© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comThis article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...Discursively, doctrinally, and psychologically, paradise and hell constitute topics of great significance in Islamic literature. While the subject has already inspired a fair amount of scholarship, the present monograph offers a significantly broader and more thorough survey than other publications. (...) The author covers texts from a great variety of intellectual perspectives that deal with the afterworld or ‘otherworld’ and its relationship to this world. While both paradise and hell are discussed, premodern authors had more to say about the former than about the latter, a preference mostly shared by modern scholars. The chronological scope is the premodern... (shrink)

This paper discusses the question of an Ismaʿili influence within the cosmology of al-Ghazālī and argues that al-Ghazālī appropriated certain features of the Ismaʿili cosmology from the Persian Ismaʿili thought of Nāṣir-i Khusraw. After introducing Nāṣir-i Khusraw and his Ismaʿili Neoplatonic cosmology, the paper first examines some of the Ismaʿili doctrinal material presented in al-Ghazālī’s anti-Ismaʿili polemical work Faḍāʾiḥ al-bāṭiniyya—concerning cosmology, revelation, and taʾwīl—and traces this content back to Nāṣir-i Khusraw’s works, arguing that Nāṣir-i Khusraw was one of the sources (...) for al-Ghazālī’s knowledge of Ismaʿili doctrines. Secondly, the paper highlights a number of commonalities and shared terminology between the cosmology, epistemology, and doctrine of prophecy in al-Ghazālī’s Mishkāt al-anwār and the Ismaʿili doctrines of Nāṣir-i Khusraw, revealing how the two thinkers understand the cosmos as containing precisely ‘two worlds’, emphasize the correspondence between the spiritual and physical realms, and conceive the faculty of prophecy as a higher supra-intellectual spirit or ‘eye’ of perception. Thirdly, the paper revisits the scholarly debate concerning al-Ghazālī’s higher theology and cosmology in the Veils section of the Mishkāt. It demonstrates that al-Ghazālī’s worldview, which places the transcendent God above the First Mover of the Aristotelians and the Necessary Existent of the falāsifa using the Qurʾānic symbolism of Moon and Sun worship, has been appropriated from Nāṣir-i Khusraw’s Ismaʿili Neoplatonic cosmology. (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comThis article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...Mark A. Tessler is a prominent political scientist, Samuel J. Eldersveld Collegiate Professor at the University of Michigan, who has worked on comparative politics, International Relations and world politics for more than forty-five years. His works have been translated into (...) French and Persian. He is probably the leading authority on public opinion in the Middle East, and has published numerous books and articles on this topic, including Public Opinion in the Middle East: Survey Research and the Political Orientations of Ordinary Citizens. In the same vein, Tessler co-directs the Arab Barometer Survey project, a reference in its field.The book under review... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comThis article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...For several years now, media and academia have mobilized a troubling narrative about Europe’s relationship with Muslims. This narrative follows from uncritical acceptance of the idea that Islam is not part of Europe’s cultural heritage, and allows the faith of (...) millions of Europeans to be depicted as somehow alien to the contours of European ‘normality’. In particular it allows the treatment of all Muslims as relatively recent immigrants, their presence framed, when necessary, as an ‘invasion’, so that Islam is historically absent from Europe except in the frame of a violent ‘demographic event’.The need for a more nuanced discourse about Muslims in... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comThis article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...In 1998 I was trying to get from Kaolack to Touba in Senegal. I asked a man at the bus stop which bus was going to Touba, but he didn't understand. For some reason I asked him again in Arabic, (...) and he pointed me where I needed to go. That always surprised me. It shouldn’t have. As Ousmane Kane proves ably in this book, ‘Islam and the Arabic language are no more foreign in Africa than they are in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq’.The grievance is old and still very valid: the study of Islam qua religion and qua Islamicate... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comThis article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...‘It is imperative,’ says Nadia Maria El Cheikh, ‘not to read literary texts as if they were windows to the past, but rather to realize that they require a methodological “turn” to the textual mechanisms of ideology construction and representation’. (...) In other fields, perhaps, few would disagree—although they might suggest we can do both, with care—but for medieval Islam the debate is still active. El Cheikh’s book joins a number of recent works—such as those of Tayeb El-Hibri, Thomas Sizgorich and Antoine Borrut—in its focus on the interplay of memory and power in medieval chronicles and other literary texts. But it... (shrink)

