New Books in Islamic Studies

Realizing Islam: The Tijaniyya in North Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Muslim World (The University of North Carolina Press 2020) by Zachary Valentine Wright (Associate Professor in Residence in History and Religious Studies at Northwestern University in Qatar) maps the intellectual history of the largest Sufi order in West and North Africa, the Tijaniyya. Using diverse primary and archival sources, Wright locates the life, teachings, and legacies of Ahmad al-Tijani (d. 1815) within broader 18th century Islamic scholarly milieu of jurisprudence and theology and reformist and revivalist discourses, as well as the social and political climate of European colonialism and Ottoman control. Here, it was the methodology of tahqiq, or verification, as it was formulated through visionary encounters of the Prophet Muhammad and al-Tijani, that led to the formative epistemologies that defined the Muhammadan Path (tariqa Muhammadiyya) of the Tijaniyya. This path which is centered on the living legacy of Prophet Muhammad then defined Tijaniyya conceptualizations of the human condition and the shaykh-murid (master-disciple relationship), but also metaphysical, esoteric, and theological ideas and practices, such as notions of sainthood. Overall, the book offers fresh insights into the wide intellectual and networked traditions that led to the development of Tijaniyya, Sufism, and Islam in North Africa. The book will be of interest to those who work and think on Islam in West and North Africa, but also scholars of Sufism generally. The book is open-access and available online, and so will be a useful and accessible resource for courses on Islam and Sufism.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

Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not (Cambridge UP, 2020) addresses one of the big questions in economics and economic history: why did the modern economy emerge in northwestern Europe at some point in the 17th or 18th century but not in the Middle East? After all, for centuries following the spread of Islam, the Middle East was far ahead of Europe – on both technological and economic terms.Jared Rubin argues that the religion itself is not to blame; the importance of religious legitimacy in Middle Eastern politics was the primary factor. In much of the Muslim world, religious authorities were given an important seat at the political bargaining table, which they used to block important advancements such as the printing press and usury. In Europe, however, the Church played a weaker role in legitimizing rule, especially where Protestantism spread (indeed, the Reformation was successful due to the spread of printing, which was blocked in the Middle East). It was precisely in those Protestant nations, especially England and the Dutch Republic, where the modern economy was born.In this interview, Jared shares with us his opinions on a wide range of topics – from the work of Jared Diamond and the theories of Max Weber, to his serendipitous journey in academia that led him to write his first book.Joshua Tham is an undergraduate reading History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests include economic history, sociolinguistics, and the "linguistic turn" in historiography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Centering on the Tibetan Muslims (the Khache) from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century, Islamic Shangri-La: Inter-Asian Relations and Lhasa’s Muslim Communities, 1600 to 1960 (University of California Press, 2018) questions the popular portrayals of Tibet as isolated, ethnically homogenous, and monolithically Buddhist.Revealing in this monograph previously inaccessible and unknown accounts of the Khache in Tibet’s history, Dr. Atwill challenges standard Indian and Chinese narratives of the region which often paint the Khache as “foreign, separate, and mutually unrecognizable rather than as indigenous, integrated, and familiar.”Highlighting Tibet’s responses to newly delineated territorial, religious, and national identities in the twentieth century, this book also places the Tibetan Muslim experience within the broader postcolonial Asian experience shaped by complex postcolonial historical trends that swept across Asia after WWII.David G. Atwill is Associate Professor of History at Penn State University where he teaches a broad range of courses on China, Tibet, and world history.Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional networks of Buddhism connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and Imperial Japan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

In this current moment it has become increasingly clear that US society is deeply entangled in racist policies and logics of white supremacy. While this affects numerous communities, anti-Muslim racism has continued to grow over the years. In With Stones in Our Hands: Reflections on Racism, Muslims and US Empire (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), Sohail Daulatzai, Associate Professor at the University of California, Irvine, and Junaid Rana, Associate Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, turn their attention to the intersection of racecraft around Muslims and imperial projects of domination by gathering committed scholars and activists to reflect on how we’ve gotten here and how we can move forward. The collection of over 20 essays contend with political dissent and the promise of activism, migration and assimilation, suspicion and surveillance, and the intellectual and cultural archives that provide imaginative strategies for possible futures. In our conversation we discuss the patterns of the Muslim Left and the Muslim International, the racialization of Muslims, Palestine and American Muslim politics, Muslim belonging in the contexts of liberal multiculturalism and settler colonialism, countering extremism programs, the media reinforcement of stereotypes, and the resources Muslims can draw upon for solidarity politics.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

Ulrike Freitag’s A History of Jeddah: The Gate to Mecca in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge University Press), offers a rich urban and biographical history of Jeddah.Known as the 'Gate to Mecca' or 'Bride of the Red Sea', Jeddah has been a gateway for pilgrims travelling to Mecca and Medina and a station for international trade routes between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean for centuries. Seen from the perspective of its diverse population, this first biography of Jeddah traces the city's urban history and cosmopolitanism from the late Ottoman period to its present-day claim to multiculturalism, within the conservative environment of the Arabian Peninsula.Contextualising Jeddah with developments in the wider Muslim world, Ulrike Freitag investigates how different groups of migrants interacted in a changing urban space and how their economic activities influenced the political framework of the city. Richly illustrated, this study reveals how the transformation of Jeddah's urban space, population and politics has been indicative of changes in the wider Arab and Red Sea region, re-evaluating its place in the Middle East at a time when both its cosmopolitan practices and old city are changing dramatically against a backdrop of modernisation and Saudi nation-building.Ulrike Freitag is a historian of the Modern Middle East with a special interest in urban history and the Arabian Peninsula in its global context. She directs Zentrum Moderner Orient and teaches at the Freie Universität. She is author of Indian Ocean Migrants and State Formation in Hadhramaut (Brill, 2003).Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are 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

In this episode, we speak with Alyssa Gabbay about her recent new book Gender and Succession in Medieval and Early Modern Islam: Bilateral Descent and the Legacy of Fatima (I.B. Tauris, 2020). The book shows that contrary to assumptions about Islam’s patrilineal nature, there is in fact precedent in pre-modern Islamic history of Muslims' recognition of bilateral descent, or descent from both the mother and the father – though, of course, bilateral descent was by no means universally acknowledged.Although not the only example of this argument, Muhammad’s daughter Fatima is essential to the study because of her status in both Sunni and Shi’i societies historically as well as because especially Shi’is have used the example of Fatima, through whom Muhammad’s lineage can be traced, to argue in support of bilateral descent. In our conversation, we discuss the concept of bilateral descent and its three components of women as mothers, heiresses, and successors; Fatima’s relevance and significance to the discussion of descent and as a representative of bilateral descent; parallels between Mary the mother of Jesus and other pious women in Muslim history; Fatima’s claim to fadak as her inheritance and its impact on Sunni and Shi’i history; and female rulers in Muslim history. The book would make for an enjoyable and educational read for anyone interested in gender studies, Islam and gender, female authority, biographical studies, medieval Islam, and Islamic history, and would make for a great resource for both undergraduate and graduate Islam courses.Shehnaz Haqqani is Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. Her primary research areas include Islam, gender, and questions of change and tradition in Islam. She also vlogs on YouTube; her videos focus on dismantling the patriarchy and are 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

What were some of the major transformations taking place for Muslim communities in the Russian Empire of the eighteenth century? How did the introduction of a state-backed structure for Muslim religious institutions alter Islamic religious authority in the empire? And who exactly was Abu Nasr Qursawi and what was his reformist project to grapple with this situation?These are some of the questions asked by Nathan Spannaus in his book, Preserving Islamic Tradition: Abu Nasr Qursawi and the Beginnings of Modern Reformism (Oxford University Press, 2019). The book offers a novel intervention in the study of early-modern Islamic thought, whose conventional geographical contours often focus on the Middle East and South Asia. Spannaus shows us that eighteenth-century Russia was also blooming with its own indigenous Islamic scholarly discourses that encompassed theology, jurisprudence, philosophy, and more. These discourses were neither totally disembodied from wider concurrent global trends in Islamic thought, nor completely dependent on them. He examines the work of one Abu Nasr al-Qursawi, an erudite and intrepid scholar who criticized clerical institutions for stagnating the development of Islamic jurisprudence and theology by foreclosing independent juristic reasoning. In doing so, Spannaus meticulously demonstrates how Qursawi radically critiqued the established tradition while simultaneously embarking on his project of interpretive reform, all while maintaining fidelity to the discursive modes and fields of that tradition.Asad Dandia is a graduate student of Islamic Studies at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

