Since 2014, substantial ink has been spilled on chronicling, explaining, and contesting the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s predominance in national politics in India. Scholars have studied the ever-intensifying waves of anti-minority violence in the country,…
The Maydan Podcast · A Common Word | EP 12 – Younus Mirza with Paul Heck | Emotions in Islam As I look closely at Qur’anic figures, I am struck by how they speak about…
In this book, the author makes a comparison between the literature of fiction novels and short stories written in Arabic and Persian that cover the narratives about the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq in…
How is the practice of religious rituals already a political act and a movement of justice? What do bodies share between themselves as they learn and convey rituals and genres? Is this mode of teaching…
Maydan Book forum on Rethinking Marital and Sexual Ethics in Islamic Law: The Case of Temporary Marriage, (Lexington Books/ Bloomsbury, 2023) by Roshan Iqbal. ISBN 9781793606280; ix+120 pages; hardback $144.85 Judd King | Fatima Razvi |…
What does it mean to be “lucky” after surviving state-sanctioned mass violence? In The Lucky Ones: A Memoir, Zara Chowdhary interrogates this very notion through her account of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom that claimed over…
[Book Review] Practices of the State: Muslims, Law and Violence in India by Tanweer Fazal (Three Essays Collective, 2024). Reviewed by Rushnae Kabir
[PODCAST] A Common Word | EP 12 – Younus Mirza with Paul Heck | Emotions in Islam
[Book Review] Dust That Never Settles Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War by Amir Moosavi | Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2025). Reviewed by Thuraya Abdulateef
Resourcing Ritualization: Transference and Spiritual Sovereignty in the Islamic Tradition
BOOK FORUM on Rethinking Marital and Sexual Ethics in Islamic Law: The Case of Temporary Marriage by Roshan Iqbal | Contributions from Judd King, Fatima Razvi, and Roshan Iqbal
[Book Review] The Lucky Ones: A Memoir by Zara Chowdhary (Crown, 2024) | Reviewed by Gungun Islam
What does it mean to be “lucky” after surviving state-sanctioned mass violence? In The Lucky Ones: A Memoir, Zara Chowdhary interrogates this very notion through her account of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom that claimed over…
Functioning as a passe-partout, Kalyani Devaki Menon’s Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India1 opens up critical pathways into the expanding literature on the ‘everyday’ experiences of Indian Muslims. Menon’s work, grounded in Anthropology, is…
Over the past several decades, the South Asian Muslim intellectual tradition has emerged as a crucial site of scholarly inquiry within the broader academic study of Islam. Historians, anthropologists, and scholars of Islamic law have…
Colloquium Program Registration Link Thursday, December 18 on Zoom | https://gmu.zoom.us/meeting/register/8YJxDQ7rRRaRkKpEshOMyw 9:45am-10:00am Introduction/Welcome 10:00am- 11:00am Panel 1: Indian Muslims and Belonging | Discussant/Moderator: TBC Gungun Islam (Michigan State University), Zara Chowdhary’s The Lucky Ones: A Memoir (Crown,…
Salafism, a theological and methodological current within Sunni Islam, has long defied neat classification. Though rooted in a call to return to the practices of the salaf—the pious predecessors—it has become a deeply contested category,…
The Maydan Podcast · A Common Word | Episode 1- Younus Mirza Hosts Rachel Mikva One of the reasons I have been drawn to A Common Word and the Islamic Mary or Maryam in…
Book Forum | Disenchanting the Caliphate: The Secular Discipline of Power in Abbasid Political Thought (Columbia Univ Press, 2023) by Hayrettin Yücesoy | ISBN: 9780231209410 (Paperback) $35.00, 392 pages. John Curry | University of Nevada, Las…
For decades, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning held a special place in psychotherapeutic literature. Frankl wrote his thoughts immediately after having survived a Nazi concentration camp. There he observed a stark difference between those…
Introduction A Culture of Ambiguity by Thomas Bauer may be one of the most significant books in Islamic Studies in recent decades.[1] Originally published in German in 2011, it was not until 2021 that it…
In Freedoms Delayed, Timur Kuran attempts to reveal how Sharī’ah affects “Patterns of civic engagement, understandings of religious liberties, distributions of political power, and relative economic capabilities…” (p . 4) Kuran, a prolific scholar whose…
Special BAMI Themed 7th Annual Graduate Student Book Review Colloquium | Program December 7, 2023 ONLINE on Zoom | Register at https://gmu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAkcu6hrzgpHdc584wi52lC3sc21YQi6j0l 9:30am- 10:00 am Welcome and introduction to BAMI | Dr. Maria Dakake, Dr. Ahmet…
This forum brings six scholars into discussion with Tazeen Ali’s The Women’s Mosque of America: Authority and Community in US Islam. In line with the book’s main argument, the reviewers [amina wadud, Esra Tunc, Iman…
The hermeneutical transcendence of the stories of al-Khidr appears as the resonance of faith in human yearning for the world beyond our reach. Professor Irfan A. Omar’s Prophet al-Khidr: Between the Qur’anic Tet and Islamic…
Over the last fifty years, Islam’s geopolitical presence has significantly expanded, allowing for expanded dialogue on the role of religion and the effects of Islam on the political stage. This has given rise to new…
A recent poetry collection intriguingly titled ʿInd al-thamānīn badaʾt shiʿrī (“At eighty, I Began My Poetry”) by litterateur, senior Azhari Shaykh, theologian, and member of the Supreme Council of Scholars, Ḥasan al-Shāfiʿī (b. 1930), contains…
