elliott Bazzano is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College. His research and teaching interests include theory and methodology in the study of religion, Islamic studies, Quranic studies, mysticism, religion and media, and religion and drugs. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at ([email protected]). Listener feedback is most welcome. 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 popular discourse today, few concepts are more sensationalized and maliciously caricatured than that of the Islamic State. In his fascinating new book For Love of the Prophet: An Ethnography of Sudan’s Islamic State (Princeton University Press, 2016), Noah Salomon, Associate Professor of Religion at Carleton College, arrests the concept of the Islamic State away from its contemporary stereotypical life by offering a rich and dazzling account of state power and formation in the Sudan. Contesting recent arguments about the impossibility of an Islamic State, Salomon explores the social life of an attempted Islamic State in multiple and often unexpected locations of everyday life. What emerges from his brilliant and ferociously multilayered analysis is an account of the political irreducible to the structure of the nation-state, permeating varied discursive, institutional, and affective registers. In our conversation we talked about the idea of doing an ethnography of the state, colonial and NIF projects of civilizing religion in Sudan, fundamentalization of knowledge, affective citizenship, and hagiography as political critique. This sure to become a classic should be read by all. SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available at https://fandm.academia.edu/SheraliTareen/. He can be reached at [email protected]. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Victor Taki’s Tsar and Sultan: Russian Encounters with the Ottoman Empire (I.B. Taurus, 2016) invites the reader to explore the captivating story of the relationship of the Russian and Ottoman Empires in the 19th century, and highlights the role the Oriental world played in the shaping of Russian national idea and Russia’s relationship with Europe. Dedicated to the study of previously less well known sources such as diplomatic correspondence, military memoirs, or former captives narratives, this book argues that, for Russia, the relationship with the Ottoman Empire served as a way to establish the image of self as a superior, more progressive westernized state. The book also talks about the transformation of the image of the Ottoman Empire in Russian cultural imagination over the course of the 19th century as well as Russian attitudes towards Christian co-religionists living outside Christian lands. Tsar and Sultan: Russian Encounters with the Ottoman Empireis particularly interesting as a multidisciplinary attempt to re-consider the concept of Russian Orientalism, and interpret Orientalism outside the framework suggested by Edward Said. Olga Breininger is a PhD candidate in Slavic and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Her research interests include post-Soviet culture and geopolitics, with a special focus on Islam, nation-building, and energy politics. Olga is the author of the novel There Was No Adderall in the Soviet Union and columnist at Literratura. 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 brilliant new book Beginnings of Islamic Law: Late Antique Islamicate Legal Traditions (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Lena Salaymeh, Associate Professor of Law at Tel Aviv University, presents a fascinating account of the historical unfolding of Islamic Law that combines dazzling textual analysis with cutting-edge theoretical interventions. Beginnings of Islamic Law makes a formidable and eminently convincing case for a carefully historicized approach to the study of Islamic law while arguing for the intimate entanglement of law and history. Another hallmark of this book is its focus putting Islamic Legal traditions in conversation with Jewish Law in singularly productive ways. Through a historically grounded and theoretically sophisticated comparison of Islamic and Jewish Law on specific questions of ethics and practice such as women initiated divorce, treatment of prisoners of war, and circumcision, this book highlights important and often surprising points of overlap and divergence. In our conversation we talked about the major themes, arguments, and possible misinterpretations of the book. Beginnings of Islamic Law will be of great interest to all students of Islam, Islamic Law, Jewish Law, Legal Studies, and the study of Religion more broadly. It should also make an excellent text for courses on these subjects. SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available at https://fandm.academia.edu/SheraliTareen/. He can be reached at [email protected]. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Christian Lange’s Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions (Cambridge University Press, 2015), which was recently awarded the British-Kuwaiti Friendship Society’s Book Prize, presents a rich, challenging, and meticulous account of how Muslims have conceptualized the spiritual world across the centuries. (Lange also edited a related volume with Brill, 2016, Locating Hell in Islamic Traditions.) With great perspicacity, the author explores Sunni and Shi’i views on his topic as well as Sufi understandings with attention to contrast and similarity amongst the schools of thought that he studies. In order to disrupt assumptions about popular conceptions, Professor Lange frequently employs the term “Otherworld” instead of perhaps more expected terms like afterlife. On this note, one of the arguments the author presents throughout the monograph, based on his extensive research, is that Islamic traditions have often articulated this Otherworld as something connected to the material world, even if it is also transcendent in important ways. Thus one of the books many strengths is its ability to present challenging paradoxes in ways that are accessible, while grounded in textual tradition. In addition to drawing upon numerous textual canons, including Quran and Hadith, Professor Lange also makes effective use of art as well modern data analysis in order to observe things like how many times a key word for Paradise and Hell (e.g., al-Janna or al-Nar) appears in various texts. And in order to complement his lucid yet erudite writing, the author includes tables and images to help guide the reader. The organization of the book, moreover, with its clear subsections and chapter themes, will prove helpful for educators and researchers looking to explore particular facets of the book’s topic, even if the arrangement of the book also allows for it to naturally build on its previous sections. This engaging book will likely interest scholars and teachers of classical Islamic thought, soteriology, textual hermeneutics, and art history among other areas. Elliott Bazzano is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College. His research and teaching interests include theory and methodology in the study of religion, Islamic studies, Quranic studies, mysticism, religion and media, and religion and drugs. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at ([email protected]). Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

How did the preeminent theorist and philosopher Michel Foucault experience and observe the Iranian revolution? How did he find the revolution disruptive of a teleological notion of history? And how did the Iranian revolution impact and shape Foucault’s thought? These are among the questions addressed by Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi in his exciting new book Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). This book presents an intimate portrait of the events and conditions that led to the revolution, coupled with a fascinating account of Foucault’s engagement with that moment. Historically rich and theoretically nuanced, Foucault in Iran advances a scathing critique of previous works on this subject that charged Foucault with having endorsed Islamist violence by supporting the revolution. This book offers a more complicated reading of Foucault’s views on the revolution that disrupts binaries like secular/Islamist while also providing a riveting analysis on questions of time, history, and revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

The historical convergence of European imperialism and technological innovation in communication and travel made multiple social sites of intersection between the local and global possible. Nile Green, Professor of South Asian and Islamic history at UCLA, examines how these terrains of exchange transformed Islam during the modern period from roughly 1800-1940 in his book, Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam (Oxford University Press, 2015). Green sees religion as a tool for social power and explores various religious economies to determine how interpretations of Islam are negotiated and deployed. What he shows is that modern iterations of the tradition are often shaped not only by Muslims, but also Christians and Hindus. In these sites of exchange religious actors and institutions can be analyzed as entrepreneurs and firms, which effectively compete for their clientele. Religious entrepreneurial competition and innovation fostered by Muslim/Christian interactions in imperial contexts contributed to the Muslims’ adaptation of Christian missionary methods for their own proselytization purposes. Overall, Green presents a world history of Islam that disrupts assertions of the unifying power of globalization on Muslims and illustrates the generative process within these terrains of exchange. In our conversation we discussed evangelical orientalism at England’s universities, Bibles and printing in Muslim societies, language-exchange, religious entrepreneurs in Hyderabad, traditions of Hindu-Sufism, and the construction of the first mosques in Detroit and Japan. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Rory Dickson’s Living Sufism in North America: Between Tradition and Transformation (SUNY Press, 2015) is the first monograph in English to focus on Sufism in North America. On this note, Dickson takes a risk by marking himself as a trendsetter in this emerging field, and he succeeds admirably. The book offers a fine balance of historical analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, and theoretical frameworks, which can help inform future studies of Sufism in North America as well as Western Sufism more broadly. Although there are a few edited volumes that explore Sufism in the West, Dickson’s single-author voice gives continuity to his study and narrative in an important and unique way. One of the elephants in the room, moreover, that he tackles head on is in response to the question: What’s the relationship between Islam and Sufism? In a way, responses to this question are what produced the phenomenon of Western Sufism in the first place, and the cacophony of voices that continue to address this question animates much of Dickson’s book. He treats a number of “Islamic” as well as “non-Islamic” Sufi orders and remains in conversation with the various time periods and influences that inform his topic throughout his well-written and fascinating book; thus although he focuses on North America, the reader is frequently reminded that Europe, South Asia, and other places are also an important part of the conversation. On top of Dickson’s careful attention to detail, extensive footnotes, and thoughtful placement of excerpts from the many interviews he conducted, he writes in a very inviting and accessible manner, which will likely draw broad readership ranging from scholars of Sufism and American religion to journalists and lay readers wishing to know more about America’s layered interactions with spirituality, Islam, and religion in general. Elliott Bazzano is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College. His research and teaching interests include theory and methodology in the study of religion, Islamic studies, Quranic studies, mysticism, religion and media, and religion and drugs. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at ([email protected]). Listener feedback is most welcome. 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 shining new book The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine, Religion, and Charity (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Ahmed Ragab, Assistant Professor of Religion and Science at Harvard Divinity School, charts the institutional and intellectual history of hospitals or bimaristans in medieval Egypt and the Levant. A central argument of this book is that hospitals in Islamdom were more than just institutions where the sick were treated; hospitals also served as important sites of communal services and congregation, as urban architectural monuments, and as symbols and expressions of a rulers political authority. By exploring an astonishing variety and number of sources, Ragab provides an unparalleled window into the aspirations and operations that defined the medieval Islamic hospital. This splendid new book will be of great interest to students of medieval Islamic history, religion and science, medical history, and the study of Islam and religion more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

The story of the martyrdom of Husayn, the prophet Muhammad’s grandson, is recounted annually around the world. More broadly, the communal retelling of the lives of Shia imams has played an important part in shaping Shia identity and practice. Matthew Pierce, Assistant Professor of Religion at Centre College, examines the early canonization of these life stories in Twelve Infallible Men: The Imams and the Making of Shiism (Harvard University Press, 2016). Pierce carefully conceptualizes the relationship between history, author, text, and audience through an examination of several collective biographies of the twelve imams from the 10th-12th centuries. From this sub-genre several themes arise in the presentation of the imams, their families, and their actions. Martyrdom is central to the retellings not only of Husayn, but of all the imams. The imams’ death are remembered through images of suffering and mourning but structured in ways that provide solace for the audience. The collective biographies also offer representations of the imams’ bodily performance and communicate idealized forms of masculinity. Accounts of women in the biographies also help in establishing gender norms for the audience. In our conversation we discussed the social role of biography, collective memory, medieval Sunni and Shia identities, gendered bodies, birth narratives, devotional practices, imam Ali’s primordial existence, martyrdom, and the narrative relationships between the imams. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Islamophobia, both as a term and concept, has a storied and complicated history, and understanding its many layers in our current historical moment remains important for any number of audiences and purposes. By focusing on contemporary incarnations but also giving historical context, Todd Green accomplishes an admirable task in The Fear of Islam: An Introduction to Islamophobia in the West (Fortress Press, 2015). Professor Green combines lucid and accessible prose with meticulous attention to detail and extensive footnotes; he strikes an impressive balance while simultaneously aiming at a scholarly and lay audience. The book explores the contours of Islamophobia both in North America and Europe, which outlines instructive similarities and differences, as the phenomenon surfaces in various contexts, within an array of colonial and political histories. Green organizes his book in smart fashion, making the chapters accessible on their own (for teaching purposes, for example), though likely best understood in sequence as each chapter builds organically on what precedes it. He explores the history of Orientalism, impact of 9/11, “professional Islamophobes,” media portrayals of Islam and Muslims, and offers some prescriptions at the end for combating Islamophobia. Green combines historical analysis, social-scientific polls, and also conducts interviews with the likes of Keith Ellison, Ingrid Mattson, and Tariq Ramadan, all of which contribute to the richness of the text. In terms of applications, any number of college instructors could consider adapting this text for use in the classroom, and it will also interest scholars who focus on Islam in the West, critiques of Orientalism, religion and politics, as well as the lay reader who seeks an erudite yet digestible introduction to the enigma of Islamophobia. Elliott Bazzano is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College. His research and teaching interests include theory and methodology in the study of religion, Islamic studies, Quranic studies, mysticism, religion and media, and religion and drugs. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at ([email protected]). Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

The Crusades loom large in contemporary popular consciousness. However, our public understanding has largely been informed from a western perspective, despite the fact that there is a rich textual tradition recording its history in Muslim sources. Paul M. Cobb, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, remedies this problem in The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford University Press, 2014) by presenting the fullest and most readable account of the Crusades relying on Islamic sources. Cobb expands the geographical and chronological boundaries of the Crusades by placing traditional conflicts within Muslim accounts of Frankish aggression. In general, medieval Muslims were not overly concerned with Europe and ongoing relationships between Christians and Muslims only really existed in the Mediterranean context. European expansion into Muslim lands throughout the Middle Ages marked a different phase of encounter,but these incursions were not always clearly demarcated by religious boundaries. Cobb illustrates the often competing logic behind political alliances, military aggression and intervention, or discursive justification. The Race for Paradise does a wonderful job of presenting the narrative in a new light and dissolving many of the assumptions about pre-modern conflicts that have been produced by one-sided accounts of the Crusades. In our conversation we discussed the Frankish conquests, the significance of Jerusalem, Mediterranean Muslims communities, Arabic sources, notions of jihad, Frankish rule in the Levant, Saladin and his political heirs, thinking about the Crusades today, and making an audio book. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Bringing together secondary and primary sources in a wide range of languages, David Brophy’s new book is a masterful study of the modern history of the Uyghurs, the Turkic-speaking Muslims of Xinjiang. Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier (Harvard University Press, 2016) joins what have usually been treated as separate subjects–the histories of the Soviet Uyghurs and the Xinjiang Uyghurs–into a single, coherent story of the creation of a Uyghur nation through a series of small steps undertaken in changing political conditions. The book argues that an account of the emergence of the Uyghur nation is a convergence of two stories: the rediscovery of the Turkic past among intellectuals connected to the Russian, Muslim, and Ottoman world of letters, and the history of efforts to capitalize on the breach created by the Russian Revolution to effect political change in Xinjiang. Moving away from a discourse of Uyghur nationalism in favor of an account of historical forms of Uyghurist politics, Brophy’s book will be required reading in the history and politics of Central Eurasia for many years to come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Aisha Geissinger’s monograph, Gender and the Construction of Exegetical Authority: A Rereading of the Classical Genre of Qur’an Commentary (Brill, 2015), contributes to the growing field of intersections between gender studies and Qur’anic studies. Unlike some recent studies that have explored the role of gender in the Qur’an itself or in applications of the Qur’an, Professor Geissinger takes a step back to explore how exegetes (broadly conceived) have historically understood the relevance and importance of gendered sources, in terms their authority to make sense of the Qur’an. What does it mean, for example, when a particular Qur’an commentary mentions a hadith with women in the isnad, while other commentaries do not? Are these rhetorical moves intentional? Were they significant in their time? In order to address these questions and others, Geissinger looks at traditional works of exegesis, sections on exegesis in hadith compilations, and literature on the virtues of the Qur’an among other topics all the while engaging with a rich breadth of modern and premodern scholarship, ranging from Bukhari to Judith Butler. The footnotes are extensive, the prose is clear, and the book well-organized. The monograph will likely appeal to a number of disciplines, especially Islamic history, Qur’anic studies, and gender studies. Elliott Bazzano is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College. His research and teaching interests include theory and methodology in the study of religion, Islamic studies, Qur’anic studies, mysticism, religion and media, and religion and drugs. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at ([email protected]). Listener feedback is most welcome. 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 The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard University Press, 2015), Ethan Katz examines and interrogates Jewish-Muslim relations from 1914 to the present. Arguing that interactions between Jews and Muslims must be understood in and through the respective, changing statuses and relationships of both communities to the French state, The Burdens of Brotherhood pursues the history of this “triangular affair.” Drawing on a range of archival, press and media sources, as well as oral interviews, the book emphasizes everyday lives and mutual perceptions in and between spaces private and public, local and transnational. Its chapters move from the diversity and legacies of wartime experiences, to family and community gathering places in three different French cities (Paris, Strasbourg, and Marseille), to the routes and mobilities of people, cultures, and politics across the Mediterranean. The Burdens of Brotherhood revisits the First World War, the interwar years, the period of Vichy and the Occupation, the French-Algerian War, and the final decades of the twentieth century. It also traces the impact of international movements and politics on ethno-religious communities and identities in the French context, from forms of Zionism and anti-imperialism to the vicissitudes of the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1948. Towards the end of our conversation, Ethan and I had a chance to speak about the recent French past, including the events of January 2015 that he addresses in the book’s conclusion. Written with the present in mind, The Burdens of Brotherhood offers vital historical perspective and insight on issues of urgent concern with important implications for the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Among the most frequent demands made of Islam and Muslims today is to become more moderate. But what counts as moderate and who will decide so are questions with less than obvious answers. In her timely and politically urgent new book Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton University Press, 2015), Elizabeth Hurd, Associate Professor of Religion and Political Science at Northwestern University, explores the powerful global networks that seek to regulate and moderate religion in the name of promoting religious freedom. Through a careful examination of the discourses and activities of a range of state and non-state actors, in the US and elsewhere, Hurd demonstrates that international regimes of religious freedom advocacy actively participate in the labor of defining and generating particular notions of good and normative religion that privilege particular actors and institutions over others. However, as Hurd brilliantly shows and argues, such attempts to canonize good religion, which often corresponds to the articulation of religion most amenable to US imperial interests, remains thwarted and unsuccessful. This is so because the global industry of producing good, moderate religion cannot come to grips with the messiness and complexities of lived religion that is unavailable for neat, digestible, and ultimately misleading generalized categorizations. In short, this book represents a profound and meticulously documented argument for the unavailability of religion for projects of moderation, division, and bifurcation into good and bad religion. Hurd assembles this argument by discussing the discourse of the two faces of faith in international relations circuits, the politics of religion-making in international religious advocacy programs, overseas religious engagement programs sponsored by the US government, and the construction of religious minorities as endangered corporate bodies. Beyond Religious Freedom is as mellifluously written as it is analytically delicious. It will make an excellent reading for undergraduate and graduate courses on Islam, Secularism, and Modernity, Middle Eastern Politics, religion and politics, and on theories and methods in Religion Studies. SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available at https://fandm.academia.edu/SheraliTareen/. He can be reached at [email protected]. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Could the Qur’an–understood, according to Muslims, as the verbatim word of God in Arabic–acquire a nationality? Specifically, could it be American? And written in English? Contemporary visual artist Sandow Birk’s American Qur’an (Liveright, 2015) raises these questions and many more. The groundbreaking and subversive project draws on multiple English translations, which Birk synthesizes to produce his own hand-written American graffiti-style translation. On top of that, every single page of the over-sized coffee table book contains meticulous illustrations of everyday American life, ranging from celebration to tragedy. As a commentary on both the Qur’an as well as American culture, moreover, the provocative visuals offer the reader a way to connect a book from 7th-century Arabia to 21st-century American cities, landscapes, challenges, and humanity. Given the herculean task that Birk accomplishes, it perhaps comes as no surprise that it took him nearly a decade to complete. Beyond the illustrations and translation, American Qur’an also contains essays from Reza Aslan (UC Riverside), Zareena Grewal (Yale), and Iftikhar Dadi (Cornell), which help to contextualize the project. As for Birk himself, he offers no commentary aside from a brief acknowledgements section; this lack of explanation thus challenges the reader to draw conclusions based on the primary source itself. Additionally, because many of the illustrations have no ostensibly straightforward connection to the text, readers have the opportunity to search for meaning in the pictures, which typical translations of the Qur’an cannot present. At the end of the day, American Qur’an is sure to spark conversations and make waves among a wide variety of people, including artists and academics (within Islamic studies and beyond), as well as other curious minds wishing to know more about the Qur’an. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Edward Said’s 1978 book, Orientalism, dramatically shifted how people think about the production of knowledge and representations of the Other. His ideas have been championed and critiqued with dozens of books expanding his work on the construction of the East in western imagination. However, very rarely have we investigated the dual move of representing the Other and self-representation from the other perspective. In his new book, Arab Occidentalism: Images of America in the Middle East (I.B.Tauris, 2015), Eid Mohamed, Assistant Professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, has undertaken this task. With great success he offers a portrait of the shifting attitudes towards America and American Culture in the Arab imagination in the post 9/11 media landscape. He found that Arab cultural producers have a complicated relationship with America, seeing it as problematic while also often representative of their own values. Mohamed delineates how this debate unfolds in literature, cinema, and news media. In our conversation we explored the dynamics of Occidentalism through Arabic novels about Egyptians living abroad in the United States, news depictions of the 2008 shoe throwing event with President George W. Bush in Iraq, the reactions to the election of Barack Obama, the Egyptian film industry, and contemporary Arab-American literary products. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected]. 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 stunning new book The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant (Stanford University Press, 2012), Dana Sajdi, Associate Professor of History at Boston College, presents a riveting narrative of the intersection of literature, religion, and history in early modern Muslim societies. She does so by focusing on the chronicle of a common Barber in 18th-century Damascus Shihab al-Din Ahmad Ibn Budayr. Through a close reading of the intellectual and political conditions that gave rise to such forms of nouveau literature and by carefully interrogating the themes, tensions, and reception of this text, Sajdis analysis provides a fascinating window into the complexity and diversity of knowledge traditions in the early modern context. Most importantly, this book serves the immensely important task of bringing into central view non-Ulama archives and imaginaries of history and history writing. In our conversation we discussed the key themes of this book such as the concept of nouveau literacy, the literary and political disorders in 18th century Damascus, Ibn Budayr’s biography and intellectual milieu, the emergence of non-‘ulama’ chronicle writers, and the later reception and reworking of Ibn Budayr’s chronicle. This nicely paced book should work very well in undergraduate and graduate courses on Muslim intellectual history, historiography, early modern Islam, and in surveys of Middle Eastern history. SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at ([email protected]). Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

As the title of the monograph suggests, Contemporary Issues in Islam (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) by Asma Afsaruddin, guides the reader through an organized and compelling narrative of reflections on hot-button topics in the modern world. The monograph offers a provocative balance of historical contextualization, close reading of texts, review of key scholars, and political analysis. Given its treatment of topics such as Islamic law, gender, international relations, and interfaith dialogue, the book should prove useful in a graduate or undergraduate context–either as a whole or as individual chapters–particularly as a conversation starter, given the depths to which each chapter points. Although the scope of the book may appear ambitious, Professor Afsaruddin is well-equipped to manage the breadth of her study into a concise, lucid, and well written text. Given her research background in jihad and violence as well as Quranic hermeneutics, moreover, Contemporary Issues in Islam is a mature work that reflects decades of careful research and intellectual synthesis with ample attention to both primary and secondary literature. The monograph will likely appeal not only to scholars and students in religious studies and Islamic studies, but also political science and history as well as journalists. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Is there a figure in sports more admired and beloved than Muhammad Ali? Widely revered not only as one of boxing’s greatest champions but also as one of the rare athletes to speak out on political issues, Ali holds a place at the pinnacle of sports heroes. In their new book Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X (Basic Books, 2016), historians Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith take the bold step of viewing Muhammad Ali not as hero but as human. Randy and Johnny focus on the young contender Cassius Clay as he trains in Miami, rises through the heavyweight ranks, and hones his persona as an athlete and celebrity. At the heart of the book is the boxer’s friendship with Malcolm X and their respective ties to Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad. The two subjects are extraordinary figures in the history of the 1960s, and they have been subjects of several books. As Randy and Johnny explain in the interview, they offer a fresh perspective by taking a meticulous approach to sources old and new, even plotting out — day by day — where Clay and Malcolm were and what they did in the years leading up to February 1964, when Clay defeated Sonny Liston for the heavyweight title, and February 1965, when Malcolm was assassinated. This fresh perspective yields a picture of Clay/Ali somewhat at odds with the reverential view commonly held today. It is a picture of a young man still finding his place in the world, before he became its king. 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 what promises to become a classic, Adeeb Khalid’s (Professor of History, Carleton College), Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR (Cornell University Press, 2015) examines the interaction of nationalism and religious reform in 20th-century Muslim Central Asia. How does the desire and anticipation of revolution generate new ways of imagining Islam, politics, and the nation? While addressing this question in the context of Muslim modernist voices and movements in Tsarist and eventually Soviet Russia, Khalid presents an intimidatingly dense yet deliciously rich narrative of how the Bolshevik revolution transformed Islam and Muslims in Central Asia. With a focus on the religious and intellectual careers of scholars attached to the modernist Jadid movement, Khalid explores ways in which they imagined the idea of a modern religious and political order through appeals to what they understood as authentically national sources and roots. Brimming with nuance and insight, this book is both painstakingly researched and lucidly written. It will also make an excellent reading for both upper level undergraduate and graduate seminars on historiography and its methods, Islam and modernity, Islam in Central Asia, and on Religion and Colonialism. SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available at https://fandm.academia.edu/SheraliTareen/. He can be reached at ([email protected]). Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies