New Books in Islamic Studies

After years of being overlooked, there has been a growing interest among academic historians in the history of Turkish Guest Workers in West Germany. In her new book, Turkish Germans in the Federal Republic of Germany: Immigration, Space, and Belonging, 1961-1990 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Sarah Thomsen Vierra examines the experience of Turkish immigrants in Berlin. Focused on social history, she synthesized evidence from oral histories, archives, memoirs, and newspapers. Building upon research from a dissertation that won the German Historical Institute’s Fritz Stern Prize, the book analyzes how the first and second generations of Turkish Germans created local spaces where they belonged despite feelings of disillusionment with nationalist xenophobia. It also includes much analysis about the role of women in the guest worker program and its aftermath. Thomsen’s book is essential for anyone interested in the modern history of European migration. Sarah Thomsen Vierra teaches at New England College.Michael E. O’Sullivan is Associate Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Sounding Islam: Voice, Media, and Sonic Atmospheres in an Indian Ocean World(University of California Press, 2018) by Patrick Eisenlohr is an exciting ethnographic study of Mauritian Muslims’ soundscapes. Through the exploration of na‘t, or devotional poetic recitations that honor the prophet Muhammad, Eisenlohr captures the sensory dimension of Islam, particularly through a linguistic anthropological analysis of performance, poetry, and acoustics. The book situates Mauritian Muslim’ practices and devotions within the context of Islamic piety both across the Indian Ocean but also through a transnational and diasporic lens. In doing so, it highlights the sectarian differences that follow the performance of na‘t within the Muslim world, signaling to the intersubjectivity of Islamic piety. The study challenges scholars of Islam to take sonic atmospheres seriously, especially as it provides key insights into Islamic identity formation, piety, and ritual practices.Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religion 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

From Indonesia’s declaration of independence in 1945 up until today, the relationship between Indonesian nationalism, Islam, and modernity has been a key subject of debate. One of the central figures in this debate was the great writer, journalist, public intellectual – and pious Muslim from Minangkabau, West Sumatra, Haji Abdul Malik Karim Amrullah, better known by his pen-name, Hamka. Largely self-taught, Hamka was one of Indonesia’s most prolific writers. Between the 1920s and his death in 1981 he penned novels, short stories, biographies, memoirs, self-help books, travel books, histories, and many studies of Islam, including a famous thirty-volume commentary on the Qur’an. In Hamka's Great Story: A Master Writer’s Vision of Islam for Modern Indonesia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2016), James R. Rush traces the development of Hamka’s thinking as expressed through these works against the backdrop of Indonesia’s tumultuous modern history, including late Dutch colonial rule, the Japanese occupation, the Indonesian revolution, the Sukarno years, and the New Order military dictatorship under Suharto.Since the end of the New Order regime in 1998 some scholars have referred to a "conservative turn" in Islam in Indonesia. Listen to James Rush explain how an appreciation of Hamka and his influence in twentieth century Indonesia can help us better understand what is happening in Indonesian Islam today.Listeners of this episode might also enjoy listening to:Vanessa Hearman, Unmarked Graves: Death and Survival in the Anti-Communist Violence in East Java, Indonesia.Anthony Reid, A History of Southeast Asia: Critical CrossroadsPatrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

In Islamic intellectual history, it is generally assumed that the Ottomans did not contribute much to Islamic thought. With his new book, Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2018), Hüseyin Yılmaz uses the Ottoman notion of the caliphate to push back against that assumption: he demonstrates how a new understanding of the caliphate was developed by Ottoman thinkers, by engaging with those that came before them as well as their own lived present.  But Yılmaz goes beyond simply addressing the caliphate and political thought. Caliphate Redefined represents one of the first major studies of pre-modern Ottoman thought, mapping out the field for the benefit for all of those who engage with it. Furthermore, Yilmaz pushes implicitly and forcefully for recognition of Turkish as a critical language in Islamic intellectual history, acknowledging its contribution to the Islamic thought canon.  Finally, Caliphate Redefined is a stunning study of Sufism in the Turkish-speaking context, allowing us a glimpse of Sufism’s intellectual history and how it intersects and encompasses different aspects of Muslim life.Huseyin Yilmaz is associate professor at George Mason University. He holds a Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University. His research interests focus on the early modern Middle East including political thought, geographic imageries, social movements, and cultural history. He is also the Director of the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University. Prior to his appointment at George Mason, he taught for the Introduction to the Humanities Program and Department of History at Stanford University and the Department of History at University of South Florida. His new book, the subject of our interview, Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2018), is the first comprehensive study of pre-modern Ottoman political thought and focuses on the intersection of mysticism and the definition of authority.Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Winner of the Middle East Studies Association’s 2018 Albert Hourani Book Award, Alireza Doostdar’s The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny (Princeton University Press, 2018) is a mesmerizing study of discourses and practices surrounding the Occult sciences or ‘metaphysicals’ in contemporary Iran. Thoroughly disrupting the common association of the Occult with popular religion and mystical enchantment, this book explores the complex and conflicting rationalities that inform varied metaphysical experimentations occupying a range of Iranian actors. Through a pulsating interrogation that moves seamlessly between narrative and analysis, Doostdar demonstrates that the landscape of the Occult sciences in Iran cannot be explained through the confining binary or opposition between state orthodoxy/paternalism and popular religion. In our conversation, we talked about a range of issues including the rationality of enchantment, geomancy, Iranian spiritists, the coalescence of pre-modern Muslim intellectual traditions with modern scientific notions of empiricism, and the negotiation of secrecy and revelation in hagiographies. The Iranian Metaphysicals is an incredible scholarly achievement that will be debated and discussed for many years, and will make a great text to wrestle with in the classroom as well.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 (stareen@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

Aasim Sajjad Akhtar’s The Politics of Common Sense: State, Society and Culture in Pakistan(Cambridge University Press, 2018) is an incisive study of continuity as well as change in Pakistan that has moved the country towards religious conservatism and increased authoritarianism. Akhtar, a political scientist and self-confessed left-wing activist, documents the development of political power in Pakistan that with the military dictatorship in the 1980s of General Zia ul-Haq ended an era of more liberal and left-wing politics and put the country on a path of right-wing religious ultra-conservatism from which it has yet to deviate. In tracking that development, Akhtar’s book makes a significant contribution by focussing not only on its ideological but also its economic aspects as well as the religious right’s appeal to urban shopkeepers and traders. He projects the religious right as a vehicle for subordinate classes to access the state and claim a stake in status quo politics. Akhtar’s contribution with this book is also his analysis of the waning of counter-hegemonic and transformative politics in Pakistan. Akhtar notes that the perceived benefits of carving out a stake in a patronage-based system far outstrip the cost and risk of efforts to transform the system. It is that cost-benefit analysis that has given Pakistan politics resilience and undergird a system in which religion is the ultimate source of legitimacy at the expense of any opposition to class and state power. In looking at how subordinate classes cope through the politics of common sense, Akhtar’s book represents a significant and innovative addition to the study not only of Pakistan but of an era in which religious, nationalist and populist forces are on the rise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Sumantra Bose's new book Secular States, Religious Politics, India, Turkey and the Future of Secularism (Cambridge University Press, 2018) is a fascinating comparison of the rise of religious parties in the non-Western world’s two major attempts to establish a post-colonial secular state. The secular experiments in Turkey and India were considered success stories for the longest period of time but that has changed with the rise of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party in Turkey and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in India and the capture of state power by political forces with an anti-secular vision of nationhood. In his ground-breaking book, Bose attributes the rise of secularism to the fact that non-Western states like Turkey and India never adopted the Western principle of separation of state and church and instead based their secularism on the principle of state intervention and regulation of the religious sphere. In doing so, Bose distinguishes between the embedding of secularism in Turkey in authoritarianism entrenched in the carving out of the modern Turkish state from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire and the fact that secularism in India is rooted in culture and a democratic form of government. With the anti-secular trend in Turkey and India fitting into a global trend in which cultural and religious identity is gaining traction, Bose’s study constitutes a significant contribution to the study of the future of secularism and the often complex relationship between religious parties and the secular state.James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Shenila Khoja-Moolji’s Forging an Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia (University of California Press, 2018)  is a pathbreaking and incredibly timely monograph that combines tools of education studies, gender studies, and post-colonial genealogy to interrogate the promises and paradoxes invested in the idea of girls’ education. Shifting her camera of analysis between global discourses on female education and empowerment and the translation of those discourses in the form of educational policies, cultural developments, and political maneuverings in post-colonial societies like Pakistan, Khoja-Moolji masterfully unveils the fraught nature of an otherwise often taken for granted ideal of girls’ education. Through a close and careful reading of varied and often colorful state and non-state archives, this book traces the often contingent and contradictory projects of nationalism and citizenship reflected in competing imaginaries of the ideal of an “educated girl” over time, with a focus on the context of Pakistan. This remarkably lucid text will be widely read by scholars of education, gender, South Asia, and post-colonial thought, and will also make an excellent choice for undergraduate and graduate seminars. 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

Both a history of science and a history of Islam, The Lighthouse and the Observatory: Islam, Science, and Empire in Late Ottoman Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2018) by Daniel Stolz tells the story of Ottoman Egypt and astronomy, looking at how astronomy tied together the state and religious practice. We talk about how religious authority was negotiated through astronomy, the zij (the genre of astronomic handbooks used by astronomers), translation, and how print affected the distribution of astronomic knowledge. Stolz also contends with the specter of the nahda, or the Arabic language intellectual renaissance, and he tells us how he deals with it in his work. As always, we check in with the field of Middle Eastern history and ask what one should do with increasingly limited access to archives. Daniel Stolz  is an assistant professor at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was previously a visiting assistant professor of history at Northwestern University, where he was also affiliated with the Science in Human Culture Program. He received his PhD from Princeton University in Near Eastern Studies. He is a historian of the modern Middle East, specializing in Egypt and the late Ottoman Empire. He is the author of many articles on science and religion in Egypt and the monograph discussed in this interview. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies