New Books in Islamic Studies

Nurhaizatul Jamil, Associate Professor of Global South Studies and author, discusses Islamic self-help practices among young Malay Muslim women in Singapore. She explores how seminars teach gratitude, patience, and piety amid state racialization and neoliberal pressures. Conversation covers gender and religious authority, pedagogies of self-improvement, romantic aspirations, and limits of self-help during COVID-19.

S. Sayyid, scholar of world history and political theory, offers decolonial and geopolitical framing. Mona Makinajadbanadaki, sociologist focused on Iranian politics and diaspora, analyzes identity and Islamophobia. They unpack narratives shaping the war on the Islamic Republic. Short takes on diaspora divisions, Kemalism, dehumanization, and how Western frameworks miss the region’s political currents.

Amir Saemi, philosopher of Islamic thought and ethics and author of Morality and Revelation in Islamic Thought and Beyond, explores the clash between scripture and moral judgment. He outlines the “New Problem of Evil,” contrasts scripture‑first and ethics‑first approaches, and examines medieval debates, the Moses principle, and how scripture can serve moral development.

Hans A. Harmakaputra, Indonesian scholar of Christian-Muslim relations and assistant professor, explores how Indonesian Christians respond to rising conservative Islam. He discusses church closings, the Ahok blasphemy case, and grassroots peacebuilding in Maluku. Short, vivid accounts of negotiation, relocation, and creative resistance illuminate identity and belonging in post-1998 Indonesia.

James McDougall, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Oxford and author of Worlds of Islam, offers a sweeping global narrative from seventh-century Arabia to the digital age. He traces Islam’s spread via armies, merchants, and missionaries. The conversation highlights diverse local stories, surprising figures, periodization choices, and the book’s role in addressing modern Islamophobia.

Gijs Kruijtzer, historian of the early modern Persianate and Latin Christian worlds, explores how people justified practices viewed as transgressions between 1200 and 1700. He compares defenses of sodomy, idolatry, and usury. He outlines four modes of justification and shows surprising similarities and evolving legal creativity across traditions.

Ken Chitwood, a researcher of Puerto Rican and Latinx Muslim communities, explores multi-sited and digital ethnography of Borícua Muslims. He discusses everyday cosmopolitanism, historical threads of Islam in Puerto Rico, foodscapes and cultural negotiation, intra-community tensions around authenticity, and solidarities linking Puerto Rican and Palestinian anti-colonial struggles.

Manuela Ceballos, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and scholar of early modern Iberia and North Africa. She traces two sixteenth-century saints across Spain and Morocco. Topics include purity of blood, saintly bleeding and menstrual stigma, tanneries and urban waste, genealogies of converts, and how blood functions as shifting material and metaphor.

Rian Thum, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Manchester and scholar of Chinese Muslim and Uyghur history. He traces pilgrims, merchants, and scholars across Ming to Republican eras. He discusses mosque libraries, multilingual texts, diaspora networks, and how biographies reveal changing identities. He also explores translation of Islamic ideas into Chinese thought and the authority of travel.

In the heyday of Islamic art collecting around the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of premodern ceramic objects circulated on the international antiquities market. Invisible Hands: Fabrication, Forgery, and the Art of Islamic Ceramics (Princeton University Press, 2026) tells the story of how traditional craft skills of the Islamic world, often thought to have died out with the advent of industrialization, were redirected toward a thriving new market in the colonial era: the fabrication and fictionalizing of antiquities, especially ceramics.In this stunning work of art history, Dr. Margaret Graves shakes the foundations of the discipline, challenging us to reconsider what is and is not art. She traces how sophisticated fabrications—as modern as they were believed to be medieval—moved within an international network of diggers, dealers, and collectors who took advantage of a largely unregulated marketplace to exchange and amass objects that were fabulous in every sense of the word. She looks at canonical artworks as well as many previously unpublished and rarely seen objects, shedding light on the astonishingly varied ways Islamic ceramics were altered and remade by highly skilled craftspeople to meet the demands of Western collectors. Shifting away from the moralizing stance of past studies on reconstructed Islamic ceramics, Dr. Graves shows how fabrication and forgery became a major site of participation in modern global capitalism and establishes an entirely new paradigm in the history of art.Drawing on a substantive new body of provenance research, archaeology, economic history, and laboratory analysis, Invisible Hands centers previously marginalized objects, reframing the practices of fabrication and forgery as crucial forms of invention and artistic skill worthy of study and admiration. 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies