New Books in Islamic Studies

There are currently eleven million Uyghurs living in China, but more than one million are being held in so-called reeducation camps. A cultural genocide is taking place under the guise of counterterrorism. 

In this profound and explosive book, Sean Roberts shows how China is using the US-led global war on terror to erase and replace Uyghur culture and persecute this ethnic minority in what has become the largest program of mass detention and surveillance in the world. In The War on the Uyghurs: China's Internal Campaign Against a Muslim Minority, Roberts contextualises these harms in the PRC's colonial legacy of the region. He demonstrates how the Chinese government was able to brand Uyghur dissent as a dangerous terrorist threat which had links with al-Qaeda. He argues that a nominal militant threat was a 'self-fulfilling prophecy'; the limited response to more than a decade of harsh repression and surveillance. 

This is the humanitarian catastrophe that the world needs to know about now. Beyond the destruction of Uyghur identity and culture, there are profound implications for the global community by this cultural genocide. 

Dr. Sean R. Roberts is an Associate Professor of the Practice of International Affairs; Director, International Development Studies Program at the Elliot School of International Affairs, George Washington University.

He is is a cultural anthropologist with extensive applied experience in international development work. Roberts conducted ethnographic fieldwork among the Uyghur people of Central Asia and China during the 1990s, and has published extensively on this community in scholarly journals and collected volumes. In 1996 he produced a documentary film on the community entitled Waiting for Uighurstan. You can find him on twitter at @robertsreport 

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hoda El Shakry’s book The Literary Qurʾan: Narrative Ethics in the Maghreb (Fordham University Press, 2019) was awarded the ACLA’s 2018 Helen Tartar Book Subvention Award and the MLA’s 2020 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies. It examines the influence of Qurʾanic textual, hermeneutical, and philosophical traditions on twentieth-century novels from the Maghreb (Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco). Placing canonical Francophone writers into conversation with lesser-known Arabophone ones, The Literary Qurʾan stages a series of pairings that invite paratactic readings across texts, languages, and literary canons. Challenging the canonization of secular modes of reading that occlude religious epistemes, practices, and intertexts, the study extracts a model of ethical narratology from the Qurʾan.

Hoda El Shakry is a scholar of twentieth- and twenty-first century cultural production from North Africa and the Middle East, with an emphasis on the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Specializing in Arabic and Francophone literature, visual culture, and criticism, her interdisciplinary research explores aesthetic theory, Islamic philosophy, comparative literary criticism, as well as gender and sexuality. El Shakry received her Ph.D. from UCLA. Before joining the University of Chicago as Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, she was an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Penn State University and a Faculty Fellow at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. Her current book project is a critical history of twentieth-century cultural journals and periodicals from the Maghreb. She is also working on a study of speculative and science fiction from the Middle East and North Africa.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In their groundbreaking new book, Islamic Interpretive Tradition and Gender Justice: Processes of Canonization, Subversion, and Change (McGill, 2020), Nevin Reda and Yasmin Amin raise excellent questions about the existence and formation of a canon in the Islamic tradition. This exciting book comprises ten chapters, organized into three sections: The Qur’an and Its Interpretation; Figurative Representation: Hadith and Biographical Dictionaries; and, finally, Fiqh and Its Application. The volume brilliantly and carefully responds to criticisms against Islamic feminism, such as the claim that Islamic feminist scholarship lacks methodological rigor. Some of the overarching themes that each chapter in the volume shares are providing more ethical and egalitarian interpretations of gendered verses in the Qur’an and interrogating the idea of canonization in Islam. Each author accomplishes this by challenging the unfounded assumption of an established canon in the Islamic tradition; by raising questions about what ijma’ (or consensus) is and if it has ever existed on given issues; and/or by using the methodologies of pre-modern male scholars of Islam only to produce significantly different interpretations on the same matter. Among the topics covered are polygamy, divorce, child marriage, women’s public participation, interreligious marriage, stoning, and so much more.

In today's conversation with Yasmin Amin and Nevin Reda, we discuss the major contributions of the book, the process of compilation, what the authors mean by decanonization and by subverting the canon if one exists, some of the specific chapters of the book, such as on child marriage, polygamy, and biographies of women, and the question of ethical interpretations of the Qur’an in the context of gender.

Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She is currently working on a book project on Muslim women's marriage to non-Muslims in Islam. Shehnaz runs a YouTube channel called What the Patriarchy?!, where she vlogs about feminism and Islam in an effort to dismantle the patriarchy and uproot it from Islam (ambitious, she knows). She can be reached at [email protected].

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Joshua Cole's Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria (Cornell University Press, 2019) appeals to a few of the different readers in my head: the one who admires a critical history interrogating archival evidence, narrative, and categories of identity; the one who enjoys a localized story that illuminates a much broader context and set of themes; and the one who is completely fascinated by a mystery.

Examining a brief, but powerful, episode of political violence in Constantine in August 1934 that resulted in the deaths of 25 Jews and 3 Muslims, the book reveals fissures within colonial society in Algeria that French authorities had a vested interest in provoking and nurturing. The particular conflict that pitted Muslims against Jews with such intensity over the course of a few days during the interwar period gave the French state an opportunity to fuel tensions between these communities in order to resist political reforms extending key rights of citizenship to Muslims in Algeria.

The book also makes the compelling case that a particular figure, Mohamed El Maadi, a Muslim Algerian who served in the French military and developed ties to extreme-right politics, played a key role in the conflict, including planning and participating in the murders. Beyond the revelation of a principal culprit during the episode, Lethal Provocation also tracks the ways the French authorities, including the police and other segments of the colonial state refused to understand the riots and murders as anything other than the expression of an inherent and essential rift between Jews and Muslims. Reframing the Constantine murders, a tragic and violent set of events that took place in 1930s Algeria, the book also makes clear that the riots are/were also en episode of a very French history. 

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email ([email protected]).

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What is the relationship between print culture, religious identity, and formations of social consciousness in the modern period? In her brilliant new book, Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life (Oxford UP, 2020), Megan Robb explores this question through a vigorous and exciting micro-history of a major 20th-century Urdu newspaper Madinah that was at the center of critical political, theological, and sociological currents in Muslim South Asia. The distinguishing feature of this book lies in its focus on the place and space of the qasbah, or small towns, as fascinating and often overlooked theaters of individual and communal identity formation and contestation. What competing notions of Islam, politics, and time emerge in a marketplace of ideas animated and engine by the technology and materiality of print culture, especially, the newspaper? Robb examines this question through a probing analysis that brings together vivid portraits of social and intellectual life in early 20th-century Northern India, with productive theoretical interventions on conceptualizing the interaction of print, religion, and politics in colonial modernity.

SherAli Tareen is Associate 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. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at [email protected]. Listener feedback is most welcome.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Book of Wings (Véhicule Press, 2021) is a stunningly mesmerizing debut novel by Tawhida Tanya Evanson. It follows the journey of the protagonist Maya across vast geographies, such as Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, France, and Morocco, as she reels from the end of a passionate relationship with her lover and partner, Shams. In this modern Sufi love story, Maya, a bi-racial Black woman, seeks Shams, her lost beloved, and this quest propels her on a spiritual search that unfolds in a physical return to her homeland in Morocco in North Africa; a return that is symbolic of the inner return to one’s spiritual origins, so modeled by the Sufis. 

Evanson also draws from various Afro-Caribbean diasporic traditions such as spirituality, music, and storytelling. These intricate Sufi, Islamic, and Afro-Caribbean diasporic traditions appear through personalities that Maya encounters on her travels, namely figures such as Muhammad, Ali, Hassan, Husayn, Fatima, Hajar or saints, dervishes, ancestors, masters, and holy ones. The novel is textured with Sufi themes, symbols, and teachings, such as in how spiritual states of beauty and love are evoked or the summation to annihilate the ego. These appear not only in the storyline but also in the prose, such as the use of repetition as Sufi pedagogy and as a literary device. This exquisite and compelling novel would be a welcome text to incorporate into numerous courses that deal with a wide range of topics such as the hero’s quest and mystical journey or topical courses such as on Sufism, Islam, gender, sexuality, or Afro-Caribbean diaspora, Canadian literature, and much more.

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.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Terrorism is a cancer, an infection, an epidemic, a plague. For more than a century, this metaphor has figured insurgent violence as contagion in order to contain its political energies. In Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817–2020 (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, shows that this trope began in responses to the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and tracks its tenacious hold through 9/11 and beyond. Raza Kolb assembles a diverse archive from colonial India, imperial Britain, French and independent Algeria, the postcolonial Islamic diaspora, and the neoimperial United States. Across literary, administrative, medical, and other non-literary sources, she reveals the tendency to imagine anticolonial rebellion, and Muslim insurgency specifically, as a virulent form of social contagion. In our conversation we discuss “imperial disease poetics,” British colonialism in South Asia, the 1857 rebellion, global cholera outbreaks, the Hajj pilgrimage, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the struggle for Algerian independence, Albert Camus’ The Plague, the 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, Frantz Fanon, Djamila Boupacha, Salman Rushdie representation of radical Islamism, the 9/11 Commission Report, the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture, and the Osama bin Laden mission.

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].

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Dangerous Religious Ideas: The Deep Roots of Self-Critical Faith in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Beacon, 2020) reveals how faith traditions have always passed down tools for self-examination and debate, because all religious ideas—not just extremist ones—can cause harm, even as they also embody important moral teachings.

Scripture’s abiding relevance can inspire great goodness, such as welcoming the stranger and extending compassion for the poor. But its authority has also been wielded to defend slavery, marginalize LGBTQ individuals, ignore science, and justify violence. Grounded in close readings of scripture and tradition in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, religious scholar Rachel Mikva shows us that the Abrahamic religions have always been aware of their tremendous power both to harm and to heal. And so they have transmitted their sacred stories along with built-in tools—interpretive traditions—to do the necessary work of taking on dangerous religious ideas and fostering self-critical faith.

Rabbi Rachel Mikva is the Rabbi & Associate Professor of Jewish Studies, and Senior Faculty Fellow of the InterReligious Institute at Chicago Theological Seminary, Illinois.

Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: [email protected].

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In Women and Gender in the Qur’an (Oxford University Press in 2020), Celene Ibrahim explores key themes related to gender in the Qur’an, focusing on women, such as female sexuality, female kin and relations, and female figures in the sacred text. Among her findings is that there are no archetypal women in the Qur’an and instead, the Qur’an provides a wide-ranging depiction of women, who figure as negative and positive exemplars and ultimately serve the specific didactic aims of Qur’anic narratives. The Qur’an invokes their good and bad examples, Ibrahim notes, especially to construct a moral framework for its immediate audience, the early Muslim community, the emerging polity.

In our discussion, she talks about the primary contributions of the book and its origins; she explains her choice to use a Qur’an-only approach to investigating the question of gender; and we discuss specific content from the book, such as the Qur’an’s portrayals of daughters and mothers, Prophet Yusuf’s harassment incident, women’s speech, Muhammad’s wives in the Qur’an, the concept – and the gender – of heavenly beings, such as the hoor, and a lot more.

Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She can be reached at [email protected].

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Islam, réforme et colonisation: une histoire de l'ibadisme en Algérie (1882-1962) by Augustin Jomier is an important study of colonial North Africa, Islamic reform, and Ibadi Islam. Jomier, a professor at France’s Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales in Paris, has reframed the history of colonial Algeria by examining it “from the south.” His focus is the Mzab, a region based around seven oasis towns in the northern Sahara 600 km away from the capital city. The Mzabis on whom Jomier concentrates are a linguistic and religious minority in Algeria, speaking a Berber language and practicing Ibadi Islam both of which distinguish them from the Arabic-speaking, Sunni majority. By grounding his study not only in colonial archives but also sources from the Mzab—where he conducted extensive fieldwork—Jomier intervenes in historiographical debates pertaining to the Mzab and far beyond. The book is not only a landmark study of reform outside of the Sunni perspective, it also elucidates the limits of reform, the opposition to reformists, and the role of orientalist discourses and an emergent public sphere.

Julian Weideman is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.