This article challenges the widely-held belief, within and outside academia, that premodern Muslims did not make a distinction between the religious and secular. I explore the issue by examining several usages of the dīn – dunyā binary across diverse genres of medieval Islamic writings and assessing to what extent it accords with or diverges from the categories of the religious and secular as commonly used in the modern Western world. I situate my particular counter-claim vis-à-vis the argument against the relevance (...) of the religious–secular distinction to Islam made by Shahab Ahmed in his, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. My findings show that contrary to Ahmed and the broader consensus, premodern Muslims did in fact view the world in terms of distinct spheres of religion and non-religion and that this distinction was used to understand phenomena as diverse and significant as politics and prophethood. Nevertheless, the two categories interacted in a way distinct from the common understanding of the two in the modern world insofar as, under the medieval Islamic conception, it was religion that regulated the secular. My article will make sense of these similarities and differences in an effort to present an indigenous account of the religious–secular dialectic in medieval Islam, one that problematizes the current standard account which holds that these categories were invented within the modern West. (shrink)

Sufism in Central Asia: New Perspectives on Sufi Traditions, 15th–21st Centuries Edited by DeWeeseDevin and GrossJo-Ann, xviii + 340 pp. Price HB $126.00. EAN 978–9004367876.

Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement By ThurstonAlexander, viii + 333 pp. Price HB £24.00. EAN 978–0691172248.

Portraiture in South Asia since the Mughals: Art, Representation and History Edited by BranfootCrispin, xviii + 270 pp. Price HB £75.00. EAN 978–1780767246.

Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast By PrangeSebastian R., xvi + 344 pp. Price HB £90.00. EAN 978–1108334860.

Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography By IrwinRobert, xxi + 243 pp. Price HB £24.00. EAN 978–0691174662.

This study attempts to show that the well-known Ḥanbalī scholar Ibn al-Jawzī was not, as commonly assumed, intrinsically opposed to mystical endeavours, but in fact himself had mystical inclinations. The basis for this argument is the previously unstudied Baḥr al-dumūʿ. A detailed examination of selected sections of this work reveals a relatively comprehensive, developed idea of the mystical path. This path sees man, upon being inspired by divine love, as desiring and later encountering God, leading to intoxication and intimacy with (...) Him and, by extension, to mutual love between man and God. Baḥr al-dumūʿ often relies on the metaphors of monasteries and wine to illustrate this journey through which man takes on a new perspective focused on God’s unveiled countenance. This perspective enables him to decipher God’s subtle speech, which gives him a keen understanding of His actions and a spiritual cognizance of Him. Hence, man recognizes God alone as True Being, surrendering all to Him and passing from his own created existence to become a witness on His behalf. While Baḥr al-dumūʿ reveals mystical elements in Ibn al-Jawzī thought, this article nevertheless argues against identifying him on this basis as a Sufi. (shrink)

Women and the Making of the Mongol Empire By BroadbridgeAnne F., xxii + 341 pp. Price PB £24.99. EAN 978–1108441001.

This article documents the existence of a vibrant republic of letters stretching from Cairo to Karachi in the middle of the twentieth century. On the basis of private letters, memoirs, and modern editions of classical texts, this article recreates the scholarly and personal commitments of a new class of professional editors. These editors were responsible for the emergence of some of the most influential publishing houses in the Islamic world, and their contribution to the production and circulation of pre-modern texts (...) has had a profound impact on the intellectual development of Islam in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They believed that cultivating a republic of letters was necessary because it served the world of learning and scholarship. In this way was fashioned a virtual community, separated by national and political borders, but united by visions of history and a shared sense of moral and intellectual duty. (shrink)

Interpreting Averroes: Critical Essays Edited by AdamsonPeter and Di GiovanniMatteo, ix + 262 pp. Price HB £75.00. EAN 978–1107114883.

Slavery and Empire in Central Asia By EdenJeff, ix + 227 pp. Price HB £75.00. EAN 978–1108470513.

Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria By ObadareEbenezer, xviii + 214 pp. Price PB £16.99. EAN 978–1786992376.

Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament, and Architecture in Medieval Islam By GravesMargaret S., xi + 339 pp. Price HB £55.00. EAN 978–0190695910.

Revival from Below: The Deoband Movement and Global Islam By IngramBrannon D., x + 315 pp. Price PB £24.00. EAN 978–0520298002.

This paper discusses the dating of the Muslim conquest of the southern Iraqi port city of al-Ubulla. Arab historians give two conflicting accounts of the event: one puts it in the year 14 ah; the other in the year 16 ah. Modern scholars for their part have made no serious attempt to reconcile the two accounts. They have linked the disagreement with the traditional rivalry between Basran and Kufan historians and, generally, tended to prefer the latter account. This paper takes (...) a different approach to the issue. It rejects the interpretation of the disagreement given by modern scholars and, instead, reconciles the two accounts through close examination of other aspects of the Ubulla conquest. The argument conlcudes that the port city was conquered twice, once in the year 14 ah before the battle of al-Qādisiyya and then again in 16 ah after that battle. This conclusion puts us in a good position, first, to reconcile other disagreements on the sequence of events regarding the conquest of southern Iraq and, secondly, to draw some judgments as to the tribal identity of the Muslim troops who implemented that conquest and established the garrison city of Basra. (shrink)

Human Rights, Islam and the Failure of Cosmopolitanism By EdmundsJune, vi + 174 pp. Price HB £90.00. EAN 978–1317612414.

The al-Ghazali Enigma and Why Shariʿa is Not Islamic Law By KhalafallahHaifaa G., vii + 288 pp. Price HB £60.00. EAN 978–1781792957.

This paper is a study of the Kalām-i pīr, a text on religious doctrine preserved among the Ismaʿili Shiʿi community of the Badakhshan region of Central Asia, attributed to the fifth/eleventh-century Ismaʿili author Nāṣir-i Khusraw. An edition and translation of this work was first published by Wladimir Ivanow, who judged it to be a ‘forgery’ by the tenth/sixteenth-century Ismaʿili missionary Khayrkhwāh Harātī. Ivanow concluded that while the text overall holds value as a specimen of Ismaʿili doctrinal writing, its first chapter, (...) which purports to be an autobiographical account of its reputed author, Nāṣir-i Khusraw, is an irrelevant appendage to the work. Since then, Ivanow’s interpretation has remained broadly authoritative within the field. In recent years, however, multiple new manuscripts of the work and a range of related materials have come to light, indicating the need for a thorough re-evaluation of the text and its history. In this article I demonstrate that Harātī had no role in the development of the Kalām-i pīr and that its production should be dated to the eighteenth century, rather than the sixteenth. Furthermore, I argue that the attribution to Nāṣir-i Khusraw, elaborated in the first chapter, is not incidental to the text, but central to understanding its significance within the Ismaʿili tradition of Central Asia. The text must be considered within the context of the history of Badakhshan in the eighteenth century, which saw an energetic expansion of the Ismaʿili mission in the region and the development of a competitive hagiographical tradition connected with Nāṣir-i Khusraw among various constituencies. This re-evaluation of the Kalām-i pīr demonstrates the need for a revision of the broader framework by which we understand both the legacy of Nāṣir-i Khusraw and the historical development of the Ismaʿili daʿwa in Central Asia. (shrink)

Jihad, Radicalism, and the New Atheism By KhalilMohammad Hassan, ix + 195 pp. Price PB £19.99. EAN 978–1108432757.

The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition By MuhannaElias, xiii + 214 pp. Price HB £30.00. EAN 978-0691175560.

Sharīʿa Scripts: A Historical Anthropology By MessickBrinkley, xii + 519 pp. Price HB £54.00. EAN 978–0231178747.

Princely Authority in the Early Marwānid State: The Life of ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Marwān By MabraJoshua, xiii + 214 pp. Price HB $95.00. EAN 978–1463206321.

Arabic Thought beyond the Liberal Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Nahda Edited by HanssenJens and WeissMax, xxiii + 437 pp. Price HB £75.00. EAN 978–1107136335.

Non-Muslim Provinces under Early Islam: Islamic Rule and Iranian Legitimacy in Armenia and Caucasian Albania By VaccaAlison, xvi + 270 pp. Price HB £75.00. EAN 978–1107188518.

The Caliphate at War: The Ideological, Organisational and Military Innovations of Islamic State By HashimAhmed S., ix + 379 pp. Price HB £25.00. EAN 978–1849046435.

Sea of the Caliphs: The Mediterranean in the Medieval Islamic World By PicardChristophe, translated by ElliottNicholas, xi + 395 pp. Price HB £25.95. EAN 978–0674660465.

Known primarily for his popular and moralizing novels, Nazir Ahmad’s accomplishments as a scholar of Islam are often omitted from his biography. Yet in addition to working for the British Government of India, participating in Muslim social, political, and educational initiatives on the subcontinent, and demonstrating his linguistic and legal acumen by translating the law codes of British India into vernacular Urdu, Nazir Ahmad also translated religious texts and penned his own original compositions on themes of religion, society, and ethics. (...) Reviewing the ideas presented in his comprehensive three-volume al-Ḥuqūq va-l-farāʾiż and his shorter catechism Ijtihād, this article outlines Nazir Ahmad’s theory of worldly religion and introduces his concept of Islamic humanism in response to ulema-centric approaches to Islamic revival and reform in British India. (shrink)

This article uses dreams, portents, and prognostications as an entry point into what some scholars have recently called ‘Ottoman exceptionalism’. Drawing on sources in Turkish and Arabic, it traces beliefs about the Ottoman dynasty and empire’s superiority, divine favour, and special role in history from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. I begin with the ‘seeds’ of the topic in the empire’s early years and myths of origin, including a number of dream stories, before moving to full-scale political exceptionalism. Looking (...) closer, I then identify an eschatological strand in the lead-up to the Islamic millennium that centred on the dynasty’s role in the end time. The millennium’s uneventful passing led to the dissolution of this strand but not of ideas about exceptionalism itself, which in later forms turned inward, depicting the empire as ‘eternal’ and projecting its rule to an undetermined future period. (shrink)

The Qurʾan and the Just Society By HarveyRamon. Foreword by Abdel HaleemM. A. S., x + 276 pp. Price HB £80.00. EAN 978–1474403290.

Youth and Revolution in the Changing Middle East, 1908–2014 By ErlichHaggai, xi + 339 pp. Price HB £49.95. EAN 978–1626371712.

The First of the Modern Ottomans: The Intellectual History of Ahmed Vasıf By MenchingerEthan L., xxx + 319 pp. Price HB £75.00. EAN 978–1107197978.