The Muslims of Bosnia in southeast Europe treasure a centuries-long tradition of writing about the journey to Mecca. These treatises and travelogues help us trace the changing ways in which the hajj was experienced and described by these European Muslims who lived under the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, then socialist Yugoslavia, before the independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 1990s. To explore these different meanings of the hajj for the Bosnian Muslims—or Bosniaks—this episode looks at the fascinating texts they wrote in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish as well as the Bosnian language. We’ll follow not only the impact of changing political conditions, but also the way new forms of transport and changing literary fashions reshaped the experience and interpretation of a pilgrimage which both was and wasn’t the same over the centuries.  Nile Green talks to Dženita Karić, author of Bosnian Hajj Literature: Multiple Paths to the Holy (Edinburgh University Press, 2022).

Islam and the occult may seem like odd bedfellows. But during the medieval and early modern periods, Muslim thinkers wrote vast numbers of manuscripts on a panoply of occult sciences, ranging from numerology and astrology to alchemy and lettrism. Just as the English word occult derives from the Latin occultus (meaning ‘hidden’), so in Arabic were these arcane disciplines collectively known as the ‘ulum al-khafiyya (‘hidden sciences’). Both the Latin and Arabic terms were references to the invisible rather than visible dimensions of the cosmos that, as the scientists of their time, such occultists sought to manipulate. So important were these Islamic occult sciences that they formed a crucial part of high imperial politics, patronized by emperors and other courtly elites who deployed these hidden sciences for everything from hiring personnel and military success to urban and even party planning. Nile Green talks to Matthew Melvin-Koushki, co-editor of Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice (Brill, 2021).

Whether in newspaper articles, books, or conversations about Islam, the ‘Muslim world’ is a commonplace term. Yet it was only coined in the late nineteenth century, and didn’t gain wider currency till the 1920s. Moreover, the ‘Muslim world’ wasn’t even a Muslim invention. In this episode, we trace the history of this term which, over the course of a century, came to serve many different purposes when it was taken up by a range of political and religious figures, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. We begin by asking how Muslims thought about geography before this new term was invented, then we follow the changing geopolitical contexts in which this relatively recent label acquired the familiarity of apparent commonsense. Along the way, we travel from the late Ottoman Empire and the US Philippines to the Muslim World Congress and Muslim World League through which Pakistan and Saudi Arabia staked rival claims of leadership over the Muslims of the world. Nile Green talks to Cemil Aydin, author of The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Harvard University Press, 2017).

As anyone will know who has so much has flicked through the pages of the Quran, the Islamic scripture contain many discussions of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. Yet Muslim tradition also venerates many Christian saints. The model was set by the Quran itself, in the chapter al-Kahf (‘The Cave’), which alludes to the Christian story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus as a moral lesson for Muslims. Over the following centuries, Muslim authors recounted the lives of various other Christian saints, ranging from such famous figures as the hermit St Anthony and the martyr St George to the less familiar likes of John of Edessa and Paul of Qentos. Writing in Arabic, Muslim authors highlighted the ‘excellent qualities,’ or fada’il, of these Christians who had such steadfast faith in God. Underlying this collective veneration was a shared scriptural universe, in which the Quran referred to stories from the Bible, and a shared sacred landscape, in which Muslims venerated the shrines of Biblical prophets and Christian saints. Nile Green talks to Reyhan Durmaz, author of Stories between Christianity and Islam: Saints, Memory, and Cultural Exchange in Late Antiquity and Beyond (University of California Press, 2022). 

The influence of the great medieval mystic Ibn ‘Arabi is immeasurable, reaching from his home city of Murcia in Andalusia to Aceh in Indonesia and just about everywhere in between. His teachings similarly try to encompass, or at least articulate, the unfathomable depths of being, both human and divine, together with the links between God’s ultimate being and our own contingent existence. Whereas Ibn ‘Arabi’s terrestrial life played out between Seville and Tunis in his early career and Mecca and Damascus in his later years, his spiritual life unfolded through encounters with saints and prophets in the ‘imaginal world’ (or ‘alam al-mithal) that was central to his cosmology. In this episode, we trace this double life and summarize his doctrines at large. We then turn to his two most famous works, the Futuhat al-Makiyya (‘Meccan Revelations’) and Fusus al-Hikam (‘Ringstones of Wisdom’), to unravel the key concept of huwiyya (literally ‘He-ness’). Nile Green talks to Ismail Lala, author of Knowing God: Ibn ‘Arabi and ‘Abd al-Razzaq al-Qashani’s Metaphysics of the Divine (Brill, 2020).

