New Books in Religion

A broad portrait of early Islamic mysticism is fairly well-know. However, there are only a few key figures that have been explored in great detail and their activities shape how we understand this early history of Sufism. Laury Silvers, Professor of Religion at the University of Toronto, makes a significant contribution to the early development of Sufism by focusing on an influential but lesser-known figure, Abu Bakr al-Wasiti (d. ca. 320 AH/932 CE), the “soaring minaret.” In her new book, A Soaring Minaret: Abu Bakr al-Wasiti and the Rise of Baghdadi Sufism (SUNY Press, 2010), she situates Wasiti and his contributions within the broader historical developments in the formative period of Sufism. By doing so she deepens our knowledge of the development and spread of Baghdadi Ahl al-Hadith culture East to Khurasan, the consolidation of Baghdadi Sufism and the internalization of Khurasani traditions during the formative period. Silvers’ approach is refreshing and useful as she details the historical context as well as the intellectual history of early mystics. Wasiti was one of the first students of the influential teachers Junayd and Nuri, the first to travel east and promote the Baghdadi Sufi tradition in Khurasan, and one of the first mystics to compose a Quran commentary. We are also presented with a detailed analysis of his theological perspective on the divine reality. Silvers thoroughly outlines Wasiti’s understanding of God’s Essence, His Attributes, and His Acts in a readable and accessible manner. Overall, Silvers offers us a comprehensive and comprehensible presentation of the intellectual development of Islamic mysticism and metaphysics within the context of the historical development and spread of Sufism. This new book is highly enjoyable and should be useful for the lay reader and academic, the student and the teacher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Many people believe that the current Islamic resurgence is not necessarily a “return of religion,” but rather a continuation of tradition. According to this line of thought, therefore, Islam is essentially resistant to modernity and incompatible with contemporary secular societies. But is this really the case? Abdulkader Tayob, professor of Religion at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, examines this question in his new book Religion in Modern Islamic Discourse (Columbia University Press, 2010). In the book, Tayob offers a fresh look at Muslim intellectuals from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. Treatments of modern Islam often portray it as uniformly antithetical to modernity, but this book presents divergent Muslim voices on this score. Tayob employs religion not as an essential category of examination, but rather as a guiding mode through which he explores Muslim debates on identity, science, politics, law, and gender. The characters involved in these dialogues span the globe from South Asia, the Middle East, and North America, and give voice to both male and female perspectives. We are left with a nuanced examination of modern Islamic thought, which has been carefully contextualized in a critical, disruptive, and engaging way. Overall, Tayob presents a wonderful thematic resource for understanding the adaptation and resistance to modernity as Muslims began to reconcile Islam with the forces of modernization and secularization. It should be useful for readers and listeners interested in modern Islam and the study of religion more generally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In his new book, The Man in the Middle: An Inside Account of Faith and Politics in the George W. Bush Era (B&H Books, 2011), Timothy S. Goeglein, former deputy director of the White House Office of Public Liaison under President George W. Bush, describes his nearly eight years working for the White House. He describes President Bush’s reaction to the 2000 election recount, his response to the tragedy of September 11, and the behind-the-scene deliberations leading up to Bush’s stem cell policy. (Goeglein also, ahem, puts in a plug for the host of this podcast, saying on page 114 that he “relied heavily on my colleague in Public Liaison, Tevi Troy, whose outreach to the American Jewish community was singularly well done.”) In our interview, we talked about Tim’s experiences serving in the White House, why Gary Bauer endorsed John McCain in 2000, and how Tim got Karl Rove to write the foreword to his book. Read all about it, and more, in Goeglein’s story-filled new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook, if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Charles Prebish is among the most prominent scholars of American Buddhism. He has been a pioneer in studying the forms that Buddhist tradition has taken in the United States. Now retired, he has written this unusual new book, An American Buddhist Life: Memoirs of a Modern Dharma Pioneer (Sumeru Press, 2011). The book tells the story of Prebish’s role in bringing the field of American Buddhism to prominence. The difficulties he faced in establishing American Buddhism as a legitimate field of study, and in trying to be recognized as a “scholar-practitioner,” will resonate with up-and-coming scholars trying to carve out a new niche for their scholarship. The book is filled with anecdotes about recognized authorities in Buddhist studies, providing a uniquely personal window into the development of the field in the late 20th century and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Despite the fact that many American Muslim families have lived in the United States for generations they are often thought of as foreigners. I have witnessed on several occasions someone asking an African American Muslim when they converted to Islam or what drew them to the religion. Or asking Muslims from Middle Eastern or Asian descent where they are from or when they came to America. These questions are not always intended to be malicious but they do underscore some of the assumptions about Muslims in American discourse: Muslims are new members of the United States, whether through immigration or conversion. Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, professor of religion at Reed College, challenges these preconceptions by thoroughly outlining the long history of Muslims in American. His new book, A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order (Cambridge University Press, 2010) maps the activities of various communities of Muslims from the colonial and antebellum period to the present. His account is rich in detail and offers a vibrant portrait of the encounters and exchanges between Muslim communities and their non-Muslim neighbors. It is by far the most comprehensive historical treatment of the Muslims in America and calls for new approaches in the study of Muslim minority populations more generally. GhaneaBassiri situates Islam within the broad context of the American religious experience and displays the complexity and diversity of American Muslim history. This rigorous and richly documented account also challenges and transcends the flat and monolithic presentation of American Muslims that is typically offered in the current politicized discursive dichotomy between Islam and the West. A History of Islam in America should be essential reading for anyone interested in Muslims in the United States and American religions more generally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Today on “New Books in Buddhist Studies” we’ll be going to hell and back with Bryan Cuevas in a discussion of his new book Travels in the Netherworld: Buddhist Popular Narratives of Death and the Afterlife in Tibet(Oxford University Press, 2008). Common in Tibetan Buddhism is the story of the delok, a person who has died, traveled to the afterlife, and returned to the land of living with some message or moral to share. Delok come from all walks of life–laypersons, lamas, and monks–all figure in these stories. And what they share is a detailed and personal account of their deaths, their journeys to various Buddhist hells and suffering beings they encounter there, and a meeting with the Lord of Death, Yama, who judges their karmic action. Invariably, Yama tells the delok that she or he should return to the living and be a more compassionate, generous, and devoted Buddhist. These morality tales tell us much about religious belief and practice in pre-modern Tibet. But Prof. Cuevas’ important work also has much to say about the limitations of the term “popular” itself. By cutting across both monastic and lay communities, this literature reveals much about common Buddhist understandings of the cosmos both inside and outside the monastery walls. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Often when we read about new Muslim intellectuals we are offered a presentation of their politicized Islamic teachings and radical interpretations of theology, or Western readings that nominally reflect the Islamic tradition. We are rarely introduced to critical Muslim thinkers who neither abandon their Islamic civilizational heritage nor adopt, wholesale, a Western intellectual perspective. In Carool Kersten‘s Cosmopolitans and Heretics: New Muslim Intellectuals and the Study of Islam (Columbia University Press, 2011), we learn about a few modern Muslim thinkers who engage their Islamic intellectual heritage with the philosophical apparatus of contemporary Western thought. Kersten, a professor of Religious and Islamic Studies at King’s College London, has tracked Muslim thinkers for years (follow his blog Critical Muslims), and book reflects a deep understanding of the wider dialogues occurring in contemporary Islamic thought. His analysis also traverses geographical limitations of much of the scholarship on contemporary Islam by discussing figures from both the eastern and western regions of Islam. We are introduced to the thought of Nurcholish Madjid (Indonesia), Hasan Hanafi (Egypt), and Mohammad Arkoun (Algeria). Through these thinkers Kersten explores how phenomenology, hermeneutics, secularization, and postcolonial vocabulary can assist us in approaching religion generally. He frames his work through Russell McCutcheon’s model of theological, phenomenological, and critical-anthropological strategies for engaging religion in order to demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches in the study of Islam. Altogether, we have the first book length analysis of these important modern Muslim thinkers and their critique of both western scholarship and Muslim intellectualism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

For many Asian and Western Buddhists today, Buddhism means meditation and an embrace of the world’s interdependence. But that’s not what it meant to Buddhists in the past; most of them never meditated and often saw interdependence (or dependent origination) as something fearful to be escaped. Many scholars, especially recently, have told this story of the transition from pre-modern to modern Buddhism, but often with no other purpose than to dismiss modern Buddhism as inauthentic, a departure from the “real” Buddhism of ritual chanting and sacred relics. David McMahan‘s book The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2008) tells the story of Buddhist modernism in a balanced way, one that acknowledges its novelty yet remains sympathetic to its concerns and interests. McMahan, who is a professor of religious studies at Franklin and Marshall College, theorizes not only Buddhism but also modernity. Using Charles Taylor’s account of modern life, he explores the forces that changed Buddhism in recent centuries. McMahan discusses typically cited factors (e.g., the emphasis on meditation, the belief in science), but also seldom mentioned (though important) elements of Buddhist modernism like affirmations of nature, interdependence, and everyday life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

“Look up the street or down the street, this way or that way, we only saw America,” wrote Mark Twain to capture his visit to Odessa in 1867. In a way, it’s not too farfetched that Twain saw his homeland in the Black Sea port city. Odessa was very much a modern city with its right-angled streets, buzzing markets, and cultural bricolage. “What Twain saw in the streets and courtyards of Odessa,” writes Charles King in his Odessa: Genius and Death in the City of Dreams, (W. W. Norton, 2011), “was a place that had cultivated like his homeland a remarkable ability to unite nationalities and reshape itself on its own terms, generation after generation.” However, what Twain failed to see King continues “was the city’s tendency to tip with deadly regularity over the precipice of self-destruction.” Odessa has always been a city of in-betweens. A Russian imperial outpost as it gestured to the north and a “window the Middle East” as it looked south. A Russian city that is closer to Vienna and Athens than Moscow and St. Petersburg. A city that is “in Russia but not of it.” King’s chronicles Odessa’s contradictory attributes and their impact on its identity. He asks how Odessa survived as a city of Enlightenment and Holocaust, high culture and revolutionary violence, multiculturalism and ethnic hatred, a bastion of freedom and victim of military occupation. In all, King concludes that Odessa is one of those cities where perpetually “teetering between genius and devastation may be the normal state of affairs.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Bombay (Mumbai), India, is a city that has never lacked chroniclers from Rudyard Kipling to Salman Rushdie to Suketu Mehta, bards of pluralism have written about Bombay’s divers religions and peoples and the interactions between them. Now here comes a fantastic new book on the much touted ‘cosmopolitan culture,’ as the natives call it, of colonial Bombay- with a twist. Nile Green‘s well received Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840-1915 (Cambridge University Press, 2011) masterfully weaves together the dizzying varieties of Islams current in this port city -Islams that grew up as the Deccan, the Konkan, Gujurat, East Africa, Central, West and Southeast Asia all converged upon the crowded lanes and workshops of Bhendi bazaar, Haji Ali, Mazgaon, Chira Bazaar, Dongri. These neighbourhoods in turn exported systems of belief and practice wherever their denizens went beliefs that were themselves shaped and modified by the time they had spent, and the adherents they had won, in Bombay. Never before has Muslim Bombay been presented as part of a global network – this is a book that traces Muslim life in Bombay and beyond in a framework transcending nationality, race and spatial demarcations- a book, in short, that tells the story of what happened when a global religion came to a global city. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion