The Maydan Podcast

In this episode of Maydan Podcast, Wikke Jansen speaks with Ken Chitwood about his latest book, The Muslims of Latin America and the Caribbean (Lynne Rienner, 2021). They discuss the role of Muslims in the history and present of the Americas and tracing their various legacies back to sixteenth-century Andalusian Spain, the coming of the colonizers and conquistadores to Americas. Reflecting on the...

Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley are the authors of the cookbook Falastin. In this episode of Knowledge and its Producers, we think about how food is in itself a way to preserve heritage and document how it changes over time, a stark contrast to academia. Together, we think about how to write about labor, the place of cookbooks in modern society and what it is to document something like food.

In episode 6 of the “Islam on the Edges” podcast, Ermin Sinanovic talks to Dr. Farid Hafez (Williams College) about the securitization of Muslims in Europe. In a vibrant discussion, Dr. Hafez speaks about the neo-Nazis and their relationship with Islamophobia in Austria and other European countries. He traces the rise of the New Right and its role in anti-Muslim rhetoric. Dr. Hafez focuses explici...

In this episode of History Speaks, Tazeen Ali speaks with Aria Nakissa about his recent book, The Anthropology of Islamic Law: Education, Ethics, and Legal Interpretation at Egypt’s al-Azhar (Oxford University Press, 2019). They discuss shifting pedagogical approaches to Islamic education, modes of reading religious texts, and the relationships between knowledge and ethics in Islamic law and more...

In this episode of On The Square, our host Dr. Su’ad is joined by the Sapelo Squad! As we round out the podcast series and 2021 we wanted to bring the Squad to you up close and personal so you get to know the people behind the work you’ve come to love. From the neverending pandemic, exonerations in the murder of Malcolm X and the coup in Sudan to the Lox VERZUZ Dipset and Black Muslim women creati...

In this episode of History Speaks, Dr. Roshan Iqbal speaks with Dr. Celene Ibrahim and Dr. Hadia Mubarak on Gender as a lens to study the Qur’an, Muslim feminism, its contributions and challenges, the limits and role of texts, and questions of power and authority in academia, among other topics.

In this episode of Maydan Podcast, CGIS Director Peter Mandaville speaks with H.A. Hellyer, a scholar and analyst unique in his experience in studying religious establishments worldwide and the halls of policy-making in the West. They discuss recent political changes in the Muslim-majority world and their impact on traditionalism, relationship between political and scholarly elites, state efforts...

In this episode of On The Square, we talk with Gilary Massa-Machado a community activist from Canada, Tahir Fuzile Sitoto, a lecturer from South Africa, and Ismael Lea South, a community and youth consultant from United Kingdom on the differences and the shared experiences of being Black and Muslim in the 21st century. Credits: On The Square’s theme music was created by Fanatik OnBeats. Artwork fo...

In this episode, Ermin Sinanovic talks to Dr. Dženita Karić (Humboldt University, Germany) and Đermana Kurić (a Ph. D. student at the University of Sarajevo) about female Muslim piety in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The episode examines a renewed interest in the study of piety in religion in general, then focuses on female piety in Bosnia and Herzegovina, tracing its evolution from the Ottoman times th...

When you think of a researcher, most people think of professors in universities. When you think of academic books, you think of books with chapters. Our guest today, Mohamed ElShahed, disrupts these assumptions and does it with an urban history flair. Mohamed ElShahed is an independent historian and curator and is well known for his website Cairobserver. We’re going to be talking to him about his...

In this episode of On The Square, we talk with Dr. Aliyah Khan, author of Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean, about the deep Muslim history of the Caribbean and how the Muslim experience is shaped by the complex racial dynamics of the region. Credits: On The Square’s theme music was created by Fanatik OnBeats. Artwork for On The Square was created by Scheme of Things Graphics.

Today we will be talking to the founders and editors of Contingent Magazine, Marc Reyes and Erin Bartram. Contingent aims at making history accessible to all while supporting academics who don’t have job security. I hope you enjoy talking to them as much as I do; there’s a lot of laughter in this interview. Bill Black is also a co-founder of Contingent Magazine, but he wasn’t available for this in...

In this episode On The Square, we talk about sex! Sapelo Square Senior Editor Su’ad Abdul Khabeer chats with The Village Auntie, Angelica Lindsey-Ali, a certfied sexual health educator and expert on all things sex, intimacy and womanhood from an African and Islamic perspecitve. Credits: On The Square’s theme music was created by Fanatik OnBeats. Artwork for On The Square was created by Scheme of T...

As the 20th anniversary of September 11 reminds us of personal tragedy as well as structural violence of the state, The Maydan Podcast editor-in-chief Ahmet Tekelioglu hosts Sahar Aziz, a legal scholar, an expert on critical race theory, and the founding director of the Center for Security, Race, and Rights at Rutgers University Law School. She is the author of the Racial Muslim, forthcoming from...

In this episode On The Square commemorates Black August. Sapelo Square Senior Editor Su’ad Abdul Khabeer speaks with Jihad Abdulmumit, community activist, playwright, freedom fighter, and chairperson of the National Jericho Movement about freedom and self-determination. Credits: This episode includes excerpts from archival clips of the Black Panther Party preserved in the National Archives. It als...

Our guest today is Jean Druel, a member of the Dominican Order (a part of the Catholic Church) who lives in Cairo. After a Master’s Degree in theology and Coptic patrology, he graduated in Teaching Arabic as Foreign Language at the American University of Cairo. In 2012, he completed a PhD thesis in the history of Arabic grammar at the University of Nijmegen, in the Netherlands titled “Numerals in...

In this episode, Ermin Sinanovic talks to Dr. Mohammed Hashas (Luiss University, Rome, Italy) and Dr. Meriem El Haitami (L’Université Internationale de Rabat in Morocco) about Islamic thought in Morocco. By tracing the genealogies of modern and contemporary Islamic thought, Dr. Hashas and Dr. El Haitami reveal the rich legacy of Moroccan Islamic thought, especially in the fields of philosophy and...

In this episode, Sapelo Square History Editor Zaheer Ali speaks with Tulani Salahu-Din, museum specialist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, about Muslim artifacts at the Museum and the importance of preserving Muslim material culture.

In this episode, Sapelo Square Arts and Culture Editor Ambata Kazi-Nance speaks with author and educator Amani-Nzinga Jabbar about her book, I Bear Witness, the craft of writing, writing about difficult subject matter, and her experiences as a Black Muslim woman writer. Amani-Nzinga Jabbar is a professor of English, author, marathon runner, health coach, wife, and mother of three children. Born in...

In this episode, Ermin Sinanovic talks to Dr. Hatem Bazian of the UC Berkeley and the Zaytuna College about Islamic Palestine and its place in Muslim theology, culture, history, memory, and future. Dr. Hatem Bazian is a co-founder and Professor of Islamic Law and Theology at Zaytuna College, the first accredited Muslim liberal arts college in the United States. In addition, Prof. Bazian is a lectu...

In this episode of History Speaks, I speak with Oludamini Ogunnaike and Sara Abdel-Latif about the self and society in Sufi thought from it’s early formative period in Nishapur to the early modern and contemporary Sufi movements in West Africa. We discuss Sufi conceptions of the self as dynamic and fluid, the role of the paradox in Sufi thought, and the subversion and authorization of hierarchies...

Our guest today is M. Lynx Qualey. We’re going to be talking about everything from translation to KDrama to work-life balance to the idea of guilty pleasures. Qualey is founding editor of the ‘ArabLit’ website (www.arablit.org), which won a 2017 London Book Fair “Literary Translation Initiative” prize. She also publishes the experimental ArabLit Quarterly magazine and is co-host of the Bulaq podca...

In this episode, Sapelo Square History Editor Zaheer Ali speaks with Dr. Su’ad Abdul Khabeer about her latest work, Umi’s Archive, a multimedia research project that digs deep into the life of her mother, Amina Amatul Haqq (neé Audrey Weeks), to explore the meanings of being Black in the world.

In this episode, Ermin interviews four scholars and activists about Ramadan fasting in their countries and communities. The episode reveals many similarities across the four continents – North America, Africa, Europe, and Asia – as well as distinct local practices. Central to the observance of Ramadan are family, community, prayers, Qur’anic recitations, and acts of charity. The four guests are Ni...

In this episode of History Speaks, I speak with Matthew Steele and Mahmood Kooria about the Islamic legal traditions in Africa, South and Southeast Asia. We discussed the life of legal texts as they traveled across the Afro-Asian world, the construction of the center and peripheries in the study of Islamic law and the role of local languages in scholarly communities and the writing of legal texts.