New Books in Islamic Studies

Dr. Emily Greble, Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, is the author of Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2021). Focusing on the Muslim inhabitants of the Austro-Hungarian Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and later Yugoslavia, as they repeatedly adjusted to shifting borders and modern state building projects between the 1870s and the 1940s, Dr. Greble shows how Ottoman political, legal, economic, and social legacies shaped post Ottoman successor states, and how ordinary Balkan Muslims understood, negotiated, and reworked the rapidly changing ideological landscapes into which the late nineteenth century had thrown them. The book forcefully argues that modern European constructs of law, national minority, and public education developed in a distinct Christian context. By recovering the Balkan Muslims’ struggle to define the role of Islam in their new, nationalizing states and societies, the book sheds new light on the historical dynamics of modern citizenship and multiculturalism, but also illuminates Muslims’ oft overlooked agency in the making of modern Europe.

Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University.

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Apocalypse Then: The First Crusade is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Jay Rubenstein, Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Premodern World at the University of Southern California, and provides us with fascinating insights into medieval society. How did the First Crusade happen? What could have suddenly caused tens of thousands of knights, commoners and even nuns at the end of the 11th century to leave their normal lives behind and trek thousands of miles across hostile territory in an unprecedented vicious and bloody quest to wrest Jerusalem from its occupying powers? Jay Rubenstein, historian of the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual worlds of Europe in the Middle Ages, carefully explores those questions based on his extensive research while discussing the Apocalypse: the crusaders’ sincere belief that the end of the world was approaching and their opportunity to participate in the last stage of the divine plan.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at [email protected].

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The construction of collective identity among the Muridiyya abroad is a communal but contested endeavor. Differing conceptions of what should be the mission of Muridiyya institutions in the diaspora reveal disciples’ conflicting politics and challenge the notion of the order’s homogeneity. While some insist on the universal dimension of Ahmadu Bamba Mbakke’s calling and emphasize dawa (proselytizing), others prioritize preserving Muridiyya identity abroad by consolidating the linkages with the leadership in Senegal. Diasporic reimaginings of the Muridiyya abroad, in turn, inspire cultural reconfigurations at home.

Drawing from a wide array of oral and archival sources in multiple languages collected in five countries, The Muridiyya on the Move: Islam, Migration, and Place Making (Ohio UP, 2021) reconstructs over half a century of the order’s history, focusing on mobility and cultural transformations in urban settings. In this groundbreaking work, Babou highlights the importance of the dahira (urban prayer circle) as he charts the continuities and ruptures between Muridiyya migrations. Throughout, he delineates the economic, socio-political, and other forces that powered these population movements, including colonial rule, the economic crises of the postcolonial era, and natural disasters.

Sara Katz is a postdoctoral associate in the history department at Duke University.

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Countering the traditional narrative of "migration as crisis," Global Nomads tells the story of a group of people for whom migration is not a symptom of a disordered world, but rather an ordinary practice full of social and personal meaning. Decentering migration from North America and Europe, this ethnography explores how ethnic Fulbe people in the West African Republic of Guinea migrate abroad to seek their fortunes and fulfill their responsibilities--and in the process, securing a place at home. 

Based on twenty-three months of ethnographic research, Global Nomads: An Ethnography of Migration, Islam, and Politics in West Africa (Oxford UP, 2020) investigates how mobility abroad shapes belonging at home and shows that political and economic motivations to migrate are important in Guinea, as elsewhere--but they are only part of the story. Family and community expectations, cultural ideals of work, notions of gender, and religious piety all come into play when people dream of going abroad and when they contemplate coming home again. Ultimately, Global Nomads shows how understandings of the past and its connections to the present--of what being a respectable person entails, of individual responsibilities to a larger community--all shape how people live in contexts of insecurity.

Dr. Sara Katz is a postdoctoral associate in the history department at Duke University.

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Muslim South Asia is widely characterized as a culture that idealizes female anonymity: women's bodies are veiled and their voices silenced. Challenging these perceptions, Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, University of Sheffield, highlights an elusive strand of autobiographical writing dating back several centuries that offers a new lens through which to study notions of selfhood. In Elusive Lives: Gender, Autobiography, and the Self in Muslim South Asia (Stanford University Press, 2018), she locates the voices of Muslim women who rejected taboos against women speaking out, by telling their life stories in written autobiography. 

To chart patterns across time and space, materials dated from the sixteenth century to the present are drawn from across South Asia – including present-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Lambert-Hurley uses many rare autobiographical texts in a wide array of languages to elaborate a theoretical model for gender, autobiography, and the self beyond the usual Euro-American frame. In doing so, she works toward a new, globalized history of the field. Ultimately, Elusive Lives points to the sheer diversity of Muslim women's lives and life stories, offering a unique window into a history of the everyday against a backdrop of imperialism, reformism, nationalism and feminism. In our conversation we discuss autobiographical writing, travelogues, letters, diaries, interviews, low literacy rates, the social and physical geographies of authors, reasons Muslim women narrated their life, the role of editors, translators, on publishers, intended and unintended audiences, the actress Begum Khurshid Mirza, and gender difference across autobiographies.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected].

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The image of the Ottoman Turks and their interaction with the Christian West, has undergone many changes in the past: from William Gladstone's famous comment that: “[The Turks] one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned.” To the more recent revisionist views of the 'cultural exchange' school, who de-emphasize the military conquest, endemic violence and proto-ethnic cleansing that were in fact part and parcel of Ottoman rule in the Balkans and elsewhere. And, instead emphasize cultural interaction between the Christian West and the Muslim East. 

