Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk Islam

After the Quran, the most widely cited text in Islamic history is the Sahih al-Bukhari: the compendium of authentic hadith—reports of the Prophet Muhammad’s words and deeds—collected by Muhammad al-Bukhari (d.870). Despite the colossal impact of this work, al-Bukhari’s biography has long remained obscure. Yet by reconstructing his life and thought we can understand both how and why he devised his...

According to a widespread Islamic tradition, when Adam was expelled from the garden of Eden he fell to earth on Sarandib (now Sri Lanka). In this episode, we hear how this tradition was interpreted in India through the monumental Arabic work, Subhat al-Marjan (The Coral Rosary). Since Arabic isn’t often associated with India, we begin by sketching the history of the language in the region. Next, w...

Wales: land of legendary dragons and male-voice choirs, of the cragged beauty of Snowdonia and the indefatigable lungs of the singer Tom Jones. Or land of old Arabic coins and lost Qurans, Sufi mystics and Muslim sons of empire. In this episode, we uncover fascinating and surprising facets of Islamic history in this little-known corner of Europe. We begin by introducing Wales itself, then asking w...

Muslims have always recognized the Gospels, or Injil, as a holy book. But for most of Islamic history, such recognition was more theoretical than practical, with the Gospels discussed in the abstract than actually read. After all, Muslim scholars studied Arabic, not the Greek or Syriac in which copies of the New Testament were available to them. However, the 19th century saw European Christian mis...

Rumi is perhaps the most famous Sufi of all time. For centuries after he died in 1273, his Persian poems were read and recited from the Balkans to Bengal. But his teachings were also passed down through the Mevlevi order that was established after his death in Konya (in present-day Turkey). From their headquarters around Rumi’s shrine in Konya, then subsequently from the Ottoman capital of Istanbu...

Of all the world’s Muslim communities, the multiethnic Muslims of China are perhaps the least known, as though secluded by a Great Wall of linguistic, geographical and political dimensions. Yet preserved in mosques and shrines across the whole length of China—as well as India and Thailand —are manuscripts, woodblock prints and lithographs that reveal the interconnections of China’s Muslims with th...

In the years after 9/11, madrasas became a major concern of serious newspapers throughout the Western world. But two decades later, how many of us can really say we know what a madrasa is – still less, what actually goes on in one of them? This episode dispenses with theoretical abstractions to explore the realities of lived experience, with a focus on South Asia (specifically India). We’ll learn...

How should one go about translating a text that is untranslatable? Especially when the text is believed to be the living word of God? Muslims have pondered this dilemma for more than a millennium, because a standard doctrine of Islam is the ‘inimitability of the Quran’ (i‘jaz al-Qur’an). This principle was often taken to imply the untranslatability of the Quran. But even in the first centuries of...

Over the past few decades, archaeologists have excavated the remnants of a little-known Muslim kingdom from beneath hotels, parking lots, and even a convent in the Spanish city of Murcia. Cast into the shadows by the splendors of Granada, in its heyday Murcia was a flourishing kingdom that welcomed both Sufi mystics and Italian merchants. The main figure responsible for this was a man of many name...

Everyone has heard of Mecca. But few people outside Pakistan have heard of Makli, or “Little Mecca,” the sacred cemetery that is both the holiest place in Sindh and a UNESCO World Heritage site. The site is actually huge, with up to a million people buried there, so the “little” reflects respect for Mecca rather than the size of Makli. More important than Makli’s size, though, is its beauty. From...

Today nearly a third of Ethiopians are Muslims. At around 37 million, that’s a larger Muslim population than many Middle Eastern countries. According to Islamic tradition, fourteen centuries ago the first person appointed by the Prophet Muhammad to call Muslims to prayer was an Ethiopian called Bilal ibn Rabbah. Moreover, some of the Prophet’s companions sought refuge in the Ethiopian Christian ki...

The Muslims of Bosnia in southeast Europe treasure a centuries-long tradition of writing about the journey to Mecca. These treatises and travelogues help us trace the changing ways in which the hajj was experienced and described by these European Muslims who lived under the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, then socialist Yugoslavia, before the independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 1...

Islam and the occult may seem like odd bedfellows. But during the medieval and early modern periods, Muslim thinkers wrote vast numbers of manuscripts on a panoply of occult sciences, ranging from numerology and astrology to alchemy and lettrism. Just as the English word occult derives from the Latin occultus (meaning ‘hidden’), so in Arabic were these arcane disciplines collectively known as the...

Whether in newspaper articles, books, or conversations about Islam, the ‘Muslim world’ is a commonplace term. Yet it was only coined in the late nineteenth century, and didn’t gain wider currency till the 1920s. Moreover, the ‘Muslim world’ wasn’t even a Muslim invention. In this episode, we trace the history of this term which, over the course of a century, came to serve many different purposes w...

As anyone will know who has so much has flicked through the pages of the Quran, the Islamic scripture contain many discussions of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. Yet Muslim tradition also venerates many Christian saints. The model was set by the Quran itself, in the chapter al-Kahf (‘The Cave’), which alludes to the Christian story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus as a moral lesson for Muslims. Over th...

The influence of the great medieval mystic Ibn ‘Arabi is immeasurable, reaching from his home city of Murcia in Andalusia to Aceh in Indonesia and just about everywhere in between. His teachings similarly try to encompass, or at least articulate, the unfathomable depths of being, both human and divine, together with the links between God’s ultimate being and our own contingent existence. Whereas I...

Meaning ‘language of the coasts’ in Arabic, Swahili emerged in East Africa many centuries ago through contact with the wider Muslim world. Although the language is most often linked with Kenya and Tanzania, Swahili was also used as a lingua franca as far north as Somalia and as far south as Mozambique—a country whose name derives from that of a fifteenth century Muslim ruler, Musa Bin Mbiki. In th...

In libraries all across the Muslim world, old manuscripts survive by scholars whose names end with al-Qirimi: ‘The Crimean.’ Discussing all manner of religious topics, these texts form just part of the rich heritage of Muslims from regions in the east of Europe and to the north of the Black Sea that eventually became part of Ukraine. In this episode, we’ll learn how these manuscripts help reveal t...

How would a medieval Sufi Muslim view the Jewish and Christian scriptures? In this episode, we explore this question through the teachings of Abd al-Karim al-Jili. Born on the Malabar coast of India in 1365, Jili studied throughout the Middle East before settling in the town of Zabid in Yemen. It was there that he wrote his most famous work, al-Insan al-Kamil fi Ma‘rifat al-Awakhir wa-al-Awa’il (T...

In 1632, the University Library at Cambridge was transformed by the arrival of an extraordinary collection of manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew, and Malay. They were collected by an early Dutch orientalist, Thomas Van Erpe, better known by his Latinized name Erpinius. To mark the four hundredth anniversary of his death in 1624, Cambridge University Library has mounted a major exhibit...

For more than four centuries, Muslims, Christians and Jews dwelt side by side on the Mediterranean island of Sicily. For around half of that time—from 827 to 1091—they lived under the rule of Arab Muslims, and for the other half under Norman then Swabian Christian kings, before the Muslims were finally expelled in 1245. Since Sicily had been part of the Byzantine Empire, its Arab conquerors inheri...

In a famous hadith, the Prophet Muhammad told his followers, “Be different!” He also warned them about the potential dangers of imitating non-Muslim communities. Over the next fourteen centuries, various Muslim scholars pondered and elaborated the possible meanings of this prophetic advice. In what ways should Muslims be different? Were all forms of imitation bad, or were the good and bad forms of...

Muslims lived in the Iberian Peninsula for best part of a millennium before their final expulsion of the early 1600s. During those nine centuries, there flourished a rich literary culture, not only in Arabic but also in Aljamiado—a version of Castilian Spanish that was written with the Arabic script. In this episode, we explore the fascinating Quran manuscripts—in Arabic and especially Aljamiado—w...

The past few decades—since 9/11 in particular—have seen the increasing prominence of ‘moderate Islam’ in the public sphere. But who gets to define what this term means? How are these different definitions projected to wider Muslim, and non-Muslim, audiences? And what are the political implications of these varied versions of ‘moderate Islam,’ whether locally or internationally? In this episode, we...

The mid-twentieth century was not only a time when some of the greatest jazz music was created. It was also a period when many African American musicians converted to Islam. By the 1940s, there was a variety of different versions of the faith from which to choose in America. The Ahmadiyya movement had arrived in the United States around 1920; the Nation of Islam had emerged out of Moorish Science...