Muslims Talking Politics: Framing Islam, Democracy, and Law in Northern Nigeria By KendhammerBrandon, xiv + 302 pp. Price PB £23.00. EAN 978–0226369037.

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comThis article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...Is Islam compatible with democracy? Can Islamists rule democratically if they obtain political power? Björn Brenner explores these familiar questions by focusing specifically on the experience of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that won the 2006 elections to the legislature (...) of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza. Despite the vicious factional feuds that erupted thereafter between Hamas and the ousted Fateh movement that previously had dominated the PA, fighting that led to Fateh’s ouster from Gaza and the emergence of Hamas as the sole authority there, Hamas’ victory offered... (shrink)

Much scholarship on Islamophobia has offered helpful analyses of the ways that news media, film, television, and even political cartoons represent Muslims generally and Arabs specifically as threating, dangerous, and entirely foreign. In contrast, I argue that analysis of Islamophobic media also requires moving from content analyses to explore why, when, and to whom these representations matter. This article draws on studies of affect to analyse the social and online media that proliferated around both Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai and the (...) film American Sniper. Media events such as these, I argue, mark nodes in the rise of modulated Islamophobic publics, which come together through distinct understandings of what it means to be American and/or modern. In this sense understanding Islamophobia requires attention not merely to media representation, but also to the structures of affective investments that give rise to very particular Islamophobic publics. (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comThis article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...I am perhaps not the only reader of Urquizar-Herrera’s Admiration and Awe to have been uncertain at the outset what to expect from it, given such an awesome title. The author does not leave us long in doubt however. He (...) tells us what he had in mind were the words ‘Admiration and Awe’ written in 1575 by Ambrosio de Morales in a work on The Antiquity of the Cities of Spain. Thus we are at the outset, and with very little introduction, pitched into one of Urquízar-Herrera’s principal themes, and it is an important one: those various ways that over the... (shrink)

The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz By MinawiMostafa, xviii + 219 pp. Price PB £17.99. EAN 978–0804799270.

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comThis article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...At time of writing, in mid-July 2017, the Qatar crisis is in full swing. Senator Bob Corker, Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says that Saudi support for extremism dwarfs that of Qatar, French Foreign Minister Le Drian comments (...) that the blockade should end, while, according to the UAE’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash, Al Jazeera may not have to close down after all. All in all it seems a mad spat, but the region has faced three major wars in the last 30 years, so the possibility of a fourth should not be excluded.The Emergence of the... (shrink)

This article analyses Sunni ḥadīth criticism by focusing on both its historical development and its reception in contemporary Muslim discourses on the authority of the Prophet’s Sunna. It argues that while ḥadīth criticism was an isnād-oriented elite practice relying on a close study of individual ḥadīths for roughly the first four centuries, new challenges arose to these major characteristics from the fifth/eleventh century onwards, including a growing concern to address the practical needs of a wider audience. Related to this, the (...) role of the isnād was diminished or blurred and alternative methods of ḥadīth authentication were developed, particularly in the mawḍūʿāt literature, such as subordinating the ḥadīth to overriding rules and principles. Though these developments did not receive a warm welcome from mainstream ḥadīth scholarship, they have continued to form domains of tension and dispute among scholars well into modern times. Focusing on the writings of Muḥammad Zāhid al-Kawtharī and Abū Isḥāq al-Ḥuwaynī, two influential ḥadīth authorities of recent times, the article explores how ḥadīth criticism emerged as a fierce battlefield between two contemporary schools of Islamic thought in twentieth-century Egypt. (shrink)

Journal of Islamic Studies, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1093/jis/etx079.

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comThis article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...Historians of philosophy are broadly agreed that Arabic or Islamic philosophy is intellectually intriguing and historically significant; that Avicenna stands out as its towering figure in that tradition; and that it did not die out in the twelfth century after (...) Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī published his famous Tahāfut al-falāsifa but lived a long, happy life thanks to the massive output of such intellectuals as Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Athīr al-Dīn al-Abharī, and Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, to name only a few up to the thirteenth century. Further, recent publications have suggested that the century between al-Ghazālī and Fakhr al-Dīn deserves attention, both in its own right... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comThis article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...The Young Turk Revolution of July 24, 1908 was potentially a momentous event that might have saved the empire if it had delivered on its promises. Led by a group of middle level army officers, the coup’s objective was to (...) restore the Ottoman constitution of 1876. The plotters did not see themselves as true revolutionaries but rather as protectors of the constitutional monarchy that the Tanzimat reformers of the mid-nineteenth century had envisioned. The sitting sultan, Abdülhamid II, was not overthrown and much of his governing council remained in place, at least initially. Nevertheless, many in the Ottoman Empire saw the event as... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comThis article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...This study focuses on a specific issue or constellation of issues infused with the tantalising, apparently oxymoronic quality of the title, uniting mysticism and reason. It concerns a critical point of convergence between the Sufi and philosophical currents in the (...) history of Muslim thought, constituted by the contribution of Ibn ʿArabī’s great disciple and son-in-law, Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī. Shaker is no mere archivist of ideas. His approach in his book, whose origins lie in his McGill PhD dissertation, is not really situated within the field of Muslim intellectual history but within a wider philosophical context, drawing on more recent European thinkers such as... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comThis article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...Shiraz Maher has written an excellent book on Jihadi-Salafism. It is clear, well-structured and highly readable and therefore accessible to the general public without content being simplified. This is a remarkable achievement for a subject that easily gets bogged down (...) in Islamic legal terminology and esoteric arguments which even most Jihadis do not understand. The reason is not only that the author has a good pen and is well-informed but also because of the focus he has chosen. Regarding Salafi-Jihadism as a modern ideology and placing it within the discipline of intellectual history Maher has brought the subject out of the dusty field... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comThis article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...About Antiquities opens with the difficult question: ‘who owns antiquities?’ Many museums have had to wrestle with the ethical dilemmas associated with their collections, while the recent attacks in Iraq and Syria have stimulated active debate about the best ways (...) to preserve endangered monuments. Zeynep Çelik contributes to this discourse through her concentration on the last decades of the Ottoman Empire. Reflecting both the increasing international cachet of the rich ancient heritage and the rapacious tendencies of foreign archaeologists operating in Ottoman lands, legislation was passed in 1869 to protect antiquities. The central aim was clearly expressed: ‘Antiquities have historic importance. Therefore, they... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comThis article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...A considerable amount of academic work has been dedicated to the study of the Malay/Muslim community in Singapore dating from the period of British colonialism to contemporary times. Studies have examined multiple dimensions ranging from the cultural to the socio-economic, (...) through various approaches including but not limited to sociological, historical to political scientific study. More recent works tend to focus on the position of the community vis-à-vis the Singapore state leadership, particularly with regards to the community’s socio-economic backwardness relative to other ethnic groups in the population. Another focal point is the role and influence of Islam, the predominant religion of the Malay... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comThis article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...The present volume consists of a number of papers presented at the fourth conference of the International Society for Arabic Papyrology, held at the Austrian National Library in Vienna in 2009. As the editors readily admit, the publication of these (...) proceedings comes after a long delay, and in the meantime, several contributions to the conference have already appeared as articles in Journals. Despite this delay, the publication of these papers remains most welcome, for each fragment of paper or papyrus—when edited and commented upon—can add important insights.Taken as a whole, the volume is a testimony to... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comThis article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...At the intersection of religiosity, obligation, fraud, absurdity, and Islamphobia, is an undercurrent of capitalistic opportunism. This is the main takeaway from Faegheh Shirazi’s Brand Islam. While it may seem like a predictable trajectory for market commodities catering to the (...) global population of nearly 2 billion Muslims, Shirazi adds nuance to the many facets of what she calls ‘Brand Islam’ in this interdisciplinary study on Islamic marketing and consumerism.Faeghah Shirazi is a scholar trained in textiles, clothing, fashion, and design, for which she is well equipped given her background as an Iranian citizen and focus on the politics of the veil in... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comThis article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...What does an ethnographic perspective contribute to scholarly understandings of Islam? The edited volume Ethnographies of Islam covers a range of ‘ritual performances and everyday practices’ that, arguably, only such a perspective can bring to light. The editors bring together (...) twelve anthropologists, three political scientists, two sociologists, and a linguist whose contributions are held together by the overarching endeavour of studying ‘Islam as a practice [… i.e., as] something which must be described in action’. Ethnography seems key to this. The editors define it as the ‘description and analysis of practices from the perspective of the social context in which they... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comThis article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...Neguin Yavari’s Advice for the Sultan is a needed reexamination of medieval Islamic advice literature, particularly the genre known as ‘mirror for princes’, which she refers to as ‘the mirrors’. She has analysed this topic in other contexts, including an (...) edited volume on the genre in the context of the ‘Global Medieval’ and articles on medieval governance and the figure of Niẓām al-Mulk. Her book illuminates understudied elements of political philosophy in the texts, revealing the importance of reason and the varied links between religion and the state. Instead of focusing on the mirrors’ provenance, she carefully analyses rhetoric, structure, and prevalent... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comThis article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...American Muslim Studies—which Bilici describes as ‘new’ and ‘fragmentary’ —is a highly interdisciplinary field to which the social sciences have made important contributions. In this respect, American Muslim Studies is not unlike the fields of American Studies and Islamic Studies, (...) though of course there are numerous differences among them. Bilici was trained in sociology at the University of Michigan, and he describes his book as ‘a work in philosophical anthropology done by a sociologist’. The book focuses on Muslim immigrants and their descendants in America. There is considerable discussion of African-American Muslims, but the main interest of the... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comAllen Fromherz has already written a very useful book on the Almohads, and he now attempts to set his work on their remarkable empire within a much wider setting, from the seventh century, when Islam reached the Maghreb, all the way to the fifteenth century, and in the entire western Mediterranean. His thesis is that we should (...) think of western Mediterranean civilization in the Middle Ages as a shared culture and experience, embracing the much-ignored history of what are now Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia alongside the study of Spanish, Italian and other histories, predominantly Christian. Close attention to the Christian shores of the western Mediterranean has, he avers, created a narrative of worlds apart: Christians on the northern flanks who had little in common... (shrink)

From the fourth/tenth century onwards, numerous Sufi authors found it necessary to identify groups they regarded as inauthentic, as false claimants to the Sufism they claimed to espouse. Particularly energetic in this regard was Ghazālī; in a treatise denouncing them together with other antinomians, he called for their eradication. Less well known is Abū Ḥafṣ al-Nasafī ; he wrote a brief treatise detailing twelve groups of claimants to Sufism, only one of which was on the right path. With his denunciation (...) of a Khārijī splinter group and the Carmatians among the eleven clusters of reprobates, al-Nasafī demonstrates how this cataloguing genre may intersect with heresiography. Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn al-Rāzī, a Shiʿi author of the sixth/twelfth century, also lists the repugnant practices of some Sufis, but decisive for him is that Sufism as such is intrinsically reprehensible as a Sunni phenomenon; here, the genre overlaps with Sunni–Shiʿi polemics. Harsher in his denunciation of Sufism was a later Shiʿi scholar, al-Ḥurr al-ʿĀmilī ; the vehemence of his prolix diatribe is doubtless attributable to the need to uproot Sufism and firmly establish Shiʿism as the creed of the Safavid realm. He incorporates al-Nasafī’s listing of deviant groups in his own work, only to dismiss it as inadequate. More nuanced in his tone than al-ʿĀmilı was the celebrated gnostic, Mullā Ṣadrā : while denouncing certain tendencies—much like his Sunni predecessors—he certified others as compatible with Shiʿism, even indeed as originating within it. A century after Ṣadrā, İbrahim Hakkı, an Ottoman scholar and Sufi, incorporated al-Nasafī’s treatise, without acknowledgement, in his Maʿrifetnâme for reasons that are not entirely clear. As Sufism became firmly established in Muslim society and the Sufi orders engaged in a measure of self-discipline, the cataloguing genre faded, and once Wahhabism appeared on the scene, it was a question of condemning Sufism as such, not certain tendencies or groups. (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comThis critical edition and English translation of the epistle on geography by the anonymous members of a tenth-century group known as the ‘Brethren of Purity’ is, after the introductory volume, the seventh instalment of the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity series published by the Institute of Ismaili Studies and Oxford University Press. Numbering 52 epistles in (...) all, this corpus of writing represents the sustained efforts of a secret society of medieval Muslims to examine the relationship between science, philosophy, and the divine. It has attracted significant attention over the years because of the mysteries surrounding its authorship and the wide dissemination of surviving manuscripts. This new series of critical editions and translations is intended to bring the work of the Brethren... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comAs indicated by its title, this festschrift is a tribute to Renata Holod by eleven of her loyal former PhD students. Holod is currently a professor and curator in the Near East Section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. She was offered a teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania in 1972, the (...) year that she completed her PhD in Harvard. The book begins with a thoughtful preface by the editor, David J. Roxburgh, on Renata’s biography and how she developed into a widely acknowledged name in the field of Islamic art and architecture. Starting with her early years in Toronto to which she—as an infant—emigrated with her family from Ukraine, the preface casts light on Renata’s eventful career,... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comReaders with a general education eager for a pleasant, readable account of who contributed to Arabic and Islamic philosophy, yet have limited awareness of it, may find this book useful. It addresses those who eschew wrestling with primary sources and prefer learning to be comfortable, as well as those unaware of the subjects raised in philosophical treatises (...) and thus unable to follow the arguments put forth by different authors. Adamson provides interesting vignettes of major and minor figures, traditions, groups, and schools contributing to philosophy in the world of Islam from its beginning to the late twentieth century. He does so with rare aplomb, and his comprehensive overview is most appealing. Indeed, the notes and bibliography testify amply to the depth and breadth of... (shrink)

Handbook of Research on Islamic Business Ethics Edited by AlĂAbbas J., xv + 318 pp. Price HB £120.00. EAN 978–1781009444.

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comThe starting point of the book is the assessment of discrimination against Muslim immigrants in French society. The first part presents the results from several surveys that illustrate the negative opinions as well as the discriminatory practices against Muslim immigrants. The second part reviews the characteristics of Muslim immigrants that fuel the discrimination and negative opinions, mainly (...) their religious practices, their gender relations, and their poor competence with the French language.Although this kind of investigation is needed, it rests on two main ideological assumptions that severely weaken its relevance. First, why do the authors claim an investigation into Christian-heritage countries, when the focus is on France? The particularity of French laicity... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comThis book examine the perennial question of Islam and democracy from an interesting angle. It focuses on seven case studies of relatively successful democracies in Muslim-majority countries. The objective is to uncover ‘relationships between political manifestations of Islam and competitive, democratic politics and [to explain] how interpretations more amenable to democracy can take root’. The author also (...) seeks ‘to determine how actors in Muslim majority states draw upon democratic concepts within Islam’. He then seeks to draw lessons from these successes for the fate of the struggling post-Arab Spring polities, mainly Egypt and Tunisia. This is a novel approach, seeking creatively to employ empirical data to answer important theoretical questions about impediments to/facilitators of democratization.Using indicators from Polity and... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comAccording to information provided by the publisher, Shuraydi finished his PhD in Arabic-Islamic Studies in 1970 at Yale University. After that, he had a career in translation/revision at the United Nations in New York and Geneva. The reader concludes that this book realizes a life-long dream of one who has cherished a commitment to independent academic research.At (...) first glance, the animal names in the title suggest yet another study on pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. However, the subtitle informs the reader that the book is neither on animals nor on pre-Islam. It points to two widespread but by no means exclusive metaphors for youth and old age in medieval Islam. The book’s ambition is to provide a comprehensive study on youth and old... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comIn 2002 Pnina Werbner recorded the micro-politics of first generation Muslims in Manchester, noting how these relatively new settlers drew upon ethnicity and race relations to create social capital and establish themselves within local political systems, whilst also creating the infrastructure necessary to develop their communities. Werbner notes that the settlers ‘felt sufficiently secure in Britain to (...) express their political opinions, however contentious’. Much has taken place over the last fifteen years, and the work under review develops our understanding, building admirably on Werbner’s beginnings.The book is an edited collection containing twelve essays written by a number of scholars ranging across several disciplines including political science, sociology, education and international relations. Unsurprisingly, the dominant discipline is political science. The majority of... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comRehana Ahmed’s Writing British Muslims: Religion, Class and Multiculturalism is a work of both literary criticism and sociological analysis which ‘combines detailed readings of texts’ with a ‘sustained engagement with their social context’. This is a difficult balance to maintain, however, and as the book proceeds, the author seems to be less concerned to use her detailed (...) knowledge of Muslim society and culture in Britain to enrich the readers’ understanding of the texts under consideration, and more concerned to use the texts to shed light on debates surrounding multiculturalism and the challenges and opportunities facing British Muslims today. Though she restricts her attention to a few select texts published within the last 30 years by British writers of South Asian Muslim heritage,... (shrink)

Although Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī is primarily known for his seminal scholarship in the field of prophetic traditions or ḥadīth studies, he was also an accomplished poet. In fact, as this article reveals, one of the poems that Ibn Ḥajar included in his carefully crafted collection from the ninth/fifteenth century struck a deep chord of Muslim memories surrounding a restored Islamic caliphate. Far from the image of complete apathy to the Cairene ʿAbbasids that has long been conventional wisdom, Ibn Ḥajar’s panegyric (...) for al-Mustaʿīn lauded the ʿAbbasid caliph’s assumption of the Mamluk sultanate as a restoration of legitimate rule to the blessed family of the Prophet. In crafting his poem, Ibn Ḥajar draws upon a deep reservoir of devotional love for the Prophet’s family in the late Mamluk era, embodied by al-Mustaʿīn as the descendant of the Prophet’s uncle al-ʿAbbās, and upon a dynamic and evolving Islamic legal tradition on matters of governance. Even though al-Mustaʿīn’s combined reign as sultan and caliph lasted only a matter of months, Ibn Ḥajar’s commemoration of it became a famous piece of cultural lore down through the last years of the Mamluk Sultanate and past the Ottoman conquest of Egypt. Through exploring the intertwined histories of Ibn Ḥajar, al-Mustaʿīn, and their contemporaries, as well as analysing published and manuscript recensions of Ibn Hajar’s poetry, topographies of Cairo, Mamluk chancery documents, and treatises on Islamic law and ḥadīth literature, this interdisciplinary article elucidates the religious and socio-political complexity of veneration for the ʿAbbasid caliphate in the late Mamluk era. (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comMore than a century has passed since the first appearance in 1901 of De Boer’s History of Philosophy in Islam, and since then a large number of works on the subject have been presented to Western readers. So, whether there is need for a new one is a natural question that must be quickly answered. At the (...) beginning of their introduction, the editors explain this as follows: ‘The study of Islamic philosophy has entered a new and exciting phase in the last few years. Both the received canon of Islamic philosophers and the narrative of the course of Islamic philosophy are in the process of being radically questioned and revised. The bulk of twentieth-century Western scholarship on Arabic or Islamic philosophy focused on... (shrink)

In Defence of Britain’s Middle Eastern Empire: A Life of Sir Gilbert Clayton By ParisTimothy J., xvi + 553 pp. Price HB £95.00. EAN 978–1845197582.

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comAre dreams real? If one chooses not to take a stance on this question, the discussion of dreams and visions in Islam runs the risk of becoming a learned, informed, but ultimately unsatisfying account. Carl Jung famously helped a young woman overcome her psychosis by relating to her vision of living on the moon—it was real to (...) her, and he was able to have a productive exchange with her only by treating it as such. In somewhat analogous fashion, the topic of this book ought to be approached as experiences of some other reality on the part of the visionaries and dreamers. It matters little whether we attach to their dreams labels such as ‘symbolic’; what counts is the attitude of those who experience.... (shrink)

This paper is based on review of the publications of the Islamic Movement and interviews with its leadership and activists. It argues that the Movement’s resistance to the 1948, 1967 and diasporic dismemberment of Palestine has constituted a critical challenge to Israeli policies, and contributed to reframing the internal Israeli political discourse. That is what led to its being banned by the state. The Islamic Movement was established in the 1970s. It remains, despite its split in 1996 into Northern and (...) Southern branches, a key player in Palestinian minority affairs at the political level, and at the social level through service provision to the marginalized Arab communities, especially in East Jerusalem. In 2015, the Israeli cabinet declared the Northern branch illegal and withdrew its status as a recognized organization. The findings of this paper show that this measure is directly linked to the Movement’s effectiveness in resisting the dispossession of the Palestinians, in advocating their right of return and other human rights, in providing leadership in the struggle over East Jerusalem, and in the organization and delivery of humanitarian services. (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comRecent years have seen a number of attempts to provide encyclopaedic works seeking to bring together the increasing amount of research on Muslims in Europe, a subject area which has grown exponentially since the 1990s. Most notable among these have been the volume from Oxford University Press, The Oxford Handbook of European Islam edited by Jocelyne Caesari, (...) and the Brill annual Yearbook of Muslims in Europe, now approaching its ninth year. Here now is another attempt to meet this need, this time in a single volume and at a rather more humane price than the other two. The approach to the material is also different. Some seventy brief articles are distributed over eleven sections and subsections. Each of... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comSince the second half of the twentieth century, the need for utilizing autochthonous African sources on various aspects of African history as part of the ‘decolonization’ process started to gel. Thus the UNESCO, through its Slave Route Project, spearheaded in the 1990s the initiative of unearthing authentic African voices on slavery from the victims and the protagonists (...) and the descendants of slave merchants/owners and the society at large. The work under review, which is one of the outcomes of that initiative has, on the one hand, an eerie atmosphere of intimidation by the size of the first tome, about 600 pages, and on the other hand, a discomfiting reminder of a dark phase... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comSince the 1980s, a number of transnational Muslim NGOs have been accused of financing or otherwise supporting so-called ‘terrorist’ networks. Suspicions of involvement in militant activism would surge from time to time, in particular in relation to the work of transnational Muslim NGOs in Afghanistan and Bosnia. Here, several NGOs were suspected of funding militant camps, facilitating (...) logistical support to fighters coming from Saudi Arabia and otherwise supporting the mujāhidīn. While the US and other governments would initially turned a blind eye to such relations, seeing the mujāhidīn as their ally in the fight against the Communists, this changed with the end of the Cold War. The alleged involvement of a... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comThis handsomely produced volume is the ninth of the OUP-IIS series titled Epistles of the Brethren of Purity. Inaugurated in 2008, the series is designed in part to replace several older Arabic editions of Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ that have been published over the decades but which failed to identify their manuscript sources. Nineteen manuscripts in all were (...) used to reconstruct the basic text, with some significant variations. The fact is that the Rasāʾil enjoy no exact dating and contain internal inconsistencies. The best estimate for their initial dissemination goes as far back as the time of ʿAbbasid caliph al-Maʾmūn. Therefore, the main contribution of this series is that it puts a semblance of order to... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comIn the best tradition of Max Weber’s theses on the Protestant ethic and its role in the evolution of modern capitalism Edward Schneier’s book is a daring and inspiring attempt to assess another form of religion’s impact on society. The focus here is on Islam, or, more precisely on the broad range of Islamic political thought and (...) ideals and their impact on democracy in not less than the Islamic world as a whole. Concerned by the heated debates on Islam, violence, and authoritarianism triggered by the terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001, the troubled history of the Middle East since the invasion in Iraq in 2003, and the Arab Spring in 2011, Schneier starts with the question what the resources of ‘Islamic... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comThis book engages with the established scholarly tradition in sociology related to the study of Islam. Such engagement is required to clear the ground to make possible access to the lived reality of Islam in the contemporary world. A large part of the book is author’s conversation with the tradition of scholarship around the study of Islam (...) in its global and local context. This conversation consists of critical appraisals, methodological questions and useful distinctions that must inform a sociological venture into examining the ‘Islamic ecumene’ in the context of history and present frames of globalism.The author admits that the field is continuously challenged in the global public sphere on account of the politicization of Islam-related themes. The author identifies the relations of religion... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comShaykh Dāʾūd bin ‘Abd Allāh from Patani in southern Thailand, who was active as a scholar and teacher in Makka in the first decades of the nineteenth century, was a highly prolific and influential author of religious texts in Malay. He was the progenitor of what Bradley has elsewhere called the ‘Patani school’, a network of scholars (...) with Patani roots that has dominated traditionalist Islamic learning in Malay during the past two centuries. Shaykh Dāʾūd’s books were read and studied throughout the Malay-speaking parts of mainland and insular Southeast Asia, and more than a dozen of them are still regularly reprinted for use in the pondok, the traditional Muslim boarding schools.Francis Bradley makes Shaykh Dāʾūd the central figure in this study of... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comBeing a librarian myself, it is heartening to learn that Paul Auchterlonie, retired librarian for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Exeter University, has been presented with a Festschrift; a thing more often than not reserved for university professors than librarians, however ‘academic’ they may be.The book, titled Books and Bibliophiles, is well presented and is printed and (...) bound to a pleasingly good quality—something also important to librarians. For example, unlike many other publications, this one happily opens quite flat on the desk. It only lacks a general index.After an introduction by the editor, Robert Gleave, and a look at Paul Auchterlonie’s career as a librarian and as office-bearer of MELCOM together with a list of his publications... (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comThis much-awaited book is a monumental achievement of fieldwork in out-of-the-way places, across dangerous frontiers, over an extended period of time. Marsden takes us on a journey that enables us to experience alongside him the constant sense of precariousness, of living between dangerous pasts and uncertain futures, which is the day-to-day experience of his Afghan trader friends. (...) In this densely described, argued and analysed account of cross-border trading, the central message is one of complexity; beyond that, Marsden finds ambiguity and ambivalence.The traders who Marsden befriended are primarily Dari speakers, a dialect of Tajiki/ Persian, and many are ethnic Tajikis from northern Afghanistan, though the author is at pains to emphasize the multi-ethnic composition of the Afghan trading diaspora. The centre of the... (shrink)