In his new book The Last Muslim Conquest: The Ottoman Empire and Its Wars in Europe (Princeton UP, 2021), Ottoman specialist, Professor Gabor Agoston, of Georgetown University, goes beyond both of the above schools, in a post-revisionist treatment which while not ignoring some aspects of the 'cultural exchange' school, retains the correct emphasize on Ottoman Turk policies of military conquest, violence and expansionism in the Balkans and elsewhere. In a treatment which depends upon rich stream of research in Ottoman Turkish archives as well as elsewhere, Professor Agoston provides the reader with an in depth analysis of the military structure that made the Ottoman Turks one of the great, military and imperial powers of the 16th and 17th centuries. And why that power's failure to adapt, eventually resulted in its long decline and eventual fall. In short, Professor Agoston's treatment is a splendid work, aimed at both the academic and the lay educated audience. A sheet delight to read.

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.

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Social and political conditions, in association with the self, can hardly be explained by one factor. Instead, they are shaped by several factors in diverse, mutually influencing ways. This is the essence of intersectionality, a concept that helps us understand the complexity of the human experience.

In the third episode of our new themed series Across the Rainbow, catch us in discussion with Dr. Shanon Shah, Visiting Research Fellow in Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College, London, and author of the article “Ethnicity, Gender and Class in the Experiences of Gay Muslims”.

Drawing from the well of personal experience, Dr. Shah delves into the ways in which multiple axes of social division, such as religion, ethnicity, gender, and class, interact differently in Malaysia, where Islam is the majority and official religion, and in Britain, where it is a minority religion, to produce varied outcomes for gay Muslim men and women in both countries.

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In Islam and the Devotional Object: Seeing Religion in Egypt and Syria (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Richard J. A. McGregor, Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University, offers a history of Islamic practice through the aesthetic reception of medieval religious objects. Elaborate parades in Cairo and Damascus included decorated objects of great value, destined for Mecca and Medina. Among these were the precious dress sewn yearly for the Ka'ba, and large colorful sedans mounted on camels, which mysteriously completed the Hajj without carrying a single passenger. Along with the brisk trade in Islamic relics, these objects and the variety of contested meanings attached to them, constituted material practices of religion that persisted into the colonial era, but were suppressed in the twentieth century. McGregor here recovers the biographies of religious objects, including relics, banners, public texts, and coverings for the Ka'ba. Reconstructing the premodern visual culture of Islamic Egypt and Syria, he follows the shifting meanings attached to objects of devotion, as well as the contingent nature of religious practice and experience. In our conversation we discuss aesthetic theory, material culture, processional objects, museum exhibition, relic typologies, devotional objects and religious landscapes, public celebrations, visual text and its illegibility, and the function of banners.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected].

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Mirjam Lücking's Indonesians and Their Arab World: Guided Mobility Among Labor Migrants and Mecca Pilgrims (Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2021) explores the ways contemporary Indonesians understand their relationship to the Arab world. Despite being home to the largest Muslim population in the world, Indonesia exists on the periphery of an Islamic world centered around the Arabian Peninsula. Mirjam Lücking approaches the problem of interpreting the current conservative turn in Indonesian Islam by considering the ways personal relationships, public discourse, and matters of religious self-understanding guide two groups of Indonesians who actually travel to the Arabian Peninsula--labor migrants and Mecca pilgrims--in becoming physically mobile and making their mobility meaningful. This concept, which Lücking calls guided mobility, reveals that changes in Indonesian Islamic traditions are grounded in domestic social constellations and calls claims of outward Arab influence in Indonesia into question. With three levels of comparison (urban and rural areas, Madura and Central Java, and migrants and pilgrims), this ethnographic case study foregrounds how different regional and socioeconomic contexts determine Indonesians' various engagements with the Arab world.

Irene Promodh is a PhD student in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a Graduate Fellow at the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies in Michigan.

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Believing in South Central: Everyday Islam in the City of Angels (University of Chicago Press, 2021) by Pamela J. Prickett is an ethnographic study of an African American Muslim community in South Central Los Angeles. The accessible study follows the believers of Masjid al-Quran (MAQ) as they live their Islam in and around the mosque community, such as during prayers or Ramadan, but also while conducting business or interacting with one another. Masjid al-Quran’s institutional history dates back to the Nation of Islam, which then later transitioned to Sunni Islam through the leadership of W. D. Mohammad. MAQ is also located in South Central, a community that has changed demographically and socio-economically overtime. Embedded in this complex urban geography, Prickett's study masterfully illuminates the deep entanglements of class, race, and gender in the defining of faith and ritual for members of MAQ. The study interrogates tenuous realities of giving and receiving charity, the intricate agentic Muslim expressions of African American femininity and womanhood, and the positionality of African American Muslims and diasporic Muslim Americans. This book is also a stunning ethnography. It is attentive to many methodological concerns of positionality, access, and immersive fieldwork, but it is also a story of friendship, love, and loss. This book will be of interest to those who think and reflect on Islam in America, African American Islam, and race, gender, class, and lived religion, but it will also be a productive text to incorporate into methods courses, especially on ethnography.

Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at [email protected]. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier.

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