New Books in Islamic Studies

Often when we read about new Muslim intellectuals we are offered a presentation of their politicized Islamic teachings and radical interpretations of theology, or Western readings that nominally reflect the Islamic tradition. We are rarely introduced to critical Muslim thinkers who neither abandon their Islamic civilizational heritage nor adopt, wholesale, a Western intellectual perspective. In Carool Kersten‘s Cosmopolitans and Heretics: New Muslim Intellectuals and the Study of Islam (Columbia University Press, 2011), we learn about a few modern Muslim thinkers who engage their Islamic intellectual heritage with the philosophical apparatus of contemporary Western thought. Kersten, a professor of Religious and Islamic Studies at King’s College London, has tracked Muslim thinkers for years (follow his blog Critical Muslims), and book reflects a deep understanding of the wider dialogues occurring in contemporary Islamic thought. His analysis also traverses geographical limitations of much of the scholarship on contemporary Islam by discussing figures from both the eastern and western regions of Islam. We are introduced to the thought of Nurcholish Madjid (Indonesia), Hasan Hanafi (Egypt), and Mohammad Arkoun (Algeria). Through these thinkers Kersten explores how phenomenology, hermeneutics, secularization, and postcolonial vocabulary can assist us in approaching religion generally. He frames his work through Russell McCutcheon’s model of theological, phenomenological, and critical-anthropological strategies for engaging religion in order to demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches in the study of Islam. Altogether, we have the first book length analysis of these important modern Muslim thinkers and their critique of both western scholarship and Muslim intellectualism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

In their new book, This Burning Land: Lessons from the Front Lines of the Transformed Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), the husband and wife team of Greg Myre and Jennifer Griffin recount their experiences working as reporters in Jerusalem during the eventful last decade. Myre, the editor of NPR’s “Morning Edition,” and his wife Griffin, Pentagon Correspondent at Fox News, tell gripping stories from individuals involved in the conflict, as well as from their own struggles in raising a young family in the midst of bus bombings and terror attacks. In our interview, we talk about Ariel Sharon’s affinity for Pringles, openly bringing automatic weapons into banks, and kidnappers who let their victims hold their weapons. Read all about it, and more, in Myre and Griffin’s engaging new book. Please become a fan of New Books in Public Policy on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

You’ve probably heard of the “Age of Exploration.” You know, Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama, Columbus, etc., etc. But actually that was the European Age of Exploration (and really it wasn’t even that, because the people who lived in what we now call “Europe” didn’t think of themselves as “Europeans” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but no matter…). There were, however, other Ages of Exploration. Giancarlo Casale‘s wonderful book is about one of them, one you haven’t heard of. It’s called, appropriately enough, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford UP, 2010) and is about–you guessed it–the Ottoman Age of Exploration. Like their “European” counterparts, the Ottoman explorers were pursuing two interests: spices and salvation. The former were found (largely) in Southern Asia and the latter was of course in Mecca. To ensure access to both, the Ottomans built–nearly from scratch–an large, ocean-going navy and set out to dominate the Indian Ocean. And they almost did it, though they faced fierce competition from the Portuguese, Safavids, and Mughals. Read all about it in Casale’s terrific book. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Sometimes a shallow explanation, the kind you read in newspapers and hear on television, is enough. “The home team was beaten at the buzzer” is probably all you need to know. Sometimes, however, it’s not. The intermittent conflict between the Shias and Sunnis in Iraq (and elsewhere) provides a good example. It is just not sufficient to say, as the major news outlets often do, that the Shias are fighting the Sunnis in Iraq because the Shias were oppressed by the Sunnis under Saddam Hussein, a Sunni. If this is all you understand about the conflict, you do not understand it. And you need to understand it. To even begin to comprehend the Sunni-Shia conflict, you need to know how, out of one revelation, Islam broke into two major parts; how, in the course of time, multi-national empires integrated those parts under one ostensibly pan-Muslim writ; how European imperialist broke up those empires, with their Shia and Sunni parts, and out of them made “nation states” where there were no nations; how Arab nationalists attempted to remake these faux-nations and their Shia and Sunni parts along “international socialist” lines; how radical Islamists, fed up with the aforementioned Arab nationalists, launched a fundamentalist revolt within Islam; how one such group, having decided, bizarrely, that the United States was somehow at fault for the oppression of Muslim “true believers” in the Middle East, murdered 3000 innocent people (from all over the world and of all confessions, it should be said) on September 11, 2001; how, in response, the president and the congress of the United States ordered the invasion of two Middle Eastern states believed to have suborned the attack and international terrorism more generally; how those invasions, and the complete breakdown of law and order that followed them, provided an opportunity for Sunni and Shia militants to settle very old scores in what the Western press blandly calls a “sectarian conflict.” This is not a tale anyone can tell in a headline or even 500 words. So if you want to grasp the “whys” of the Sunni-Shia struggle, you need to look beyond The New York Times. Lesley Hazleton’s marvelous After the Prophet: the Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split (Doubleday, 2009) is an excellent place to start. In terms of historical trade-craft, Hazleton has done something quite remarkable: she’s told a complicated story in writerly, yet concise way. You won’t get lost (though the cast of characters is long) and you won’t tire (though the tale stretches over centuries). Moreover, the book is written with great understanding and sympathy. Hazelton allows us to share the feeling of frustration (and worse) that the early followers of the Prophet felt as they tried to work out what Islam would be in his absence. In so doing, she gives us a sense of their frustration (and worse) as they continue to do so in places like Iraq. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies