Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk Islam

Just how much does Islam vary in different places around the world? And how have local forms of Islam evolved in rural regions where Muslims have lived side-by-side with Hindus for centuries? In this episode, we tackle these questions by looking at local religious practices in the south Indian village called Gugudu. Turning away from theoretical abstractions, we see how religion is practiced on th...

China is not only home to around 20 million Muslims, it is also home to a variety of different Islamic traditions, and of various ethnic groups who follow those different versions of Islam. In this episode we focus on the Chinese-speaking (or ‘Sinophone’) Muslims rather than the better-known Turkic-speaking (or Uyghur) Muslims. From the medieval period onwards, these Chinese-speaking followers of...

Many people, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, might think of Sharia as ancient and unchanging. But like any form of law, it has a history. And like every aspect of religion, it was transformed in the modern era. This episode examines how Sharia changed during the two centuries when the British Empire ruled over large parts of the Muslim world. Surveying two transformational centuries—from around 1750...

In 1218, the pagan armies of the Mongols appeared on the horizon of the Middle East to begin a series of campaigns unparalleled in their scale of violence. In the deceptively mellifluous phrasing of the Persian historian Juvaini, “amadand o kandand o sokhtand o koshtand o bardand o raftand.” (“They came, they uprooted, they burned, they killed, they looted, and they left.”) And then they came back...

The importance of Christian monasteries to the socio-economic no less than the religious life of medieval Europe has long been recognized. Far less well-known is the comparable role of Muslim shrine complexes in providing a socio-economic infrastructure for their surrounding communities. This was especially the case in the eastern Islamic lands comprising what is today Iran, Afghanistan, and the o...

Today, thousands of Islamic manuscripts survive as testimony to the seven-hundred-year Muslim presence in southeastern Europe. But collections of manuscripts that belonged to a single person are exceedingly rare. And when the books of an individual person remain together as a collection, they tell us much more than they do when dispersed. In this episode, we peruse one such private library—of the...

As any observer of the Islamic world—or regular listener to Akbar’s Chamber—will know, there are a dizzying variety of different forms of Islam. Yet every Muslim who follows one of these different versions believes it represents the true version of the faith. This begs the question of who gets to decide what is, and isn’t, Islam? In other words, who has the religious authority to define Islam? In...

Today, Muslim martyrdom is often most associated with the modern phenomenon of suicide bombing. But definitions about martyrdom—and its relationship to jihad—are complex and contested, being the subject of intense scrutiny and debate among Muslim scholars for nearly fourteen centuries. In this episode, we’ll examine the development of the Islamic doctrine of martyrdom, from its surprising absence...

As a crossroads of the Indian Ocean’s monsoon winds, Sri Lanka has hosted Muslim traders, pilgrims, and settlers since the early centuries of Islamic history. From the early medieval period to the present day, this episode traces the development of Sri Lanka’s several distinct Muslim communities, each with their own languages and traditions, with roots that stretch from Arabia and Persia to India...

West Africa has a rich history of the writing and reading of Arabic poetry that connects the region to the literary and philosophical traditions of the wider Muslim world. Building on praise poems composed by the Prophet Muhammad’s own companions, and the work of medieval Egyptian masters such as al-Busiri, West African religious teachers developed their own tradition of writing madih, or praise p...

For Muslims and non-Muslims alike, the study of Islam usually equates to the reading of books. But in recent decades, archaeological excavations have revealed a more complex picture of the Muslim past than written sources have recorded. This has been especially the case for the history of Islam in Africa, where excavations in different regions of the continent have shown not only distinctive local...

Founded in north India in the late nineteenth century, the Barelwi (or Barelvi) movement has since gained more than 200 million followers across India, Pakistan, and the South Asian diaspora from Southeast Asia to Africa, Europe, and the United States. Yet even its name remains unfamiliar, let alone its doctrines. So, in this episode, we’ll explore the development of Barelwi teachings through the...

Born in Palestine in 1941, Abdallah Azzam became associated with the Muslim Brotherhood as an adult refugee in Jordan. Then, in his twenties and thirties, he moved between Amman, Cairo, and Jeddah, gaining religious qualifications and joining the Islamist opposition to Israel and Arab leftist movements alike. But it was only with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that Azzam found his calling: in...

What is Islamic law? How does it work? And who decides what is and isn’t legally permitted? In this episode, we’ll be exploring these questions with regard to the followers of one of the four Sunni law schools, the Shafi‘i school. Named after its founder, Imam al-Shafi‘i (who died in Cairo in 820), over the following centuries the Shafi‘i school (or madhhab) was exported eastwards by teachers and...

The story of Joseph is one of the greatest sagas in world history. A youth of stunning beauty, beloved of his father but envied by his brothers, who is sold into slavery, before resisting the seductions of his owner’s wife and rising up to be governor of Egypt after interpreting Pharoah’s dreams. It is a story that has everything: jealousy and love, ambition and humility, edification and adventure...

Writing amid the tumult of the Mongol invasions, the polymath Zakariyya al-Qazwini compiled an account of the earth and heavens that rose above his dismal surroundings to depict a creation full of wonders and rarities. After leading readers through everything under the sun—animal, mineral, or vegetable-he then turned to the planets and stars, before looking back below, to the relations of the cele...

Home to some 175 million Muslims, Bengal—incorporating today’s Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal—is one of the largest but least known regions of the Muslim world. Since the medieval period, it has also reared a rich literature in the Bangla language, written by both Muslims and Hindus alike. In this episode, we’ll examine how one particular text, the Nabivamśa, helped convert many Be...

Between the eighth and tenth century, a series of profound texts were written in Arabic that explored the deepest, darkest and ultimately the most brightly illuminated corners of the human psyche.  Their authors were the founding figures of the Islamic mystical tradition known as Sufism. But inasmuch as these teachers were mystics, whose prayers and spiritual exercises had yielded extraordinary in...

Few people today would think of Singapore as being a religious center, still less a Muslim one. But even before it began its great commercial climb in modern times, the city was already linked to the spiritual and mercantile networks of Indian Ocean Islam. Then, from nineteenth century, Singapore played host to as varied a spectrum of Asian Muslims as might be imagined, whether Yemeni Sufis and me...

Few philosophers can be said to have been watershed figures, in the wake of whose teachings a tradition of philosophy forever changed its course. Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi was such a figure for the development of Islamic philosophy. Trained in the Aristotelian school of Ibn Sina (known in the West as Avicenna), Suhrawardi nonetheless became a mystical philosopher who not only demonstrated the limit...

According to a famous saying of the Prophet Muhammad, “Poverty is my pride.” Perhaps no group of Muslims took that adage so seriously as the qalandars and other dervishes who not only renounced the comforts of family and domestic life, but also rejected every trace of social respectability. Nothing mattered more to them—they took pride in nothing else—than their vows of complete poverty. For to re...

Salafism has gained a great deal of media attention over the past twenty years, but for all that remains poorly understood. Part of the reason is a paradox at the heart of the name and goals of the Salafis themselves. In taking their name from the pious ‘ancestors’ (al-salaf)—the first generations of Muslims in the seventh century—the Salafis are deeply concerned with following the original and au...

According to a famous saying of the Prophet Muhammad, “A true dream constitutes one forty-sixth part of prophethood.” Over the following centuries, countless Muslim thinkers discussed the hidden problem in that saying: how to distinguish a ‘true dream’ from other kinds of dreams, whether mundane ones caused by illness and indigestion or more worrying ones sent by Satan. Consequently, Muslims devel...

In this episode we explore the contents of a remarkable medieval library: the Ashrafiya of Damascus. What makes the Ashrafiya important isn’t so much its fame in its own time, but the survival of an extraordinary document: the oldest Arabic library catalogue ever discovered. Using this as our guide, we take a tour of the library, from its location between the eighth century Umayyad mosque and the...

Usually in Akbar’s Chamber we pursue questions of inter-religious understanding. But in this episode, we explore its flip side by way of the religious misunderstandings—and plain disagreements—between Christians and Muslims which were amplified in modern period by the spread of printing through the Middle East. After outlining the context in which Muslim scholars began both debating Christianity a...