Amir Artaban Sedaghat’s Translating Rumi into the West: A Linguistic Conundrum and Beyond (Routledge, 2023) engages Rumi, the 13th-century Muslim Persian mystic and a best-selling poet, and the paradoxes of English translations associated with him. Sedaghat explores generative questions from translation to audience reception using translation studies and the ... Show More
Nov 22
Faisal Devji, "Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam" (Yale UP, 2025)
Faisal Devji's Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam (Yale UP, 2025) is a compelling examination of the rise of Islam as a global historical actor. Until the nineteenth century, Islam was variously understood as a set of beliefs and practices. But after Muslims began ... Show More
1h 4m
Nov 21
Jasbeer Musthafa Mamalipurath, "TEDified Islam: Postsecular Storytelling in New Media" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
Jasbeer Mamalipurath’s TEDified Islam: Postsecular Storytelling in New Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) is the first of its kind in-depth examination of the TedTalk phenomenon and in particular how Islam and Muslim experiences are represented in these talks. Mamalipurath argues t ... Show More
1h 14m
Nov 14
Basit Kareem Iqbal, "The Dread Heights: Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution" (Fordham UP, 2025)
Basit Kareem Iqbal's new book The Dread Heights: Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution (Fordham UP, 2025) uses ethnographic scenes from Jordan and Canada to contextualize the role of Muslim charities and community organizations that support displaced refugees from t ... Show More
1h 16m
Dec 2023
Rumi - The Most Famous Sufi Poet in the World
<p>Finally, we're talking about the incredibly significant Persian sufi poet Jalal al-din Rumi. This video provides an in-depth analysis of Rumi's life, poetic themes, literary contributions, and their significance in the context of Sufism and Persian literature. </p><br><p>Thank ... Show More
1h 19m
Dec 2022
Rumi — You wake the dead to life
Who brings you to praise? Rumi’s great poem of praise to the “you” is to his great friend Shams, and through that friendship, to God.Rumi was a 13th-century Muslim mystic and poet. He left behind a vast body of lyric poetry, metaphysical writings, lectures, and letters, which hav ... Show More
15m 11s
May 2021
Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi, "The Translator of Desires: Poems" (Princeton UP, 2021)
In this ground-breaking work, Michael Sells (the Barrows Professor Emeritus of the History and Literature of Islam and Professor emeritus of comparative literature at the University of Chicago) translates sixty-one poems that form the Tarjuman al-ashwaq or The Translator of Desir ... Show More
1h 4m
Oct 2023
Anna Ziajka Stanton, "The Worlding of Arabic Literature: Language, Affect, and the Ethics of Translatability" (Fordham UP, 2023)
Critics have long viewed translating Arabic literature into English as an ethically fraught process of mediating between two wholly incommensurable languages, cultures, and literary traditions. Today, Arabic literature is no longer “embargoed” from Anglophone cultural spaces, as ... Show More
37m 38s
Oct 2022
Ruth Harris, "Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda" (Harvard UP, 2022)
Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda (Harvard UP, 2022) tells the story of Swami Vivekananda, the nineteenth-century Hindu ascetic who introduced the West to yoga and to a tolerant, scientifically minded universalist conception of religion. Ruth Harris explores t ... Show More
43m 56s
Jun 2020
Lara Harb, "Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
Lara Harb’s Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a delightful and formidable study on the details and development of poetics and aesthetics in medieval Arabic literature. The central theme of this splendid book ... Show More
1h 3m