It’s now the norm for NBA and collegiate teams to have international players dotting their rosters. The Olympics are no longer a gimme for Team USA. Both via fans streaming from all over the globe and leagues starting in countries throughout the world, the international presence of the game of basketball is a force to be reckoned with. That all started with Hakeem “the Dream” Olajuwon. He was the first international player to win the MVP, which is hard to believe now considering the last time an...
Nov 02, 2024•47 min•Ep. 279
Every hundred years, as the story goes, two angels wonder out loud whether the bees are still swarming. For as long as the bees are swarming, the angels are reassured, the world holds together. Still, the tale suggests, the angels live in anxious anticipation of the End. Local beekeepers in Bosnia and Herzegovina retell the old tale with growing unease, as their honeybees weather the ground effects of climate change. Beekeeping in the End Times (Indiana UP, 2024) relates extreme weather events a...
Oct 26, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 331
In this episode, we interview Prof. Bernard Freamon on his new book Possessed by the Right Hand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
Oct 23, 2024•28 min•Season 1Ep. 20
On Tuesday 13 September 2022, all Mahsa Amini has planned is a day shopping in Tehran. Her birthday is next week. But she is arrested as she comes out of the subway – the Guidance Patrol deem her hijab inadequate. On Friday she is pronounced dead. By Sunday, women have taken to the streets across Iran, setting their headscarves on fire and cursing the Supreme Leader. Months later, workers down their tools and businesses close. The battle cry everywhere: Women, Life, Freedom. This isn’t a passing...
Oct 23, 2024•56 min•Ep. 1
Emrah Yildiz's new book Zainab’s Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others Across Borders (University of California Press, 2024) is a masterful ethnographic study that maps the religious, political, and economic traffics from Tehran to just outside Damascus to the shrine of Sayyida Zainab’s tomb. Attending to questions of mobility and immobility of pilgrims and contraband across state borders, Zainab's Traffic unsettles our approaches to ziyarat (pilgrimages) by provoking the reader to dwell in...
Oct 22, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 343
This week on International Horizons, John Torpey, Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute, speaks with sociologists Mucahit Bilici and Samuel Heilman about their book, Following Similar Paths: What Jews and Muslims Can Learn From One Another (University of California Press, 2024). Bilici and Heilman explore how Judaism and Islam, as minority religions in the U.S., share common challenges and cultural adaptations. The discussion dives into topics like religious identity, multiculturalism, and the ...
Oct 17, 2024•42 min•Ep. 154
In this episode, we talk to Professor Jonathan Brown about his book, Slavery and Islam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
Oct 16, 2024•37 min•Ep. 19
The first in-depth study of the collaborative intellectual exchange between the European and the Arabic Republics of Letters. Beyond Orientalism: Ahmad Ibn Qasim Al-Hajari Between Europe and North Africa (U California Press, 2023) reformulates our understanding of the early modern Mediterranean through the remarkable life and career of Moroccan polymath Ahmad Ibn Qâsim al-Hajarî (ca. 1570-1641). By showing Hajarî’s active engagement with some of the most prominent European Orientalists of his ti...
Oct 16, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 226
As the predominantly Muslim Chinese who claim ancestry from Persian and Arabic-speaking regions in Central Asia and the Middle East, the Hui people in China have received relatively little attention in anthropology. According to the 2010 census, the Hui are the largest Muslim group in China and its third largest ethnic minority with a total population of 10.6 million. Due to their extensive geographic distribution and long-term acculturation by the atheist Han majority, the question of Hui ident...
Oct 14, 2024•48 min•Ep. 328
Today I talked to Christopher Paul Clohessy about Half of My Heart: The Narratives of Zaynab, Daughter of Alî (Gorgias Press, 2020). As Abû ʿAbd Allâh al-Ḥusayn, son of ʿAlî and Fâṭima and grandson of Muḥammad, moved inexorably towards death on the field of Karbalâʾ, his sister Zaynab was drawn ever closer to the centre of the family of Muḥammad, the 'people of the house' (ahl al-bayt). There she would remain for a few historic days, challenging the wickedness of the Islamic leadership, defendin...
Oct 06, 2024•41 min•Ep. 342
Francesco Piraino’s Sufism in Europe: Islam, Esotericism and the New Age (University of Edinburgh Press, 2024) is a vital contribution to the growing field of Sufism in the Global North which often encompasses studies of North America and western Europe. This monograph study, the first focused study of Sufism in Italy and France, uses ethnographic data and sociological analysis to map and situate various Sufi communities in Paris and Milan, along with transnational flows of these communities acr...
Oct 04, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 341
Pakistan, founded less than a decade after a homeland for India's Muslims was proposed, is both the embodiment of national ambitions fulfilled and, in the eyes of many observers, a failed state. Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (Harvard UP, 2013) cuts to the core of the geopolitical paradoxes entangling Pakistan to argue that India's rival has never been a nation-state in the conventional sense. Pakistan is instead a distinct type of political geography, ungrounded in the historic conne...
Oct 04, 2024•1 hr 37 min•Ep. 243
In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Lucia Ardovini to discuss the Brotherhood’s search for identity in a post-2013 context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
Oct 02, 2024•18 min•Season 1Ep. 18
In their book Women, Households, and the Hereafter in the Qur’an: A Patronage of Piety (Oxford UP/Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2024), Karen Bauer and Feras Hamza make a compelling and thought-provoking argument about the role of everyday life in the Qur’an. They aptly demonstrate that the idea of households and women is integral to the salvific message of the Qur’an, to the Qur’an’s understanding of piety and morality, and to Islamic theology. By doing this, the book also makes an important cas...
