New Books in Islamic Studies Marshall Poe

How are notions of justice and equality constructed in Islamic virtue ethics (akhlaq)? How are Islamic virtue ethics gendered, despite their venture into perennial concerns of how best to live a good and ethical life? These are the questions that Zahra Ayubi, an assistant professor of religion at Dartmouth college, examines in her new book Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society (Columbia University Press, 2019). Using akhlaq literature by al-Ghazali, Davani and Tusi, Ayubi closely studies the ways in which these male Muslim scholars constructed ideas of the self (nafs), particularly in relation to the family and the society. Despite the ethicists’ differing sectarian and theological orientations in Islam, they still concluded that the status of a perfect ethical human was only achievable by a male elite. Meaning that the capacity to utilize rational faculty, which is central to self-refinement, was deemed not accessible to females, slaves, and non-elite males. In unpacking these gendered and hierarchical dynamics around ethics and comportment, Aybui masterfully applies feminist and gender analysis to deconstruct ethical texts. In light of her findings, she calls for a “philosophical turn” that must employ critical gender analysis when reading these texts not only in the context of Islamic philosophy, but broadly in the study of Islam. The book is a must read for scholars and students interested in Islamic philosophy and gender and Islamic studies.
M. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Queen’s University. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism(Bloombsury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2017). More details about her research and scholarship may be found on here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Capitalism is not only an economic system but also a system of production and allocation of hope. In Egypt, a generation of young men desire fulfilling employment, meaningful relationships, and secure family life, yet find few paths to achieve this. 
In The Labor of Hope:: Meritocracy and Precarity in Egypt (Stanford UP, 2023), Harry Pettit follows these educated but underemployed men as they struggle to establish careers and build satisfying lives. In so doing, this book reveals the lived contradiction at the heart of capitalist systems - the expansive dreams they encourage and the precarious lives they produce. Pettit considers the various ways individuals cultivate distraction and hope for future mobility: education, migration, consumption, and prayer. These hope-filled practices are a form of emotional labor for young men, placing responsibility on the individual rather than structural issues in Egypt’s economy. Illuminating this emotional labor, Pettit shows how the capitalist economy continues to capture the attention of the very people harmed by it.
Harry Pettit is Assistant Professor in Economic Geography at Radboud University Nijmegen. His research is on emotional politics and late capitalism. He has published articles on the emotional politics of precarious labour in Cairo in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, and Emotion, Space, and Society.
Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found 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

Forgotten Foods: Memories and Recipes from Muslim South Asia (Pan Macmillan India, 2023) is a collection of essays and recipes that highlights the complex and layered food history of Muslim communities across South Asia. The contributors to the volume include historians, literary scholars, plant scientists, writers, chefs, and more. And their range of essays take us from Ladakh in the north to Sri Lanka in the south, as we learn how food has not been fixed but rather has traveled, survived, and transformed with its peoples. The memories of foods captured here, be it biryanis, pulaos, khicheris, prawn curries, dhal, kanhi (or khanji), and halwa, just to name a few, unsettle gender, class, economic, and caste boundaries, and welcome us to plunge into the delicious food practices of diverse Muslim communities be they Indians, Pakistanis, Rampuris, Kashmiris, Mappila, and Tamils. 
The collection also critically highlights how food has been weaponized and politicized (as we see with Muslims eating beef in India today) while also being invoked in discourses of authenticity, especially as food practices and memories travel with those who are displaced into the diaspora, such as amongst Kashmiri Muslims. Food here is then used as an incisive analytical tool to complicate histories and contemporary experiences of Muslims in South Asia. This stunning archive of Muslim food memories and its accompanying delicious recipes will be of interest to so many communities of listeners, from academics of Islam in South Asia, food bloggers, foodies on social media, chefs, and 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

In their landmark new translation of the Qur’an, The Qur’an: A Verse Translation (LIveright, 2024), M. A. R. Habib and Bruce B. Lawrence translate the entirety of the Qur’an in a fashion that beautifully and majestically captures the poetic sensibility of the Qur’an for contemporary English speakers and readers. The distinctive feature of this Qur’an translation is its close attentiveness to the literary possibilities opened by the versification of the text and to the oral and aural capacities of the Qur’an, punctuated by its rhythmic qualities. This book also includes a very helpful glossary and appendix, as well as a deeply erudite account of the translation theory and thought process that went into the composition of this Qur’an translation. This powerful, mellifluous, and often dazzling translation is sure to alternatively jolt and energize the reader; it will also work as a great Qur’an translation in courses on various topics concerning Islam and Muslim societies.
SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state. Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Muslim refugee resettlement reinvigorated regional economies, but also intensified competition over land and, at times, precipitated sectarian tensions, setting in motion fundamental shifts in the borderlands of the Russian and Ottoman empires. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky's Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024) tell this story.
The book reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

The Promise of Piety: Islam and the Politics of Moral Order in Pakistan (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Arsalan Khan is an incisive ethnographic study of Pakistan’s Tablighi movement. This piety movement attracts Pakistani Muslim men across class, caste, and social contexts and as such Khan is particularly attuned and reflexive as he navigates the boundaries of this community. 
Khan theorizes the various modalities of relationality that mark this movement from its sonic and ritual dimensions, especially as it relates to dawat or preaching, to its kinship and ethical ones. Dawat is an analytical tool to map some of the ways in which piety and morality are cultivated in public, private, and domestic spheres by the men of the Tablighi movement. In the end, Tablighi’s ethical worldviews unsettle liberal sensibilities and approaches to Islam (religion) and secularism (non-religion), modernity, sovereignty and much more. This book will be of interest to those think about South Asia, piety movements, anthropology of Islam, Islamic reformism, secularism, and politics 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