New Books in Islamic Studies

A conversation with award-winning academic Dr. Shabana Mir discussing her book Muslim American Women on Campus: Undergraduate Social Life and Identity (UNC Press, 2016) Interviewer: Sofia Rehman.

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This episode is the first of three special episodes in this season of Radio ReOrient in which we look back on the first principles of Critical Muslim Studies. In this episode, Hizer Mir talks to Salman Sayyid about post-positivism - what it means, what it offers, and how it relates to the project of decolonising. The discussion that we kick off here will reverberate throughout this series, as we return to talk in later episodes about post-orientalism and decoloniality.

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An interview with Prof. Salman Sayyid on post-orientalism, what it means and its place in Critical Muslim Studies. 

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Nahj al-Balagha is among the most powerful, consequential, and linguistically brilliant masterpieces of Arabic and of Islamic thought and literature. Based on the orations, letters, and sayings of wisdom of ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib (d. 661), the first Imam or successor to Prophet Muhammad in Shi‘i Islam and the fourth caliph in Sunni Islam, this oral treasure was compiled and brought together as a text by the late tenth/early eleventh scholar and poet Al-Sharif al-Radi (d. 1015). 

In this episode I speak with Professor Tahera Qutbuddin who has provided us with a majestic and brilliant complete English translation of Nahj al-Balagha titled Nahj al-Balāgha: The Wisdom and Eloquence of ‘Alī (Brill, 2024), a parallel English-Arabic text published open access by Brill. The publication of this volume is an event of seismic importance in the study of Islam, religion, and Arabic. Qutbuddin’s translation is animated with the purpose of rendering the Arabic text of Nahj al-Balagha in English in a fashion that amplifies its literary and philosophical potency, a task at which she excels throughout the translation. The experience of reading this translation is nothing short of a deeply moving, philosophically enriching, and linguistically powerful rhapsody. In addition to an eminently user friendly translation with the particular sections and moments of Nahj al-Balagha clearly marked out, Qutbuddin also presents an erudite account of the text’s reception, reception history, and archival density. This outstanding volume will also be a joy to teach and use as primary source material in a range of courses on Islam, religion, Arabic, and the Humanities more broadly.

SherAli Tareen is Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. Listener feedback is most welcome.

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In Breathtaking Revelations: The Science of Breath from the Fifty Kamarupa Verses to Hazrat Inayat Khan (Suluk Press, 2024), Carl W. Ernst and Patrick J. D’Silva explore the intersections of Sufi and yogic breath-based meditation. Ernst and D’Silva offer us here two stunning texts for study. 

The first, an anonymous Persian translation of a 14th century manuscript that introduces us to a variety of divinations, incantations, and much more, as well as a thorough outline of the science of the breath, based on whether it comes out from the left or right nostrils and its significance. This text especially is fascinating for its incantations to yogini devis (or female spirits). 

The second text under consideration is Hazrat Inayat Khan’s The Science of the Breath dictated in English to his student Zohra Williams in the early 20th century. There are numerous similarities across these two texts separated by centuries, especially the focus on breath divination based on left and right nostrils (in this instance associated with jamal and jalali qualities while in the former focused on solar and lunar relations) but also key differences, such as attention to the elements like earth, fire, water etc. in Inayat Khan’s teachings. 

Reading these two texts on breath and its divination side by side brings to focus the long tradition of Sufi engagement with yoga, and the overlaps between Hindu and Muslim spiritual practices amongst Sufis and yogis, especially of magic, sciences and much more. This book will be of interest to practitioners of Sufism as well as those with interest in Sufism, Islam, yoga, Hinduism, and much more.

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An interview with Salman Sayyid about decoloniality and its place in Critical Muslim Studies. 

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Radio ReOrient is back for another season, and this time Hizer Mir is joined by a new team of hosts: Claudia Radiven, Saeed Khan and Chella Ward. In this first episode Hizer and Chella interview Ambereen Dadabhoy, associate professor of literature at Harvey Mudd College, about her brand new book Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds (Routledge, 2024). In the process we discover Shakespeare’s secret Muslim characters, travel around an early modern Mediterranean that is nothing like the border of Europe we know today, and ask whether it is possible to talk about Islamophobia much earlier in history than its conventional beginnings.

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Ibrahim Fraihat’s latest book, Iran and Saudi Arabia: Taming a Chaotic Conflict (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) is much more than an exploration of the history of animosity between Saudi Arabia and Iran and its debilitating impact on an already volatile Middle East. It is a detailed roadmap for management and resolution of what increasingly looks like an intractable conflict. Based on years of field research, Fraihat builds a framework that initially could help Saudi Arabia and Iran prevent their conflict from spinning out of control, create mechanisms for communication and travel down a road of confidence building that could create building blocks for a resolution. Fraihat’s book could not have been published at a more critical moment. A devastating coronavirus pandemic has hit both Saudi Arabia and Iran hard. So has the associated global economic breakdown and the collapse of oil markets. The double whammies constitute the most existential crisis the kingdom has faced in at least half a century. They hit Iran particularly hard as it labours under harsh US sanctions. Fraihat offers a roadmap that would allow Saudi Arabia and Iran to ultimately extricate themselves from costly proxy wars in Yemen, Syria and Libya. By providing a detailed roadmap, Fraihat’s book makes a major contribution not only to a vast literature of conflict in the Middle East but also to policymakers in Saudi Arabia and as well as would-be mediators.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies and the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute.

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The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World (Basic Book, 2024) recreates one of the watershed moments in the history of the Middle East: the ferocious outbreaks of disorder across the Levant in 1860 which resulted in the massacre of thousands of Christians in Damascus.

Eugene Rogan brilliantly recreates the lost world of the Middle East under Ottoman rule. The once mighty empire was under pressure from global economic change and European imperial expansion. Reforms in the mid-nineteenth century raised tensions across the empire, nowhere more so than in Damascus. A multifarious city linked by caravan trade to Baghdad, the Mediterranean and Mecca, the chaos of languages, customs and beliefs made Damascus a warily tolerant place. Until the reforms began to advantage the minority Christian community at the expense of the Muslim majority.

But in 1860 people who had generally lived side by side for generations became bitter enemies as news of civil war in Mount Lebanon arrived in the city. Under the threat of a French expeditionary force, the Ottomans dealt with the disaster effectively and ruthlessly - but the old, generally quite tolerant Damascene world lay in ruins. It would take a quarter of a century to restore stability and prosperity to the Syrian capital.

This is both an essential book for understanding the emergence of the modern Middle East from the destruction of the old Ottoman world, and a uniquely gripping story.

Eugene Rogan is author of the bestselling The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914-1920. He is professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Oxford and Director of the Middle East Centre, St Antony's College, Oxford.

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Since coming to power in 2002, Turkey’s governing party, the AKP, has made poverty relief a central part of their political program. In addition to neoliberal reforms, AKP’s program has involved an emphasis on Islamic charity that is unprecedented in the history of the Turkish Republic. To understand the causes and consequences of this phenomenon, Zencirci introduces the concept of the Muslim Social, defined as a welfare regime that reimagined and reconfigured Islamic charitable practices to address the complex needs of a modern market society.

In The Muslim Social: Neoliberalism, Charity, and Poverty in Turkey (Syracuse UP, 2024), Zencirci explores the blending of religious values and neoliberal elements in dynamic, flexible, and unexpected ways. Although these governmental assemblages of Islamic neoliberalism produced new forms of generosity, distinctive notions of poverty, and novel ways of relating to others in society, Zencirci reveals how this welfare regime privileged managerial efficiency and emotional well-being at the expense of other objectives such as equality, development, or justice. The book provides a lens onto the everyday life of Islamic neoliberalism, while also mapping the kind of political concerns that animate poverty governance in our capitalist present.

Gizem Zencirci is an associate professor of political science at Providence College. Her work has been published in journals such as the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and the Journal of Cultural Economy.

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