Books in the Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks series

Thirteenth-century Sufi poet, mystic, and legal scholar Muhyi al-Din ibn al-'Arabi gave deep and sustained attention to gender as integral to questions of human existence and moral personhood. Reading his works through a critical feminist lens, Sa'diyya Shaikh opens fertile spaces in which new and creative encounters with gender justice in Islam can take place.

Shows how an unexpected coterie of scholars, practitioners, and ordinary individuals negotiated the contests and challenges of colonial legal change. The rich archive of unpublished fatwa files, qazi notebooks, and legal documents they left behind chronicles their efforts to make Islamic law relevant for everyday life.

Against the sweeping backdrop of South Asian history, this is a story of journeys taken by sixteenth-century reformist Muslim scholars and Sufi mystics from India to Arabia. At the centre is the influential Sufi scholar Shaykh Ali Muttaqi and his little-known network of disciples.

Analysing classical Muslim literary representations of Muhammad's body as they emerge in Sunni hadith and sira from the eighth to the eleventh centuries, Michael Muhammad Knight argues that early Muslims' theories and imaginings about Muhammad's body contributed in significant ways to the construction of prophetic masculinity and authority.

In this transnational history of World War II, Kelly Hammond places Sino-Muslims at the centre of imperial Japan's challenges to Chinese nation-building efforts. Hammond shows how imperial Japanese aimed to defeat the Chinese Nationalists in winning the hearts and minds of Sino-Muslims, a vital minority population.

The Tijaniyya is the largest Sufi order in West and North Africa. In this unprecedented analysis of the Tijaniyya's origins and development in the late eighteenth century, Zachary Valentine Wright situates the order within the broader intellectual history of Islam in the early modern period.

How do people in the African diaspora practice Islam? While the term "e;Black Muslim"e; may conjure images of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, millions of African-descended Muslims around the globe have no connection to the American-based Nation of Islam. The Call of Bilal is a penetrating account of the rich diversity of Islamic religious practice among Africana Muslims worldwide. Covering North Africa and the Middle East, India and Pakistan, Europe, and the Americas, Edward E. Curtis IV reveals a fascinating range of religious activities--from the observance of the five pillars of Islam and the creation of transnational Sufi networks to the veneration of African saints and political struggles for racial justice. Weaving together ethnographic fieldwork and historical perspectives, Curtis shows how Africana Muslims interpret not only their religious identities but also their attachments to the African diaspora. For some, the dispersal of African people across time and space has been understood as a mere physical scattering or perhaps an economic opportunity. For others, it has been a metaphysical and spiritual exile of the soul from its sacred land and eternal home.

Taking us inside the world of the madrasa - the most common type of school for religious instruction in the Islamic world - Ebrahim Moosa provides an indispensable resource for anyone seeking to understand orthodox Islam in global affairs.

Gary R. Bunt is a twenty-year pioneer in the study of cyber-Islamic environments (CIEs). In this new book, he explores the diverse and surprising ways digital technology is shaping how Muslims across vast territories relate to religious authorities in fulfilling spiritual, mystical, and legalistic agendas.

This volume selects major moments and key players from the seventh century to the twenty-first that have defined Muslim networks as the building blocks for Islamic identity and social cohesion. The essays provide a long view of Muslim networks, correcting both scholarly omission and political sloganeering.

Gender, Sainthood, and Everyday Practice in South Asian Shi ism"

Positioned at the crossroads of the maritime routes linking the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, the Yemeni port of Aden grew to be one of the medieval world's greatest commercial hubs. Roxani Eleni Margariti examines the ways in which physical space and urban institutions developed to serve and harness the commercial potential presented by the city's strategic location.

Walking Qur'an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa

Presents an exploration of Iranian literature and society. This book warns against the rise of what the author calls the 'New Orientalist narrative', which thrives on stereotype and prejudice and is often tied to geopolitical conflict rather than an understanding of Iran.

Replete with a cast of giants in Islamic thought and philosophy, Ahmad S. Dallal's ground breaking intellectual history of the eighteenth-century Muslim world challenges stale views of this period as one of decline, stagnation, and the engendering of a widespread fundamentalism. Far from being moribund, Dallal argues, the eighteenth century was one of the most fertile eras in Islamic thought.

Islam is often described as abstract, ascetic, and uniquely disengaged from the human body. Examining Sufi conceptions of the body in religious writings from the late fifteenth through the nineteenth century, this title demonstrates that literature from this era often treated saints' physical bodies as sites of sacred power.