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432 results in Islam

Page 1 of 22

Universalism and Regionalism in the Early Islamic World
  • The Beginnings of Local History-Writing
  • Harry Munt
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2026
    Print publication:
    28 February 2026
  • What was the role of local history-writing in the early Islamic World, and why was it such a popular way of thinking about the past? In this innovative study, Harry Munt explores this understudied phenomenon. Examining primary sources in both Arabic and Persian, Munt argues that local history-writing must be situated within its appropriate historical contexts to explain why it was such a popular way of thinking about the past, more popular than most other contemporary forms of history-writing. The period until the end of the eleventh century CE saw many significant developments in ideas about community, about elite groups and about social authority. This study demonstrates how local history-writing played a key role in these developments, forming part of the way that Muslim scholars negotiated the dialogues between more universalist and more particularist approaches to the understanding of communities. Munt further demonstrates that local historians were participating in debates that ranged into disciplines far beyond history-writing.

An Islamic Legal Philosophy
  • Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām and the Ethical Turn in Islamic Law
  • Mariam Sheibani
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2025
    Print publication:
    31 December 2025
  • While many studies of Islamic law have centred on the development of legal theory and substantive law, especially in their formative period of development, Mariam Sheibani instead argues that the rich legal history of the postformative period and the Islamic legal philosophy that developed in it have been comparatively neglected. This innovative study traces the ethical turn in medieval Islamic legal philosophy through the pioneering work of the prominent jurist and legal philosopher Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām (d. 660/1262). Sheibani demonstrates how Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām advanced a comprehensive analysis of the law's purposive and coherent rationality, articulated in a distinctive genre, with direct bearing on legal doctrine and social praxis. Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām expanded on previous theological and legal reasoning, furthering two ideas developed by Khurasani Shāfiʿīs: maṣlaḥa (human benefit) and qawāʿid (legal maxims). He also sought to embody and deploy its teachings for socioreligious reform in Ayyubid Damascus and Cairo, breaking with the dominant formalism of legal practice. The new forms of legal reasoning and writing that Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām developed would influence subsequent jurists from diverse legal schools and across regional traditions until the present day.

Mantle of the Sufi Kings
  • Political Sufism and the Rise of Early Modern Iran
  • Hani Khafipour
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2025
    Print publication:
    30 November 2025
  • The rise and establishment of Safavid rule in Iran is a clear and momentous event in the wider history of the Middle East and Islamic world. In this study, Hani Khafipour explores how loyalty, social cohesion, and power dynamics found in Sufi thought underpinned the Safavid community's sources of social power and determination. Once in power, the Safavid state's patronage of art, literature, and architecture, turned Iran into a flourishing empire of culture, influencing neighboring empires including the Ottomans and Mughals. Examining the origin and evolution of the Safavid order, Mantle of the Sufi Kings offers fresh insights into how religious and sociopolitical forces merged to create a powerful Shi'i empire, with Iran remaining the only Shi'i nation in the world today. This study provides a bold new interpretation of Iran's early modern history, with important implications for the contemporary religio-political discourse in the Middle East.

Salafi Political Theology
  • Daniel Lav
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2025
    Print publication:
    30 September 2025
  • Salafism is a theological movement whose radical wing is today affiliated with al-Qaʿida and the Islamic State, but which draws on precedents stretching back to the medieval theology of Ibn Taymiyya. This innovative study focuses on the concept of theonomy in salafi thought: the tenet that rule by God's law is an essential component of faith, and the corresponding notion that other forms of rule based on human legislation are inherently polytheistic and thereby illegitimate. It is this tenet which furnishes radical militants with their principal casus belli against ruling regimes in the Muslim world. In this book, Daniel Lav details the intellectual grounding for modern salafi theonomy in Ibn Taymiyya's doctrine of tawhid and the writings of the early Wahhabi movement, in addition to the twentieth-century thought of Abu al-Aʿla Mawdudi and Sayyid Quṭb, while drawing on insights from comparative political theology to analyze this key school of thought.

Shariah, Society and Stratification
  • Muslim Lifestyles in Southeast Asia
  • Edited by Norshahril Saat, Sharifah Afra Alatas
  • Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    05 July 2025
    Print publication:
    05 September 2024
  • Since the Islamic resurgence hit Southeast Asia in the 1980s, Muslim societies now have greater aspirations for adhering to the Shariah, the body of laws meant to govern Muslims' day-to-day lives. At the institutional level, the desire for this compliance manifested in the establishment of various institutions such as Islamic banking and financial programmes. At the personal and societal levels, there are increasing demands for the provision of halal-certified goods and services, most commonly in the food and beverage industry. However, increasingly, compliance to the Shariah is no longer limited to laws or ensuring that food and beverages are halal, but has become an entire lifestyle. The rise of the Muslim middle class in Southeast Asia has catalysed this preference. Muslim consumers now demand that products in other industries, such as fashion, sports, tourism, medicine and personal hygiene, should also be Shariah-compliant and even reminiscent of the time in which Prophet Muhammad lived. This book analyses the various social, economic, and political forces that have contributed to such trends across many countries in Southeast Asia. In identifying these trends and the forces that shape them, it discusses the potential consequences of such a lifestyle on society, specifically in entrenching various forms of stratification.

Prospects and Challenges in Promoting Humanitarian Islam
  • Nahdlatul Ulama's International Social Partnerships
  • Sara Loo, A'an Suryana
  • Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    04 July 2025
    Print publication:
    08 September 2024
  • Humanitarian Islam refers to the efforts of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) to promote peaceful coexistence among people of different faiths in the world, with a focus on rahmah (universal love and compassion). The main vehicles for promoting Humanitarian Islam have been North Carolina-registered non-governmental organizations (NGOs), namely Bayt ar-Rahmah (Home of the Divine Grace) and the Center for Shared Civilizational Values. Key advocates of this campaign include current NU chairman Yahya Cholil Staquf and North Carolina native Holland Taylor. The Humanitarian Islam message promoted under Yahya Cholil Staquf's leadership goes back to the philosophy of Abdurrahman Wahid (Gus Dur) and NU's promotion of Islam Nusantara under Said Aqil Siroj's chairmanship. It focuses on recontextualizing orthodox religious teachings through the establishment of various inter- and intra-religious partnerships globally. NU and Bayt ar-Rahmah leaders have witnessed early-stage successes in promoting the Humanitarian Islam vision to forge ties with other large religious organizations across the world such as the Imam Warith Deen Muhammad (IWDM) community and World Evangelical Alliance through utilizing universal vocabularies such as indigeneity, human dignity and humanitarian Islam. However, precisely owing to the broad, catch-all nature of this concept, NU faces, among others, three communications-related challenges in implementing the Humanitarian Islam concept - within NU, among the grassroots, and with its partners. Ethnographic work and interviews with NU leaders, Gerakan Pemuda Ansor members, NU's partners and the grassroots reveal that the vision suffers from a lack of clarity and buy-in beyond a select few leaders.

The Politics of Islamic Ethics
  • Hierarchy and Human Nature in the Philosophical Tradition
  • Raissa A. von Doetinchem de Rande
  • Published online:
    29 June 2025
    Print publication:
    10 July 2025
  • Fundamental to Islamic thought is the idea that there is a way that human beings simply are, by nature or creation. This concept is called fiṭra. Rooting her investigation in the two central passages in the Qur'an and Hadith literature, where it is asserted that God created human beings in a certain way, the author moves beyond discussion of the usual figures who have commented on those texts to look instead at a group of classical Islamic philosophers rarely discussed in conjunction with ethical matters. Tracing the development of fiṭra through this overlooked strand of medieval thinking, von Doetinchem de Rande uses fiṭra as an entrée to wider topics in Islamic ethics. She shows that the notion of fiṭra articulated by al-Farabi, Ibn Bajja, Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd highlights important issues about organizational hierachies of human nature. This, she argues, has major implications for contemporary political and legal debates.

The Cambridge Companion to Women and Islam
  • Edited by Masooda Bano
  • Published online:
    12 April 2025
    Print publication:
    17 April 2025
  • The Cambridge Companion to Women and Islam provides a comprehensive overview of a timely topic that encompasses the fields of Islamic feminist scholarship, anthropology, history, and sociology. Divided into three parts, it makes several key contributions. The volume offers a detailed analysis of textual debates on gender and Islam, highlighting the logic of classical reasoning and its enduring appeal, while emphasizing alternative readings proposed by Islamic feminists. It considers the agency that Muslim women exhibit in relation to their faith as reflected in women's piety movements. Moreover, the volume documents how Muslim women shape socio-political life, presenting real-world examples from across the Muslim world and diaspora communities.  Written by an international team of scholars, the Companion also explores theoretical and methodological advances in the field, providing guidance for future research. Surveying Muslim women's experiences across time and place, it also presents debates on gender norms across various genres of Islamic scholarship.

Traces of the Prophets
  • Relics and Sacred Spaces in Early Islam
  • Adam Bursi
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    15 March 2025
    Print publication:
    31 January 2024
  • Contributing to scholarship studying Islam alongside other late antique religions, Traces of the Prophets highlights how early Muslims deployed sacred objects and spaces to inscribe and dispute Islam's continuities with, and differences from, Judaism and Christianity. The book argues that prophets' relics ritually and rhetorically shaped Muslim identities in the first centuries of Islam.

    Traces of the Prophets rewrites the history of holy bodies and sacred spaces in the emergence of Islam. Rather than focusing on theological controversies among early Muslims, this book is grounded in the material objects and places that Muslims touched and 'thought with' in defining Islamic practice and belief. While often marginalized in modern scholarship, sacred relics and spaces stood at the disputed boundaries of emergent Islamic identities. Objects and spaces like Abraham's footprints in Mecca and Muhammad's tomb in Medina provided sites of shared Islamic ritual, as well as tools for differentiating Muslims from non-Muslims.

Pacifism and Non-Violence in Contemporary Islamic Philosophy
  • Mapping the Paths of Peace
  • Tom Woerner-Powell
  • Published online:
    13 March 2025
    Print publication:
    20 March 2025
  • In Pacifism and Nonviolence in Contemporary Islamic Philosophy, Tom Woerner-Powell combines historical analysis and contemporary interviews with Muslim peace advocates in an effort to develop an empirically grounded survey of Islamic philosophies of nonviolence and a general analysis of the phenomenon. The first monograph on Islamic nonviolence to engage substantively with contemporary debates in the field of moral philosophy, his study is critical and descriptive rather than apologetic and polemical. His approach is both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary. Drawing on methods from the fields of peace studies, Islamic studies, and moral philosophy, he identifies, critiques, and addresses the shortcomings within the dominant approaches in these fields regarding the question of pacifism and nonviolence in contemporary Islam. Woerner-Powell's book sheds new light not only on Islamic cases of nonviolence but also on the manner in which Islamic thought might play a larger role in secular and inter-religious debates. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Hadith Commentary
  • Continuity and Change
  • Edited by Joel Blecher, Stefanie Brinkmann
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    08 March 2025
    Print publication:
    31 May 2023
  • Hadith commentary has been a central site of Islamic intellectual life for more than a millennium, across diverse periods, regions and sects. This is the first volume of scholarly essays ever collected on the key texts and critical themes of hadith commentary. The book unfolds chronologically from the early centuries of Islam to the modern period, and readers will discover continuities and changes as a group of international experts offer illuminating studies of Sunnis, Shi'is and Sufis who interpret and debate the meaning of hadith over a wide terrain: Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, India, and further. The volume also models a variety of methodological approaches, including social history, intellectual history, the study of religion, and digital history. By highlighting both differences and commonalities as the practice of hadith commentary circulated across distant eras and lands, this volume sheds new light on the way Muslims have historically understood the meaning of Muhammad's example.

Principles for Progress
  • Essays on Religion and Modernity by Abdu'l-Bahā
  • Edited by Sen McGlinn
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    04 January 2025
    Print publication:
    01 June 2018
  • This book presents three of the works of Abdu'l-Bahá, son of the founder of the Bahá’í Faith, dealing with social and political issues. In The Secret of Divine Civilization (1875) Abdu'l-Bahá supports the administrative and broader social reforms of Mirza Hosayn Khan, but looks mainly for organic reform through the efforts of Iranian intellectuals to waken and educate the masses. In this work, Abdu'l-Bahá gives virtuous and progressive Islamic clerics a leading role among these intellectuals, indeed most of his appeals are directed specifically to them. A Traveller's Narrative (1889/90) is an authoritative statement of the broad lines of Bahá’í social and political thinking. The Art of Governance (1892/93) was written as Iran entered a pre-revolutionary phase, and ideas that we recognise today as the precursors of political Islam were spreading. It sets out the principles underlying the ideal relationship between religion and politics and between the government and the people. In addition to presenting the first parallel text translations of these works, the Persian texts incorporate notes on variants in the early published sources. An introduction outlines the intellectual and political landscape from which Abdu'l-Bahá. wrote, and in which his expected readers lived.

Being Muslim in Indonesia
  • Religiosity, Politics and Cultural Diversity in Bima
  • Muhammad Adlin Sila
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    19 December 2024
    Print publication:
    06 March 2021
  • There are many ways of being Muslim in Indonesia, where more people practice Islam than anywhere else in the world. In Being Muslim in Indonesia, Muhammad Adlin Sila reveals the ways Muslims in one city constitute unique religious identities through ritual, political, and cultural practices. Emerging from diverse contexts, the traditionalist and reformist divide in Indonesian Islam must be understood through the sociopolitical lens of its practitioners' whether royalty, clerics, or laity.

Ayatollah Khomeini's Mystical Poetry and its Reception in Iran and the Diaspora
  • Diede Farhosh-Van Loon
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    19 December 2024
    Print publication:
    10 January 2023
  • There are many publications dealing with the political career of Ruhollah Khomeini (1902-1989), who transformed the political landscape of Iran and the Middle East after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Most of the research conducted in the West is on Khomeini's political strategies, while the influential role of mysticism in all facets of his life is ignored. This book is the first study examining Khomeini's poetry, mysticism and the reception of his poetry both in Iran and the West. It investigates how Khomeini integrated various doctrines and ideas of Islamic mysticism and Shi’ism such as the 'Perfect Man' into his poetry.

Contesting Pluralism(s)
  • Islamism, Liberalism, and Nationalism in Turkey and Beyond
  • Nora Fisher-Onar
  • Published online:
    19 December 2024
    Print publication:
    02 January 2025
  • Contesting Pluralism(s) challenges a widespread tendency to limit studies of Turkish – and Muslim – politics to 'Islamist vs. secularist' or 'Islam vs. democracy' debates. Instead, Nora Fisher-Onar's innovative argument centers on coalitions for and against pluralism. Retelling Turkey's story from the late Ottoman Empire to the present as a tale of pluralizing vs. anti-pluralist coalitions, this book offers an alternative explanation for major outcomes from elections and coup d'etats to revolutions. Here, cross-camp alliances pit those who are willing to coexist with 'Other(s)' against those who champion a unitary, national project in which everyone speaks, believes, looks, and loves as they do. Drawing on a rich array of primary and secondary data, Fisher-Onar introduces an analytical framework for capturing causal complexity in political contestation. This study rejects Orientalist exceptionalism, rereading the relationship between political religion, pluralism, and populism via a framework that travels across and beyond the Muslim-majority world.

The Science of Music
  • Knowledge Production in Medieval Baghdad and Beyond
  • Mohammad Sadegh Ansari
  • Published online:
    19 December 2024
    Print publication:
    02 January 2025
  • How did the medieval Islamic intellectual tradition conceptualize, produce, and disseminate scientific knowledge? What can we learn about medieval Islamic civilizations from the way they examined and studied the universe? In answering these fundamental questions, Mohammad Sadegh Ansari provides a unique perspective for the study of both musicology and intellectual history. Widely considered to be an art today, music in the medieval Islamic world was categorized as one of the four branches of the mathematical sciences, alongside arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy; indeed, some philosophers and scholars of music went as far as linking music with medicine and astrology as part of an interconnected web of cosmological knowledge. This innovative book raises fascinating questions about how designating music a 'science' rather than an 'art' impacts our understanding of truth and reconstructs a richly holistic medieval system of knowledge in the process.

Reimagining Faith and Abortion
  • A Global Perspective
  • Edited by Fiona Bloomer, Kellie Turtle
  • Published by:
    Bristol University Press
    Published online:
    18 December 2024
    Print publication:
    09 January 2024
  • Providing perspectives from the global North and South, faith leaders, scholars and activists demonstrate the complex connections between faith and abortion, how women and pregnant people are positioned in society and how morality is claimed and challenged.

Islamic Law in Context
  • A Primary Source Reader
  • Edited by Omar Anchassi, Robert Gleave
  • Published online:
    14 November 2024
    Print publication:
    21 November 2024
  • This volume surveys the diversity of Islamic legal thought and practice, a 1500 - year tradition that has been cultivated throughout the Islamic world. It features translations of Islamic legal texts from across the spectrum of literary genres (including legal theory, judicial handbooks, pamphlets) that represent the range of temporal, geographic and linguistic contexts in which Islamic law has been, and continues to be, developed. Each text has been chosen and translated by a specialist. It is accompanied by an accessible introduction that places the author and text in historical and legal contexts and explains the state of the relevant field of study. An introduction to each section offers an overview of the genre and provides a useful bibliography. The volume will enable all researchers of Islamic law - established academics, undergraduate students, and general readers - to understand the tremendous and sometimes bewildering diversity of Islamic law, as well the continuities and common features that bind it together.

How Islam Rules in Iran
  • Theology and Theocracy in the Islamic Republic
  • Mehran Kamrava
  • Published online:
    02 May 2024
    Print publication:
    09 May 2024
  • This study provides a comprehensive examination of the evolution of Islam as a ruling framework in postrevolutionary Iran up to the present day. Beginning with the position and structure of Iran's clerical establishment under the Islamic Republic, Kamrava delves into the jurisprudential debates that have shaped the country's political institutions and state policies. Kamrava draws on extensive fieldwork to examine various religious narratives that inform the basis of contemporary Iranian politics, also revealing the political salience of common practices and beliefs, such as religious guardianship and guidance, Islam as a source of social protection, the relationship between Islam and democracy, the sources of divine and popular legitimacy, and the theoretical justifications for religious authoritarianism. Providing access to many Persian-language sources for the first time, Kamrava shows how religious intellectual production in Iran has impacted the ongoing transformation of Iranian Shi'ism and ultimately underwritten the fate of the Islamic Republic.

The Islamic Welfare State
  • Muslim Charity, Human Security, and Government Legitimacy in Pakistan
  • Christopher Candland
  • Published online:
    30 April 2024
    Print publication:
    04 July 2024
  • The Islamic Welfare State explains the relationship between government legitimacy, everyday security, and lived Islam in Pakistan—a major Muslim-majority country. Its humanitarian spirit makes Islam a compelling, community-strengthening faith that motivates people to provide essential services to the needy, to foster moral sentiments that build social solidarity, and to thereby challenge the legitimacy of government with its focus on 'protecting Islam' and 'national security' rather than enhancing the lives of ordinary people. The book surveys four kinds of Islamic charities—traditional, professional, partisan, and state. The focus is on ground realities, on the activities of welfare workers and beneficiaries, mostly patients and students from low-income families. The attention to the different political sentiments that different kinds of charity foster allows us to better understand politics and political change in Pakistan and across the Muslim world.

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