Everyone has heard of Mecca. But few people outside Pakistan have heard of Makli, or “Little Mecca,” the sacred cemetery that is both the holiest place in Sindh and a UNESCO World Heritage site. The site is actually huge, with up to a million people buried there, so the “little” reflects respect for Mecca rather than the size of Makli. More important than Makli’s size, though, is its beauty. From the fourteenth onwards, rulers and aristocrats from the local Samma, Arghun, then Mughal dynasties commissioned elegant carved stone mausoleums around the burial places of the saints who rendered Makli sacred. In this episode, we’ll take an audio tour of its beautiful buildings, looking at their decorative symbolism and Arabic inscriptions, before delving further into the history of this extraordinary necropolis of the holy, powerful, and poor alike. Nile Green talks to Fatima Quraishi, author of Palimpsests Past and Present: The Sufis and Sultans of the Makli Necropolis (1380–1660) (University of North Carolina Press, 2026).

Today nearly a third of Ethiopians are Muslims. At around 37 million, that’s a larger Muslim population than many Middle Eastern countries. According to Islamic tradition, fourteen centuries ago the first person appointed by the Prophet Muhammad to call Muslims to prayer was an Ethiopian called Bilal ibn Rabbah. Moreover, some of the Prophet’s companions sought refuge in the Ethiopian Christian kingdom of Axum. Over the following centuries, Islam spread to other regions and ethnic groups in what is now Ethiopia, developing a rich tradition of manuscript written in Arabic and local languages alike. Using the Arabic script (or more recently the Fidäl script), Islamic manuscripts were written in languages as varied as Somali, Harari, Oromo, Afar and Tigrinya. This episode explores the multilingual manuscripts, Sufi traditions, and modern technologies through which Ethiopia’s Muslims have maintained their religious and cultural heritage from the time of Bilal to today.  Nile Green talks to Alessandro Gori, co-editor of The Writings of the Muslim Peoples of Northeastern Africa (Brill, 2022).

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).

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).