In their edited volume Veil Obsessed: Representations in Literature, Art, and Media (Syracuse University Press, 2024), Umme Al-wazedi and Afrin Zeenat complicate discussions of the veil and highlight the prevalent anxieties surrounding it. The edited volume is unique in its focus and engagement of the veil as it appears in various literary, artistic, and pop ... Show More
Jul 2
Michael Cook, "A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity" (Princeton UP, 2024)
A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity (Princeton UP, 2024) by Michael A. Cook This book describes and explains the major events, personalities, conflicts, and convergences that have shaped the history of the Muslim world. The body of the book ta ... Show More
1h 19m
Jun 20
Omneya Ayad, "Love in Sufi Literature: Ibn ‘Ajiba’s Understanding of the Divine Word" (Routledge, 2023)
Love in Sufi Literature: Ibn ‘Ajiba’s Understanding of the Divine Word (Routledge, 2023) explores the role of divine love in the Quranic commentary of the Moroccan Sufi scholar Aḥmad Ibn ʿAjība (d. 1224/1809). Through close textual analysis of Ibn ʿAjība’s exegesis al-Baḥr al-mad ... Show More
39m 33s
Jun 4
Sarah Nagaty, "The Collective Dream: Egyptians Longing For A Better Life" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
The Collective Dream: Egyptians Longing For A Better Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) links two seminal moments in Egypt’s history – the Revolution of 25th January 2011 and the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser – through various cultural manifestations. It conceives the concept of ... Show More
36m 56s
Mar 2024
Umme Al-wazedi and Afrin Zeenat, "Veil Obsessed: Representations in Literature, Art, and Media" (Syracuse UP, 2024)
In their edited volume Veil Obsessed: Representations in Literature, Art, and Media (Syracuse University Press, 2024), Umme Al-wazedi and Afrin Zeenat complicate discussions of the veil and highlight the prevalent anxieties surrounding it. The edited volume is unique in its focus ... Show More
50m 15s
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 4m
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
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 6m
Mar 2021
Hawraa Al Hassan, "Women, Writing and the Iraqi Ba'thist State" (U Edinburgh Press, 2020)
Hawraa Al Hassan’s Women, Writing and the Iraqi Ba’thist State: Contending Discourses of Resistance and Collaboration, 1968-2003 (University of Edinburgh Press, 2020) is unique because it both explores discourse concerning women and how women themselves used literature to create ... Show More
55m 54s
Oct 2020
Danielle Haque, “Interrogating Secularism: Race and Religion in Arab Transnational Art and Literature” (Syracuse UP, 2019)
In many popular accounts of contemporary “Western” society there is an inherent contradiction between the principles underlying liberal secularism and Islam. This type of binary discourse about “religion” and “secular” naturalizes these differences and promotes the seeming rigidi ... Show More
57m 8s