Meaning ‘language of the coasts’ in Arabic, Swahili emerged in East Africa many centuries ago through contact with the wider Muslim world. Although the language is most often linked with Kenya and Tanzania, Swahili was also used as a lingua franca as far north as Somalia and as far south as Mozambique—a country whose name derives from that of a fifteenth century Muslim ruler, Musa Bin Mbiki. In this episode, we explore the little-known history of Swahili in Mozambique, where the language became a rich poetic vehicle of religious teachings. After an overview of Swahili under the Portuguese rulers and the sultans of Angoche, we take a closer look at performances of the Nazajina, an epic poem recounting the last days of the Prophet. Finally, we zoom back out to the big picture by asking how Mozambiquan Swahili helps us rethink the notion of ‘world literature.’ Nile Green talks to Clarissa Vierke, author of On the Poetics of the Utendi: A Critical Edition of the Nineteenth-Century Swahili Poem “Utendi wa Haudaji” (Lit, 2011).

In libraries all across the Muslim world, old manuscripts survive by scholars whose names end with al-Qirimi: ‘The Crimean.’ Discussing all manner of religious topics, these texts form just part of the rich heritage of Muslims from regions in the east of Europe and to the north of the Black Sea that eventually became part of Ukraine. In this episode, we’ll learn how these manuscripts help reveal the long history of Islam in both western and eastern Ukraine, along with the changing forms of religious leadership that emerged under the rule of such different states as the Crimean Khanate, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Ottoman Empire, and the Soviet Union. From the cities of Bakhchysarai and Akkerman, we’ll follow the trail of Qirimi mystics and scholars to trace the impact of Ukrainian Tatars on such distant places as Arabia and Indonesia. Nile Green talks to Mykhaylo Yakubovych, author of “A Neglected Ottoman Sufi Treatise from 16th Century: Mawahib al-Rahman fi bayan Maratib al-Akwan by Ibrahim al-Qirimi,” The Journal of Ottoman Studies 45 (2015).

How would a medieval Sufi Muslim view the Jewish and Christian scriptures? In this episode, we explore this question through the teachings of Abd al-Karim al-Jili. Born on the Malabar coast of India in 1365, Jili studied throughout the Middle East before settling in the town of Zabid in Yemen. It was there that he wrote his most famous work, al-Insan al-Kamil fi Ma‘rifat al-Awakhir wa-al-Awa’il (The Perfect Human in the Knowledge of the Last and First Things).  In that book, Jili drew on the terminology of the Quran and the Sufi teachings of Ibn Arabi to summarize his vision of the relationship between God and humanity. Consequently, he was centrally concerned with scriptural revelation: how God reveals Himself to humankind through the holy books. This led Jili to write a mystical comparison of the Quran with the Hebrew Bible and New Testament (known in Arabic as the Tawrah and the Injil). Nile Green talks to Fitzroy Morrissey, the author of Sufism and the Scriptures: Metaphysics and Sacred History in the Thought of ‘Abd al-Karim al-Jili (I.B. Tauris, 2021).

In 1632, the University Library at Cambridge was transformed by the arrival of an extraordinary collection of manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew, and Malay. They were collected by an early Dutch orientalist, Thomas Van Erpe, better known by his Latinized name Erpinius. To mark the four hundredth anniversary of his death in 1624, Cambridge University Library has mounted a major exhibition of Erpinius's manuscript.  For a brief tour of the exhibition, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kCe865F7Ek Even today, the collection continues to teach researchers important new insights into not only the Islamic past, but also into the origins of European orientalism. In this episode, we trace the background of Erpinius’s interest in Islam, before following his career as a linguist and manuscript collector that took him from his native Holland to the university cities of Europe, then Venice, before being appointed Professor of Arabic at Leiden University in 1613. Together with his writings and manuscript collection, this made him a key—but altogether complex—founder of orientalism.  Nile Green talks to Majid Daneshgar, the curator of the exhibition at Cambridge and the author of Studying the Quran in the Muslim Academy (Oxford, 2020).

For more than four centuries, Muslims, Christians and Jews dwelt side by side on the Mediterranean island of Sicily. For around half of that time—from 827 to 1091—they lived under the rule of Arab Muslims, and for the other half under Norman then Swabian Christian kings, before the Muslims were finally expelled in 1245. Since Sicily had been part of the Byzantine Empire, its Arab conquerors inherited a population who spoke Greek, prompting centuries of linguistic, literary, and wider cultural exchanges that became richer still when the Normans introduced Latin. After sketching the historical background, this episode explores the complex society that developed on Sicily, along with the literature and architecture that emerged from the collusion and shifting hierarchy of cultures. Through the Arabic geographical manual patronized by King Roger II, the translation of classical Greek works to Latin via Arabic, and the Arab-Norman churches of Palermo and Cefalù, Sicily was the lesser-known counterpart to al-Andalus. Nile Green talks to Alex Metcalfe, author of The Muslims of Medieval Italy (Edinburgh, 2009).

In a famous hadith, the Prophet Muhammad told his followers, “Be different!” He also warned them about the potential dangers of imitating non-Muslim communities. Over the next fourteen centuries, various Muslim scholars pondered and elaborated the possible meanings of this prophetic advice. In what ways should Muslims be different? Were all forms of imitation bad, or were the good and bad forms of imitation? How much did social and political circumstances affect whether a Muslim should visibly mark his or her difference from non-Muslims around them? And so, long before Western societies began theorizing ‘assimilation’ and ‘diversity,’ Muslim scholars were writing multi-volume studies devoted to the question of what it meant to live in a multiethnic and multireligious society. Nile Green talks to Youshaa Patel, author of The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present (Yale, 2023).

Muslims lived in the Iberian Peninsula for best part of a millennium before their final expulsion of the early 1600s. During those nine centuries, there flourished a rich literary culture, not only in Arabic but also in Aljamiado—a version of Castilian Spanish that was written with the Arabic script. In this episode, we explore the fascinating Quran manuscripts—in Arabic and especially Aljamiado—written in the last few centuries of Moorish life in Iberia. We’ll learn how these rare manuscripts survived—sometimes hidden for centuries in the walls of old houses—and what they tell us about the people who wrote them, and the form of Islam they followed. In so doing, we’ll learn about a long-forgotten chapter in European literary as much as religious history: the only surviving complete Quran in Aljamiado Spanish was written at exactly the same time as Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Nile Green talks to Nuria de Castilla, author of “The Qur’an: Production, Transmission, and Reception in the Mudejar and Morisco Communities,” in The Qur’an and its Handwritten Transmission (Brill, 2024).

The past few decades—since 9/11 in particular—have seen the increasing prominence of ‘moderate Islam’ in the public sphere. But who gets to define what this term means? How are these different definitions projected to wider Muslim, and non-Muslim, audiences? And what are the political implications of these varied versions of ‘moderate Islam,’ whether locally or internationally? In this episode, we focus on three major players in the geopolitical competition to define ‘moderate Islam,’ namely Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia, while also bringing in Qatar, Turkey, and Iran. By paying special attention to Indonesia—and its huge civil society organization called Nahdlatul Ulama—we see how Asian Muslims are becoming increasingly important arbiters of Islam for the twenty-first century.  Nile Green talks to James M. Dorsey, author of The Battle for the Soul of Islam: Defining the Muslim Faith in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

The mid-twentieth century was not only a time when some of the greatest jazz music was created. It was also a period when many African American musicians converted to Islam. By the 1940s, there was a variety of different versions of the faith from which to choose in America. The Ahmadiyya movement had arrived in the United States around 1920; the Nation of Islam had emerged out of Moorish Science a decade later; and by the 1940s different currents of Sunni Islam had been introduced to port cities like Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. By the 1950s and 60s, those ports became gateways to a wider world—to the Middle East and Africa—as African American Muslims set out on musical, religious, and political pilgrimages among their coreligionists overseas. In this episode, we’ll be following those journeys by the likes of Art Blakey, Ahmed Abdul-Malik, and Yusuf Lateef, as well as Malcolm X and the great John Coltrane.  Nile Green talks to Richard Brent Turner, author of Soundtrack to a Movement: African American Islam, Jazz, and Black Internationalism (New York University Press, 2021).   Album Links: Ahmed Abdul-Malik, East Meets West https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmMR8J7yUEI Yusuf Lateef, Eastern Sounds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMTHsK3MlzA John Coltrane, ‘Naima’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPAC6zt_1ZM John Coltrane, A Love Supreme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll3CMgiUPuU

Just how much does Islam vary in different places around the world? And how have local forms of Islam evolved in rural regions where Muslims have lived side-by-side with Hindus for centuries? In this episode, we tackle these questions by looking at local religious practices in the south Indian village called Gugudu. Turning away from theoretical abstractions, we see how religion is practiced on the ground through sacred spaces and rituals that are shared by Hindu and Muslim devotees of a local Sufi saint called Pir Kullyapa. We also learn how the people of Gugudu use the Telugu language to conceptualize their religious practices— and how they creatively adapt and combine religious terms from Arabic and Sanskrit to formulate their own ‘village theology.’ But in the twenty-first century, Indian villages have become increasingly connected to the outside world, not least through cellphones and the internet. So, we’ll also ask how reformist global Islam is affecting the local Islam of Gugudu. Nile Green talks to Afsar Mohammad, author of The Festival of Pirs: Popular Islam and Shared Devotion in South India (Oxford University Press, 2013). 

