New Books in Islamic Studies

The story of the martyrdom of Husayn, the prophet Muhammad’s grandson, is recounted annually around the world. More broadly, the communal retelling of the lives of Shia imams has played an important part in shaping Shia identity and practice. Matthew Pierce, Assistant Professor of Religion at Centre College, examines the early canonization of these life stories in Twelve Infallible Men: The Imams and the Making of Shiism (Harvard University Press, 2016). Pierce carefully conceptualizes the relationship between history, author, text, and audience through an examination of several collective biographies of the twelve imams from the 10th-12th centuries. From this sub-genre several themes arise in the presentation of the imams, their families, and their actions. Martyrdom is central to the retellings not only of Husayn, but of all the imams. The imams’ death are remembered through images of suffering and mourning but structured in ways that provide solace for the audience. The collective biographies also offer representations of the imams’ bodily performance and communicate idealized forms of masculinity. Accounts of women in the biographies also help in establishing gender norms for the audience. In our conversation we discussed the social role of biography, collective memory, medieval Sunni and Shia identities, gendered bodies, birth narratives, devotional practices, imam Ali’s primordial existence, martyrdom, and the narrative relationships between the imams.

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Islamophobia, both as a term and concept, has a storied and complicated history, and understanding its many layers in our current historical moment remains important for any number of audiences and purposes. By focusing on contemporary incarnations but also giving historical context, Todd Green accomplishes an admirable task in The Fear of Islam: An Introduction to Islamophobia in the West (Fortress Press, 2015). Professor Green combines lucid and accessible prose with meticulous attention to detail and extensive footnotes; he strikes an impressive balance while simultaneously aiming at a scholarly and lay audience. The book explores the contours of Islamophobia both in North America and Europe, which outlines instructive similarities and differences, as the phenomenon surfaces in various contexts, within an array of colonial and political histories.

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The Crusades loom large in contemporary popular consciousness. However, our public understanding has largely been informed from a western perspective, despite the fact that there is a rich textual tradition recording its history in Muslim sources. Paul M. Cobb, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, remedies this problem in The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford University Press, 2014) by presenting the fullest and most readable account of the Crusades relying on Islamic sources. Cobb expands the geographical and chronological boundaries of the Crusades by placing traditional conflicts within Muslim accounts of Frankish aggression. In general, medieval Muslims were not overly concerned with Europe and ongoing relationships between Christians and Muslims only really existed in the Mediterranean context. European expansion into Muslim lands throughout the Middle Ages marked a different phase of encounter,but these incursions were not always clearly demarcated by religious boundaries. Cobb illustrates the often competing logic behind political alliances, military aggression and intervention, or discursive justification. The Race for Paradise does a wonderful job of presenting the narrative in a new light and dissolving many of the assumptions about pre-modern conflicts that have been produced by one-sided accounts of the Crusades. In our conversation we discussed the Frankish conquests, the significance of Jerusalem, Mediterranean Muslims communities, Arabic sources, notions of jihad, Frankish rule in the Levant, Saladin and his political heirs, thinking about the Crusades today, and making an audio book.

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Bringing together secondary and primary sources in a wide range of languages, David Brophy’s new book is a masterful study of the modern history of the Uyghurs, the Turkic-speaking Muslims of Xinjiang. Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier (Harvard University Press, 2016) joins what have usually been treated as separate subjects–the histories of the Soviet Uyghurs and the Xinjiang Uyghurs–into a single, coherent story of the creation of a Uyghur nation through a series of small steps undertaken in changing political conditions. The book argues that an account of the emergence of the Uyghur nation is a convergence of two stories: the rediscovery of the Turkic past among intellectuals connected to the Russian, Muslim, and Ottoman world of letters, and the history of efforts to capitalize on the breach created by the Russian Revolution to effect political change in Xinjiang. Moving away from a discourse of Uyghur nationalism in favor of an account of historical forms of Uyghurist politics, Brophy’s book will be required reading in the history and politics of Central Eurasia for many years to come.

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Aisha Geissinger’s monograph, Gender and the Construction of Exegetical Authority: A Rereading of the Classical Genre of Qur’an Commentary (Brill, 2015), contributes to the growing field of intersections between gender studies and Qur’anic studies. Unlike some recent studies that have explored the role of gender in the Qur’an itself or in applications of the Qur’an, Professor Geissinger takes a step back to explore how exegetes (broadly conceived) have historically understood the relevance and importance of gendered sources, in terms their authority to make sense of the Qur’an. What does it mean, for example, when a particular Qur’an commentary mentions a hadith with women in the isnad, while other commentaries do not? Are these rhetorical moves intentional? Were they significant in their time? In order to address these questions and others, Geissinger looks at traditional works of exegesis, sections on exegesis in hadith compilations, and literature on the virtues of the Qur’an among other topics all the while engaging with a rich breadth of modern and premodern scholarship, ranging from Bukhari to Judith Butler. The footnotes are extensive, the prose is clear, and the book well-organized. The monograph will likely appeal to a number of disciplines, especially Islamic history, Qur’anic studies, and gender studies.

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In The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard University Press, 2015), Ethan Katz examines and interrogates Jewish-Muslim relations from 1914 to the present. Arguing that interactions between Jews and Muslims must be understood in and through the respective, changing statuses and relationships of both communities to the French state, The Burdens of Brotherhood pursues the history of this “triangular affair.” Drawing on a range of archival, press and media sources, as well as oral interviews, the book emphasizes everyday lives and mutual perceptions in and between spaces private and public, local and transnational. Its chapters move from the diversity and legacies of wartime experiences, to family and community gathering places in three different French cities (Paris, Strasbourg, and Marseille), to the routes and mobilities of people, cultures, and politics across the Mediterranean. The Burdens of Brotherhood revisits the First World War, the interwar years, the period of Vichy and the Occupation, the French-Algerian War, and the final decades of the twentieth century. It also traces the impact of international movements and politics on ethno-religious communities and identities in the French context, from forms of Zionism and anti-imperialism to the vicissitudes of the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1948. Towards the end of our conversation, Ethan and I had a chance to speak about the recent French past, including the events of January 2015 that he addresses in the book’s conclusion. Written with the present in mind, The Burdens of Brotherhood offers vital historical perspective and insight on issues of urgent concern with important implications for the future.

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Among the most frequent demands made of Islam and Muslims today is to become more moderate. But what counts as moderate and who will decide so are questions with less than obvious answers. In her timely and politically urgent new book Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton University Press, 2015), Elizabeth Hurd, Associate Professor of Religion and Political Science at Northwestern University, explores the powerful global networks that seek to regulate and moderate religion in the name of promoting religious freedom. Through a careful examination of the discourses and activities of a range of state and non-state actors, in the US and elsewhere, Hurd demonstrates that international regimes of religious freedom advocacy actively participate in the labor of defining and generating particular notions of good and normative religion that privilege particular actors and institutions over others. However, as Hurd brilliantly shows and argues, such attempts to canonize good religion, which often corresponds to the articulation of religion most amenable to US imperial interests, remains thwarted and unsuccessful. This is so because the global industry of producing good, moderate religion cannot come to grips with the messiness and complexities of lived religion that is unavailable for neat, digestible, and ultimately misleading generalized categorizations. In short, this book represents a profound and meticulously documented argument for the unavailability of religion for projects of moderation, division, and bifurcation into good and bad religion. Hurd assembles this argument by discussing the discourse of the two faces of faith in international relations circuits, the politics of religion-making in international religious advocacy programs, overseas religious engagement programs sponsored by the US government, and the construction of religious minorities as endangered corporate bodies. Beyond Religious Freedom is as mellifluously written as it is analytically delicious. It will make an excellent reading for undergraduate and graduate courses on Islam, Secularism, and Modernity, Middle Eastern Politics, religion and politics, and on theories and methods in Religion Studies.

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Could the Qur’an–understood, according to Muslims, as the verbatim word of God in Arabic–acquire a nationality? Specifically, could it be American? And written in English? Contemporary visual artist Sandow Birk’s American Qur’an (Liveright, 2015) raises these questions and many more. The groundbreaking and subversive project draws on multiple English translations, which Birk synthesizes to produce his own hand-written American graffiti-style translation. On top of that, every single page of the over-sized coffee table book contains meticulous illustrations of everyday American life, ranging from celebration to tragedy. As a commentary on both the Qur’an as well as American culture, moreover, the provocative visuals offer the reader a way to connect a book from 7th-century Arabia to 21st-century American cities, landscapes, challenges, and humanity.

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Edward Said’s 1978 book, Orientalism, dramatically shifted how people think about the production of knowledge and representations of the Other. His ideas have been championed and critiqued with dozens of books expanding his work on the construction of the East in western imagination. However, very rarely have we investigated the dual move of representing the Other and self-representation from the other perspective. In his new book, Arab Occidentalism: Images of America in the Middle East (I.B.Tauris, 2015), Eid Mohamed, Assistant Professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, has undertaken this task. With great success he offers a portrait of the shifting attitudes towards America and American Culture in the Arab imagination in the post 9/11 media landscape. He found that Arab cultural producers have a complicated relationship with America, seeing it as problematic while also often representative of their own values. Mohamed delineates how this debate unfolds in literature, cinema, and news media. In our conversation we explored the dynamics of Occidentalism through Arabic novels about Egyptians living abroad in the United States, news depictions of the 2008 shoe throwing event with President George W. Bush in Iraq, the reactions to the election of Barack Obama, the Egyptian film industry, and contemporary Arab-American literary products.

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In her stunning new book The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant (Stanford University Press, 2012), Dana Sajdi, Associate Professor of History at Boston College, presents a riveting narrative of the intersection of literature, religion, and history in early modern Muslim societies. She does so by focusing on the chronicle of a common Barber in 18th-century Damascus Shihab al-Din Ahmad Ibn Budayr. Through a close reading of the intellectual and political conditions that gave rise to such forms of nouveau literature and by carefully interrogating the themes, tensions, and reception of this text, Sajdis analysis provides a fascinating window into the complexity and diversity of knowledge traditions in the early modern context. Most importantly, this book serves the immensely important task of bringing into central view non-Ulama archives and imaginaries of history and history writing. In our conversation we discussed the key themes of this book such as the concept of nouveau literacy, the literary and political disorders in 18th century Damascus, Ibn Budayr’s biography and intellectual milieu, the emergence of non-‘ulama’ chronicle writers, and the later reception and reworking of Ibn Budayr’s chronicle. This nicely paced book should work very well in undergraduate and graduate courses on Muslim intellectual history, historiography, early modern Islam, and in surveys of Middle Eastern history.

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