By examining the intersection of Islamic law, state law, religion, and culture in the Egyptian nation-building process, Recasting Islamic Law highlights how the sharia, when attached to constitutional commitments, is reshaped into modern Islamic state law. Rachel M. Scott analyzes the complex effects of constitutional commitments to the sharia in the wake of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. She…
Breaching the Bronze Wall deals with the idea that the words of honorable Muslims constitute proof and that written documents and the words of non-Muslims are of inferior value. Thus, foreign merchants in cities such as Istanbul, Damascus or Alexandria could barely prove any claim, as neither their contracts nor their words were of any value if countered by Muslims. Francisco Apellániz explore…
The book examines the growing tension between social movements that embrace egalitarian and inclusivist views of national and global politics, most notably classical liberalism, and those that advance social hierarchy and national exclusivism, such as neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and national populism. In exploring issues relating to tensions and conflicts around globalization, the book iden…
For centuries, the Mosque of Eyüp Sultan has been one of Istanbul’s most important pilgrimage destinations, in large part because of the figure buried in the tomb at its center: Halid bin Zeyd Ebû Eyûb el-Ensârî, a Companion of the Prophet Muhammad. Timur Hammond argues here, however, that making a geography of Islam involves considerably more. Following practices of storytelling and bu…
This social, cultural, and political history of Slavic Muslim women of the Yugoslav region in the first decades of the post-Ottoman era is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of the issues confronting these women. It is based on a study of voluntary associations (philanthropic, cultural, Islamic-traditionalist, and feminist) of the period. It is broadly held that Muslim women were sil…
First Nationalism Then Identity focuses on the case of Bosnian Muslims, a rare historic instance of a new nation emerging. Although for Bosnian Muslims the process of national emergence and the assertion of a new salient identity have been going on for over two decades, Mirsad Kriještorac is the first to explain the significance of the whole process and how the adoption of their new Bosniak id…
"Chicago is home to one of the largest, most politically active Palestinian immigrant communities in the United States. For decades, secular nationalism held sway as the dominant political ideology, but since the 1990s its structures have weakened and Islamic institutions have gained strength. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interview data, Palestinian Chicago charts the origins of these cha…
This book tells the story of a manuscript repository found all over the pre-modern Muslim world: the khizanat al-kutub, or treasury of books. The focus is on the undisclosed Arabic manuscript culture of a small but vibrant South Asian Shi’i Muslim community, the Bohras. It looks at how books that were once part of one of the biggest imperial book repositories of the medieval Muslim world, the…
The book offers an examination of issues, institutions and actors that have become central to Muslim life in the region. Focusing on leadership, authority, law, gender, media, aesthetics, radicalization and cooperation, it offers insights into processes that reshape power structures and the experience of being Muslim. It makes room for perspectives from the region in an academic world shaped by…
Seven new scholarly essays present original research that includes rare historical and photographic materials highlighting the significance of Islamic civilization and its vexed legacy in a variety of contemporary European countries and challenging the perception of European identity as exclusively Christian. This volume unearths a rich, complex history of relationships between Muslims and Chri…