New Books in Islamic Studies

The Women’s Mosque of America (WMA), a multiracial, women-only mosque in Los Angeles, is the first of its kind in the United States. Since 2015, the WMA has provided a space for Muslim women to build inclusive communities committed to gender and social justice, challenging the dominant mosque culture that has historically marginalized them through inadequate prayer spaces, exclusion from leadership, and limited access to religious learning.In The Women’s Mosque of America: Authority and Community in US Islam (NYU Press, 2022), Tazeen M. Ali explores this congregation, focusing on how members contest established patriarchal norms while simultaneously contending with domestic and global Islamophobia that renders their communities vulnerable to violence. Drawing on textual analysis of WMA sermons and ethnographic interviews with community members, and utilizing Black feminist and womanist frameworks, Ali investigates how American Muslim women create and authorize new conceptions of Islamic authority. Whereas the established model of Islamic authority is rooted in formal religious training and Arabic language expertise, the WMA is predicated on women’s embodied experiences, commitments to social and racial justice, English interpretations of the Qur’an, and community building across Islamic sects and in an interfaith context.Situating the US at the center rather than at the margins of debates over Islamic authority and showing how American Muslim women assert themselves as meaningful religious actors in the US and beyond, Ali’s work offers new insights on Islamic authority as it relates to the intersections of gender, religious space, and national belonging. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

In Stories between Christianity and Islam: Saints, Memory, and Cultural Exchange in Late Antiquity and Beyond (University of California Press, 2022), Reyhan Durmaz offers an original and nuanced understanding of Christian–Muslim relations that shifts focus from discussions of superiority, conflict, and appropriation to the living world of connectivity and creativity. Durmaz uses stories of saints to demonstrate and analyze the mutually constitutive relationship between Christianity and Islam in the Middle Ages.Reyhan Durmaz is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

In Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion (NYU Press, 2022), Evelyn Alsultany, Professor at the University of Southern California, argues that, even amid challenges to institutionalized Islamophobia, diversity initiatives fail on their promise by only focusing on crisis moments. Muslims get included through “crisis diversity,” where high-profile Islamophobic incidents are urgently responded to and then ignored until the next crisis. In the popular cultural arena of television, this means interrogating even those representations of Muslims that others have celebrated as refreshingly positive. In the realm of corporations, she critically examines the firing of high-profile individuals for anti-Muslim speech—a remedy that rebrands corporations as anti-racist while institutional racism remains intact. At universities, Muslim students get included in diversity, equity, and inclusion plans but that gets disrupted if they are involved in Palestinian rights activism. And in law enforcement, hate crime laws revolving around violence against Muslims fail to address root causes. In our conversation we discuss anti-Muslim racism and the racialization of Muslims, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts, corporate motivations to value diversity, recent Hollywood representations of Muslims, the Obeidi-Alsultany Test, racial gaslighting in law enforcement, the 2015 Chapel Hill shooting, anti-Muslim speech at NPR and ESPN, Palestinian activism on campus, and strategies to move beyond “crisis diversity.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

In 2002, armed Hindu mobs attacked Muslims in broad daylight in the west Indian state of Gujarat. The pogrom, which was widely seen over television, left more than one thousand dead. In Composing Violence: The Limits of Exposure and the Making of Minorities (Duke UP, 2023). Moyukh Chatterjee examines how highly visible political violence against minorities acts as a catalyst for radical changes in law, public culture, and power. He shows that, far from being quashed through its exposure by activists, media, and politicians, state-sanctioned anti-Muslim violence set the stage for transforming India into a Hindu supremacist state. The state's and civil society’s responses to the violence, Chatterjee contends, reveal the constitutive features of modern democracy in which riots and pogroms are techniques to produce a form of society based on a killable minority and a triumphant majority. Focusing on courtroom procedures, police archives, legal activism, and mainstream media coverage, Chatterjee theorizes violence as a form of governance that creates minority populations. By tracing the composition of anti-Muslim violence and the legal structures that transform that violence into the making of minorities and majorities, Chatterjee demonstrates that violence is intrinsic to liberal democracy.Yash Sharma is a PhD student in Political Science at the School of Public and International Affairs, University of Cincinnati. His research is focused on the interactions of political mobilization and anti-minority violence within Hindu nationalist organizations in India. Twitter. Email: sharmaym@mail.uc.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

In We'll Play till We Die: Journeys across a Decade of Revolutionary Music in the Muslim World (University of California Press, 2022), Mark LeVine, Professor at University of California, Irvine, dives into the revolutionary youth music cultures of Muslim societies before, during, and beyond the waves of resistance that shook the region from Morocco to Pakistan. This sequel to his celebrated 2008 musical travelogue Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam, shows how some of the world's most extreme music not only helped inspire and define region-wide protests, but also exemplifies the beauty and diversity of youth cultures throughout Muslim societies. In our conversation we discussed early metal scenes in the Southwest Asia, the Arab uprisings, hip hop culture, the rise of electronic music, musicians and fans organizing and protesting, the circulation of music through global platforms, the role of subcultures, harassment, imprisonment and police brutality toward youth, the role of women in music scenes, and collaboration and authorship.Kristian Petersen is an Associate Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia (U California Press, 2023) explores the question of what it meant to be Hindu in precolonial South Asia. Divya Cherian presents a fine-grained study of everyday life and local politics in the kingdom of Marwar in eighteenth-century western India to uncover how merchants enforced their caste ideals of vegetarianism and bodily austerity as universal markers of Hindu identity. Using legal strategies and alliances with elites, these merchants successfully remade the category of "Hindu," setting it in contrast to "Untouchable" in a process that reconfigured Hinduism in caste terms. In a history pertinent to understanding India today, Cherian establishes the centrality of caste to the early-modern Hindu self and to its imagination of inadmissible others.This book is available open access here. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

In the past two decades, the consumption of beauty services and cosmetic surgery in Turkey has developed from an elite phenomenon to an increasingly common practice, especially among younger and middle-aged women. Turkey now ranks among the top countries worldwide with the highest number of cosmetic procedures, and with its cultural and economic capital, Istanbul has become a regional center for the beauty and fashion industries. Istanbul Appearances: Beauty and the Making of Middle-Class Femininities in Urban Turkey (Syracuse University Press, 2023) shows the profound effects of this growing market on urban residents’ body images, gendered norms, and practices. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork carried out in beauty salons and clinics in different parts of the city, Liebelt explores how standards of femininity and female desire have shifted since the consolidation of power and authoritarian rule of the conservative, pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party. Arguing that the politics of beauty are intricately bound up with the politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality, Liebelt shows that female bodies have become a major site for the negotiation of citizenship. It is in the numerous beauty salons and clinics that the heteronormative ideals and images of gendered bodies become real, embodied in a complex array of emotional desires of who and what is considered not only beautiful but also morally proper.Claudia Liebelt is professor in social and cultural anthropology at the Free University of Berlin. She is the author of Caring for the ‘Holy Land’: Filipina Domestic Workers in Israel. Armanc Yildiz is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology with a secondary field in Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

In the powerful book Among the Eunuchs: A Muslim Transgender Journey (Hurst Publishers, 2022), Leyla Jagiella reflects on her story as a trans Muslim living among a third-gender community known as Khwajasira in Pakistan and hijra in India. Throughout the book, we learn about this community, the ways they forge relationships with each other and with the mainstream community, the roles they play, the challenges they face, all told from an inviting, loving perspective. Jagiella’s academic background as an anthropologist is especially prominent in her writing, given her attention to the everyday in this book. Jagiella also pays close attention to religious history, to Islam more specifically, and the role of trans people in Islam. However, as Jagiella emphasizes in our conversation, this book is not about trans people – it is specifically her own journey, and as a part of a community, she cannot be separated from the community she is part of. The book in fact resists attempts to essentialize and clearly define identity.In our conversation, Jagiella discusses the origins of the book, its contributions to our understanding of gender and sexuality in the Muslim South Asian context, the evolution of the terms for this third-gender community, her own experiences as a trans person traveling throughout South Asia, colonialism and its impact on trans identity, homonationalism and identity as ideology, and the importance and beauty of nuance, complexity, and ambiguity, which the book embraces.Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

How is science fiction from the Arab and Muslim world different than mainstream science fiction from the West? What distinctive and original contributions can it make? Why is it so often neglected in critical considerations of the genre? While other books have explored these questions, all have been from foreign academic voices. Instead, Hosam A. Ibrahim Elzembely and Emad El-Din Aysha,'s book Arab and Muslim Science Fiction (McFarland, 2022) examines the nature, genesis, and history of Arabic and Muslim science fiction, as well as the challenges faced by its authors, in the authors’ own words. These authors share their stories and struggles with censors, recalcitrant publishers, critics, the book market, and the literary establishment. Their uphill efforts, with critical contributions from academics, translators, and literary activists, will enlighten the sci-fi enthusiast and fill a gap in the history of science fiction. Topics covered range from culture shock to conflicts between tradition and modernity, proactive roles for female heroines, blind imitation of storytelling techniques, and language games.Iqra Shagufta Cheema writes and teaches in the areas of media cultures, Anglophone literatures, transnational digital feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and global south film studies. Check out their upcoming books: The Other #MeToos and ReFocus: The Films of Annemarie Jacir. Follow them on Twitter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

In Iranian Literature After the Islamic Revolution: Production and Circulation in Iran and the World (Edinburgh UP, 2021), Dr. Laetitia Nanquette explores how Iranian literature has functioned and circulated from the 1979 revolution to the present. She looks at prose productions in particular, analyzing several genres and media.Taking Iran as a starting point, Nanquette explores the forms, structures and functions of Iranian literature within Iranian society. She then turns to the diaspora – with a focus on North America, Western Europe and Australia – and the world beyond Iranians to examine the current dynamics of literary production and circulation between Iranian diasporic spaces and the homeland.Laetitia Nanquette is Senior Lecturer in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. Between 2015 and 2019, she was an Australia Research Council DECRA Fellow at UNSW and worked on the project "A Global Comparative Study of Contemporary Iranian Literature".Connor Christensen is a graduate student at the University of Chicago, pursuing both an MPP at the Harris School of Public Policy and an MA at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He welcomes collaboration, so feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or at his email, ctchristensen@uchicago.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies