New Books in 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

In her moving, sophisticated, and analytically groundbreaking new book Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality (Oxford UP, 2023), Shenila Khoja-Moolji recounts and engages critical narratives of displacement and migration to examine the formation of religious communities. A central theme of this book is the idea of an Isma‘ili ethics of care, as Khoja-Moolji documents with meticulous care the powerful manifestations and consequences of everyday life connected with practices ranging from cooking, socio-religious counseling, and story telling. Moving nimbly between different locations including East Africa, South Asia, and North America, as well as varied theoretical registers dealing with categories of sacred space, the sensorium, and embodied sociality, Rebuilding Community is a delightful text that will interest scholars in multiple fields across the Humanities.SherAli Tareen is Associate 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 book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

I talk with a Muslim friend about the places that Islam and Christianity overlap, and also the places where they diverge. Of these subjects, none is more interesting than the role of Jesus Christ whom Muslims call the Prophet Issa (peace be upon him). Muslims hold him in high esteem but do not believe in his divinity or in the Trinity itself. Muslims believe in the Resurrection and Second Coming but interestingly not in the death of Jesus. They also revere Our Lady, the Virgin Mary.Munir Sheikh is a Sunni Muslim from Bangladesh. He’s a management consultant on Wall Street in New York. He joined a Catholic Dads’ group (how I met him) to talk about important issues of faith and family life with some of his oldest American friends (who are Catholic). Munir Sheikh on LinkedIn Derya Little, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 27: Faithful Frontiers: A Turkish Scholar Describes How She Became a Catholic Apologist Mufti Menk, “The Story of Jesus” Omar Suleiman, “The Life and Mission of Jesus” Omar Suleiman, “Islam,” on the Lex Fridman Podcast Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Teena Purohit’s new book Sunni Chauvinism and the Roots of Muslim Modernism (Princeton University Press, 2023) maps how various Muslim modernists from the 19th to the 20th centuries used their Sunni normativity to construct social and political boundaries around conceptions of tawhid or Islamic unity. The book distinctively focuses on how Muslim modernists such as canonical figures like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad ‘Abduh, Rashid Rida and many others, focused on communities such as Shi‘as, Ismailis, Ahmadis, and Bahai’s in their activist and intellectual projects that aspired for a singular unified Islam against encroaching western modernity. For Muslim modernists who were anxious to reclaim a “lost unity” of Islam that existed in the past and believed could be achieved again in the future (though lacking in their time), non-Sunni groups, like Ahmadis for Muhammad Iqbal or esoteric groups for Rashid Rida, became communities that received disparaging attention and intolerant attitudes that led to a particular Sunni chauvinism, Purohit argues. And as such, this obsession with unity (tawhid) and the privileging of Sunnism that went with it was found in all forms of Muslim modernism. This book then invites a rethinking of our conceptualization of Muslim modernism in light of these thinkers approaches to esoteric (i.e., Sufi) and Shi‘a groups who were viewed as problematic for the social and political goal of tawhid. This accessible book will be of interest to those who think and write on Muslim modernism and non-Sunni movements in Islam. It will also be a great teaching resource for undergraduate and graduate classes.Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

The Rohingya population, from Myanmar’s Rakhine State, are a community almost living entirely in exile, whether in refugee camps in Bangladesh, or working on boats throughout the Indian Ocean. The Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, is now the world’s largest.But the Rohingya’s struggles began long before the crisis intensified in 2012 and 2017, as noted in Kaamil Ahmed’s first book, I Feel No Peace: Rohingya Fleeing Over Seas and Rivers (Hurst, 2023). Kaamil talks to Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and beyond to understand how this community has tried to survive years of neglect and at times hostility from the governments and institutions meant to look after them.In this interview, Kaamil and I talk about the Rohingya population, their lives in the refugee camps, and their attempts to make a life for themselves.Kaamil Ahmed is a journalist at The Guardian, covering international development, who previously lived in and reported from Jerusalem, Bangladesh and Turkey.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of I Feel No Peace. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Saadia Sumbal's book Islam and Religious Change in Pakistan: Sufis and Ulema in 20th-Century South Asia (Routledge, 2021) examines the history of, and the contestations on, Islam and the nature of religious change in 20th century Pakistan, focusing in particular on movements of Islamic reform and revival.This book is the first to bring the different facets of Islam, particularly Islamic reformism and shrine-oriented traditions, together within the confines of a single study ranging from the colonial to post-colonial era. Using a rich corpus of Urdu and Arabic material including biographical accounts, Sufi discourses (malfuzat), letter collections, polemics and unexplored archival sources, the author investigates how Islamic reformism and shrine-oriented religiosity interacted with one another in the post-colonial state of Pakistan. Focusing on the district of Mianwali in Pakistani northwestern Punjab, the book demonstrates how reformist ideas could only effectively find space to permeate after accommodating Sufi thoughts and practices; the text-based religious identity coalesced with overlapped traditional religious rituals and practices. The book proceeds to show how reformist Islam became the principal determinant of Islamic identity in the post-colonial state of Pakistan and how one of its defining effects was the hardening of religious boundaries.Challenging the approach of viewing the contestation between reformist and shrine-oriented Islam through the lens of binaries modern/traditional and moderate/extremist, this book makes an important contribution to the field of South Asian religion and Islam in modern South Asia.Iqra Shagufta Cheema writes and teaches in the areas of media cultures, postcolonial 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

Members of Palestine's Muslim community have long honored al-Nabi Musa, or the Prophet Moses. Since the thirteenth century, they have celebrated at a shrine near Jericho believed to be the location of Moses's tomb; in the mid-nineteenth century, they organized a civic festival in Jerusalem to honor this prophet. Considered one of the most important occasions for Muslim pilgrims in Palestine, the Prophet Moses festival yearly attracted thousands of people who assembled to pray, conduct mystical forms of worship, and hold folk celebrations.Palestinian Rituals of Identity: The Prophet Moses Festival in Jerusalem, 1850-1948 (U Texas Press, 2023) takes an innovative approach to the study of Palestine's modern history by focusing on the Prophet Moses festival from the late Ottoman period through the era of British rule. Halabi explores how the festival served as an arena of competing discourses, with various social groups attempting to control its symbols. Tackling questions about modernity, colonialism, gender relations, and identity, Halabi recounts how peasants, Bedouins, rural women, and Sufis sought to influence the festival even as Ottoman authorities, British colonists, Muslim clerics, and Palestinian national leaders did the same. Drawing on extensive research in Arabic newspapers and Islamic and colonial archives, Halabi reveals how the festival has encapsulated Palestinians' responses to modernity, colonialism, and the nation's growing national identity.Roberto Mazza is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

The world as seen by a Qur’an specialist in late imperial and early Soviet Russia. Alfrid Bustanov and Vener Usmanov's book Muslim Subjectivity in Soviet Russia (Brill, 2022) tells a dramatic story of ’Abd al-Majid al-Qadiri, a Muslim individual born in the Kazakh lands and brought up in the Sufi environment of the South Urals, who memorized the entire Qur’an at the Mosque of the Prophet. In Russia he travelled widely, performing the Qur'an recitations. The Stalinist terror was merciless to him: in total, he spent fifteen years of his life in labour camps in Solovki, in the North, and Tashkent, in the south. At the end of his life, al-Qadiri wrote the fascinating memoirs that we analysed and translated in this book for the first time. Al-Qadiri’s life account allows us to look at the history of Islam in Russia from a new angle. His lively language provides access to everyday concerns of Russia’s Muslims, their personal interactions, their emotions, and the material world that surrounded them. Al-Qadiri’s book is a book of memory, full of personal drama and hope.Alfrid Bustanov is an assistant professor at the University of AmsterdamAruuke Uran Kyzy is a History Ph.D. student at Stanford University in the Transnational, Global, and International (TIG) field with a focus on trans-imperial Naqshbandiyya Sufi networks across the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and Central Asia near the turn of the 18th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Jonathan Brown’s Islam and Blackness (Oneworld Academic, 2022) is a thorough and thoroughly riveting study of the tensions and conceptions of Blackness in Muslim intellectual traditions and social histories, premodern and modern, in a variety of contexts. At once deeply reflective, philologically majestic, and theoretically productive, Islam and Blackness engages and examines a range of texts from a wide expanse of scholarly genres to show that the question of whether Islam is antiblack is immensely complicated and knotty. Unafraid to pose and address difficult and provocative questions on issues of race, class, and difference in Islamic thought, this book not only represents a profound meditation on Islam and Blackness, but is also a painstakingly researched presentation of the depth and complexity of Muslim scholarly traditions and debates more broadly. The ethical perceptiveness of this book competes fiercely with the clarity of its prose and propose, and the intellectual cum political significance of its argument.SherAli Tareen is Associate 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 book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

There is a vast body of imaginal literature in Bengali that introduces fictional Sufi saints into the complex mythological world of Hindu gods and goddesses. Dating to the sixteenth century, the stories--pīr katha--are still widely read and performed today. The events that play out rival the fabulations of the Arabian Nights, which has led them to be dismissed as simplistic folktales, yet the work of these stories is profound: they provide fascinating insight into how Islam habituated itself into the cultural life of the Bangla-speaking world. In Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination (U California Press, 2019), Tony K. Stewart unearths the dazzling tales of Sufi saints to signal a bold new perspective on the subtle ways Islam assumed its distinctive form in Bengal.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