In this episode, Hizer Mir and Salman Sayyid continue the conversation with Professor Sherman Jackson, discussing his work on the Islamic secular, Islamic studies and the state. The second half of this special episode discusses religious pluralism, the modern state and the secular, and the relationship between Sharia and the political. Sherman Jackson holds the King Faisal Chair in Islamic Thought and Culture at the University of Southern California, where he is also Professor of Religion and of American Studies and Ethnicity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

It is easy to believe that manners are empty gestures, little more than social artifice or practiced etiquette whose sole purpose is to project civility and facilitate social interaction. But if we look more closely, they can tell us much more than we might first suppose, revealing what conventional accounts of state, economy, and religion often ignore. With Empire of Manners: Ottoman Sociability and War-Making in the Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford UP, 2025), Dr. James Grehan offers a panoramic view of manners and sociability across the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire, from the Balkans to the Middle East to North Africa. Studying chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and travel accounts, he throws new light on the inner dynamics of Ottoman society during a transitional period in Ottoman history which has too often been misunderstood. Empire of Manners proposes a new way of thinking about the history of manners, arguing that violence and war-making, as much as civility and etiquette, have a central role in shaping them. The eighteenth century proved to be a turning point in this paradoxical relationship between violence and manners as war-making turned into a substantially more complex and costly enterprise, leaving a deeper and wider social footprint. The interplay between violence and manners, an unlikely couple, unexpectedly narrates the Ottoman path to the modern age. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

This is Radio ReOrient. Welcome to Season 13. This our tenth year of navigating the post-Western and connecting the Islamosphere. In this episode, Sherman Jackson joins our regular hosts, Salman Sayyid and Hizer Mir, to talk about his new book, The Islamic Secular (Oxford UP, 2024). The book provocatively challenges the assumption that the secular is external to Islam and the Islamicate. Sherman Jackson is one of the leading scholars of Islamic thought today. He holds the King Faisal Chair in Islamic Thought and Culture at the University of Southern California, where he is also Professor of Religion and of American Studies and Ethnicity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

This year, as they have for millennia, many people around the world will set out on pilgrimages. But these are not only journeys of personal and spiritual devotion - they are also political acts, affirmations of identity and engagements with deep-rooted historical narratives. In Holy Places: How Pilgrimage Changed the World (Profile, 2025) Professor Kathryn Hurlock follows the trail of pilgrimage through nineteen sacred sites - from the temples of Jerusalem to the banks of the Ganges, by way of Iona, Lourdes, Amritsar and Buenos Aires - revealing the many ways in which this ancient practice has shaped our religions and our world. Pilgrimages have transformed the fates of cities, anointed dynasties, provided guidance in hard times and driven progress in good. Filled with fascinating insights, Holy Places unveils the complex histories and contemporary endurance of one of our most fundamental human urges. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

What happens when an analyst conducts interviews—and I am not speaking here about interviewing other analysts as we do at NBiP, but rather what happens when an analyst does field research, and researches one of the eternal subjects of our field which is to say love and also, to borrow from Gregorio Kohon, its’ vicissitudes? Locating within himself demeaning feelings towards an other—and the setting is a psych ward in India, and in an India that continues to rework its having been partitioned, having partitioned itself, and the other is a Muslim other in a Hindu majority nation—the author, Ashis Roy, wants to know more about what he calls his “communal mind”, a mind that developed in a country where, “Muslims know the Hindu myths but the reverse is not true,” so a mind that was afforded an instant other to deposit its unwanted contents into. His book, Intimacy in Alienation: A Psychoanalytic Study of Hindu-Muslim Relationships, explicates intimacy and asymmetry, as it delves into cross-religious desire, and in this case the forbidden desire of Hindus for Muslims, and Muslims for Hindus, which, when acknowledged, threatens social, familial, and cultural mores, and also the prerogatives of the state. Who are these people, Roy asks, who take such a step, which is a step that can lead to a kind of social death, akin, in the American context from which I write, to the experience of gay people who come out and are brutally shorn of their families, communities, and sometimes their lives? The power of desire, a power beyond us, in excess of ourselves always, can propel us to this vertiginous place. Perhaps, and only perhaps, it can also push us to live in ways that reject socially and politically enforced liminality as well. One starts to imagine these couples, engaged ongoingly by Roy, as healing a malignant split that beats at the heart of contemporary Indian life. Roy’s thinking draws from the myriad psychoanalytic theories of Kakar, Green, Erikson, Altman, Bollas, and Phillips, (among others), all of them kings of our trade, many of their names never uttered in the same breath—(I am thinking especially of Green and Altman.) Fascinatingly, he also orients himself to his material by engaging the work of two historians (queens of their own domains) and they are the American, Joan Wallach Scott and rather especially (or that is my read) the Italian scholar Luisa Passerini. Like Roy, Passerini delved deeply into her own milieu, and like Roy she performed interviews with her peers who participated in what is commonly called the anni interessante in Italy (known for its red brigades, the murder of Aldo Moro, wildcat strikes in the auto industry alongside acts of student solidarity) all of which happened while she was in Africa. Her book, Autobiography of a Generation (1983), reads as an effort to be in touch with something fundamental about her homeland that she missed. My impression is that Intimacy in Alienation serves a similar purpose for Roy, who realizes that there is a world nearby that remained visually and affectively sidelined. Both wanted to see what had previously been, for various reasons, scotomized. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Jamal J. Elias' new book After Rumi: The Mevlevis & Their World (Harvard UP, 2025) takes us on a historical journey through the development of the Mevlevi community after Jalaluddin Rumi’s passing in 1273. He frames the Mevlevis as an “emotional community” that is anchored in affective engagements with Rumi and his Masnavi. The book is organized around three major historical moments, the first is centered around Ulu ‘Arif Chelebi, Rumi’s grandson, the second after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and the final chapters focus on the career of Isma‘il Anqaravi (d. 1631). Through close readings of biographies and various manuscripts, Elias paints a rich and complex metahistory of significant intellectual, metaphysical, political, social, and cultural factors that have defined the Mevlevi community. For instance, aspects such as charismatic leadership and the role of the Masnavi remain vital and also shifting factors for the Mevlevi community, as we see in the commentaries on the Masnavi written by Anqaravi. Throughout the book we learn how notions of orthodoxy and heterodoxy are unstable categories, especially in relation to antinomian tendencies, the place of women in the Mevlevi communities, and the shifting significance and use of Persian in literary productions. This book will be of interest to those who read and write on Sufism, Anatolian, Ottoman, and Turkish history and Rumi and the Mevlevis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

The Unforgotten Women of the Islamic State (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Gina Vale explores the governance of the Islamic State (IS) terrorist organization through the lives and words of local Iraqi, Syrian, and Kurdish women. While the roles and activities of foreign (predominantly Western), pro-IS women have garnered significant attention, the experiences and insights of local civilian populations have been largely overlooked. Drawing on the testimonies of 63 local Sunni Muslim and Yazidi women, Dr. Vale exposes the group's intra-gender stratified system of governance. Eligibility for the group's protection, security, 'citizenship', and entrance into the (semi-)public sphere were not universal, but required convergence with the gender norms of IS, through permanent erasure or at least temporary disguise of certain markers of difference. In some cases, this was directed by a pre-meditated 'divide and conquer' strategy, while in others, it manifested as unregulated violences at the hands of individual group members, including women. The structure follows the trajectory of IS's increasing control over its 'citizens' and captive populations: its militarization of society; imposition of law and order; provision of goods and services; and intervention in civilians' private lives. Analysis of diverse first-hand accounts and the group's documentation reveals that the presence, exclusion, and victimization of local civilian women were necessary to the functioning and legitimation of IS's 'caliphate' project, and the supremacy of affiliated men - and women. As a fledgling proto-state, IS needed local Iraqi, Syrian, and Kurdish women. Though far from represented or protected, they were by no means forgotten. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities (Columbia University Press, 2025), is a groundbreaking book that recasts the role of knowledge in the making of a colonial and postcolonial nation. It makes a case for a new literary and intellectual-historical approach to Islam in Africa. The Senegalese Muslim scholar Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864–1945) wrote History of the Blacks, a monumental history of West Africa, in a time when colonial discourses asserted that Africans lacked both writing and history. He sought to publish a bilingual Arabic and French edition of the book by working with humanists in colonial institutions, but the project was ultimately undermined by the disregard of the French state. Textual Life considers Kamara’s story as a parable about the fate of the humanities amid epistemic and technological change. Wendell H. Marsh argues that Kamara’s scholarship reflected what he calls the textual attitude, an orientation to the world mediated by reading. Colonial humanists shared this attitude even while upholding racial and religious hierarchies, and they took an interest in African texts and traditions. The bureaucrats and technocrats who succeeded them, however, disdained such dialogue—for reasons that bear a striking resemblance to the algorithmic antihumanism that is ascendant today. Drawing on Kamara’s body of work, colonial archival documents, and postcolonial knowledge production within Senegal, Textual Life offers a decolonial vision of the humanities. By engaging with African and Muslim intellectual resources, Marsh shows how thinkers like Kamara who were subjected to colonialism can help us find a future after empire. Wendell Marsh is Associate Professor of African Literature and Philosophy at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University. Madina Thiam is Fannie Gaston-Johansson Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

The Assassins and the Templars are two of history’s most legendary groups. One was a Shi’ite religious sect, the other a Christian military order created to defend the Holy Land. Violently opposed, they had vastly different reputations, followings, and ambitions. Yet they developed strikingly similar strategies—and their intertwined stories have, oddly enough, uncanny parallels. In Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood (Yale UP, 2025), Dr. Steve Tibble engagingly traces the history of these two groups from their origins to their ultimate destruction. He shows how, outnumbered and surrounded, they survived only by perfecting “the promise of death,” either in the form of a Templar charge or an Assassin’s dagger. Death, for themselves or their enemies, was at the core of these extraordinary organisations. Their fanaticism changed the medieval world—and, even up to the present day, in video games and countless conspiracy theories, they have become endlessly conjoined in myth and memory. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

The Malay world boasts a wealth of diverse cultures. The arrival of Islam in the Malay world during the 12th to 13th centuries permanently transformed the aesthetic landscape, and even European colonisation could not stem this change. In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Prof. Julie Yu-Wen Chen from the University of Helsinki talks to Dr. Dzul Afiq bin Zakaria and Dr. Wahyuni Masyidah Binti Md Isa from the Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Malaya about the localisation of Islamic arts in Malaysia. They illuminate the core of Islamic arts, which view art as a reflection of their faith. In Islam, there is no fundamental distinction between spiritual and secular art, enabling the qualities of Islamic architecture and arts to rise above mere aesthetics and utility. Dr. Dzul Afiq bin Zakaria, a distinguished scholar and artist, possesses artwork that can be shared with our audience to elucidate the relationship between culture, philosophy, and the arts within the Malay world. Dr. Wahyuni Masyidah Binti Md Isa’s research employs Motion Capture technology to chart and conserve Islamic art. For example, Senaman Melayu Tua is a therapeutic exercise rooted in Malay culture. This exercise harmoniously integrates with both Malay culture and Islam, yielding comprehensive positive effects on the spiritual aspect by fostering inner peace, patience, and self-awareness. Her research utilises technology to visualize the micro-lines embedded within Senaman Melayu Tua. Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies and Asian studies coordinator at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland). Chen is one of the Editors of the highly-ranked Journal of Chinese Political Science. Formerly, she was Editor-in-Chief of Asian Ethnicity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

In this episode of Unlocking Academia, host Raja Aderdor speaks with Dr. Mutaz Al-Khatib, Associate Professor at the Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics and Director of the Master’s program in Applied Islamic Ethics at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. Together, they explore Key Classical Works on Islamic Ethics (Brill, 2024), a groundbreaking edited volume that brings together foundational texts spanning hadith, fiqh, kalam, Sufism, and Islamic medicine. Dr. Al-Khatib traces the intellectual lineage of Islamic ethical thought, highlighting how these texts offer practical guidance for lived moral practice while challenging dominant Greco-centric frameworks in ethical theory. The conversation delves into the interdisciplinary nature of Islamic ethics, its historical evolution, and why understanding ethics as a lived tradition remains vital in contemporary scholarship. Listeners will gain insight into the methods behind compiling and editing classical texts, the thematic threads that connect diverse genres, and the enduring relevance of Islamic ethical thought for scholars, students, and anyone interested in the intersections of religion, law, and philosophy. Lyrical, insightful, and rigorously scholarly, this episode invites audiences to engage with the rich, evolving tradition of Islamic ethics and consider its impact on both historical and modern contexts. We are Clavis Aurea: a dynamic team dedicated to advancing academic publishing and sharing groundbreaking scholarship with scholars, students, and enthusiasts worldwide. Based in the historic publishing hub of Leiden, we eat, sleep, and breathe publishing! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Muslims have lived in the Caribbean for centuries. Far From Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean (Rutgers University Press, 2020) examines the archive of autobiography, literature, music and public celebrations in Guyana and Trinidad, offering an analysis of the ways Islam became integral to the Caribbean, and the ways the Caribbean shaped Islamic practices. Aliyah Khan recovers stories that have been there all along, though they have received little scholarly attention. The interdisciplinary approach takes on big questions about creolization, gender, politics and cultural change, but it does so with precision and attention to detail. Aliyah Khan is an assistant professor of English and Afroamerican and African studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Today’s episode focuses on the intersection of Islam, society, and politics in Indonesia, the world’s single-largest majority Muslim country and the world’s third biggest democracy. Indonesian Islam is notable for its diversity, its associational strength, and its prominent role in both the transition from authoritarian rule to democracy in the late 1990s and in democratic politics in the country since that time. To discuss this huge, complicated topic, Dialogues on Southeast Asia turns to Professor Robert Hefner, Professor of Anthropology and Professor of Global Studies at Boston University. Professor Hefner is the author of four major studies of Islam in Indonesia: Hindu Javanese: Tengger Tradition and Islam (Princeton University Press, 1985), The Political Economy of Mountain Java: An Interpretive History (University of California Press, 1990), Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton University Press, 2000), and, most recently, Islam and Citizenship in Indonesia: Democracy and the Quest for an Inclusive Public Ethics (Routledge, 2024). He is also the author of a long list of journal articles and book chapters and the editor or co-editor of no less than fifteen edited or co-edited volumes, many of which serve as foundational texts in the comparative study of religion and of Islam in particular. A towering figure in the study of Islam in Indonesia and in the comparative study of religion more broadly. Robert Hefner’s work spans the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and political science to cover the intersection and interplay of religion, society, and politics in Indonesia and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

In its first edition, this book focused on the representations of Islam that circulated in the wake of the 9/11 attacks – representations that scholars, pundits, and politicians alike used either to essentialize and demonize it or, instead, to isolate specific aspects as apolitical and thus tolerable faith. This little book’s larger thesis therefore argued for how the classifications that we routinely use to identify and thereby negotiate our social worlds – notably such categories as “religion” or “faith” – are explicitly political. The new edition of Religion and the Domestication of Dissent: Or, How to Live in a Less Than Perfect Nation (Routledge, 2025), which updates the first and adds a new closing chapter, continues to be relevant today – a time when assertions concerning supposedly authentic and homogenous identities (whether shared by “us” or “them”) continue to animate a variety of public debates where the stakes remain high. Thinking back on how Islam was often portrayed in scholarship and popular media in western Europe and North America offers lessons for how debates today unfold on such topics as Christian nationalism – a designation now prominent among pundits intent on identifying the proper and improper ways in which religion intersects with modern political life. But it is this very distinction (between religion and politics) that ought to be attracting our attention, if we are interested not in which way of being religious is right or reasonable but, instead, in determining why some social groups are known as religious in the first place. Seeing the latter question as linked to studying how socially formative categories function in liberal democracies, Religion and the Domestication of Dissent offers an anthropology of the present, when the longstanding mechanisms of liberal governance seem to be under threat. Russell T. McCutcheon is University Research Professor and, for 18 years, was the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, USA. His publications include a variety of works on the history of the field, the everyday effects of the category “religion,” along with a number of practical resources for scholars, teachers, and students. This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website thereluctantamericanist.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

It's often touted that Rumi is one of the best-selling poets in the United States. That may be the case but popular renderings of the writings of this 13th-century Muslim have largely detached him from the Islamic tradition, and specifically Sufi mysticism. In Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition (Yale University Press, 2018), Omid Safi, Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University, places Jalal al-Din alongside luminaries within the rich archive of Islamic Sufi poetry. In this anthology of newly translated poetry Safi focuses on love, especially ‘ishq/eshq, what he renders as “radical love.” The volume organizes translations of Qur’an and Hadith, Sufi mystics and poets into four thematic sections: God of Love, Path of Love, Lover & Beloved, and Beloved Community. Radical Love does an excellent job of introducing readers to key ideas from Islamic mysticism that are rooted in first hand knowledge of Arabic and Persian texts. This book is valuable to both the scholar and the student because of Safi’s informed nuance in both the careful selection of source passages and the subtle lyricism of his translations. In our conversation we discussed the translation of Sufi poetry in English, strategies to translation work, love in the Islamic tradition, the reception of Rumi, Ahmed Ghazali’s first book in Persian on love, Qawwali singers, contemporary sheikhs, and several key Sufis authors. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

A major new history of Saudi Arabia, from its eighteenth-century origins to the present day Saudi Arabia is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, a major player on the international stage and the site of Islam’s two holiest cities. It is also one of the world’s only absolute monarchies. How did Saudi Arabia get to where it is today? In Saudi Arabia: A Modern History (Yale UP, 2025), David Commins narrates the full history of Saudi Arabia from oasis emirate to present-day attempts to leap to a post-petroleum economy. Moving through the ages, Commins traces how the Saud dynasty’s reliance on sectarianism, foreign expertise, and petroleum to stabilize power has unintentionally spawned secular and religious movements seeking accountability and justice. He incorporates the experiences of activists, women, religious minorities, Bedouin, and expatriate workers as the country transformed from subsistence agrarian life to urban consumer society. This is a perceptive portrait of Saudi Arabia’s complex and evolving story—and a country that is all too easily misunderstood. David Commins is the Benjamin Rush Chair in the Liberal Arts and Sciences and professor of history at Dickinson College. He is the author of Islam in Saudi Arabia, The Gulf States, and The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

