Exploring literature in Arabic, Bengali, Persian, Punjabi, Urdu, Telugu, and Turkish, this collection of essays answers important questions about the place of religion in society, secularity and literature, the complexities of treating religion as a stable category, and its relationship to virtue, ethics, legitimacy and social hegemony.
Moharram Performances in Shiʿi Iran from the Qajar to the Covid Era
Babak Rahimi
Price: $79.95
ISBN: 9781512828344
Pub Date: January 2026
Format: Hardcover
416 Pages
In Senses of Mourning, Babak Rahimi analyzes Moharram in Shi‘i Iran through the five senses (sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste) with an emphasis on the relationship between the religious practices as embodied experiences and how these performances—and practitioners’ experiences of them—changed over time.
Seeking Allah’s Hierarchy probes the existence of hierarchical practices prevalent among Muslims, focusing on Muslim barbers and their work relations in Kerala on the southwest coast of India. It complicates the question of “caste” by showcasing the specificity of hierarchical practices among Muslims, despite the egalitarianism of their religion.
After Revelation integrates Jewish legal thought in the medieval Islamic world into its larger environment. Traveling from Baghdad to Cairo and bookending with accounts of medieval Jewish luminaries Saadia Gaon and Moses Maimonides, Marc D. Herman underscores that medieval Judaism evolved into the shapes that it did through contact with Islam.
Islam, Political Cost, and the Practice of Democracy in Greece
Dimitris Antoniou
Price: $44.95
ISBN: 9781512827163
Pub Date: February 2025
Format: Paperback
248 Pages
Why Not Build the Mosque explores the Greek state’s attempts to build a mosque. Looking at the project’s decades-long history of failure and its bittersweet realization in 2020, Dimitris Antoniou demonstrates the productivity of unrealized plans and sheds light on what it takes for things to happen in contemporary democracies.
Islamist political parties and groups are on the rise throughout the Muslim world, constituting a new political Islam that is global in scope and yet local in action. Emmanuel Karagiannis explains how various Islamists have endorsed human rights, democracy, and justice to gain influence and mobilize supporters.
This new literary history of Arabic poetry from 500–750 CE draws on a range of texts, including hundreds of lines of poetry never before translated into English, to explore what pre-Islamic culture actually entailed. The Emergence of Arabic Poetry offers an urgently needed reappraisal of a significant but underexamined poetic corpus.
Ambiguity, Hermeneutics, and the Formations of Religious Identity in Islam
Tehseen Thaver
Price: $49.95
ISBN: 9781512825947
Pub Date: May 2024
Format: Hardcover
320 Pages
Beyond Sectarianism offers new and theoretically exciting avenues for studying the tradition of Qur’an commentary in Islam. It argues that sectarian identity and scriptural interpretation do not always follow predetermined patterns and questions the dominant assumption in the study of Shi‘i Qur’an commentaries that they do.
This innovative volume examines how Islamist parties operate and interact within democratic and semidemocratic political systems in Turkey, Morocco, Yemen, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Bangladesh.
