New Books in Islamic Studies

In this final episode of Season 11, the Radio ReOrient team - Hizer Mir, Claudia Radiven, Saeed Khan, Chella Ward and Salman Sayyid - look back over our discussions this season. We put these into the context in which the conversations took place: the context of the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and the Occupied Territories, of global Islamophobia, of campus movements and protests for decolonial liberation… and much more. We reflect on the value of the literary, which has been a thread throughout this season, for imagining beyond islamophobia and share some secret sneak peaks of what to expect next season! We will be back soon and look forward to catching up with you then, listeners old and new. But for now: let’s listen in!

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The second part of the interview with Prof. Ella Shohat in which ghosts, nationalism/national identity and its role in calls for liberation (amongst other topics).

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A conversation between Prof. Salman Sayyid and Prof. Ella Shohat on (amongst other topics) the significance of 1492, Orientalism and race.

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Farid al-Din ‘Attar’s writings have greatly influenced Persian Sufism, but what do we know of him as a thinker? Engaging his diverse writings from poetry to stories, Cyrus Ali Zargar’s Religion of Love: Sufism and Self-Transformation in the Poetic Imagination of ‘Attar (SUNY Press, 2024) captures for us some of ‘Attar’s worldviews, especially as it is rooted in a Persian and Muslim historical context. The book gives us insights to ‘Attar’s take on moral psychology, ethics, and intellectual debates he was responding to, such as with philosophers and legal scholars. Zargar captures ‘Attar’s religion of love, which takes us to the edge of infidelity and at times even crosses its threshold only to better understand the experience of union with the Beloved (Divine) that mystics have discussed across traditions. This book will be of interest to listeners who are curious about Persian literature, Sufism, Islamic philosophy and mysticism generally.

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Women, Agency, and the State in Guinea: Silent Politics (Routledge, 2020) examines how women in Guinea articulate themselves politically within and outside institutional politics. It documents the everyday practices that local female actors adopt to deal with the continuous economic, political, and social insecurities that emerge in times of political transformations.

Carole Ammann argues that women's political articulations in Muslim Guinea do not primarily take place within women's associations or institutional politics such as political parties; but instead women's silent forms of politics manifest in their daily agency, that is, when they make a living, study, marry, meet friends, raise their children, and do household chores. The book also analyses the relationship between the female population and the local authorities, and discusses when and why women's claim making enjoys legitimacy in the eyes of other men and women, as well as representatives of 'traditional' authorities and the local government.

Paying particular attention to intersectional perspectives, this book will be of interest to scholars of African studies, social anthropology, political anthropology, the anthropology of gender, urban anthropology, gender studies, and Islamic studies.

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A vibrant urban settlement from mediaeval times and the royal seat of the Safavid dynasty, the city of Isfahan emerged as a great metropolis during the seventeenth century. Using key sources, Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran (Penn State University Press, 2024) reconstructs the spaces and senses of this dynamic city.

Focusing on nuances of urban experience, Dr. Farshid Emami expands our understanding of Isfahan in a global context. He takes the reader on an evocative journey through the city’s markets, promenades, and coffeehouses, bringing to life the social landscapes that animated the lives of urban dwellers and shaped their perceptions of themselves and the world. In doing so, Emami reveals seventeenth-century Isfahan as more than a cluster of beautiful monuments and gardens. It was a cosmopolitan city, where senses and materials, nature and artifice, and ritual and sociability acted in unison, engendering urban experiences that became paramount across the globe during the early modern period.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.

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Over the course of the Almoravid (1040–1147) and Almohad (1121–1269) dynasties, mediaeval Marrakesh evolved from an informal military encampment into a thriving metropolis that attempted to translate a local and distinctly rural past into a broad, imperial architectural vernacular. In Marrakesh and the Mountains: Landscape, Urban Planning, and Identity in the Medieval Maghrib (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Abbey Stockstill convincingly demonstrates that the city’s surrounding landscape provided the principal mode of negotiation between these identities.

The contours of mediaeval Marrakesh were shaped in the twelfth-century transition between the two empires of Berber origin. These dynasties constructed their imperial authority through markedly different approaches to urban space, reflecting their respective concerns in communicating complex identities that fluctuated between paradigmatically Islamic and distinctly local. Using interdisciplinary methodologies to reconstruct this urban environment, Dr. Stockstill broadens the analysis of Marrakesh’s mediaeval architecture to explore the interrelated interactions among the city’s monuments and its highly resonant landscape. Marrakesh and the Mountains integrates Marrakesh into the context of urbanism in the wider Islamic world and grants the Almoravid and Almohad dynasties agency over the creation and instantiation of their imperial capital.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.

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This episode is the third one this series where we look back over the first principles of the ReOrient project. In previous episodes we have discussed post-orientalism and post-positivism, here we turn to decoloniality. Discussions of decoloniality have become increasingly mainstream since the ‘Decolonise the Curriculum’ and ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movements, and calls to decolonise are often heard on pro-Palestine marches around the world. But what is the relationship between the decolonial and the Islamicate? And how do we ensure that as it is mainstreamed, decolonial thought does not lose its meaning? To find out, let’s listen in.

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An interview with Salman Sayyid in which he addresses some of the criticisms of the recent definition of Islamophobia as “a type of racism that targets Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.”

To read more about the incident of Islamophobia mentioned in this podcast, please visit this link.

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Two academics, one Jewish and one Muslim, come together to show how much their faiths have in common—particularly in America.

This book provides a braided portrait of two American groups whose strong religious attachments and powerful commitments to ritual observance are not always easy to adapt to American culture. Orthodox Jews and observant Muslims share many similarities in their efforts to be at home in America while holding on to their practices and beliefs. As Samuel Heilman and Mucahit Bilici reveal, they follow similar paths in their American experience.

Heilman and Bilici immerse readers in three layers of discussion for each religious group: historical evolution, sociological transformation, and a comparative understanding of certain parallel beliefs and practices, each of which is used as a window onto the lived reality of these communities.

Written by two sociologists, one a religiously observant American Jew and the other an American Muslim, Following Similar Paths: What American Jews and Muslims Can Learn from One Another (U California Press, 2024) offers lively insider and outsider perspectives that deepen our understanding of American diversity and what it means to be religious in a modern society.

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