New Books in Islamic Studies

The claim to moderate or modernist Islam in Indonesia is particularly contentious today, as these labels participate in the global politics of identity for Muslims past and present. Who gets to claim to be representative of an Islam that is modernist, progressive, or tolerant? What constitutes a traditionalist Islamic orientation? And why and for whom do these distinctions matter? In her new book...

Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty: Genres of Tradition in Muslim South Asia (U Notre Dame 2026) explores the rich vast textual archive of Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanavi, a South Asian Muslim theologian and Sufi. Mian’s deep and careful reading of Thanavi’s diverse genres of texts, such as letters, and those composed by his disciples, such as hagiographies and councils, captures the complex colo...

In this episode, hosts Claudia Radiven and Amina Easat-Daas were joined by Farid Hafez to discuss his most recently published book G overning Islam in Austria and Germany: From Colonial Times to the Present (Oxford UP, 2026). Hafez’s recent work centres on the comparative analysis of the Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the German rule in Tanzania, Togo and Cameroon, and in particul...

The French Médersa: Islamic Education and Empire in Northwest Africa (Cornell UP, 2026) explores how the French state pursued a century-long project of bicultural Franco-Muslim education in its northwest African colonies, resulting in a new type of school, the médersa, that combined French and Islamic curricula. French officials frequently described these schools and their students as "hyphen...

From their foundational era in 1097 to Saladin's conquest of Jerusalem almost a century later, the Crusader States transformed the Middle Eastern world. In an era shaped by many conflicts, this was not simply a war between Christianity and Islam, but an epic contest among multiple rival empires, dynasties, and cultures. Nicholas Morton's The Crusader Storm: A Global History of the Wars for the Mid...

Han Hsien Liew’s fascinating and insightful new book, Preaching Pious Rulership in Medieval Islam: Ibn al-Jawzi’s Political Thought (Edinburgh UP, 2026) offers a new way of understanding the political thought of one of medieval Islam’s most influential preachers, Ibn al-Jawzi. Although Ibn al-Jawzi is often remembered primarily as a preacher, moralist, and religious scholar, Han Hsien challenges c...

Reinventing Caste: Islam and Hierarchy in Late Colonial India (Stanford UP, 2026) reveals that caste, usually assumed to be a feature of Hindu society, was in fact a trans-religious phenomenon in colonial India, as it is today. Even in an Islamic religious milieu that was supposedly more egalitarian than hierarchical Hinduism, colonial Indian subjects thought and acted in terms of caste. Through a...

Matthew Thomas Miller's new book Feeling like Lovers: Affect in Medieval Sufism (U California Press, 2026), and is available as an open access book (see link below), considers how for many medieval Sufis, Sufism was the “path of love”, and God was the Beloved, and so one had to become a lover of the Beloved on this path. And though there remains a rich corpus of Sufi texts from theological, legal...

Constructing the Medieval Maritime State: Identity, Violence, and Connection in the Mediterranean (Oxford University Press, 2026) by Professor Travis Bruce explores how the small medieval kingdom of Denia in Spain became a powerful maritime state after the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate. Its rulers built authority, not only through war and seafaring raids but also by connecting Denia to wider M...

Mary, the mother of Jesus, has been historically revered throughout the Islamic tradition. This began already in the Qur'an, where she is called by the name "Maryam." The Islamic Mary: Maryam Through the Centuries (Fortress Press, 2025) examines the varied appearances of Maryam in different Islamic cultural and theological contexts. The chapters in this history extend from Maryam's scriptural ment...

Descended from Mughal nobility, Akhtar al-Nisa Begum Nawab Sarbuland Jung grew up in Hyderabad in southern India, where she lived a quiet, private, and privileged life at the heart of the state's royal court. In 1896, at the age of 20, she married Nawab Muhammad Hamidullah Khan Sarbuland Jung, a prominent lawyer and the scion of a leading Muslim reformist movement. In 1909, the wealthy couple...

In this conversation, we are entering an Indian Ocean world connected by steamships, telegraphs, pilgrimage routes, and print. From Bombay and the Gulf to Cairo and Mecca—and onward to Moscow and Geneva—merchants, scholars, activists, and political exiles debated a question that still feels urgent: how can different communities live together without being reduced to permanent majorities and minori...

Following Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1798 campaign in Egypt, new possibilities of travel and improvements in printing technology saw an emergence of publishing ventures in France and Britain dedicated to the production of albums and travel accounts featuring images of Muslim Egypt and Islamic architecture and catering to a growing European fascination with the East. In her debut book, Visualizing Egypt:...

Rahim Thawer and Maryam Khan's new edited volume Queer and Muslim: On Faith, Family and Healing (U Regina Press, 2026) is a powerful anthology that brings together writers, activists, and scholars who meditate, reflect, and share stories of queer Muslim life, that contains the complexity of rage, grief and resilience but also joy, love, and healing. In the process, Thawer and Khan deconstruct the...

Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan: State Violence and Resistance, 1949–2024 (Cornell University Press, 2026) by Dr. Xian Aubin Wang investigates decades of contentious relations between the Communist party-state of China and the Muslim community of southern Yunnan centered on the village of Shadian, site of an incident of state violence in 1975 that resulted in 1600 civilian deaths. Examining th...

Unruly Monuments: Disrupting the State at Delhi's Islamic Architecture (Cambridge University Press, 2025) examines how Delhi's Sultanate and Mughal architecture, dating from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, became modern monuments and were assimilated and ordered into public consciousness as spaces for tourism, leisure, and intellectual contemplation during the colonial and early postcolo...

In her most recent publication, Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health, and Modernity in Indonesia (Stanford UP, 2025), Chiara Formichi argues that Muslim women in Java and Sumatra, from the late 1910s to the 1950s, were central to Indonesia's progress as guardians and promoters of health and piety through gendered activities of care work. While sidelined in the Dutch colonial project of hygie...

Tunisia’s Andalusians: The Cultural Identity of a North African Minority (Edinburgh UP, 2025) tells the captivating story of those Andalusians, descendants of Muslims expelled from Spain in the seventeenth century, who sought refuge in Tunisia. Rather than simply replicating Iberian traditions, Andalusian culture in Tunisia stands as a vibrant and evolving phenomenon, shaped by complex dynamics of...

Examining sectarian divergence in the early modern Middle East, Ayşe Baltacıoğlu-Brammer's study provides a fresh perspective on the Sunni–Shi'i division. Drawing on Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and European sources, Boundaries of Belonging: Sectarianism and Statecraft in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2026) explores the paradox of an Ottoman state that combined rigid id...

Youssef J. Carter’s The Vast Oceans: Remembering Allah and Self on the Mustafawiyya Sufi Path (UNC Press, 2026) is a stunning meditation on Black Atlantic Sufism, specifically as it travels between South Carolina and Senegal via the Mustafawiyya Sufi community and Shaykh Arona Faye. The book orbits around Sufi conceptual frameworks which are translated through the register of Black and Africana St...

In this episode of the New Books Network, we explore Ethnographic Reflections on Marriage in Dhofar, Oman (Anthem Press, 2026), with anthropologist Dr Marielle Risse. Drawing on nearly two decades of ethnographic fieldwork, Dr Risse offers a nuanced examination of marriage practices among Sunni Muslim communities in southern Oman, challenging many of the assumptions that often underpin Western di...

Fundamental to Islamic thought is the idea that there is a way that human beings simply are, by nature or creation. This concept is called fiṭra. In The Politics of Islamic Ethics: Hierarchy and Human Nature in the Philosophical Tradition (Cambridge UP, 2025), rooting her investigation in two central passages in the Qur’an and hadith literature, where it is asserted that God created human being...

In this episode, Saeed Khan, Amina Easat Daas, Chella Ward and Claudia Radiven sit down for a round up of the season’s dynamic episodes, and take a look toward the future and the next season. The conversation drew on the manifestations of Islamophobia across many different national contexts and the connectedness of them all. Across the episodes this season we explored the structural and systemic p...

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr. Oludamini Oguannaike, Associate Professor of African Religious Thought and Democracy at the University of Virginia. Tazin and Oludamini talk about his work into how languages, such as English, express concepts that originate from onto-epistemic perspectives that are not historically associated with the English lang...

In this episode hosts Salman Sayyid and Amina Easat-Daas were joined by William Barylo to discuss his most recent book ‘Muslims in the Neoliberal Era: Resisting, Healing, and Flourishing in the Metacolonial Era’. The discussion centred on the differing nature of the Muslim experience in France, the UK, and beyond, and the ways in which Muslims find spaces and forms of community resistance in view...