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,…
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…
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…
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,…
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…