Today nearly a third of Ethiopians are Muslims. At around 37 million, that’s a larger Muslim population than many Middle Eastern countries. According to Islamic tradition, fourteen centuries ago the first person appointed by the Prophet Muhammad to call Muslims to prayer was an Ethiopian called Bilal ibn Rabbah. Moreover, some of the Prophet’s companions sought refuge in the Ethiopian Christian kingdom of Axum. Over the following centuries, Islam spread to other regions and ethnic groups in what...
Aug 01, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 71
The Muslims of Bosnia in southeast Europe treasure a centuries-long tradition of writing about the journey to Mecca. These treatises and travelogues help us trace the changing ways in which the hajj was experienced and described by these European Muslims who lived under the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, then socialist Yugoslavia, before the independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 1990s. To explore these different meanings of the hajj for the Bosnian Muslims—or Bosniaks—this episo...
Jul 01, 2025•57 min•Ep. 70
Islam and the occult may seem like odd bedfellows. But during the medieval and early modern periods, Muslim thinkers wrote vast numbers of manuscripts on a panoply of occult sciences, ranging from numerology and astrology to alchemy and lettrism. Just as the English word occult derives from the Latin occultus (meaning ‘hidden’), so in Arabic were these arcane disciplines collectively known as the ‘ulum al-khafiyya (‘hidden sciences’). Both the Latin and Arabic terms were references to the invisi...
Jun 01, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 69
Whether in newspaper articles, books, or conversations about Islam, the ‘Muslim world’ is a commonplace term. Yet it was only coined in the late nineteenth century, and didn’t gain wider currency till the 1920s. Moreover, the ‘Muslim world’ wasn’t even a Muslim invention. In this episode, we trace the history of this term which, over the course of a century, came to serve many different purposes when it was taken up by a range of political and religious figures, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. We b...
May 01, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 68
As anyone will know who has so much has flicked through the pages of the Quran, the Islamic scripture contain many discussions of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. Yet Muslim tradition also venerates many Christian saints. The model was set by the Quran itself, in the chapter al-Kahf (‘The Cave’), which alludes to the Christian story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus as a moral lesson for Muslims. Over the following centuries, Muslim authors recounted the lives of various other Christian saints, ranging...
Apr 01, 2025•1 hr•Ep. 67
The influence of the great medieval mystic Ibn ‘Arabi is immeasurable, reaching from his home city of Murcia in Andalusia to Aceh in Indonesia and just about everywhere in between. His teachings similarly try to encompass, or at least articulate, the unfathomable depths of being, both human and divine, together with the links between God’s ultimate being and our own contingent existence. Whereas Ibn ‘Arabi’s terrestrial life played out between Seville and Tunis in his early career and Mecca and ...
Mar 01, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 66
Meaning ‘language of the coasts’ in Arabic, Swahili emerged in East Africa many centuries ago through contact with the wider Muslim world. Although the language is most often linked with Kenya and Tanzania, Swahili was also used as a lingua franca as far north as Somalia and as far south as Mozambique—a country whose name derives from that of a fifteenth century Muslim ruler, Musa Bin Mbiki. In this episode, we explore the little-known history of Swahili in Mozambique, where the language became ...
Feb 01, 2025•57 min•Ep. 65
In libraries all across the Muslim world, old manuscripts survive by scholars whose names end with al-Qirimi: ‘The Crimean.’ Discussing all manner of religious topics, these texts form just part of the rich heritage of Muslims from regions in the east of Europe and to the north of the Black Sea that eventually became part of Ukraine. In this episode, we’ll learn how these manuscripts help reveal the long history of Islam in both western and eastern Ukraine, along with the changing forms of relig...
Jan 01, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 64
How would a medieval Sufi Muslim view the Jewish and Christian scriptures? In this episode, we explore this question through the teachings of Abd al-Karim al-Jili. Born on the Malabar coast of India in 1365, Jili studied throughout the Middle East before settling in the town of Zabid in Yemen. It was there that he wrote his most famous work, al-Insan al-Kamil fi Ma‘rifat al-Awakhir wa-al-Awa’il (The Perfect Human in the Knowledge of the Last and First Things). In that book, Jili drew on the term...
Dec 01, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 63
In 1632, the University Library at Cambridge was transformed by the arrival of an extraordinary collection of manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew, and Malay. They were collected by an early Dutch orientalist, Thomas Van Erpe, better known by his Latinized name Erpinius. To mark the four hundredth anniversary of his death in 1624, Cambridge University Library has mounted a major exhibition of Erpinius's manuscript. For a brief tour of the exhibition, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch...
Nov 01, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 62
For more than four centuries, Muslims, Christians and Jews dwelt side by side on the Mediterranean island of Sicily. For around half of that time—from 827 to 1091—they lived under the rule of Arab Muslims, and for the other half under Norman then Swabian Christian kings, before the Muslims were finally expelled in 1245. Since Sicily had been part of the Byzantine Empire, its Arab conquerors inherited a population who spoke Greek, prompting centuries of linguistic, literary, and wider cultural ex...
Oct 01, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 61
In a famous hadith, the Prophet Muhammad told his followers, “Be different!” He also warned them about the potential dangers of imitating non-Muslim communities. Over the next fourteen centuries, various Muslim scholars pondered and elaborated the possible meanings of this prophetic advice. In what ways should Muslims be different? Were all forms of imitation bad, or were the good and bad forms of imitation? How much did social and political circumstances affect whether a Muslim should visibly m...
Sep 01, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 60
Muslims lived in the Iberian Peninsula for best part of a millennium before their final expulsion of the early 1600s. During those nine centuries, there flourished a rich literary culture, not only in Arabic but also in Aljamiado—a version of Castilian Spanish that was written with the Arabic script. In this episode, we explore the fascinating Quran manuscripts—in Arabic and especially Aljamiado—written in the last few centuries of Moorish life in Iberia. We’ll learn how these rare manuscripts s...
Aug 01, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 59
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 Sau...
Jul 01, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 58
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 citie...
May 31, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 57
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 S...
Apr 30, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 56
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 Hanaf...
Mar 31, 2024•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 55
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 ...
Feb 29, 2024•1 hr•Ep. 54
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, “ amad and 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...
Feb 01, 2024•1 hr•Ep. 53
The importance of Christian monasteries to the socio-economic no less than the religious life of medieval Europe has long been recognized. Far less well-known is the comparable role of Muslim shrine complexes in providing a socio-economic infrastructure for their surrounding communities. This was especially the case in the eastern Islamic lands comprising what is today Iran, Afghanistan, and the other “stans” of Central Asia, as well as northwestern China. Yet whether through redistributing the ...
Jan 01, 2024•55 min•Ep. 51
Today, thousands of Islamic manuscripts survive as testimony to the seven-hundred-year Muslim presence in southeastern Europe. But collections of manuscripts that belonged to a single person are exceedingly rare. And when the books of an individual person remain together as a collection, they tell us much more than they do when dispersed. In this episode, we peruse one such private library—of the judge and mystic Mustafa Muhibbi—as a storehouse of literary, religious, and cultural life in ninete...
Dec 08, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 52
As any observer of the Islamic world—or regular listener to Akbar’s Chamber—will know, there are a dizzying variety of different forms of Islam. Yet every Muslim who follows one of these different versions believes it represents the true version of the faith. This begs the question of who gets to decide what is, and isn’t, Islam? In other words, who has the religious authority to define Islam? In this episode, we explore the social, historical, and doctrinal dimensions of religious authority thr...
Nov 01, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 50
Today, Muslim martyrdom is often most associated with the modern phenomenon of suicide bombing. But definitions about martyrdom—and its relationship to jihad—are complex and contested, being the subject of intense scrutiny and debate among Muslim scholars for nearly fourteen centuries. In this episode, we’ll examine the development of the Islamic doctrine of martyrdom, from its surprising absence in the Quran through its appearance in the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, and the different ways i...
Sep 30, 2023•57 min•Ep. 49
As a crossroads of the Indian Ocean’s monsoon winds, Sri Lanka has hosted Muslim traders, pilgrims, and settlers since the early centuries of Islamic history. From the early medieval period to the present day, this episode traces the development of Sri Lanka’s several distinct Muslim communities, each with their own languages and traditions, with roots that stretch from Arabia and Persia to India and Java. We also explore their relationship with the island’s Buddhist majority and Hindu minority,...
Sep 01, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 48
West Africa has a rich history of the writing and reading of Arabic poetry that connects the region to the literary and philosophical traditions of the wider Muslim world. Building on praise poems composed by the Prophet Muhammad’s own companions, and the work of medieval Egyptian masters such as al-Busiri, West African religious teachers developed their own tradition of writing madih , or praise poems. Yet these verses are not mere panegyrics; they are eloquently profound encapsulations of Isla...
Aug 01, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 47
For Muslims and non-Muslims alike, the study of Islam usually equates to the reading of books. But in recent decades, archaeological excavations have revealed a more complex picture of the Muslim past than written sources have recorded. This has been especially the case for the history of Islam in Africa, where excavations in different regions of the continent have shown not only distinctive local patterns of Islamization, but also the connections of locales such as Gao in Mali with Andalusia an...
Jun 30, 2023•54 min•Ep. 46
Founded in north India in the late nineteenth century, the Barelwi (or Barelvi) movement has since gained more than 200 million followers across India, Pakistan, and the South Asian diaspora from Southeast Asia to Africa, Europe, and the United States. Yet even its name remains unfamiliar, let alone its doctrines. So, in this episode, we’ll explore the development of Barelwi teachings through the life of its founder and namesake: Ahmed Raza Khan Barelwi (1856-1921). What distinguished him from t...
Jun 01, 2023•59 min•Ep. 45
Born in Palestine in 1941, Abdallah Azzam became associated with the Muslim Brotherhood as an adult refugee in Jordan. Then, in his twenties and thirties, he moved between Amman, Cairo, and Jeddah, gaining religious qualifications and joining the Islamist opposition to Israel and Arab leftist movements alike. But it was only with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that Azzam found his calling: in calling others to participate in the Afghan jihad. In the 1980s, he set up an international infrastr...
May 01, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 44
What is Islamic law? How does it work? And who decides what is and isn’t legally permitted? In this episode, we’ll be exploring these questions with regard to the followers of one of the four Sunni law schools, the Shafi‘i school. Named after its founder, Imam al-Shafi‘i (who died in Cairo in 820), over the following centuries the Shafi‘i school (or madhhab ) was exported eastwards by teachers and traders around the Indian Ocean. From the late medieval period, it had spread from Egypt and Yemen ...
Mar 31, 2023•58 min•Ep. 43
The story of Joseph is one of the greatest sagas in world history. A youth of stunning beauty, beloved of his father but envied by his brothers, who is sold into slavery, before resisting the seductions of his owner’s wife and rising up to be governor of Egypt after interpreting Pharoah’s dreams. It is a story that has everything: jealousy and love, ambition and humility, edification and adventure. Unsurprisingly, from its scriptural foundations in the Book of Genesis and the Quranic chapter Yus...
Mar 01, 2023•57 min•Ep. 42
