New Books in Islamic Studies

Leyla Ozgur Alhassen’s book Qur’anic Stories: God, Revelation and the Audience (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) provides excellent analyses of several Qur’anic surahs, or chapters, to explore how Qur’anic stories function as narratives – but not just any kind of narratives: narratives with a theological purpose behind them. The specific stories she looks at include those of Maryam, Yusuf, and Musa primarily. Alhassen analyzes the literary themes present in these different chapters, such as the themes of control, knowledge, semantic echoes, and consonance, or themes of family, judgment, evidence, and secrets – whether it’s secrets that the text is withholding from the reader or secrets that characters are keeping from each other. One of the most important contributions that the book makes is to offer one possible and convincing explanation for why stories of the same characters are told in different ways in different chapters of the Qur’an. For example, God is woven into some stories as both a character and an omniscient narrator depending on the larger theme of the surah and the placing of the story; in some instances, God as the omniscient narrator shows the words of a beloved, righteous character as true, thus making a theological statement. Alhassen argues that in such renderings of a story, where it becomes unclear whether a certain quote is God’s or a character’s, the point the text is making there is that God merges His (or Her) words with characters as a reward from God. Other theological statements that the stories seem to be making are that they reveal some insight into divine intent.In this interview, we discuss the origins of the book, how the Qur’an establishes structure and how Qur’anic stories serve as narratives, the main points of each chapter and story, and whether, and how, if at all, it matters that the Qur’an doesn’t give us identical quotes from characters in the various renditions of their stories in order to make an important stylistic choice.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Shehnaz Haqqani's new book Feminism, Tradition and Change in Contemporary Islam: Negotiating Islamic Law and Gender (Oneworld 2024), masterfully blends textual analysis of pre-modern and modern Islamic consensus with qualitative interviews with Muslims in the contemporary United States, to track how notions of what constitutes Islamic and Islamic tradition shift over time. We learn from her interlocutors that certain Islamic legal rulings can be negotiated, as in the case of child marriage, sexual slavery or even female inheritance, while other legal consensus, such as around women’s interfaith marriage or women leading mixed-gender prayers are not negotiable. Haqqani incisively swifts through these various standards of negotiations and arrives at how legal rulings pertaining to Muslim women’s experiences are met with resistance. It seems then that matters of urgency and relevance, which are inevitably political, dedicate when Islamic law and/or tradition can be negotiated. Haqqani’s book illuminates how Islamic tradition has always been flexible, but male dominated scholarly consensus still dedicates this flexibility (or rather inflexibility from an Islamic feminist perspective). This book will be of interest to those who think on gender, Islam, Islamic feminism, Islamic law, and much more.Dr. Shehnaz Haqqani is an assistant professor at Mercer University and specialises in Islam, with a focus on gender and sexuality. She is a host of the podcast New Books Network. 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 Dr. Uzma Jamil talks with Prof. Setrag Manoukian about his article “Ordinary Matters in Islamic Studies: Notes from the Field” (ReOrient Vol 5, No. 1). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Popular discourse around British Muslims has often been dominated by a focus on Muslim women and their sartorial choices, particularly the hijab and niqab. British Bangladeshi Muslims in the East End: The Changing Landscape of Dress and Language (Manchester UP, 2024) by Dr. Fatima Rajina takes a different angle and focuses on Muslim men, examining how factors like the global war on terror influenced and changed their sartorial choices and use of language. The book denaturalises the ubiquitous and deeply problematic security lens through which knowledge of Muslims has been produced in the past two decades.British Bangladeshi Muslims in the East End offers an alternative reading of these communities and how their political subjectivities emerge. Drawing on historical events, field research and existing academic work, the book aims to address the multiple ways British Bangladeshi Muslim men and women create their relationship with dress and language. This is the first book to empirically examine how dress and language shape the identities of British Bangladeshi Muslims in the East End, using in-depth analysis useful for anyone interested in the study of British Muslims broadly. While the book focuses on a specific Muslim community, the emerging themes demonstrate the interconnectedness of Muslims locally and globally and how they manifest their identities through dress and language.