US-born Protestant evangelicalism has gone global to an extent of which many of us might be unaware. Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims (Columbia Global Reports, 2024) tells the story of Americans’ colossal mobilization to proclaim Christianity “to the ends of the Earth,” a movement that triumphed in the Global South, challenged the Vatican, then turned east in full force after 9/11 to spread the Gospel among Muslims. When the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq set off a wave of anti-American attacks and made the field too dangerous for US missionaries, thousands of disciples, particularly from Latin America, were mobilized to finish the task. In Soul by Soul, journalist Adriana Carranca follows the pilgrimage of a missionary family from Brazil as they move to Afghanistan. Carranca brings us on a harrowing journey through the underground passages of the global evangelical movement as it clashes with the full force of militant Islamic groups in the Middle East and South Asia, where contemporary religious wars are being fought, soul by soul. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Focusing on Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) – one of the foremost scholars and authorities in the Muslim world who is central to the Islamic intellectual tradition – this book embarks on a study of doubt (shakk) and certainty (yaqīn) in his epistemology. Ghazālī’s Epistemology: A Critical Study of Doubt and Certainty (Routledge, 2024) looks at Ghazālī’s attitude to philosophical demonstration and Sufism as a means to certainty. In early scholarship surrounding Ghazālī, he has often been blamed as the one who single-handedly offered the death-blow to philosophy in the Muslim world. In much of contemporary scholarship, Ghazālī is understood to prefer philosophy as the ultimate means to certainty, granting Sufism a secondary status. Hence, much of previous scholarship has either focused on Ghazālī as a Sufi or as a philosopher; this book takes a parallel approach, and acknowledges each discipline in its right place. It analyses Ghazālī’s approach to acquiring certainty, his methodological scepticism, his foundationalism, his attitude to authoritative instruction (taʿlim), and the place of philosophical demonstration and Sufism in his epistemology. Offering a systematic and comprehensive approach to Ghazālī’s epistemology, this book is a valuable resource for scholars of Islamic philosophy and Sufism in particular, and for educated readers of Islamic studies in general. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

The collection of wisdom fables known as Kalila and Dimna began its long literary life in Sanskrit more than two millennia ago, and was subsequently translated to numerous languages. But it is the Arabic version, adapted from Middle Persian by the eighth-century scholar Ibn al-Muqaffa, that has left the most substantial literary footprint. A foundational text of classical Arabic prose and the basis for translations into Hebrew, Syriac, Castilian, Latin, Persian, and more, versions of Kalila and Dimna exists in hundreds of manuscript copies held in libraries around the world. Kalila and Dimna is the focus of Isabel Toral and Beatrice Gruendler's new work An Unruly Classic: Kalīla and Dimna and Its Syriac, Arabic, and Early Persian Versions (Brill: 2024). In this collected volume, members of the Kalila and Dimna project discuss, from different perspectives, a core aspect of their work with this textual tradition: the study of variation and mutability. The aim is to shed light on Kalila and Dimna’s so-called mouvance and establish typologies of textual mobility and instability across linguistic traditions and historical periods, as well as to develop analytical tools to describe, classify, represent, and interpret these dynamics. As will be shown, the progressive digitalization of philology in the last decades has offered the unique opportunity of putting the concept of mouvance into practice. Contributors include Theodore S. Beers, Jan J. van Ginkel, Khouloud Khalfallah, Mahmoud Kozae, Rima Redwan, and Johannes Stephan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Murad Idris, a political theorist in the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics at the University of Virginia, explores the concept of peace, the term itself and the way that it has been considered and analyzed in western and Islamic political thought. War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought (Oxford University Press, 2018) traces the concept of peace, and the way it is often insinuated with other words and concepts, over more than 2000 years of political thought. Idris begins with Plato’s Laws as one of the early sources to consider the tension that seems to be constant in terms of the pursuit of violence in order to attain peace. War for Peace provides some important framing in thinking about peace, in large measure because the research indicates how rare it is for peace itself to be solitary, it is almost always lassoed to other words and concepts, and functions either as a binary opposition (e.g.: war and peace) or as part of a dyad combination (e.g.: peace and justice). We are urged to think about peace and the valence that is given to the word and the ideal—since the moral and the political understandings of peace are often entangled and part of what Idris is doing in his careful and thoughtful research is to tease out the political concept, apart from the often religious and moral ideal. This rich and complex analysis integrates a broad group of theorists—Plato, al-Farabi, Aquinas, Erasmus, Gentili, Grotius, Ibn Khaldun, Hobbes, Kant, and Sayyid Qutb)—all of whom were examining the role of peace within politics and political thought. And Idris structures these thinkers into chronological and theoretical groupings, to explore the ways in which they were responding to each other, across time, but also to understand how different thinkers were connecting peace to other concepts. War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought may leave the reader anxious but also enlightened in considering this idea and its perplexing place within the history of political thought. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies