Islamic Humanities – serie

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.In Forging the Ideal Educated Girl, Shenila Khoja-Moolji traces the figure of the ‘educated girl’ to examine the evolving politics of educational reform and development campaigns in colonial India and Pakistan. She challenges the prevailing common sense associated with calls for women’s and girls’ education and argues that such advocacy is not simply about access to education but, more crucially, concerned with producing ideal Muslim woman-/girl-subjects with specific relationships to the patriarchal family, paid work, Islam, and the nation-state. Thus, discourses on girls’/ women’s education are sites for the construction of not only gender but also class relations, religion, and the nation.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. There is a vast body of imaginal literature in Bengali that introduces fictional Sufi saints into the complex mythological world of Hindu gods and goddesses. Dating to the sixteenth century, the stories—pīr katha—are still widely read and performed today. The events that play out rival the fabulations of the Arabian Nights, which has led them to be dismissed as simplistic folktales, yet the work of these stories is profound: they provide fascinating insight into how Islam habituated itself into the cultural life of the Bangla-speaking world. In Witness to Marvels, Tony K. Stewart unearths the dazzling tales of Sufi saints to signal a bold new perspective on the subtle ways Islam assumed its distinctive form in Bengal.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.Up to the twentieth century, Islamic charitable endowments provided the material foundation of the Muslim world. In Lebanon, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the imposition of French colonial rule, many of these endowments reverted to private property circulating in the marketplace. In contemporary Beirut, however, charitable endowments have resurfaced as mosques, Islamic centers, and nonprofit organizations. A historical anthropology in dialogue with Islamic law, God's Property demonstrates how these endowments have been drawn into secular logics—no longer the property of God but of the Muslim community—and shaped by the modern state and modern understandings of charity and property. Although these transformations have produced new kinds of loyalties and new ways of being in society, Moumtaz’s ethnography reveals the furtive persistence of endowment practices that perpetuate older ways of thinking of one’s self and one’s responsibilities toward family and state.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.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 building projects from the final years of the Ottoman Empire to the early 2010s, Placing Islam shows how different individuals and groups articulated connections among people, places, traditions, and histories to make a place that is paradoxically defined by both powerful continuities and dynamic relationships to the city and wider world. This book provides a rich account of urban religion in Istanbul, offering a key opportunity to reconsider how we understand the changing cultures of Islam in Turkey and beyond.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.In Ways of Seeking, Emily Drumsta traces the influence of detective fiction on the twentieth-century Arabic novel. Theorizing a “poetics of investigation,” she shows how these novels, far from staging awe-inspiring feats of logical deduction, mock the truth-seeking practices on which modern exercises of colonial and national power are often premised. Their narratives return to the archives of Arabic folklore, Islamic piety, and mysticism to explore less coercive ways of knowing, seeing, and seeking. Drumsta argues that scholars of the Middle East neglect the literary at their peril, overlooking key critiques of colonialism from the intellectuals who shaped and responded through fiction to the transformations of modernity. This book ultimately tells a different story about the novel’s place in the constellation of Arab modernism, modeling an innovative method of open-ended inquiry based on the literary texts themselves.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, working-class people across northern India found themselves negotiating rapid industrial change, emerging technologies, and class hierarchies. In response to these changes, Indian Muslim artisans began publicly asserting the deep relation between their religion and their labor, using the increasingly accessible popular press to redefine Islamic traditions “from below.” Centering the stories and experiences of metalsmiths, stonemasons, tailors, press workers, and carpenters, Pious Labor examines colonial-era social and technological changes through the perspectives of the workers themselves. As Amanda Lanzillo shows, the colonial marginalization of these artisans is intimately linked with the continued exclusion of laboring voices today. By drawing on previously unstudied Urdu-language technical manuals and community histories, Lanzillo highlights not only the materiality of artisanal production but also the cultural agency of artisanal producers, filling in a major gap in South Asian history.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.Since a right-wing Hindu nationalist government came to power in 2014, Indian Muslims have faced rampant Islamophobia, lynchings and mob violence, discriminatory legislation, and economic ostracism. How have Indian Muslims—the largest religious minority in the world’s largest democracy—responded to the failures and demise of state secularism? Using the lens of Urdu poetry, this beautiful ethnography explores how Indian Muslims have drawn upon Islamic traditions to actualize free-thinking selves and imagine a pluralistic society unbeholden to coercive state power. Through poetic symposiums, interviews, social media, and deep conversations with diverse Muslim interlocutors, from religious leaders to politicians, civil society activists to poets, Anand Vivek Taneja paints a portrait of the vitality of Indian Muslim artistic, ethical, and spiritual life at a moment of existential crisis.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.Since a right-wing Hindu nationalist government came to power in 2014, Indian Muslims have faced rampant Islamophobia, lynchings and mob violence, discriminatory legislation, and economic ostracism. How have Indian Muslims—the largest religious minority in the world’s largest democracy—responded to the failures and demise of state secularism? Using the lens of Urdu poetry, this beautiful ethnography explores how Indian Muslims have drawn upon Islamic traditions to actualize free-thinking selves and imagine a pluralistic society unbeholden to coercive state power. Through poetic symposiums, interviews, social media, and deep conversations with diverse Muslim interlocutors, from religious leaders to politicians, civil society activists to poets, Anand Vivek Taneja paints a portrait of the vitality of Indian Muslim artistic, ethical, and spiritual life at a moment of existential crisis.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.Theologies of Remembering reveals how Indonesia's two largest Muslim groups, Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah—self-identifying as respectively traditionalist and modernist—actively engage memory as a framework for theological thought and practice. By reimagining their pasts to respond to new contexts, they articulate what it means to be a traditionalist or a modernist in the present and imagine possibilities for the future. Verena Meyer draws on interviews with group members, Islamic intellectual and narrative traditions, and critical theory to show that processes of remembering facilitate manifestations of the divine that destabilize binaries between the historical and transhistorical as well as linear understandings of temporality. Observing how constructions of the past are called into the service of sometimes conflicting demands, she argues against the pervasive idea that Islamic modernities have lost their tolerance for ambiguity and paradox. Tensions among incommensurable memories are generative for articulating elusive theological insights and complex positionalities among both traditionalists and modernists, prompting us to rethink these familiar distinctions in modern identity politics.