New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

In Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Ovamir Anjum explores a timely topic, even though his focus is hundreds of years in the past. In order to present his topic Professor Anjum asks a series of foundational questions, such as: How have Muslims understood ideal government and political theology? What is the role of rulers in those politics? And what does it even mean to talk about “politics” as a category? In Anjum’s words “the relationship between Islam and politics in the classical age can neither be described as a formal divorce nor a honeymoon, but rather a tenuous and unstable separation of spheres of religious authority from political power that was neither justified in theory nor wholeheartedly accepted” (136). The “Taymiyyan Moment,” a rephrasing of the “Machiavellian Moment” comes during the life of the prodigious author, theologian, and jurist Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328). By honing in on Ibn Taymiyya’s magnum opus, Dar’ Ta’arud al-‘aql wa-l-naql (The Repulsion of Opposing Reason and Revelation)–not a political work, per se, but a theological one–Anjum reflects on, among other things, tensions between “community-centered” and “ruler-centered” visions of politics, and how scholars before Ibn Taymiyya had understood these ideas. Based on meticulous research of primary and secondary sources, Anjum’s monograph will likely encourage new scholarship on the post-classical era, including the impact of Ibn Taymiyya’s ideas on later generations, as well as interest among scholars from a variety of disciplines, ranging from History and Religious Studies, to Political Science and Law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Ronen Shamir‘s new book is a timely and thoughtful study of the electrification of Palestine in the early twentieth century. Current Flow: The Electrification of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2013) makes use of Actor-Network Theory as a methodology to trace the processes involved in constructing a powerhouse and assembling an electric grid in 1920s Palestine. The book brilliantly shows how electrification “makes politics” rather than just transmitting it: under the auspices of British colonial government, the material processes of electrification produced and affirmed ethno-national distinctions like “Jews” and “Arabs” and the spaces they came to produce and inhabit in Palestine. The electric grid, here, “performs and enables (or disables) social formations through the physical connections it establishes and its attachments to other entities.” The episteme of separatism and the roots of what would become a partition plan were born in this context, as Shamir shows. The first part of the book (chapters 1 & 2) explores these phenomena by looking at flows of electric current to streetlights and private consumers who were lighting their homes and businesses. The second part of the book (chapters 4 & 5) looks at the attachment (or not) of the electric grid to railways, industry, and agriculture. The third chapter acts as a pivot between them, examining the processes by which the measurement and standardization of current became a potent social force, creating new divisions between areas of the city of Tel Aviv, public and private spheres, and kinds of consumers. Whether you’re interested the history of Palestine or the historical sociology of science, this is a fascinating, inspiring study well worth reading! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Scholars of Islam and historians have frequently pointed to the Miḥna, translated as ‘trial’ or ‘test,’ as a crossroad in the landscape of Islamic history. Professor John P. Turner of Colby College is among those who challenge the long held assumption that the Miḥna was a uniquely pivotal event in his work Inquisition in Early Islam: The Competition for Political and Religious Authority in the Abbasid Empire (I. B. Tauris, 2013). In his book, Turner explores issues of heresy, orthodoxy, and caliphal authority. He investigates how Muslim doxographers, a term Professor employs instead of heresiographers, defined orthodoxy not by what orthodoxy is but what orthodoxy is not. Defining the limits of orthodoxy allowed scholars and caliphs to become the arbiters of orthodoxy. This discussion sets the stage for his examination of heresy trials that took place under both the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs. Of particular importance is the heresy trial of Aḥmad ibn Hanbal, whose name is carried on by the HanbalÄ« madhhab. Turner demonstrates that heresy trials were instituted by caliphs to consolidate their power and authority as the ‘Commnder of the Faithful’ by establishing and enforcing religious normativity. Thus, heresy trials, like the Miḥna, should not be understood as exceptional events, but one of the methods caliphs employed to solidify control of the Muslim polity. Professor Turner provides his readers with a clear and well argued revision of the understanding of the Miḥna in the history of Islam. All scholars of Islam will benefit from this work, but those with interests related to Islamic doxographies or political authority will thoroughly enjoy this book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Saudi Arabia is, for most Westerners, a mysterious place. It’s home to one of the most conservative forms of Islam around and ruled by one of the least democratic regimes in the world. Yet it’s a great friend of the liberal, democratic Western powers, the United States in particular. That’s odd. As J. Matthias Determann shows in his fascinating book Historiography in Saudi Arabia: Globalization and the State in the Middle East (Tauris, 2014), Saudi Arabia is something of a mysterious–or at least contested–place for many Saudi Arabian historians. Somewhat surprisingly, Saudi Arabian historians have enjoyed a relatively free hand in depicting the country’s past. That past, as Determann explains, is at once tribal, regional, religious, dynastic, national, and even global, depending on how you look at it. Saudi Arabian historians–and the royal family that ultimately supports them all–have looked at Saudi history through all these lenses. In their work, the seemingly monolithic country (from the Western perspective, at least) emerges as something of a pastiche of inter-penetrating historical identities. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

In Where The Two Seas Meet (Fons Vitae, 2013), Hugh Talat Halman unpacks one of the most provocative narratives in the Islamic tradition. In the 18th chapter of the Qur’an, Surat al-Kahf (The Cave), a mysterious figure named Khidr (the “Green Man”), guides Moses through a series of seemingly criminal acts. These events turn out to be, rather, tests to try Moses’ patience, each with divine purpose and knowledge behind it. Because of Khidr’s special knowledge and status–even immortal according to some traditions–this story from the Qur’an has inspired Muslims from a variety of cultures to take interest in the relationship between Moses and Khidr as a model of discipleship, adversity, and spiritual symbolism. In his pioneering book, Halman charts the waters of literature about the story of Khidr and Moses while giving special attention to Sufi commentaries, including those of Ruzbihan Baqli, al-Qushayri, and al-Qashani. Halman also demonstrates that it was not only medieval Muslims who gravitated toward mining the spiritual wisdom of the story but also non-Muslims in the modern period, including Carl Jung, a director of a kung fu film, and others. Halman ends his monograph with a poem that synthesizes the many faces of the narrative and adds a unique personal touch to his work. Where The Two Seas Meet has undoubtedly become the authoritative English-language reference for research on the “Green Man” and provides the reader with lucid writing and ample references. Inevitably, moreover, it will also interest readers beyond the academy because of its transcultural insights and possibilities for interpretation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

When did groups in Kufa begin forming unique identities leading to the development of Shiism? Najam Haider, professor of Religion at Barnard College of Columbia University, answers this question in his book, The Origins of Shia: Identity, Ritual, and Sacred Space in Eighth-Century Kufa (Cambridge University Press, 2011). This study is a boon for those with research interests in early Shiism, or the history of Islam prior to the ninth century. In the first section of his book, Haider announces his intention to test literary narratives of the origins of Shiism: namely, if Shiism did, in fact, develop during the early 8th century and if it was the product of the merging of two distinct groups. To answer those questions he proposes to analyze the 8th-century Kufa traditions. Haider examines these traditions on the basis of their legal authorities and the composition of their narrative styles.He applies this method to three cases studies in the second section of his book: (1) the basmala in ritual prayer, (2) the use of qunÅ«t, a blessing or curse, in prayer, and (3) the prohibition of intoxicants. Each case study centers on ritual which Haider argues is a more determinative means of ascribing identity then an individual or group’s theology. Based on the results of these three case studies, Haider proposes a revised history of Shiism in his third section. Haider’s work stands out for the clarity of the questions he seeks to answer and the method he employs in doing so. Every chapter concludes with a concise summary of the major points and the entire work is filled with charts of data to help readers understand how the massive corpus of information he utilized was organized and categorized. Scholars will obviously benefit from its proposed revised history, but its readability makes it useful for undergraduates and laypersons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

The work of Charles Darwin, together with the writing of associated scholars of society and its organs and organisms, had a particularly global reach in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Marwa Elshakry‘s new book offers a fascinating window into the ways that this work was read and rendered in modern Arabic-language contexts. Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2013) invites us into a late nineteenth-century moment when the notions of “science” and “civilization” mutually transformed one another, and offers a thoughtful and nuanced account of the ways that this played out for scholars working and writing in Syria and Egypt. The early chapters of Elshakry’s book focus on the central role played by popular science journals like Al-Muqtataf (The Digest) in translating and disseminating Darwin’s ideas. We meet Ya’qub Sarruf and Faris Nimr, young teachers at the Syrian Protestant College who were instrumental in translating scientific works into Arabic there and, later, in Egypt. An entire chapter looks closely at Isma’il Mazhar’s work producing the first verbatim translation of Darwin’s Origin of Species into Arabic, but the book also looks well beyond Darwin to consider broader Arabic discourses on the relationship between science and society, as those discourses were shaped by engagements with the work of Herbert Spencer, and many others. Elshakry pays special attention to the ways that this story is embedded in the histories of print culture, the politics of empire, and debates over educational reform, materialism, and socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and concludes with a consideration of the continuing reverberations of these issues into late twentieth century Egypt and beyond. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the entanglements of science, translation, and empire in the modern world, and it will change the way we understand the place of Arabic interlocutors in the history of modern science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Crucifixion is one of the most widely envisioned symbols in history. So much so, that for a contemporary reader the notion almost immediately plants an image of Jesus on the cross. Sean Anthony, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Oregon, argues that an assumption of uniformity in the role of crucifixion hinders our understanding of it, which is especially true when looking at crucifixion as a cross-cultural category during the Late Antique period. In Crucifixion and Death as Spectacle: Umayyad Crucifixion in Its Late Antique Context (American Oriental Society, 2014), crucifixion is examined in the early Muslim context but placed within broader social and political tactics of late antiquity. Extreme death techniques, especially in the disciplining of religious deviants, were most often public spectacles of ritualized violence used to legitimize political leaders. Umayyad leadership used crucifixion as a ideological tool to reinforce their own political legitimacy. Anthony demonstrates how this all plays out in the cases of Abdallah ibn al-Zubayr and Zayd ibn ‘Ali. The study of crucifixion also enables us to examine the rich ways that Muslims remembered and accounted for their own personal histories. In our conversation we discussed the relationship between early Islam and late antique societies, crucifixion in the Zoroastrian setting, the treatment of the dead Muslim body, crucifixion in the Qur’an and Hadith, the public/private spheres of the body, deciphering historical sources, religious deviance, and the ironic fate of the conquered Ummayads. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

This book tells a remarkable and–to me at least–little known but very important story. In Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East(Yale UP, 2014), Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz trace the many connections between Germany–Imperial and Nazi–and the Arab world. Their particular focus is on a fellow named Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem between from 1921 to 1948. Both Al-Husseini and, a bit later, Hitler inherited a project hatched by the German officials in World War I, namely, to start an Islamist Jihad against the Western Powers in the Middle East. The two found common cause in this project: al Husseini wanted the French and British out and Hitler wanted to Germany to dominate the region. But they were also united by another cause: eliminationist Jew-hatred. Al-Husseini and Hitler worked together throughout the war to murder and plan the murder of as many Jews as they could get their hands on. After the war al-Husseini denied any connection with Hitler, yet he continued their common anti-Western, anti-Jewish project. Al-Husseini enlisted many former Nazis for just this purpose. In the late 1940s al-Husseini remained influential, not only among Palestinian Arabs, but widely in the Middle East. That influence, so Rubin and Schwanitz show, can be seen in the actions of many post-war Arab nationalist and Islamist leader–right down to today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Many Muslim debates regarding women are solely situated in legal or political frameworks. For example, we often find this tendency in conversations about women’s leadership in the mosque or the politics of veiling. Sa’diyya Shaikh, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town, provides a unique approach to these discussions that puts feminist hermeneutics in dialogue with the thought of the prolific Muhyi al-Din ibn al-‘Arabi (1165-1240). In Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn Arabi, Gender and Sexuality (University of North Carolina Press, 2012) she explores contestations over embodiment and gender, spirituality and leadership, sexuality and power in order to rethink patriarchal epistemologies in contemporary Muslim discourses. She argues that contesting positions on gender in these debates are underpinned by certain assumptions about human nature, its gendering, and existence. Shaikh outlines the social and ritual consequences of spiritual (in)equality and initiates reflections on Islamic notions of the central category “human being.” Shaikh leads us through Ibn ‘Arabi’s dynamic anthropology, ontology, and cosmology and links abstract philosophical concepts with concrete daily relationships between men and women. In our conversation we discussed Islamic feminism, apophatic unsayings and hermeneutic of subversions, Ibn ‘Arabi’s interpersonal relationships with women, parallels between the macrocosm and microcosm, Muslim exegesis, notions of creation, interpretations of Adam and Eve, Jesus’ birth from the Virgin Mary, and masculine and feminine in Islam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies