Islam, as a historical tradition, began in early seventh century Arabia. The formative canons of Islamic thought – the Qur’an as well as the voluminous literature describing the early community of Muslims – contain a…
In Charles Taylor’s magnum opus, A Secular Age, he makes a series of wonderful distinctions about the pre-modern and modern worlds. Among these is the idea that modernity entails a loss of enchantment, a move…
“#We_are_all_responsible”: Bio-power and the Early Saudi Religious Response to Pandemic With a crisis like COVID-19 comes trepid opportunity, and in Saudi Arabia, home to Islam’s two holiest shrines, the once-defanged “religious police” have returned with…
Introduction Anyone who has been homeless can tell you it is not a place you want to be. The pangs of hunger, the cold, lonely nights roaming the street or countryside, the uncomfortable position of…
After Professor Muhammad Anwar, OBE, FRSA, passed away last month, Virinder S Kalra, head of the department of sociology at the University of Warwick, wrote that he was a “founding figure in the field of…
*A slightly different version of this article first appeared in print in the Summer 2020 edition of Critical Muslim (35) which was commissioned as part of the Muslim Atlantic research project. In his seminal book, The Black…
al-Bīrūnī 2.0: The Future of Muslim Studies of the Hindu Tradition
Enchantment, Orientalism, and Modern Mysticism
“#We_are_all_responsible”: Bio-power and the Early Saudi Religious Response to Pandemic
Why the Muslim World Matters: Building a Home with the Homeless
A British Pioneer in the Study of Ethnic Relations: Muhammad Anwar
Realising a Muslim Atlantic
*A slightly different version of this article first appeared in print in the Summer 2020 edition of Critical Muslim (35) which was commissioned as part of the Muslim Atlantic research project. In his seminal book, The Black…
The Al-Qaeda boogeyman in Bosnia ”10.000 mujahedeen in Bosnia and Herzegovina ready for a new Jihad.” This is how the headline of an article read in a leading Bosnian Serb newspaper in January 2019. It…
The Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies (AVACGIS) at George Mason University is organizing a webinar series that will explore the impact of Covid-19 on various dimensions of Muslim religious life in global…
The Covid-19 pandemic has been disruptive to all religious communities in the US, including American Muslims. What happens to the rituals of religion—Durkheim’s “eminently social phenomenon”—when the social is withdrawn from them? Believers find themselves…
In Indonesia, like elsewhere, Islam and Marxism have an historical relationship largely characterized by opposition. Notably, there was an historical moment during the late colonial and early independence eras when a tradition of Islamic communism…
Sughra Ahmed | The Maydan & the Muslim Atlantic Podcast The Maydan · Sughra Ahmed | The Maydan & the Muslim Atlantic Podcast Peter Mandaville speaks with Sughra Ahmed, a leading British Muslim voice with…
Since January 2016, I’ve been conducting ethnographic research on the progressive Muslim community globally, both face to face in six North American groups and in three online groups. Some of this work, which I report…
Mohammed A. Bamyeh, Lifeworlds of Islam: The Pragmatics of a Religion (Oxford University Press, 2019). ISBN: 9780190280567. 256 pages. Hardcover: $65.00. | Reviewed by Ehsan Sheikholharam When asked to define their religion, Muslims tend to…
The 17th Annual Duke-UNC Middle East and Islamic Studies Graduate Student Conference was held at UNC on 29 February 2020. The theme for this year was – Who Speaks for Islam? Approaches to Authority within…
The image of the voracious reader in prison is a powerful trope of film and literature, from The Shawshank Redemption to the Autobiography of Malcolm X. Based on the idea of redemption through education, it…