Sep 26, 2024•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 340
An interview with Khalidah Ali on re-examining Hassan Al-Banna's model of dawah after the Arab Spring. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
Sep 25, 2024•21 min•Season 1Ep. 17
An interview with Dr. Marco Demichelis in which we discuss the ideas of just war and the seal of prophethood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
Sep 18, 2024•23 min•Ep. 16
Hizer Mir in conversation with Yahya Birt who speaks on decolonial Muslim political activism and thought in Britain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
Sep 11, 2024•27 min•Season 1Ep. 15
An interview with Dr. Alexandre Caeiro in which we discuss Islamic law and institutions in Qatar, secularisation and the Ottomans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
Sep 04, 2024•20 min•Season 1Ep. 14
In this final episode of Season 11, the Radio ReOrient team - Hizer Mir, Claudia Radiven, Saeed Khan, Chella Ward and Salman Sayyid - look back over our discussions this season. We put these into the context in which the conversations took place: the context of the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and the Occupied Territories, of global Islamophobia, of campus movements and protests for decolonial liberation… and much more. We reflect on the value of the literary, which has been a thread thr...
Aug 29, 2024•43 min•Ep. 89
The second part of the interview with Prof. Ella Shohat in which ghosts, nationalism/national identity and its role in calls for liberation (amongst other topics). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
Aug 28, 2024•35 min•Season 1Ep. 13
A conversation between Prof. Salman Sayyid and Prof. Ella Shohat on (amongst other topics) the significance of 1492, Orientalism and race. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
Aug 21, 2024•31 min•Season 1Ep. 12
Farid al-Din ‘Attar’s writings have greatly influenced Persian Sufism, but what do we know of him as a thinker? Engaging his diverse writings from poetry to stories, Cyrus Ali Zargar’s Religion of Love: Sufism and Self-Transformation in the Poetic Imagination of ‘Attar (SUNY Press, 2024) captures for us some of ‘Attar’s worldviews, especially as it is rooted in a Persian and Muslim historical context. The book gives us insights to ‘Attar’s take on moral psychology, ethics, and intellectual debat...
Aug 21, 2024•58 min•Ep. 339
Women, Agency, and the State in Guinea: Silent Politics (Routledge, 2020) examines how women in Guinea articulate themselves politically within and outside institutional politics. It documents the everyday practices that local female actors adopt to deal with the continuous economic, political, and social insecurities that emerge in times of political transformations. Carole Ammann argues that women's political articulations in Muslim Guinea do not primarily take place within women's association...
Aug 18, 2024•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 196
A vibrant urban settlement from mediaeval times and the royal seat of the Safavid dynasty, the city of Isfahan emerged as a great metropolis during the seventeenth century. Using key sources, Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran (Penn State University Press, 2024) reconstructs the spaces and senses of this dynamic city. Focusing on nuances of urban experience, Dr. Farshid Emami expands our understanding of Isfahan in a global context. He takes the reader on an evocativ...
Aug 17, 2024•53 min•Ep. 77
Over the course of the Almoravid (1040–1147) and Almohad (1121–1269) dynasties, mediaeval Marrakesh evolved from an informal military encampment into a thriving metropolis that attempted to translate a local and distinctly rural past into a broad, imperial architectural vernacular. In Marrakesh and the Mountains: Landscape, Urban Planning, and Identity in the Medieval Maghrib (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Abbey Stockstill convincingly demonstrates that the city’s surrounding landscape...
Aug 16, 2024•58 min•Ep. 72
This episode is the third one this series where we look back over the first principles of the ReOrient project. In previous episodes we have discussed post-orientalism and post-positivism, here we turn to decoloniality. Discussions of decoloniality have become increasingly mainstream since the ‘Decolonise the Curriculum’ and ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movements, and calls to decolonise are often heard on pro-Palestine marches around the world. But what is the relationship between the decolonial and the ...
Aug 15, 2024•41 min•Ep. 87
An interview with Salman Sayyid in which he addresses some of the criticisms of the recent definition of Islamophobia as “a type of racism that targets Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” To read more about the incident of Islamophobia mentioned in this podcast, please visit this link. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
Aug 14, 2024•26 min•Season 1Ep. 11
Two academics, one Jewish and one Muslim, come together to show how much their faiths have in common—particularly in America. This book provides a braided portrait of two American groups whose strong religious attachments and powerful commitments to ritual observance are not always easy to adapt to American culture. Orthodox Jews and observant Muslims share many similarities in their efforts to be at home in America while holding on to their practices and beliefs. As Samuel Heilman and Mucahit B...
Aug 09, 2024•35 min•Ep. 124
In this episode Salman Sayyid talks to Haiyun Ma about Muslimness in China. This is the second episode in this series which addresses this topic: in a previous episode we spoke to Darren Byler about Uyghur Muslims in East Turkestan. In this episode, our focus is slightly different, and encompasses many Muslim groups in China. Haiyun Ma, assistant professor at Frostburg State University, tells us about his career and his interests in Islam and Muslims in Chinese history. This episode is one of ou...
Aug 09, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 86
Islamic art is often misrepresented as an iconophobic tradition. As a result of this assumption, the polyvalence of figural artworks made for South Asian Muslim audiences has remained hidden in plain view. Faces of God: Images of Devotion in Indo-Muslim Painting, 1500-1800 (Brill, 2023) situates manuscript illustrations and album paintings within cultures of devotion and ritual shaped by Islamic intellectual and religious histories. Central to this story are the Mughal siblings, Jahanara Begum a...
Aug 08, 2024•33 min•Ep. 347
