New Books in Islamic Studies

Ibn Taymiyya is one of the most prolific and influential Islamic thinkers to date, and was even the only pre-modern Muslim author cited in the 9/11 Report. His supporters and detractors alike have engaged his scholarship extensively for hundreds of years, and Hoover’s monograph, Ibn Taymiyya (2020), in English, as part of Oneworld’s “Makers of the Muslim World” series therefore offers an invaluable contribution to existing literature on Ibn Taymiyya.In our interview, Professor Hoover and I discuss the reasons for Ibn Taymiyya’s popularity, including his time in prison and controversial views on marriage, interfaith relations, and mysticism. Hoover’s monograph goes beyond a simple introduction to Ibn Taymiyya’s life and works and instead explores the prolific thinker in great detail, in terms of his own scholarship as well as reception history. Unsurprisingly, Hoover’s previous scholarship on Ibn Taymiyya (including a monograph on theodicy, as well several articles that explore Ibn Taymiyya’s thought broadly) informs the current work by allowing the author to write from an already expert vantage point. The bibliography is extensive and complements Hoover’s extant bibliography of Taymiyyan studies scholarship, hosted on his personal website. The book is sure to appeal to a broad range of audiences, including journalists, political scientists, and religion scholars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

John Tolan’s latest book Faces of Muhammad: Western Perceptions of the Prophet of Islam from the Middle Ages to Today (Princeton UP, 2019) is a fascinating and rich survey of the complex perceptions of Muhammad as understood by Christian Europeans. Using sources that range from art to literature to history to theater to religion, Tolan shows that portrayals of Muhammad are varied and complex – indeed contradictory – and reveal more about the context in which these images appear than about Muhammad or Islam. In other words, the non-Muslim European discourse on Muhammad reflects the writers’ own preoccupations at home. Views about Muhammad are varied and complex, Tolan argues, and not always negative as is often highlighted. Sure, Muhammad is a false prophet, a heretic, a trickster, an idol, in some cases, but he’s also a role model, a hero, a great leader in others, sometimes in the same time period. For instance, while during the Crusades, Muhammad is a false prophet and the primary opponent of the Christian writers, during the Protestant Reformation, the prophet of Islam is received more positively, although not consistently: he is instrumentalized in the polemics between the various Christian groups such that each group – specifically the Protestants, the Catholics, the Unitarians – hold differing views on Muhammad, and parallels are drawn between him and the writer’s contemporary heroes or opponents.In today’s discussion, Tolan shares with us the primary contributions and arguments of the book, including specific depictions of Muhammad and the contexts that shape them, legends associated with Muhammad involving bulls and doves and floating coffins, the Christian doctrine of Immaculate Conception and its relevance to Muhammad, Jewish authors’ perception of and relationship with Muhammad, and more. Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. Her primary research areas include Islam, gender, and interreligious marriage. She has a YouTube channel called What the Patriarchy, where she vlogs about feminism and Islam in an effort to dismantle the patriarchy; the vlog is available at https://www.youtube.com/whatthepatriarchy. 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

In many popular accounts of contemporary “Western” society there is an inherent contradiction between the principles underlying liberal secularism and Islam. This type of binary discourse about “religion” and “secular” naturalizes these differences and promotes the seeming rigidity of the two categories. But secularism is much messier than that.Danielle Haque, Associate Professor at Minnesota State University, Mankato, questions this simplistic narrative in her new book Interrogating Secularism: Race and Religion in Arab Transnational Art and Literature (Syracuse University Press, 2019). She deconstructs liberal accounts of secularism through an examination of the work of authors and artists from ethnic and religious minorities. The literary and visual economies that inform their art demonstrates that secular values are not always neatly distinguished from religious principles nor are spiritual forms necessarily steeped in tradition. In our conversation we discuss secular ideologies, contemporary orientalism, the racialization of Muslims, the War on terror, state surveillance, visual and literary cultural production, transnational identities, publishing norms, museum practice, human rights discourses, Muslim feminist praxis, and LGBTQ identities.Kristian Petersen is an Assistant 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

In her stunning and conceptually adventurous new book Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India: From Balance to Fervor (Oxford University Press, 2020), Margrit Pernau examines the varied and hugely consequential expressions of and normative investments in emotions in modern South Asian Muslim thought. By considering a wide array of sources including male and female reformist literature, poetry, newspapers, journals, sermons, and much more, Pernau explores the question of how the career of Islam in colonial India saw a paradigmatic shift from emphasis on balance or ‘adl to fervor and ebullience (josh). The intensification rather than the retreat of emotion represents a major feature of South Muslim scholarly thought and culture in late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Pernau convincingly demonstrates. Through the specific case study of modern South Asian Islam, she also presents and argues for novel conceptualizations of modernity as a lived and analytical category, marked not by just the disciplining of the body and emotions, but one infused with emotional politics, passions, and communities. This riveting read will fascinate and interest not only Islam and South Asia specialists, but anyone interested in the interaction of modernity, emotion, religion, and politics.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. 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

Sir Noel Malcolm’s captivating new book, Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750 (Oxford University Press, 2019), tells the story of Western European fascination with the Ottoman empire and Islam between the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the latter half of the 18th century. This beautifully argued, erudite monograph traces a textured encounter between two civilizational complexes and exposes the dynamic role that the Ottomans played in intra-European political and cultural struggles. Useful Enemies contends that ideas about the Ottomans were active ingredients in European thought, and were used to “shake things up, to provoke, to shame, to galvanise.” Discussions of Islam and the Ottoman empire were thus bound up with mainstream thinking in the West on a wide range of important topics - power, religion, society, and war. These Eastern enemies were not just there to be denounced. They were there to be made use of, in arguments which significantly contributed to the development of Western political thought.Sir Noel Malcolm is a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford. His main research interests are in British and European early modern history. Sir Noel is one of the foremost scholars of Thomas Hobbes. His other interests concern Western knowledge of the Ottoman empire and Balkan history.Vladislav Lilić is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the place and persistence of quasi-sovereignty in late Ottoman and post-Ottoman Southeastern Europe. Vladislav’s other fields of interest include the socio-legal history of empire, global history of statehood, and the history of international thought. You can reach him at vladislav.lilic@vanderbilt.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Here, There, and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World (Stanford University Press, 2020) by Tahseen Shams (Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto) reconceptualizes the homeland-hostland dyad. Drawing from the experiences of diasporic South Asian Muslim community in America, namely Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and Indians, Shams introduces an innovative conceptual notion of “elsewhere” which informs her new multicentered approach to the study of globalized immigrant identities. Using ethnographic study, social media analysis, and autoethnographic reflections, she provocatively highlights how for her varied participants, their identities as South Asian Muslim Americans were not only informed by their perception of sending and receiving countries, but also was defined by societies beyond these nation states, especially those that defined their sense of an ummatic connection, such as to countries in the Middle East. In such instances, affinities to elsewhere informed South Asian American Muslim’s political and social mobilizations, such as during American presidential elections or in their other social justice involvement. At the same time, other elsewhere events, such as an ISIS attack in a European country, further altered their experiences as Muslims in America. The conceptual paradigm of “elsewhere” in this study productively shifts homeland-hostland dynamics beyond a simple binary and further challenges us to rethink how homeland politics, global Muslim events, and hostland reception dynamics complicate diasporic identity formation in a globalized and transnational context. This book will be of interest to those who work on international migration, diaspora studies, South Asian Islam, and Islam in America.Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism (Bloombsury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2017). More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Sayyid Fadl, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, led a unique life—one that spanned much of the nineteenth century and connected India, Arabia, and the Ottoman Empire. For God or Empire: Sayyid Fadl and the Indian Ocean World (Stanford University Press) tells his story, part biography and part global history, as his life and legacy afford a singular view on historical shifts of power and sovereignty, religion and politics.Wilson Chacko Jacob recasts the genealogy of modern sovereignty through the encounter between Islam and empire-states in the Indian Ocean world. Fadl's travels in worlds seen and unseen made for a life that was both unsettled and unsettling. And through his life at least two forms of sovereignty—God and empire—become apparent in intersecting global contexts of religion and modern state formation.While these changes are typically explained in terms of secularization of the state and the birth of rational modern man, the life and afterlives of Sayyid Fadl—which take us from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Indian Ocean worlds to twenty-first century cyberspace—offer a more open-ended global history of sovereignty and a more capacious conception of life.Wilson Chacko Jacob is an Associate Professor of History at Concordia University in Montréal, where he has been teaching since 2006. He is the author of the well-received monograph Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870-1940 (Duke University Press, 2011).Kelvin Ng hosted the episode. He is a Ph.D. student at Yale University, History Department. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit.Saumyashree Ghosh co-hosted the episode. She is a PhD candidate in History at Princeton University. She works on South Asia and the Indian Ocean world and her research involves business and legal histories, histories of religious and political institutions in Islam and histories of empire and slave trade. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Religious freedom debates set blood boiling. Just consider notable Supreme Court cases of recent years such as Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission or Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania. How can we reach any agreement between those who adhere strictly to the demands of divine law and the individual conscience and those for whom human-derived law is paramount? Is there any legal and philosophical framework that can mediate when tensions erupt between the human right of religious liberty and laws in the secular realm?In her 2019 book, The Possibility of Religious Freedom: Early Natural Law and the Abrahamic Faiths (Cambridge UP), Karen Taliaferro argues that natural law can act as just such a mediating tool. Natural law thinking can both help protect religious freedom and enable societies across the globe to maintain social peace and to function on the basis of fairness to all. Taliaferro shows that natural law is not merely a somewhat arcane legal philosophy promulgated by a subset of mostly conservative Catholic scholars and philosophers. She argues that natural law offers those in many faith traditions and those of no faith whatever a workable, intellectually rich way to examine fundamental questions of law and fairness without relegating religion to ever-diminishing permissible venues.One of the signal contributions of the book is that Taliaferro shows us how non-Christian thinkers such as the Muslim scholar Ibn Rushd (also known as Averroes), the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, and Sophocles in his play Antigone (and Taliaferro’s original and provocative reading of that work alone is well worth the price of the book) employed natural law reasoning even if they did not use the term as such. For those who need to learn how societies around the world (and Taliaferro draws fascinatingly on her own experiences in the Middle East at times in the book) can balance the rights of religious people and the demands of other citizens for a strict, often ruthless secularism this book is the place to start. Give a listen.Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. 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 early 20th-century Muslims, primarily with roots in Lebanon, began to settle in Canada’s interior plains. In 1938, the small community in Edmonton opened the first mosque in the country, which would come to play a key role in shaping Islam's development in the Canada. Earle H. Waugh, Professor Emeritus at University of Alberta, narrates the history of this community and the place of this institution in Al Rashid Mosque: Building Canadian Muslim Communities (University of Alberta Press, 2018). The micro-history of Edmonton’s Muslim community opens up vistas on the broader Canadian history and the role of Muslims in forming national projects and identities. Waugh outlines shifts in Islamic educational programs and community leadership, as well as the political terrains Muslims needed to traverse. Overall, the book offers a readable and robust history that adds a unique story to the history of Canada. In our conversation we discuss the Muslim population in Canada during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the mosque’s original building and the funding efforts to build it, the role of women in the community, Islamic education, religious leadership, the new mosque building in 1982, the effects of local and global politics, the Palestinian question in Canada, and 9/11 and its aftermath on Canadian Muslims. We also discuss Waugh’s training in Religious and Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago in the 1960s and 70s with scholars like Fazlur Rahman and Mircea Eliade.Kristian Petersen is an Assistant 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

Is it possible to interpret the Qur’an using the Qur’an alone? Is a feminist interpretation of controversial verses such as 4:34, the notorious “wife-beating” verse, possible? What evidence is there for the possibility that Maryam, the mother of Isa (Jesus) was a prophet, and why does that matter? How are Islamic feminist scholars in conversation with each other, as they both draw from and challenge each other in their efforts to find meaning in gender-related verses in the Qur’an? Abla Hasan’s book Decoding the Egalitarianism of the Qur’an: Retrieving Lost Voices on Gender (Lexington Books, 2020) offers possible answers to these questions and more.Hasan is an Associate Professor in Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she teaches courses in Arabic language and culture. She received her PhD in Philosophy of Language from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research and teaching focus on Qur'anic Studies, Islamic feminism, women and gender studies, and Arabic Studies.In Decoding the Egalitarianism of the Qur’an, Hasan aims to provide new interpretations of qur’anic verses related to gender and family—or, at least verses believed by others to be about the family—through a Qur’an-only approach. She shows that it is possible, meaningful, and necessary to read the Qur’an outside of any external sources such as hadiths, fiqh or Islamic jurisprudence, tafsir, and other traditional ways through which the Qur’an has historically been read. This allows her to offer new interpretations of many verses, such as those related to polygyny, the hijab, child marriage, the claim that men have a degree of superiority over women, and verse 4:34, which is traditionally believed to grant husbands the right to physically discipline their wives. Using her background in the linguistics of the Qur’an, she analyzes the textual context of each verse in question as well as in specific key terms to highlight what she argues are the original, intended meanings of these verses. For example, she interrogates common understandings of the audience of many gender-related verses, believed to be men or husbands, and offers alternative possibilities.The book is the latest important intervention in the discourse on Islam and gender. It will be of interest to specialist and non-specialist, including non-academic, audiences interested in women’s and gender studies, Qur’anic studies, religion and gender, and tafsir studies. It will be especially relevant in undergraduate and graduate courses related to gender and religion.In our discussion today, she explains her choice to rely on the Qur’an alone for her arguments, including the importance of a linguistic and semantic approach to understanding the Qur’an. She shares with us what some of the problems in existing scholarship on gender and Islam are – whether from feminist engagements or the historical patriarchal ones. And she shares some of her interpretations of some verses, such as female agency in the Qur’an, Maryam’s prophethood, polygyny, the hijab, the idea of men’s darajah (or a degree of superiority) over women, and, of course, 4:34, among others.Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. Her primary research areas include Islam, gender, and interreligious marriage. She has a YouTube channel called What the Patriarchy, where she vlogs about feminism and Islam in an effort to dismantle the patriarchy; the vlog is available at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClvnmSeZ5t_YSIfGnB-bGNw 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