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. 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, Dr. Ismail Patel sits down with Prof. Nazia Kazi to discuss her book “Islamophobia, Race and Global Politics” 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 Fate of the Jews in the Early Islamic Near East: Tracing the Demographic Shift from East to West (Cambridge UP, 2022), Phillip Lieberman revisits one of the foundational narratives of medieval Jewish history--that the rise of Islam led the Jews of Babylonia, the largest Jewish community prior to the rise of Islam, to abandon a livelihood based on agriculture and move into urban crafts and long-distance trade. Here, he presents an alternative account that reveals the complexity of interfaith relations in early Islam. Using Jewish and Islamic chronicles, legal materials, and the rich documentary evidence of the Cairo Geniza, Lieberman demonstrates that Jews initially remained on the rural periphery after the Islamic conquest of Iraq. Gradually, they assimilated to an emerging Islamicate identity as the new religion took shape, sapping towns and villages of their strength. Simultaneously, a small, elite group of merchants and communal leaders migrated westward. Lieberman here explores their formative influence on the Jewish communities of the southern Mediterranean that flourished under Islamic conquest. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Youcef Soufi’s Homegrown Radicals: A Story of State Violence, Islamophobia, and Jihad in the Post-9/11 World (NYU Press, 2025) tells the story of three Muslim university students who disappeared from Winnipeg, Canada. In this gripping narrative, we learn that these young men had become “radicalized”, which brought the attention of Canadian and American security agencies to this small town. What is different about the journey we go on with Soufi is the story of families, friends, and the Muslim community who are left behind grappling with loss, grief, and hyper-surveillance as the result of the disappearance of these young men. From university to the courtroom, and beyond, Soufi’s moving narrative forces us to grapple with the affective injury faced by the Winnipeg Muslim community as discourse of radicalization, Islamophobic state policies, and military response to the war on terror, reminded Muslims of the ungrievability of their lives. Soufi’s writing is poignant; he moves between his scholarly command of Islamic history, archival data, and interviews and deeply vulnerable auto-ethnography. The book is a must read for anyone interested in Muslims and Islam, especially in North America. 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. Ismail Patel on social mobility, Islamophobia and Britishness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Saadia Yacoob’s excellent new book, Beyond the Binary: Gender and Legal Personhood in Islamic Law (U of California Press 2024), makes a compelling argument about gender and Islamic law that has been shockingly overlooked: Legal personhood in Islamic law is intersectional and relational, and gender is not a binary. While Muslims commonly treat gender as a fixed, stand-alone category in Islam that fundamentally shapes an individual’s legal status, Yacoob shows that that legal status in Islamic law was not determined by fixed categories of male or female but by a complex web of social hierarchies, including class, age, freedom, enslavement, social status, and lineage. She challenges the conventional binary understanding of gender by drawing on a rich array of historical, early Hanafi texts from the ninth to twelfth centuries. With insightful coverage of topics such as marriage, slavery, and sexual ethics, Yacoob finds that the categories of man and woman are unstable and conditional in Islamic law. In fact, she shows, the person’s legal and social status determined their role in society and not just their role but also how they were punished and treated in the law. Further, she argues that the category gender “did not exist as a group that had shared interests or a shared social position that led to a shared legal personhood as men or women” (p. 92).In our interview today, Yacoob describes the origins of the book and its main arguments and findings and explains what she means by “beyond the binary” and “legal personhood” in the title of the book. We also discuss the specific chapters and some of the major themes that show up in each chapter, such as illicit sex and its consequences depending on one’s legal personhood, how a “child” was understood in her sources, what the terms “emphasized femininity” and “hegemonic masculinity” mean. Yacoob also explains what scholars miss by using only “gender” as an analytical category for studying power relations in Islamic law. We end with some of the practical implications of the arguments and findings of this book for both academics and lay Muslims, such as how we can use Islamic law itself to build our critiques of where we are today. 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, Dr. Uzma Jamil introduces Tariq Modood on his new book “Essays on Secularism and Multiculturalism”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies