New Books in Islamic Studies

In Hearing Islam: The Sounds of a Global Religious Tradition, Lauren Osborne delves into the sonic dimensions of Islam, exploring how the tradition’s rich soundscape offers deep insights into culture, identity, and spirituality. In this innovative work, Osborne shifts the focus from the written word to the auditory, asking, "What can we learn about Islam when we enter through its sounds, instead o...

In this episode Saeed Khan and Hizer Mir take a trip to Muslim Sicily, via a new book edited by Nuha Alshaar. They are also joined for this conversation by Shainool Jiwa, one of the authors whose work is featured in this edited volume. They discuss the period from around 800 CE to the mid-13th century, one characterised by a large Muslim presence which still exerts an important, though sometimes f...

In Postcolonial Bollywood and Muslim Identity: Production, Representation, and Reception (Oxford UP, 2024), Nadira Khatun explores the contentious Muslim identity in contemporary India as reflected in recent Bollywood films. She argues that the approach towards Muslim identity in Bollywood films are influenced by the changing political landscape from Nehruvian India to the rise of BJP, which views...

In this episode of High Theory, Nina Studer tells us about alcohol. The restrictions and prohibitions, medical and moral discourses surrounding alcohol reveal a great deal about a given society in a particular historical moment. Nina uses alcohol as a lens to analyze the history of French colonization in North Africa. Who consumed alcohol, in what places, how much, and what kinds, what was viewed...

When Only God Can See: The Faith of Muslim Political Prisoners (Pluto Press, 2024), uncovers the unique experiences of Muslim political prisoners held in Egypt and under US custody at Guantanamo Bay and other detention black sites. This groundbreaking book explores the intricate interplay between their religious beliefs, practices of ritual purity, prayer, and modes of resistance in the face of ad...

In this episode, Saeed Khan and Chella Ward sat down with Dr Aliyah Khan to discuss Muslimness in the Caribbean, drawing on Aliyah’s book Far From Mecca and ongoing important work in this area. This wide-ranging conversation covers decolonial solidarities and neglected histories, and is part of our Forgotten Ummah series, where we investigate Muslimness in places outside of the Middle East and Nor...

In The Woman Question in Islamic Studies (Princeton UP, 2024), the Introduction of which is available at the publisher's website, Kecia Ali delves into the deeply entrenched ways sexism continues to shape the academic landscape of Islamic Studies. Despite the growing presence of women scholars in the field, Ali finds that women’s work remains marginalized, relegated to the periphery while male-aut...

In this episode, Chella Ward and Salman Sayyid talked to Adnan Husain about some of the challenges involved in reorienting history. We spoke about the opportunities and limitations of the idea of ‘the global’ as a way of organising history, and explored the relationship between the global and the decolonial. Adnan Husain is a Medieval European and Middle Eastern historian at Queen’s University, Ca...

Since Kenya's invasion of Somalia in 2011, the Kenyan state has been engaged in direct combat with the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab, conducting airstrikes in southern Somalia and deploying heavy-handed police tactics at home. As the hunt for suspects has expanded within Kenya, Kenyan Muslims have been subject to disappearances and extrajudicial killings at the hands of U.S.-trained Kenyan poli...

Palestine's Christians and the Nationalist Cause: The Late Ottoman and Mandatory Periods (Routledge, 2024) provides an historical overview of Palestine's Christian communities and their role in the Palestinian nationalist movement during the late Ottoman and British mandatory periods. More than being a history of Palestine's Christian Arabs, the book focuses on Palestine's Christians during the fo...

In this episode Chella Ward and Salman Sayyid talked to Professor Priyamvada Gopal, Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge. We talked about her important work on anticolonial resistance, about the importance of the literary in imagining liberation, and about the relationship between the Muslim and the decolonial – and also had the opportunity to hear about some of her upc...

In this episode, Amina Easat-Daas interviews Houria Bouteldja on decolonial activism and Islamophobia in France. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

William Gallois joins the podcast to discuss his latest book, Qayrawān: The Amuletic City, published by The Pennsylvania State University Press in 2024. Qayrawān: The Amuletic City investigates the fascinating history of the Tunisian city of Qayrawān, which in the last years of the nineteenth century found itself covered in murals. Concentrated on and around the city’s Great Mosque, these monument...

In this episode of In Conversation, Claudia Radiven talks with Abdul-Basit Shaikh on PREVENT (Preventing Violent Extremism), academia and representation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

In Ayesha Jalal’s latest work Muslim Enlightened Thought in South Asia (Routledge, 2024) readers are introduced to the “roshan khayali” (enlightened thought) of South Asian Muslim thinkers spanning from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. In the course of eleven chapters Jalal highlights the contributions of diverse Muslim voices to debates about reason, religion, liberality, belonging, and...

The Ethics of Karbala: Myths, Modernity, and Virtues of Nobility (Routledge, 2024) investigates the relationship between sacred narratives and the development of character. Focusing on the warrior ethos expressed in accounts of the Battle of Karbala, Zargar searches for the place of the martial virtues in modern life and warfare. This book is the first of its kind in taking a virtue ethics approac...

In this episode, Ismail Patel speaks with Diana Darke about her new book, “Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture shaped Europe”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

In this episode, Ismail Patel talks with Lars Erik Berntzen on the Far Right and the expansion of anti-Muslim sentiment within it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

In this episode, Uzma Jamil is speaking to Stephen Sheehi on epistemology, critical race theory and critical Muslim studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India (Cambridge UP, 2024) tells a story about the relationship between secular law and religious violence by studying the memorialisation of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom--postcolonial India's most litigated and mediatized event of anti-Muslim mass violence. By reading judgments and films on the pogrom through a novel interpretive framew...

This podcast features Ammar Rashid, a leading figure in left-wing politics in Pakistan, and currently Director of the action-research organization Alliance for Urban Rights, and Research Lead at the public health think tank, Heartfile. This episode of Radio ReOrient is hosted by Sher Ali Tareen with Shehla Khan and Salman Sayyid. The conversation explores the lengthening political crisis in Pakist...

A conversation with Dr. Sylviane Diouf on enslaved Muslim in the Americas. Diouf is the author of Slavery's Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (NYU Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

This episode features Daniel Majchrowicz, Associate Professor of South Asian Literature & Culture at Northwestern University, discussing his new book, The World in Words: Travel Writing and the Global Imagination in Muslim South Asia published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press. It is a study of South Asia’s global imagination as it was expressed in Urdu-language travel writing from 1840 to the...

Zanzibari Muslim Moderns: Islamic Paths to Progress in the Interwar Period (Oxford UP, 2024) is a historical study of Zanzibar during the interwar years. This was a period marked by rapid intellectual and social change in the Muslim world, when ideas of Islamic progress and development were hotly debated. How did this process play out in Zanzibar? Based on a wide range of sources—Islamic and colon...

In this episode, Dr. Hizer Mir speaks with Momodou Taal on Critical Race Theory and Black Lives Matter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies