New Books in Islamic Studies

Following the Iranian Revolution of 1978—79, public and scholarly interest in Iran have skyrocketed, with a plethora of attempts seeking to understand and explain the events which led up to that moment. However, navigating the terrain of Iran’s modern historical trajectory has proven to be a daunting task which has only intensified, given the muddled public discourse that tends to frame it within the paradigm of a perennial conflict between the “religious,” “traditional,” and “despotic” East versus the “secular,” “modern,” and “enlightened” West.

The emergent field of Iranian intellectual history has long sought to rectify and complicate this framing, and numerous prominent works have been published to that effect. With his provocative and timely addition to the field, Both Eastern and Western: An Intellectual History of Iranian Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Professor Afshin Matin-Asgari deftly punctuates his mark both as a constructive critic and as a contributor of those efforts.

Through a careful study and critical overview of the current historiography of Iranian intellectual history as it relates to the decades leading up to the Revolution, Matin-Asgari uncovers the intellectual “missing links” both within and without Iran concerning the formation of Iranian national identity. He highlights overlooked trends in contemporary Iranian historiography by drawing the reader’s attention to factors such as the Russian and Ottoman influence on Iranian constitutionalism, early twentieth-century German political culture’s impact on Iranian authoritarianism, and the understudied phenomenon of Islamic socialism. As a result, he concludes that the intellectual history of modern Iran is “both Eastern and Western.”

By framing the development of Iranian national identity in the twentieth century as a discursive project intimately tied to the contingencies of contemporaneous global currents, Matin-Asgari demonstrates that there was nothing inevitable about the dominance of particular streams of Iranian nationalism over others. This book will serve as a useful tool for students of modern Iran and for anyone interested in how to better understand modern global intellectual history as a whole.

Asad Dandia is a graduate student of Islamic Studies at Columbia University.

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Iran has one of the planet's highest rates of addiction. Maziyar Ghiabi's Drug Politics: Managing Disorder in the Islamic Republic of Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2019) offers a fascinating, new, and nuanced perspective on the control and consumption of substances in Iran. Based on ethnographic and historical research, this fully Open Access book reveals the complex and at times progressive nature of drug policy in Iran. The book showcases drug policy in Iran as well as the everyday lives of users. And, in doing so, Ghiabi argues that the Islamic Republic of Iran's image as an inherently conservative state is not only misplaced and inaccurate, but in part a myth.

Maziyar Ghiabi is a Lecturer at the University of Oxford.

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. 

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After the Rushdie affair in 1989 there was an important shift in the public life of British Muslims. Their image came under closer scrutiny which led to new social policies and self-perceptions. This moment also served as a significant pivot in the narrative and representational patterns in British Muslim literature. Claire Chambers, Senior Lecturer at the University of York, examines these new paradigms in Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels (Palgrave, 2019). She outlines Muslim cultural production during this period through a literary analysis of the senses, especially those beyond the visual. Overall, Chambers provides a rich portrait of the non-visual senses in British Muslim fiction over the past three decades. This book also continues the work of her previous one, Britain Through Muslim Eyes: Literary Representations, 1780-1988 (Palgrave, 2015). In our conversation we discussed the Rushdie affair and its consequences, how to approach touch, smell, taste, and hearing in literature, the role of Islam in contemporary literary representation, the senses in a digital age of advanced technologies, the construction of religious practice or gendered norms, radicalization, and authors such as Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, and Mohsin Hamid, among many others.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). 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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We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them.

However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas.

In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world.

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How do contemporary events shape the ways in which we read, understand, and interpret historical processes of identity formation? How can we resist framing conflicts of the past through frameworks of the present? What role does historical memory play in the forming and framing of group identity? In her book Medieval Islamic Sectarianism (Amsterdam University Press, 2019), Christine D. Baker, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern History at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, engages these questions by exploring the formation of sectarian identities in the tenth century medieval Middle East and North Africa.

The tenth century, which is often deemed the “Shi’i century” because it witnessed the emergence of two major Shi’i empires, gave rise to a new challenge for the existing Sunni Abbasid Caliphate. There were the Fatimids of North Africa who came to dominate from the western end of the caliphate, and the Buyids of Iraq and Iran who come to dominate from the eastern end, and each one claimed their political legitimacy by positioning themselves against the Abbasid rulers. But how exactly did they do that?

Christine cautions against reading the political conflicts between these empires through the lens of modern sectarian identities and urges us to examine them in their own right. In this way, we avoid the risk of reinforcing a false narrative of primordial Sunni-Shi’i conflict, and are able to consider more accurately how those empires legitimated themselves and delegitimated the other.

Asad Dandia is a graduate student of Islamic Studies at Columbia University.

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Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast (Cambridge University Press, 2019) by Sebastian Prange provides a fascinating window into the Muslim world of the medieval (12-16th century) Malabar Coast and the development of Islam that was defined by significant trade networks. Prange conceptualizes this particular development of Muslim communities on the Malabar Coast as Monsoon Islam. Subverting any notions that Islam developed systematically or through organized political efforts, the book uses the history of the pepper trade across the Indian Ocean to map spatial developments, such as of mosques and ports, and the early Muslim trading communities who inhabited these realms. We have before us a global history of Monsoon Islam that utilizes trade networks to capture far more complex cross-cultural exchanges that included kinship, religious, textual, Sufi, and political networks. The latter dynamics led to instances of negotiated establishment of legal and religious codes, as well as familial and economic ties. For instance, the book highlights how legal norms or religious practices became localized and translated to a new context by minority Muslims within a predominately Hindu society, such as in mosque architecture or marriage practices. Prange’s detailed study asks us to think of both global and local processes that led to the formation of a cosmopolitan and transoceanic Monsoon Islam and thus complicates how we study the spread of Islam across diverse regions in South Asia, and the vital role of traders, scholars, and saints. The study’s deep engagement with diverse historical sources, and its beautifully written analysis, makes it an accessible and critical read for scholars interested in the world of Islam in the Indian Ocean and South Asia, as well as Islamic economics, politics, and history broadly.

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In her pioneering and politically urgent new book Delusional States: Feeling Rule and Development in Pakistan’s Northern Frontier (Cambridge UP, 2019), Nosheen Ali presents a lyrical and at many times haunting account of the aspirations, anxieties, and tragedies enfolding everyday life in the rarely studied Gilgit-Baltistan region in Pakistan. How does the encounter and interplay of love and betrayal inform the relationship between the state and its aspiring citizens? Ali engages and extends this foundational political and conceptual question in a range of discursive sites including the affective dimensions of militarization and state power, sectarianism and education, poetic publics and their alternate imaginaries of Islam and Muslim identity, and the agonistic operations of environmental development on everyday pastoral life. Written with exceptional clarity and extraordinary poetic panache, Delusional States is a landmark publication in the study of Islam, South Asia, Pakistan, and politics that should spark several important and far reaching discussions and debates in the academy and beyond. It will also make a terrific text for undergraduate and graduate seminars on these and many other themes.

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

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Scholarly and public discourse on Islamic intellectual thought in the modern period tend to frame it narrowly through the concept of “influence” as it emanates from the Middle Eastern “center” to the non-Middle Eastern “peripheries” without paying sufficient attention to the ways in which these variegated “peripheries” retain the autonomy to form their own conceptions of religious identity in relation to themselves and to those “centers.”

In his latest work, In a Pure Muslim Land: Shi’ism between Pakistan and the Middle East (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), Simon Wolfgang Fuchs interrogates this framework with a novel intervention by examining the case of Shi’i Islamic intellectual thought in Pakistan as it relates to the Middle East. Beginning his study with pre-colonial India, Simon explores the internal debates that took place within Shi’i scholarly circles in the subcontinent prior to and after the founding of Pakistan to unearth the myriad ways in which they negotiated and contested their place within their social and intellectual milieus as arbiters of their religious tradition on equal footing with Middle Eastern Shi’i scholars and with their Sunni counterparts in South Asia.

Through rigorous research conducted in libraries across the Middle East and South Asia, Simon re-centers the importance of theological ideas – as elaborated in doctrinal texts, journal publications, and speeches – as a necessary complement to material interests in the formation of religious and sectarian identity in modern Islamic thought. He further demonstrates how Pakistani Shi’i intellectuals were not passive recipients of concepts from the Shi’i centers of Iraq and Iran, but active participants in the process of evaluating the usefulness of those ideas, working to re-appropriate or repackage them for their own local circumstances. Pakistani Shi’i scholars thus “indigenized” watershed events like the Iranian Revolution but also retained their own autonomy as actors with full agency to determine to what extent Iranian notions of authority and hierarchy ought be emulated.

This work cuts across the fields of Middle East Studies, South Asia Studies, and Islamic Studies, and creates avenues for further research in the history of transnational and transregional Islamic thought by challenging the conventional “center-periphery” binary between the Middle East and South Asia and by drawing our attention to the importance of the bidirectional flow of ideas between those regions.

Asad Dandia is a graduate student of Islamic Studies at Columbia University.

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An interview with Dr. Hizer Mir on the Alt Right and Islam.

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An interview with Dr. Hizer Mir on the Alt Right and Islam.

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