Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk Islam akbarschamber

The past few decades—since 9/11 in particular—have seen the increasing prominence of ‘moderate Islam’ in the public sphere. But who gets to define what this term means? How are these different definitions projected to wider Muslim, and non-Muslim, audiences? And what are the political implications of these varied versions of ‘moderate Islam,’ whether locally or internationally? In this episode, we focus on three major players in the geopolitical competition to define ‘moderate Islam,’ namely Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia, while also bringing in Qatar, Turkey, and Iran. By paying special attention to Indonesia—and its huge civil society organization called Nahdlatul Ulama—we see how Asian Muslims are becoming increasingly important arbiters of Islam for the twenty-first century.  Nile Green talks to James M. Dorsey, author of The Battle for the Soul of Islam: Defining the Muslim Faith in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

The mid-twentieth century was not only a time when some of the greatest jazz music was created. It was also a period when many African American musicians converted to Islam. By the 1940s, there was a variety of different versions of the faith from which to choose in America. The Ahmadiyya movement had arrived in the United States around 1920; the Nation of Islam had emerged out of Moorish Science a decade later; and by the 1940s different currents of Sunni Islam had been introduced to port cities like Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. By the 1950s and 60s, those ports became gateways to a wider world—to the Middle East and Africa—as African American Muslims set out on musical, religious, and political pilgrimages among their coreligionists overseas. In this episode, we’ll be following those journeys by the likes of Art Blakey, Ahmed Abdul-Malik, and Yusuf Lateef, as well as Malcolm X and the great John Coltrane.  Nile Green talks to Richard Brent Turner, author of Soundtrack to a Movement: African American Islam, Jazz, and Black Internationalism (New York University Press, 2021).
 
Album Links:
Ahmed Abdul-Malik, East Meets West https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmMR8J7yUEI
Yusuf Lateef, Eastern Sounds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMTHsK3MlzA
John Coltrane, ‘Naima’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPAC6zt_1ZM
John Coltrane, A Love Supreme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll3CMgiUPuU

Just how much does Islam vary in different places around the world? And how have local forms of Islam evolved in rural regions where Muslims have lived side-by-side with Hindus for centuries? In this episode, we tackle these questions by looking at local religious practices in the south Indian village called Gugudu. Turning away from theoretical abstractions, we see how religion is practiced on the ground through sacred spaces and rituals that are shared by Hindu and Muslim devotees of a local Sufi saint called Pir Kullyapa. We also learn how the people of Gugudu use the Telugu language to conceptualize their religious practices— and how they creatively adapt and combine religious terms from Arabic and Sanskrit to formulate their own ‘village theology.’ But in the twenty-first century, Indian villages have become increasingly connected to the outside world, not least through cellphones and the internet. So, we’ll also ask how reformist global Islam is affecting the local Islam of Gugudu. Nile Green talks to Afsar Mohammad, author of The Festival of Pirs: Popular Islam and Shared Devotion in South India (Oxford University Press, 2013). 

China is not only home to around 20 million Muslims, it is also home to a variety of different Islamic traditions, and of various ethnic groups who follow those different versions of Islam. In this episode we focus on the Chinese-speaking (or ‘Sinophone’) Muslims rather than the better-known Turkic-speaking (or Uyghur) Muslims. From the medieval period onwards, these Chinese-speaking followers of Islam developed their own religious traditions by drawing on classical Sufi mystical works and Hanafi legal texts written outside of China and applying them to local conditions, which often involved translating or writing religious texts in Chinese. Yet despite occasional contacts with the wider Muslim world, it wasn’t till the late nineteenth century that these Sinophone Muslims established regular ties with their coreligionists in the Middle East. Those new contacts set in motion a century of religious change that was also shaped by political events as China was transformed from an empire to a nationalist republic, then a communist People’s Republic. This episode traces the outcomes of these twentieth-century links between Muslims in China and Middle East. Nile Green talks to Mohammed Al-Sudairi, author of “Traditions of Maturidism and Anti-Wahhabism in China: An Account of the Yihewani Hard-liners of the Northwest,” Journal of Islamic Studies 32, 3 (2021).

Many people, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, might think of Sharia as ancient and unchanging. But like any form of law, it has a history. And like every aspect of religion, it was transformed in the modern era. This episode examines how Sharia changed during the two centuries when the British Empire ruled over large parts of the Muslim world. Surveying two transformational centuries—from around 1750 to around 1950—we’ll hear what happened to Sharia as British rule fanned out from India (including what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh) to Malaya (including what is today Malaysia and Singapore) then Egypt. We’ll learn how Sharia metamorphosed from a general societal discourse to a narrower notion of ‘Islamic law’ then state law in turn. The result was what this episode’s expert guest has called “the paradox of Islamic law,” by which Sharia was centralized by the state but at the same time marginalized by state institutions. Nile Green talks to Iza Hussin, author of The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority, and the Making of the Muslim State (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

In 1218, the pagan armies of the Mongols appeared on the horizon of the Middle East to begin a series of campaigns unparalleled in their scale of violence. In the deceptively mellifluous phrasing of the Persian historian Juvaini, “amadand o kandand o sokhtand o koshtand o bardand o raftand.” (“They came, they uprooted, they burned, they killed, they looted, and they left.”) And then they came back again, and again. Over the course of four decades, the Mongols subjugated or destroyed the whole gamut of states that comprised the region’s medieval geopolitical jigsaw, from the Muslim-ruled states of the Khwarazmians, Saljuqs, Ayyubids, and Zangids to the different Christian polities of the Byzantines, Armenians, Georgians, and Crusaders. Three generations would pass by the time the Mongol emperor Ghazan Khan converted to Islam in 1295. By then, the Middle East had been irrevocably transformed. Exploring these decades of destruction and reconstruction, Nile Green talks to Nicholas Morton, author of The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East (Basic Books, 2022).