China is not only home to around 20 million Muslims, it is also home to a variety of different Islamic traditions, and of various ethnic groups who follow those different versions of Islam. In this episode we focus on the Chinese-speaking (or ‘Sinophone’) Muslims rather than the better-known Turkic-speaking (or Uyghur) Muslims. From the medieval period onwards, these Chinese-speaking followers of Islam developed their own religious traditions by drawing on classical Sufi mystical works and Hanafi legal texts written outside of China and applying them to local conditions, which often involved translating or writing religious texts in Chinese. Yet despite occasional contacts with the wider Muslim world, it wasn’t till the late nineteenth century that these Sinophone Muslims established regular ties with their coreligionists in the Middle East. Those new contacts set in motion a century of religious change that was also shaped by political events as China was transformed from an empire to a nationalist republic, then a communist People’s Republic. This episode traces the outcomes of these twentieth-century links between Muslims in China and Middle East. Nile Green talks to Mohammed Al-Sudairi, author of “Traditions of Maturidism and Anti-Wahhabism in China: An Account of the Yihewani Hard-liners of the Northwest,” Journal of Islamic Studies 32, 3 (2021).

Many people, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, might think of Sharia as ancient and unchanging. But like any form of law, it has a history. And like every aspect of religion, it was transformed in the modern era. This episode examines how Sharia changed during the two centuries when the British Empire ruled over large parts of the Muslim world. Surveying two transformational centuries—from around 1750 to around 1950—we’ll hear what happened to Sharia as British rule fanned out from India (including what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh) to Malaya (including what is today Malaysia and Singapore) then Egypt. We’ll learn how Sharia metamorphosed from a general societal discourse to a narrower notion of ‘Islamic law’ then state law in turn. The result was what this episode’s expert guest has called “the paradox of Islamic law,” by which Sharia was centralized by the state but at the same time marginalized by state institutions. Nile Green talks to Iza Hussin, author of The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority, and the Making of the Muslim State (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

In 1218, the pagan armies of the Mongols appeared on the horizon of the Middle East to begin a series of campaigns unparalleled in their scale of violence. In the deceptively mellifluous phrasing of the Persian historian Juvaini, “amadand o kandand o sokhtand o koshtand o bardand o raftand.” (“They came, they uprooted, they burned, they killed, they looted, and they left.”) And then they came back again, and again. Over the course of four decades, the Mongols subjugated or destroyed the whole gamut of states that comprised the region’s medieval geopolitical jigsaw, from the Muslim-ruled states of the Khwarazmians, Saljuqs, Ayyubids, and Zangids to the different Christian polities of the Byzantines, Armenians, Georgians, and Crusaders. Three generations would pass by the time the Mongol emperor Ghazan Khan converted to Islam in 1295. By then, the Middle East had been irrevocably transformed. Exploring these decades of destruction and reconstruction, Nile Green talks to Nicholas Morton, author of The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East (Basic Books, 2022).

The importance of Christian monasteries to the socio-economic no less than the religious life of medieval Europe has long been recognized. Far less well-known is the comparable role of Muslim shrine complexes in providing a socio-economic infrastructure for their surrounding communities. This was especially the case in the eastern Islamic lands comprising what is today Iran, Afghanistan, and the other “stans” of Central Asia, as well as northwestern China. Yet whether through redistributing the wealth of rulers or managing the underground irrigation channels known as kariz or qanat, such shrines played crucial agricultural and economic no less than political and religious roles. In this episode, we trace the history of one such shrine—that of Ahmad-e Jam (1049-1141)—from the life of its founder to its patronage by such medieval conquerors as Sultan Sanjar and Tamerlane the Great to its links with the Timurid renaissance in nearby Herat. Nile Green talks to Shivan Mahendrarajah, author of The Sufi Saint of Jam: History, Religion, and Politics of a Sunni Shrine in Shi'i Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Today, thousands of Islamic manuscripts survive as testimony to the seven-hundred-year Muslim presence in southeastern Europe. But collections of manuscripts that belonged to a single person are exceedingly rare. And when the books of an individual person remain together as a collection, they tell us much more than they do when dispersed. In this episode, we peruse one such private library—of the judge and mystic Mustafa Muhibbi—as a storehouse of literary, religious, and cultural life in nineteenth century Bosnia, which remained part of the Ottoman Empire till 1878. We’ll hear not only about the mixture of languages, but also the assortment of interests—law and poetry, magic and medicine, astrology and grammar—molded into coherent cultural unity by a curious individual mind. We’ll also learn how a beloved personal library formed a biographical mirror to the arduous life of a provincial official who an 1841 register described as merely a medium-sized man with a grizzled beard. Nile Green talks to Tatjana Paić-Vukić, Senior Research Fellow at the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts and author of The World of Mustafa Muhibbi: A Kadi from Sarajevo (Isis Press, 2011).