In this revised edition of her classic and groundbreaking work, Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an (University of Texas Press, 2019), Asma Barlas demonstrates how a Muslim believer can fully adopt an antipatriarchal reading of the Qur’anic text while maintaining belief in its Divine Providence. The intervention she makes is thus as useful to those studying the Quran (and scriptural interpretation more broadly) in the western academy as it is to Muslims searching for renewed ways to interpret their Divine Scripture in a more egalitarian spirit.Barlas cogently argues that just as patriarchy is read into the text, it can also be unread, and provides a methodology by which this can be done. In the process, she critiques both those within her tradition who hold to fixed patriarchal or authoritarian readings of scripture and those outside of her tradition who believe that her efforts are futile. Barlas’s hermeneutic privileges the text without being strictly textualist. That is to say, she is conscious of—and likewise calls her readers to be attuned to—the role played by power in the construction of interpretive knowledge. For example, she argues that even if the Qur’an is emphatic and explicit in affirming that God is genderless, this has not prevented a masculinization and an anthropomorphization of God through certain (male-dominated) theological and spiritual discourses and language.In our interview, we take a journey through the three parts of her book: (1) Texts, Contexts, and Religious Meaning (2) God, the Prophets, and Fathers and (3) Unreading and Rereading Patriarchy. With deep moral clarity, Asma Barlas aims to recover what Leila Ahmad (1992) has called the ‘stubbornly egalitarian’ voice of Islam by illuminating the polysemic voice of the Qur’an. We additionally discuss the two new chapters in this revised edition of the book: “Abraham’s Sacrifice in the Qur’an: Beyond the Body” which elaborates on the Qur’anic rejection of representations of fathers as surrogates of a divine patriarch; and “Secular/Feminism and the Qur’an” where she engages with—and responds to—her secular and feminist interlocutors/critics on the subject of Qur’anic interpretation. This book is a passionate clarion call to dig deeper into how we receive, understand, and interpret scripture regardless of our faith commitments.Asad Dandia is a graduate student of Islamic Studies at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Gaurav Desai’s Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination (Columbia University Press, 2013), offers an alternative history of East Africa in the Indian Ocean world. Reading the life narratives and literary texts of South Asians writing in and about East Africa, Gaurav Desai highlights many complexities in the history of Africa's experience with slavery, migration, colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. Consulting Afrasian texts that are literary and nonfictional, political and private, he broadens the scope of African and South Asian scholarship and inspires a more nuanced understanding of the Indian Ocean's fertile routes of exchange.Desai shows how the Indian Ocean engendered a number of syncretic identities and shaped the medieval trade routes of the Islamicate empire, the early independence movements galvanized in part by Gandhi's southern African experiences, the invention of new ethnic nationalisms, and the rise of plural, multiethnic African nations. Calling attention to lives and literatures long neglected by traditional scholars, Desai introduces rich, interdisciplinary ways of thinking not only about this specific region but also about the very nature of ethnic history and identity. Traveling from the twelfth century to today, he concludes with a look at contemporary Asian populations in East Africa and their struggle to decide how best to participate in the development and modernization of their postcolonial nations without sacrificing their political autonomy.Gaurav Desai is Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.Micheal Rumore is a PhD candidate at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His work focuses on the Indian Ocean as an African diasporic site. He can be reached at mrumore@gradcenter.cuny.edu.Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are 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

In The History of the Civil War in Tajikistan (Lexington Books) Iraj Bashiri provides an overview of the Civil War in Tajikistan that emerged amidst the collapse of the Soviet Union.Based on personal observations, interviews, and a variety of primary and secondary publications, Bashiri places the conflict in a broader historical context, paying careful attention to longstanding tensions that came to the forefront in the early 1990s. These include ideology, regionalism, and, most importantly, disagreements over the role of religion in the functioning of the state.This book will be useful for students, scholars, and any others interested in the recent history of Tajikistan and Central Asia.Iraj Bashiri is one of the leading scholars in the fields of Central Asian studies and Iranian studies with a focus on Tajik and Iranian identity.Nicholas Seay is a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies