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).

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).