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…
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…
In September 2012, the euphoria of the Arab Spring was still continuing in the region. My wife and I decided to spend the 2012-2013 academic year in Qatar for research, and our son was born…
[Book Review Essay] Brannon D. Ingram, Revival from Below: The Deoband Movement and Global Islam (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2018). 315 pages. Paperback $26.03. Hardcover $61.81. | Reviewed by Andrew Booso Barbara Metcalf’s…
[Book Review] Rashid Shaz. Kodra: A Narrative of Shi‘a-Sunni Understanding (New Delhi: Milli Publications, 2018). 239 pages. INR 300 hardcover. A romanticized view of Muslim history still makes Muslims comfortable. Their discussions are heavily loaded…
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst’s Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels, and Jihad explores how revolts in 1857 and 1858 in India profoundly shaped the conceptualization of Muslims as a distinct minority community in…
Debates regarding all-encompassing transnational identities, and the historical circumstances which contributed to the construction of such imaginations, are gaining momentum as today’s ever-globalizing world becomes more interconnected in challenging long-standing sensibilities and allegiances at a…
[Book Review] Fahad Ahmad Bishara, A Sea of Debt – Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 288 pages; ISBN:9781107155657 & Johan Mathew, Margins of the Market: Trafficking…
[Book Review] : Siavash Saffari , Beyond Shariati: Modernity, Cosmopolitanism, and Islam in Iranian Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 256pp., $96.41 Ali Shariati is probably the most celebrated Islamist thinker in contemporary Iran. His…
In American society there is a predominate public narrative that asserts that Islam is inherently violent, Muslims are foreign and dangerous, we should remain alert and suspicious, and policies or acts of aggression against them…