Adam Bursi’s Traces of the Prophets: Relics and Sacred Spaces in Early Islam (Edinburg University Press, 2024) uses writings by early Muslims to map a history of material objects, relics, and tombs of prophetic figures as they were conceptualized in the 8th and 9th centuries. The book draws from various genres of writings, including biographies and hadith of ... Show More
Oct 3
Jamal J. Elias, "After Rumi: The Mevlevis and Their World" (Harvard UP, 2025)
Jamal J. Elias' new book After Rumi: The Mevlevis & Their World (Harvard UP, 2025) takes us on a historical journey through the development of the Mevlevi community after Jalaluddin Rumi’s passing in 1273. He frames the Mevlevis as an “emotional community” that is anchored in aff ... Show More
1h 2m
Sep 29
Gina Vale, "The Unforgotten Women of the Islamic State" (Oxford UP, 2024)
The Unforgotten Women of the Islamic State (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Gina Vale explores the governance of the Islamic State (IS) terrorist organization through the lives and words of local Iraqi, Syrian, and Kurdish women. While the roles and activities of foreign (p ... Show More
56m 55s
Sep 22
Wendell Marsh, "Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities" (Columbia UP, 2025)
Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities (Columbia University Press, 2025), is a groundbreaking book that recasts the role of knowledge in the making of a colonial and postcolonial nation. It makes a case for a new literary and intellectual-historical approach ... Show More
53m 46s
Jan 2023
Youshaa Patel, "The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line Between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present" (Yale UP, 2023)
According to a famous prophetic report, “Whoever imitates a people becomes one of them.” What does “imitation” here mean? Rather, what does this statement really mean at all, and how have Muslims historically understood it? How did this simple report become a doctrine in the Isla ... Show More
1h 32m
Dec 2020
Sean Anthony, "Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam" (U California Press, 2020)
Contemporary historians have searched for the historical Muhammad along many paths. In Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam (University of California Press, 2020), Sean Anthony, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Ohio State Univer ... Show More
1h 7m
Dec 2023
Ta’wīl and Ishāra: The Meaning of these Terms in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Approach to the Qur’an
Dr. Dakake researches and publishes on Islamic intellectual history, Quranic studies, Shi`ite and Sufi traditions, and women's spirituality and religious experience. She is one of the general editors and contributing authors of the The Study Quran (HarperOne, 2015), which compris ... Show More
21m 50s
Dec 2023
Nur Sobers-Khan et al., "Beyond Colonial Rupture: Print Culture and the Emergence of Muslim Modernity in Nineteenth-Century South Asia" (2023)
Scholarly discussions on Islam in print have focused predominantly on the role of Urdu in the development of North Indian Muslim publics (Dubrow, 2018; Robb, 2020), ʿulama and Islamic jurisprudence (Tareen, 2020) and relations between Islam and colonial modernity (Robinson, 2008; ... Show More
39m 21s
Feb 2024
Keys to Decipher Ibn ʻArabī’s Manzil al-manāzil. Ibn ʻArabī's unique Quranic journey in Kitāb Manzil: A mystical correlation of 114 suras with the science of numbers and symbolic ascent
Pablo writes: This presentation analyses the content of Ibn ʻArabī’s lesser-known work, Kitāb Manzil al-manāzil al-fahwāniyya (“The Mansion that Gathers [the Keys to All] the Mansions in Which Direct Speech Descends”), which is devoted to Quranic hermeneutics and structured on sy ... Show More
54m 45s
Feb 2024
The Muslim Mindset and Islam’s Mission with Dr Sohail Hanif
Our guest this week, Dr Sohail Hanif, argues that we need to reconnect with not just our relationship with our umma but also have to reorient our lives to live like the murabitun of the past, those who saw themselves as within a wider objective of thinking about deen and the umma ... Show More
1h 35m