New Books in Islamic Studies

Episodi

• Xian Aubin Wang, "Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan: State Violence and Resistance, 1949–2024" (Cornell UP, 2026) 03.07.2026 1h 3min

  Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan: State Violence and Resistance, 1949–2024 (Cornell University Press, 2026) by Dr. Xian Aubin Wang investigates decades of contentious relations between the Communist party-state of China and the Muslim community of southern Yunnan centered on the village of Shadian, site of an incident of state violence in 1975 that resulted in 1600 civilian deaths. Examining the causes and legacies of the Shadian massacre, Dr. Wang draws on an extensive review of internal official documents, original written testimonies, and firsthand interviews with Muslim villagers. By exploring interactions among Beijing, the Yunnan provincial government, county officials, CCP Muslim cadres, and Shadian villagers against the backdrop of the CCP's nationwide political campaigns since the early 1950s, Dr. Wang shows how Islam and Maoism influenced the ways that local villagers and party cadres saw and dealt with each other—and how these encounters shaped the developing conflict and its aftermath. Providing an in-depth account of Chinese religious groups living under the CCP, Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan reveals how religion and politics shaped Muslim villagers' responses to the party-state's efforts to control and secularize them. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
• Aditi Chandra, "Unruly Monuments: Disrupting the State at Delhi's Islamic Architecture" (Cambridge UP, 2025) 01.07.2026 1h 3min

  Unruly Monuments: Disrupting the State at Delhi's Islamic Architecture (Cambridge University Press, 2025) examines how Delhi's Sultanate and Mughal architecture, dating from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, became modern monuments and were assimilated and ordered into public consciousness as spaces for tourism, leisure, and intellectual contemplation during the colonial and early postcolonial eras (1828-1963). It examines the resistance that challenges this ordering, rendering monuments unruly and unassimilable despite state efforts to control their narrative. This exposes the nation's contradictory claims of inclusivity while marginalizing subaltern groups. It guides readers through picturesque landscapes, museums, imperial displays, postcards, travel experiences, Partition refugee camps, and cinema. Analyzing these forms reveals how the archive of Indo-Islamic monuments was shaped through presences and absences. Each chapter examines everyday life, untangles knowable public transcripts, illuminates strategic excisions and hidden transcripts, juxtaposes evidence that has not yet been analyzed in conjunction, reads archival material against the grain, and finds archival layers in unfamiliar places. NBN Host: Sohini Majumdar Sohini teaches history at University of San Francisco and Santa Clara University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
• Chiara Formichi, "Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health, and Modernity in Indonesia" (Stanford UP, 2025) 30.06.2026 1h 10min

  In her most recent publication, Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health, and Modernity in Indonesia (Stanford UP, 2025), Chiara Formichi argues that Muslim women in Java and Sumatra, from the late 1910s to the 1950s, were central to Indonesia's progress as guardians and promoters of health and piety through gendered activities of care work. While sidelined in the Dutch colonial project of hygienic modernity, women's labor of social reproduction became increasingly visible during the Japanese Occupation and early years of independence. Women from all walks of life were called upon to fulfill domestic and motherly roles for the production and socialization of laborers, soldiers, and citizens. The medicalization of cleanliness, intersecting with multiple patriarchal orders, marginalized women's traditional influence and knowledge. However, leveraging the critical importance of infant care, cleanliness, and nutrition, women pushed against the boundaries imposed on them by the colonial and postcolonial state. Largely absent from government archives, their words and acts are evident in vernacular magazines and visual sources drawn from official outreach, news and lifestyle media, and advertisements. Women writers rearticulated scientific mothering, nationalist maternalism, and Islamic ideals of motherhood to create a public voice through gendered care work. The framework of Domestic Nationalism proposes that as the modern Indonesian nation-state took shape capitalizing on the public function of mothering, so did homemaking become a crossroads of national and international approaches to development, blurring nonaligned self-reliance and global capitalist interests. In this episode Dr. Chiara Formichi (Cornell University) and Leah Cargin (University of Oklahoma and Journal of Women’s History) discuss Domestic Nationalism. We converse about feminist theory and tensions between Indonesian women and colonial establishments. We talk about food, food choices, food preparation and nutrition to reveal an intersection of hygiene, nutrition, and imperialism. And last, we discuss how imperial and colonial invocation of novel hygiene practices was a global phenomenon in the mid-twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
• Marta Dominguez Diaz, "Tunisia's Andalusians: The Cultural Identity of a North African Minority" (Edinburgh UP, 2025) 25.06.2026 1h 11min

  Tunisia’s Andalusians: The Cultural Identity of a North African Minority (Edinburgh UP, 2025) tells the captivating story of those Andalusians, descendants of Muslims expelled from Spain in the seventeenth century, who sought refuge in Tunisia. Rather than simply replicating Iberian traditions, Andalusian culture in Tunisia stands as a vibrant and evolving phenomenon, shaped by complex dynamics of interaction and adaptation over four centuries. The book dismantles the romanticised view of Andalusian culture as a mere transplantation of al-Andalus, analysing distinctive cultural features that distinguish Andalusians as an ethnic group within Tunisia’s diverse social fabric. Drawing on historical records and contemporary ethnographic data, including personal accounts and family archives, the book sheds light on how Andalusians navigate their unique cultural position amidst a Tunisian national narrative often focused on Arabo-Muslim homogeneity. By examining the complexities of cultural preservation and assimilation, the book offers a nuanced perspective on Andalusian identity, revealing its dynamism and resilience in the face of changing social, political, and economic circumstances. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
• Ayşe Baltacıoğlu-Brammer, "Boundaries of Belonging: Sectarianism and Statecraft in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2026) 23.06.2026 1h 14min

  Examining sectarian divergence in the early modern Middle East, Ayşe Baltacıoğlu-Brammer's study provides a fresh perspective on the Sunni–Shi'i division. Drawing on Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and European sources, Boundaries of Belonging: Sectarianism and Statecraft in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2026) explores the paradox of an Ottoman state that combined rigid ideological discourses with pragmatic governance. Through an analysis of key figures, events, periods, and policies, Boundaries of Belonging reveals how political, economic, and religious forces intersected, challenging simplistic sectarian binaries. Baltacıoğlu-Brammer provides a comprehensive historical account of Ottoman governance during the long sixteenth century, focusing on its relationship with non-Sunni Muslim subjects, particularly the Qizilbash. As both the founders of the Safavid Empire and the largest Shiʿi-affiliated group within the Ottoman realm, the Qizilbash occupied a crucial yet often misunderstood position. Boundaries of Belonging examines their role within the empire, challenging the notion that they were merely persecuted outsiders by highlighting their agency in shaping imperial policies, negotiating their status, and influencing the Ottoman–Safavid rivalry in Anatolia, Kurdistan, and Iraq, and western Iran. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
• Youssef J. Carter, "The Vast Oceans: Remembering Allah and Self on the Mustafawiyya Sufi Path" (UNC Press, 2026) 19.06.2026 1h 19min

  Youssef J. Carter’s The Vast Oceans: Remembering Allah and Self on the Mustafawiyya Sufi Path (UNC Press, 2026) is a stunning meditation on Black Atlantic Sufism, specifically as it travels between South Carolina and Senegal via the Mustafawiyya Sufi community and Shaykh Arona Faye. The book orbits around Sufi conceptual frameworks which are translated through the register of Black and Africana Studies. For example, bay’a is rendered as “solidarity” or khidma as “labour”; such attunement of Sufi concepts presents capacious possibilities for Sufi studies at the intersection of Black and Muslim studies. The book then uses deep ethnography to capture the flows of stories, rituals, and piety, and also Black radical labour, motherwork, and becoming to highlight how in spite of the ongoing violence of racial capitalism and plantation modernity, Black-Africana Sufi communities are vital spaces of worldmaking, one that is not merely metaphysical (such as through ritual piety) but also political, anti-racist, and anti-colonial and rooted in collective care. This book is necessary reading for scholars of Sufism, and those who work on Black and African Islam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
• Marielle Risse, "Ethnographic Reflections on Marriage in Dhofar, Oman" (Anthem Press, 2026) 15.06.2026 36min

  In this episode of the New Books Network, we explore Ethnographic Reflections on Marriage in Dhofar, Oman (Anthem Press, 2026), with anthropologist Dr Marielle Risse. Drawing on nearly two decades of ethnographic fieldwork, Dr Risse offers a nuanced examination of marriage practices among Sunni Muslim communities in southern Oman, challenging many of the assumptions that often underpin Western discussions of gender, family, and personal autonomy. Rather than portraying marriage as either oppressive or emancipatory, Dr Risse presents it as a complex social institution shaped by kinship networks, religious values, and community expectations. Risse’s work encourages readers to reconsider familiar ideas about family, marriage, household, intimacy, autonomy, and social life. Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
• Raissa von Doetinchem de Rande, "The Politics of Islamic Ethics: Hierarchy and Human Nature in the Philosophical Tradition (Cambridge UP, 2025) 14.06.2026 54min

  Fundamental to Islamic thought is the idea that there is a way that human beings simply are, by nature or creation. This concept is called fiṭra. In The Politics of Islamic Ethics: Hierarchy and Human Nature in the Philosophical Tradition (Cambridge UP, 2025), rooting her investigation in two central passages in the Qur’an and hadith literature, where it is asserted that God created human beings in a certain way, the author moves beyond discussion of the usual figures who have commented on those texts to look instead at a group of classical Islamic philosophers rarely discussed in conjunction with ethical matters. Tracing the development of fiṭra through this overlooked strand of medieval thinking, von Doetinchem de Rande uses fiṭra as an entrée to wider topics in Islamic ethics. She shows that the notion of fiṭra articulated by al-Fārābī, Ibn Bājja, Ibn Ṭufayl, and Ibn Rushd highlights important issues about organizational hierarchies of human nature. This, she argues, has major implications for contemporary political and legal debates. Raissa von Doetinchem de Rande is Assistant Professor of Religious Ethics and Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago. Host Yaseen Christian Andrewsen is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, specialising in Islamic intellectual history in West Africa focusing on issues in Sufism, theology, renewal, and authority. Yaseen is a co-host for the New Books in Islamic Studies podcast. He can be reached by email at: christian.andrewsen@pmb.ox.ac.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
• Radio ReOrient Season 14 Round Up, hosted by Saeed Khan, Amina Easat-Daas, Marchella Ward and Claudia Radiven 12.06.2026 47min

  In this episode, Saeed Khan, Amina Easat Daas, Chella Ward and Claudia Radiven sit down for a round up of the season’s dynamic episodes, and take a look toward the future and the next season. The conversation drew on the manifestations of Islamophobia across many different national contexts and the connectedness of them all. Across the episodes this season we explored the structural and systemic problems facing Muslims internationally, the work being done to combat it, and how tolerance may not be so tolerant after all. In this round up the team looked back at conversations at the recent International Islamophobia Studies Research Association Conference in Malaysia as well as in the ReOrient journal and blog, ReOrientations. We also looked forward to the upcoming debates and discussions to be held at the Critical Muslim Studies Conference and Summer Programme in Turkiye. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
• Islam in English 10.06.2026 36min

  In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr. Oludamini Oguannaike, Associate Professor of African Religious Thought and Democracy at the University of Virginia. Tazin and Oludamini talk about his work into how languages, such as English, express concepts that originate from onto-epistemic perspectives that are not historically associated with the English language. They discuss his 2019 article “Islam in English,” which he co-authored with Dr. Mohammed Rustom and how this research is expressed in the literary genre in his book of poetry called The Book of Clouds. The conversation considers how the distinctive philosophical and metaphysical concepts associated with Islam collide with the use of English as a result of the global dominance of English. Tazin and Oludamini discuss how he has used his research and knowledge of historical religious thought to express these concepts using English in poetry. References Ogunnaike, O. (2024). The Book of Clouds. Fons Vitae of Kentucky. Ogunnaike, O., & Rustom, M. (2019). Islam in English. American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, 36(2), 102-111. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
• Radio ReOrient S14:10: Muslims in the Neoliberal Era, with William Barylo, hosted by Salman Sayyid and Amina Easat-Daas 05.06.2026 57min

  In this episode hosts Salman Sayyid and Amina Easat-Daas were joined by William Barylo to discuss his most recent book ‘Muslims in the Neoliberal Era: Resisting, Healing, and Flourishing in the Metacolonial Era’. The discussion centred on the differing nature of the Muslim experience in France, the UK, and beyond, and the ways in which Muslims find spaces and forms of community resistance in view of the dominant structures. William Barylo is a research fellow in Sociology at the University of Warwick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
• Radio ReOrient 14:9: Racializing the Ummah, with Rhea Rahman, hosted by Saeed Khan and Claudia Radiven 29.05.2026 1h 3min

  In this episode, Claudia Radiven and Saeed Khan were in conversation with Rhea Rahman to discuss her new book ‘Racializing the Ummah - Muslim Humanitarians: Beyond Black, Brown and White’. Through this, the discussion drew on issues of ‘doing good’, racial capitalism and the struggles faced by Islamic NGOs in a time when Islamophobia is on the rise. Rhea Rahman is an assistant professor of anthropology at Brooklyn College CUNY, working primarily on global racial formations in relation to histories of Islamic practice and Muslims identity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
• Radio ReOrient 14:8: Dutch Islamophobia and Muslim Exceptionalism, with Martijn de Koning, hosted by Marchella Ward and Amina Easat-Daas 22.05.2026 54min

  In this episode Chella Ward and Amina Easat-Daas spoke with Dr Martijn de Koning about the nature of Islamophobia in the Netherlands and how this sits in relation to common perceptions about Dutch society as a liberal and tolerant society and the Islamophobic realities of the Netherlands. De Koning also spoke at length of the recent NTA affair in the Netherlands, the exceptionalising of surveilling Muslim communities and how Muslims in the Dutch context have begun to challenge this. Dr de Koning is an Associate Professor in Islam, Politics and Society at Radboud University and has published extensively on Islamophobia in the Netherlands. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
• Utku Balaban, "Industrial Islamism: How Authoritarian Movements Mobilize Workers" (U California Press, 2025) 20.05.2026 1h 20min

  What explains the rise of religious populism in contemporary Turkish politics and society? How does industrialization help to explain change and continuity in social and religious life in Muslim majority countries? In his new book Industrial Islamism: How Authoritarian Movements Mobilize Workers (University of California Press, 2025), Utku Balaban examines Turkey’s rapid post-Cold War industrialization and argues that the answers to these questions lie in a class analysis centered on the relationships between employers and employees situated within larger contexts of globalization and historical Islamization. Political and religious transformations occurring in the 1980s and 1990s are not the result of a cultural backlash to or rejection of “Westernization,” or a nostalgia for an idealistic past. Rather, Balaban argues they are related to the rise of a socio-economic-political class he calls the “faubourgeosie” that strategically employ Islamic populism as a method of protecting their interests against other primary class actors. These changes are internal to the mechanics and logics of capitalism as shifts in the traditional relations of production produced new alliances and networks based on small-scale capital accumulation. Balaban’s Turkish case study can be applied to other Muslim-majority countries in which small-scale industrialists similarly dealt with economic anxiety and aspirations through recourse to popular Islamist rhetoric not as a specifically moral strategy, but as a political one. Industrial Islamism recently received the best new book in the category of international political economy from the International Studies Association. Dr. Utku Balaban is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Xavier University. He is the author of A Conveyor Belt of Flesh: Urban Space and the Proliferation of Industrial Labor Practices in Istanbul’s Garment Industry (2011) and Social Inclusion Practices in Turkey (2015). Dr. Jaclyn Michael is an Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (USA). She is the author of several articles on Muslim cultural representation, performance, and religious belonging in India and in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
• George Baylon Radics, "Emotional Filipinos: The American Myth of the 'Lazy Native' and Islamic Separatism in the Philippines" (U Georgia Press, 2026) 20.05.2026 45min

  In the first half of the twentieth century, the United States attempted to build a colony in the Philippines in its own image—one fraught with racist notions of what it means to be civilized, developed, and worthy of self-rule. These imported notions of race and modernity left a profound imprint on the nation. More recently, we have seen a menacing rise of Islamic "terrorism," political polarization, populism, xenophobia, and isolationism. Conventional wisdom has attributed this rise to a "failed state" or economic insecurity and cultural backlash. In ⁠Emotional Filipinos: The American Myth of the "Lazy Native" and Islamic Separatism in the Philippines⁠ (University of Georgia Press, 2026), however, Dr. George Baylon Radics explains this forgotten part of U.S. history with emotions as a driving force behind social action. The Philippines is currently experiencing the longest-running Muslim-Christian conflict in the modern world and an increasingly anti-Western populist government. By unpacking the role of emotions from the American colonial period to the present, Emotional Filipinos blurs the line between American colonizer and Muslim-Filipino "terrorist," highlighting the lasting effects of America's footprint in Southeast Asia. Radics humanizes this fraught history and reveals unexplored connections between past and present. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose ⁠book⁠ focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on ⁠New Books with Miranda Melcher⁠, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
• Radio ReOrient S14:7: Surveilling Muslimness in Denmark, with Amani Hassani, hosted by Claudia Radiven and Amina Easat-Daas 15.05.2026 56min

  In this episode hosts Claudia Radiven and Amina Easat-Daas were joined by Amani Hassani, to discuss her most recent work around Islamophobia and Muslimness in Denmark. Hassani discussed Danish colonial histories and the surveilling nature of the Danish welfare state, and how these are employed to construct a narrative of Danish benevolence while simultaneously marking Muslims in Denmark as ‘other’ and deserving of intolerance in an otherwise tolerant nation. Amani Hassani is a lecturer at Brunel University and her work spans urban ethnography, sociology, anthropology and human geography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
• Samiha Rahman, "Black Muslim Freedom Dreams: Islamic Education, Pan-Africanism, and Collective Care" (NYU Press, 2026) 11.05.2026 1h 22min

  Samiha Rahman’s Black Muslim Freedom Dreams: Islamic Education, Pan-Africanism, and Collective Care (New York University Press, 2026) follows three generations of Black American Muslims as they pursue education through the Tijani Sufi order in Medina Baye, Senegal, outside the anti-Black and anti-Muslim racism of the United States. This deeply rich ethnographic book captures the transatlantic flows of Black American religious life through the prism of Black mothers and othermothers (as conceptualized by Patricia Hill Collins “motherwork”) and the young people whose lives are transformed through the process. By focusing on the Islamic education offered by the Tijani Order, such as Qur’an education, we learn about the intricate networks of kin that step in to support the young Black Muslims who have migrated for schooling, highlighting the tangible realities of collective care and service that circulates within the Tijani Order. These registers of care and service are informed by Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse, the Senegalese Islamic scholar, Sufi Shaykh, and pan-Africanist, whose teachings define these networks of education, organizing, and care work. The book then offers critical insights into the flow of one particular Sufi community between the United States and Senegal, and how dreams of better futures for Black Muslim youth and the liberatory goals of Pan-Africanism intersect to co-constitute a significant economy of collective care, Sufi service, and Islamic piety. This book will be of interest to anyone who works on education, Sufism, Black and African Islam and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
• Radio ReOrient S14:6: The Road to Sarajevo, with Haris Tagari, hosted by Claudia Radiven and Saeed Khan 08.05.2026 1h 3min

  In this episode, Claudia Radiven and Saeed Khan spoke with Haris Tagari about his recent journey to Sarajevo in a 20 year old Toyota Yaris. Along the way he documented lost Islamic history throughout Europe, before arriving in Bosnia where he discusses genocide, solidarity and Muslim identity. Haris is a freelance journalist working as a reporter and videographer, with a degree in history from the University of Lancaster. Haris is widely known for his Instagram series, travelling to and reporting on destroyed and lost Muslim heritage across the world. He has filmed documentaries and political explainers from Syria, Iraq, Turkiye, Bosnia, Kosovo, Hungary, Serbia and Montenegro. You can follow the journeys of Haris in a Yaris on Instagram @harristory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
• Edith Szanto, "Twelver Shi'i Self-flagellation Rites in Contemporary Syria: Mourning Sayyida Zaynab" (Edinburgh UP, 2025) 07.05.2026 1h 45min

  Edith Szanto’s Twelver Shi'i Self-Flagellation Rites in Contemporary Syria: Mourning Sayyida Zaynab (Edinburgh UP, 2025) is a striking and deeply immersive ethnographic study that takes the reader into the shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab in Syria. This town was a vibrant center of Shi‘i life, pilgrimage, and healing, especially for Iraqi refugees until the 2011 Syrian uprising. By combining meticulous fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2010 with rich historical and social context, Szanto shows how these contested rituals served as both spiritual expression and pathways to worldly and psychological healing. The book examines controversial Muharram practices, especially self-flagellation, not simply as ritual acts but as deeply meaningful responses to trauma, displacement, and the search for justice and healing. In doing so, Szanto pays close attention to how people actually live their religion: through relationships with saints, engagement with religious authorities, media, ritual performance, and forms of spiritual healing. In this conversation, Szanto and I explore specific Muharram practices, including self-flagellation, the wedding of Qasim, and other ritualized forms of mourning, as well as gendered dynamics in who participates and why. We discuss what these practices looked like on the ground—what Muharram in Sayyida Zaynab felt like, how different communities understood and debated these rituals, and what purposes they served for those who participated in them. We talk about the Zaynabiyya seminary and how changes in its physical and institutional structure reshaped how knowledge was taught and who held authority. We also discuss relationships with saints, spiritual healers like Shaykh Abu Ahmad, and the ways that media, music, and ritual performance mediate piety. Szanto also treats us to reflecting on some of her experiences observing and engaging with these rituals. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Islamic studies generally, Shi‘i studies, Middle Eastern religious life, or the ways that communities navigate devotion, trauma, and healing through ritual. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
• Rhea Rahman, "Racializing the Ummah: Muslim Humanitarians Beyond Black, Brown, and White" (U Minnesota Press, 2026) 29.04.2026 1h 5min

  Racializing the Ummah: Muslim Humanitarians Beyond Black, Brown and White (U Minnesota Press, 2026) is an ethnography of Islamic Relief (IR), the largest Islamic NGO based in the West. Racializing the Ummah explores how a Muslim organization can do good in a world that defines Muslimness as less than human. Rooted in more than a decade of international research, Rhea Rahman’s study on the organization’s projects, methods, and limitations reveals how racial capitalism permeates all aspects of humanitarianism. Beginning with a counterhistory of Muslims in the United Kingdom following World War II, Rahman analyzes IR’s mission and transnational activities in and across places including the UK, South Africa, and Mali in the broader context of global white supremacy. She shows how IR’s approaches often effectively secularize Islam to evade anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia, implicating concepts such as the “good” Muslim aid worker, who complies with War on Terror surveillance while attending to victims of Western colonialism. Meanwhile, Rahman theorizes the tactics of aid workers on the ground, who creatively draw on an Islamic Black radical tradition to drive real change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies