New Books in Islamic Studies

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them.However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas.In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

How do contemporary events shape the ways in which we read, understand, and interpret historical processes of identity formation? How can we resist framing conflicts of the past through frameworks of the present? What role does historical memory play in the forming and framing of group identity? In her book Medieval Islamic Sectarianism (Amsterdam University Press, 2019), Christine D. Baker, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern History at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, engages these questions by exploring the formation of sectarian identities in the tenth century medieval Middle East and North Africa.The tenth century, which is often deemed the “Shi’i century” because it witnessed the emergence of two major Shi’i empires, gave rise to a new challenge for the existing Sunni Abbasid Caliphate. There were the Fatimids of North Africa who came to dominate from the western end of the caliphate, and the Buyids of Iraq and Iran who come to dominate from the eastern end, and each one claimed their political legitimacy by positioning themselves against the Abbasid rulers. But how exactly did they do that?Christine cautions against reading the political conflicts between these empires through the lens of modern sectarian identities and urges us to examine them in their own right. In this way, we avoid the risk of reinforcing a false narrative of primordial Sunni-Shi’i conflict, and are able to consider more accurately how those empires legitimated themselves and delegitimated the other.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

Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast (Cambridge University Press, 2019) by Sebastian Prange provides a fascinating window into the Muslim world of the medieval (12-16th century) Malabar Coast and the development of Islam that was defined by significant trade networks. Prange conceptualizes this particular development of Muslim communities on the Malabar Coast as Monsoon Islam. Subverting any notions that Islam developed systematically or through organized political efforts, the book uses the history of the pepper trade across the Indian Ocean to map spatial developments, such as of mosques and ports, and the early Muslim trading communities who inhabited these realms. We have before us a global history of Monsoon Islam that utilizes trade networks to capture far more complex cross-cultural exchanges that included kinship, religious, textual, Sufi, and political networks. The latter dynamics led to instances of negotiated establishment of legal and religious codes, as well as familial and economic ties. For instance, the book highlights how legal norms or religious practices became localized and translated to a new context by minority Muslims within a predominately Hindu society, such as in mosque architecture or marriage practices. Prange’s detailed study asks us to think of both global and local processes that led to the formation of a cosmopolitan and transoceanic Monsoon Islam and thus complicates how we study the spread of Islam across diverse regions in South Asia, and the vital role of traders, scholars, and saints. The study’s deep engagement with diverse historical sources, and its beautifully written analysis, makes it an accessible and critical read for scholars interested in the world of Islam in the Indian Ocean and South Asia, as well as Islamic economics, politics, and history broadly. 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 pioneering and politically urgent new book Delusional States: Feeling Rule and Development in Pakistan’s Northern Frontier (Cambridge UP, 2019), Nosheen Ali presents a lyrical and at many times haunting account of the aspirations, anxieties, and tragedies enfolding everyday life in the rarely studied Gilgit-Baltistan region in Pakistan. How does the encounter and interplay of love and betrayal inform the relationship between the state and its aspiring citizens? Ali engages and extends this foundational political and conceptual question in a range of discursive sites including the affective dimensions of militarization and state power, sectarianism and education, poetic publics and their alternate imaginaries of Islam and Muslim identity, and the agonistic operations of environmental development on everyday pastoral life. Written with exceptional clarity and extraordinary poetic panache, Delusional States is a landmark publication in the study of Islam, South Asia, Pakistan, and politics that should spark several important and far reaching discussions and debates in the academy and beyond. It will also make a terrific text for undergraduate and graduate seminars on these and many other themes.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 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

Scholarly and public discourse on Islamic intellectual thought in the modern period tend to frame it narrowly through the concept of “influence” as it emanates from the Middle Eastern “center” to the non-Middle Eastern “peripheries” without paying sufficient attention to the ways in which these variegated “peripheries” retain the autonomy to form their own conceptions of religious identity in relation to themselves and to those “centers.”In his latest work, In a Pure Muslim Land: Shi’ism between Pakistan and the Middle East (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), Simon Wolfgang Fuchs interrogates this framework with a novel intervention by examining the case of Shi’i Islamic intellectual thought in Pakistan as it relates to the Middle East. Beginning his study with pre-colonial India, Simon explores the internal debates that took place within Shi’i scholarly circles in the subcontinent prior to and after the founding of Pakistan to unearth the myriad ways in which they negotiated and contested their place within their social and intellectual milieus as arbiters of their religious tradition on equal footing with Middle Eastern Shi’i scholars and with their Sunni counterparts in South Asia.Through rigorous research conducted in libraries across the Middle East and South Asia, Simon re-centers the importance of theological ideas – as elaborated in doctrinal texts, journal publications, and speeches – as a necessary complement to material interests in the formation of religious and sectarian identity in modern Islamic thought. He further demonstrates how Pakistani Shi’i intellectuals were not passive recipients of concepts from the Shi’i centers of Iraq and Iran, but active participants in the process of evaluating the usefulness of those ideas, working to re-appropriate or repackage them for their own local circumstances. Pakistani Shi’i scholars thus “indigenized” watershed events like the Iranian Revolution but also retained their own autonomy as actors with full agency to determine to what extent Iranian notions of authority and hierarchy ought be emulated.This work cuts across the fields of Middle East Studies, South Asia Studies, and Islamic Studies, and creates avenues for further research in the history of transnational and transregional Islamic thought by challenging the conventional “center-periphery” binary between the Middle East and South Asia and by drawing our attention to the importance of the bidirectional flow of ideas between those regions.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

An interview with Dr. Hizer Mir on the Alt Right and Islam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Since the fall of the Indonesian New Order regime in 1998 there has been a steady rise of Islamic popular culture in the nation. Muslim consumers and producers have cultivated a mediated domain where they can encounter commercial entertainment though the prism of spiritual reflection and piety. In Gender and Islam in Indonesian Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Alicia Izharuddin, Women's Studies in Religion Program Research Associate at Harvard Divinity School, explores the development of the Islamic film genre with a specific focus on gender representation. Indonesian cinema throughout the New Order era focused on Muslim characters, both men and women, frequently framing them in nationalistic ideals. But after the record success of 2008’s film, Ayat-Ayat Cinta (Verses of Love), the viewing preferences of Indonesian Muslim audiences were met with a slew of Islamically themed films. These often contained the repetition of formulaic tropes and symbols deemed Islamic in order to sell out the box office. In our conversation we discussed the characteristics of the film Islami genre, the importance of gender analysis and feminist methodologies, the role of women as actors and filmmakers, idealized masculinities, the public piety of celebrity actresses, producing a “Good Muslim”/ “Bad Muslim” narrative dichotomy, films about the famous Wali Songo saints, and mediated public Islamic values in contemporary Indonesia.Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. 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 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 the absence of any real certainty about the nature and intention of the early sources that tell us the story of the early Islamic period, how can we use them? What sort of methodological approaches may we deploy to elucidate the meanings of texts, often similar in their core elements, but with divergent perspectives and intentions that cut across a range of genres? In The Rebel and the Imam in Early Islam (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Professor Najam Haider, Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Barnard, follows his two earlier books on Shi'ism with an exploration of the link between early Islamic historical writing and Late Antique and Classic Rhetoric. Najam seeks not to supplant positivist approaches to history with his new methodology, but rather to ask new kinds of questions relating to intention, meaning, and community.Aaron Hagler is an assistant professor of history at Troy University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it.How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in.Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Much has been written about the Crusades, the religiously-inspired wars that pockmarked the later centuries of the Middle Ages. Yet for all of the many books on the subject there has been surprisingly little focus on the men and the women who were entangled in these conflicts. In his book Crusaders: The Epic History of the Wars for the Holy Lands (Viking, 2019), Dan Jones addresses this by detailing the role of key individuals played in these events. By drawing from a variety of perspectives, he shows how the Crusades was a different event depending upon one’s perspective, be that of a Norman ruler, a Byzantine princess, or a Muslim chronicler. Moreover, by expensing the scope of coverage beyond such traditional figures to include people such as the Norwegian king Sigurd I, Jones demonstrates the wide impact of the wars and the ways in which they drew in people from throughout Europe. From their stories, Jones shows how the purpose of the Crusades changed over time, as they reflected more the motivations of the individuals involved rather than the goals traditionally associated with them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies