New Books in Islamic Studies

A vibrant urban settlement from mediaeval times and the royal seat of the Safavid dynasty, the city of Isfahan emerged as a great metropolis during the seventeenth century. Using key sources, Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran (Penn State University Press, 2024) reconstructs the spaces and senses of this dynamic city. Focusing on nuances of urban experience, Dr. Farshi...

Over the course of the Almoravid (1040–1147) and Almohad (1121–1269) dynasties, mediaeval Marrakesh evolved from an informal military encampment into a thriving metropolis that attempted to translate a local and distinctly rural past into a broad, imperial architectural vernacular. In Marrakesh and the Mountains: Landscape, Urban Planning, and Identity in the Medieval Maghrib (Penn State Universit...

This episode is the third one this series where we look back over the first principles of the ReOrient project. In previous episodes we have discussed post-orientalism and post-positivism, here we turn to decoloniality. Discussions of decoloniality have become increasingly mainstream since the ‘Decolonise the Curriculum’ and ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movements, and calls to decolonise are often heard on...

An interview with Salman Sayyid in which he addresses some of the criticisms of the recent definition of Islamophobia as “a type of racism that targets Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” To read more about the incident of Islamophobia mentioned in this podcast, please visit this link. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! ht...

Two academics, one Jewish and one Muslim, come together to show how much their faiths have in common—particularly in America. This book provides a braided portrait of two American groups whose strong religious attachments and powerful commitments to ritual observance are not always easy to adapt to American culture. Orthodox Jews and observant Muslims share many similarities in their efforts to be...

In this episode Salman Sayyid talks to Haiyun Ma about Muslimness in China. This is the second episode in this series which addresses this topic: in a previous episode we spoke to Darren Byler about Uyghur Muslims in East Turkestan. In this episode, our focus is slightly different, and encompasses many Muslim groups in China. Haiyun Ma, assistant professor at Frostburg State University, tells us a...

Islamic art is often misrepresented as an iconophobic tradition. As a result of this assumption, the polyvalence of figural artworks made for South Asian Muslim audiences has remained hidden in plain view. Faces of God: Images of Devotion in Indo-Muslim Painting, 1500-1800 (Brill, 2023) situates manuscript illustrations and album paintings within cultures of devotion and ritual shaped by Islamic i...

An interview with Professor Shenhav in which the politics of translation is discussed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

By examining the intersection of Islamic law, state law, religion, and culture in the Egyptian nation-building process, Recasting Islamic Law: Religion and the Nation State in Egyptian Constitution Making (Cornell University Press, 2021) highlights how the sharia, when attached to constitutional commitments, is reshaped into modern Islamic state law. Dr. Rachel M. Scott analyses the complex effect...

This episode is the first of two episodes this season on Muslims in China. Here Claudia Radiven and Chella Ward talk to Darren Blyer about his book Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Duke UP, 2022). Darren is a sociocultural anthropologist at Simon Fraser University, whose book explores how islamophobia and capitalism contribute to the violence against Uyghu...

An interview with Dr. Mustapha Sheikh on his co-authored paper on alcohol, Islam and the ontic. 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 the 2010s, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) began to mobilize an international media system to project Turkey as a rising player and counter foreign criticism of its authoritarian practices. In Talking Back to the West: How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order (University of Illinois Press, 2024), Bilge Yesil examines the AKP’s English-langua...

As Muslim American representation becomes more prominent in popular culture, how are they continued to be portrayed?  Rosemary Pennington's new book Pop Islam: Seeing American Muslims in Popular Media (Indiana University Press, 2024) explores the “trap of hypervisibility” faced by Muslims in popular media and the burden of representation that follows them. More representation may not always be gen...

Persevering with our literary theme this season, in this episode Claudia Radiven and Chella Ward chat to A. M. Dassu about her books for young readers. Az is a children’s author of fiction and non-fiction, whose books include Fight Back (Tu Books, 2022) and Boy, Everywhere (Tu Books, 2021). Her books engage young readers with themes of migration, activism and political solidarity, and she often wr...

In this episode, Richard Bulliet talks about his work in world and Islamicate history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr Ibrar Bhatt about heritage literacies, particularly as they are practiced by Chinese Muslims. Bhatt is the author of A Semiotics of Muslimness in China (Cambridge UP, 2023). About the book:  A Semiotics of Muslimness in China examines the semiotics of Sino-Muslim heritage literacy in a way that integrates its Perso-Arabic textual qualities with broader cultural semiot...

In this episode of Radio ReOrient we return to the literary theme of this season, to explore the work of Laury Silvers. Laury is the author of many successful book series set in the past and present of the Islamicate, including her Sufi Mysteries Quartet set in 10th Century Baghdad. In this interview she tells Saeed Khan and Salman Sayyid about her work, about the way that orientalism structures s...

Fatima, the daughter of Prophet Muhammad, has an interesting legacy, one that is often shaped by sectarian differences and tensions. The sermon of Fatima, which is the focus of Mahjabeen Dhala's Feminist Theology and Sociology of Islam: A Study of the Sermon of Fatima (Cambridge University Press, 2024), though itself riddled with questions of authenticity, is a compelling incident which brings to...

Contemporary thought typically places a strong emphasis on the exclusive and competitive nature of Abrahamic monotheisms. This instinct is certainly borne out by the histories of religious wars, theological polemic, and social exclusion involving Jews, Christians, and Muslims. But there is also another side to the Abrahamic coin. Even in the midst of communal rivalry, Jews, Christians, and Muslim...

In this very exciting book that I couldn’t put down - Neo-Traditionalism in Islam in the West: Orthodoxy, Spirituality, and Politics (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) - Walaa Quisay explores the trend of white male convert neo-traditionalist scholars in the West and their relationship with young seekers of sacred knowledge. She highlights the meanings of "tradition" that these scholars imagine an...

In this episode Hizer Mir and his co-author Sahar Ghumkhor talk to Shareef Muhammad about the phenomenon of Muslims in the Manosphere. Shareef is a scholar of history based in Atlanta, Georgia, who works on Muslims, race and third worldism - especially the experience of Black Muslims in the context of imperial America. This interview results from an article Sahar and Hizer wrote about the Muslim M...

An interview with Dr. Nadia Fadil who speaks about secularism the state and Islam. We delve into questions such as what it means to call Islam a lived and embodied reality and what the relationship is between Islam and secularism. 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 we celebrate the release of a special issue of the ReOrient journal, ‘Hindutva and the Muslim Subject’, edited by Sheheen Kattiparambil. Shvetal Vyas Pare and Sheheen sat down to discuss the special issue, introducing what Hindutva is and how it relates to global projects of Islamophobia within and beyond India (including Tel Aviv’s genocide in Palestine). ‘Hindutva and the Muslim...

 Dr Sabrina Lei, Director of Tawasul Europe Centre for Dialogue and Research, is an emerging Italian Muslim philosopher and thinker. Trained in Latin, Greek and ancient philosophy for over a decade, with a PhD from Pontifical Gregorian University (one of the prominent centres of Catholic scholarship in Rome) in ancient Greek philosophy. Dr Sabrina has, so far, translated over 25 Muslim classics in...

The third episode of this season of Radio ReOrient continues our project this season of returning to the first principles of Critical Muslim Studies. In the previous episode, Hizer Mir and Salman Sayyid discussed post-positivism: here they turn to post-orientalism. The advent of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 shook the foundations of many academic disciplines. Not only Oriental Studies (which w...