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This study of devotional hagiographical texts and contemporary ritual performances of the Shi'a of Hyderabad, India demonstrates how traditions of sainthood and localized cultural values shape gender roles. The author focuses on the annual mourning assemblies held on 7 Muharram to commemorate the battlefield wedding of Fatimah Kubra and her warrior-bridegroom Qasem, who was martyred in 680 ce at the battle of Karbala, Iraq, before their marriage was consummated. She argues that hagiography, an important textual tradition in Islam, plays a dynamic role in constructing the memory, piety, and social sensibilities of a Shi'i community. Through the Hyderabadi rituals that idealize and venerate Qasem, Fatimah Kubra, and the other heroes of Karbala, a distinct form of sainthood is produced. These saints, the author explains, serve as socioethical role models and religious paragons whom Shi'i Muslims aim to imitate in their everyday lives, improving their personal religious practice and social selves. On a broader community level, the author observes, such practices help generate and reinforce group identity, shared ethics, and gendered sensibilities. By putting gender and everyday practice at the center of her study, the author challenges Shi'i patriarchal narratives that present only men as saints and brings to light typically overlooked women's religious practices.

The Isma'ili Muslims, a major sect of Shi'i Islam, form a community that is intriguing in its deterritorialized social organization. Informed by the richness of Isma'ili history, theories of transnationalism and globalization, and first-hand ethnographic fieldwork in the Himalayan regions of Tajikistan and Pakistan as well as in Europe, this book investigates Isma'ili Muslims and the development of their remarkable and expansive twenty-first-century global structures. Led by a charismatic European-based hereditary Imam, Prince Karim Aga Khan IV, global Isma'ili organizations make available an astonishing array of services—social, economic, political, and religious—to some three to five million subjects stretching from Afghanistan to England, from Pakistan to Tanzania. The book argues that this intricate and highly integrated network enables a new kind of shared identity and citizenship, one that goes well beyond the sense of community maintained by other diasporic populations. Of note in this process is the rapid assimilation in the postcolonial period of once-isolated societies into the intensively centralized Isma'ili structure. Also remarkable is the Isma'ilis' self-presentation, contrary to common characterizations of Islam in the mass media, as a Muslim society that is broadly sympathetic to capitalist systems, opposed to fundamentalism, and distinctly modern in orientation.

Muhammad’s Body introduces questions of embodiment and materiality to the study of the Prophet Muhammad. Analyzing classical Muslim literary representations of Muhammad’s body as they emerge in Sunni hadith and sira from the eighth through the eleventh centuries CE, Michael Muhammad Knight argues that early Muslims’ theories and imaginings about Muhammad’s body contributed in significant ways to the construction of prophetic masculinity and authority. Knight approaches hadith and sira as important religiocultural and literary phenomena in their own right. In rich detail, he lays out the variety of ways that early believers imagined Muhammad’s relationship to beneficent energy—baraka—and to its boundaries, effects, and limits. Drawing on insights from contemporary theory about the body, Knight shows how changing representations of the Prophet’s body helped to legitimatize certain types of people or individuals as religious authorities, while marginalizing or delegitimizing others. For some Sunni Muslims, Knight concludes, claims of religious authority today remain connected to ideas about Muhammad’s body.

Irfan Ahmad makes the far-reaching argument that potent systems and modes for self-critique as well as critique of others are inherent in Islam—indeed, critique is integral to its fundamental tenets and practices. Challenging common views of Islam as hostile to critical thinking, Ahmad delineates thriving traditions of critique in Islamic culture, focusing in large part on South Asian traditions. Ahmad interrogates Greek and German as well as French Enlightenment notions of reason and critique, and he notes how they are invoked in relation to “others,” including Muslims. To move away from the Enlightenment’s equation with reason and critique, the book turns to the axial age, an “age of criticism.” Like the Prophets Moses and Jesus, Muhammad was a critic-reformer. Drafting an alternative genealogy of critique in Islam, Ahmad reads religious teachings and texts, drawing on sources in Hindi, Urdu, Farsi, and English, and demonstrates how they serve as expressions of critique. Throughout, he depicts Islam as an agent, not an object, of critique. On a broader level, Ahmad expands the idea of critique itself. Drawing on his fieldwork among marketplace hawkers in Delhi and Aligarh, he construes critique anthropologically as a sociocultural activity in the everyday lives of ordinary Muslims, beyond the world of intellectuals. Religion as Critique allows space for new theoretical considerations of modernity and change, taking on such salient issues as nationhood, women’s equality, the state, culture, democracy, and secularism.

Thirteenth-century Sufi poet, mystic, and legal scholar Muhyi al-Din ibn al-Άrabī gave deep and sustained attention to gender as integral to questions of human existence and moral personhood. Reading his works through a critical feminist lens, this book opens fertile spaces in which new and creative encounters with gender justice in Islam can take place. Grounding her work in Islamic epistemology, the author attends to the ways in which Sufi metaphysics and theology might allow for fundamental shifts in Islamic gender ethics and legal formulations, addressing wide-ranging contemporary challenges including questions of women's rights in marriage and divorce, the politics of veiling, and women's leadership of ritual prayer. She deconstructs traditional binaries between the spiritual and the political, private conceptions of spiritual development and public notions of social justice, and the realms of inner refinement and those of communal virtue. Drawing on the treasured works of Sufism, the author raises a number of questions about the nature of selfhood, subjectivity, spirituality, and society to contribute to the prospects of Islamic feminism as well as feminist ethics more broadly.

The Transnational Mosque is the first book-length study to provide a nuanced understanding of the role of mosques in the construction of Muslim identity through the lens of their political, religious, and architectural history. The primary subject in current debates on Islam is the reinterpretation of history, which is often linked to an idealized age of Caliphal rule, the painful legacy of colonialism, or an imagined regional identity. The debates hinge upon what might the future hold for Muslim nations and their subjects. This discussion concerns not simply a monolithic transformation of ideology, but a contested space where governments and communities of belief compete for the dissemination of their own version of Islamic identity. This book is a study in which the built environment is a critical resource for understanding culture and politics in the contemporary Middle East and the Islamic world. By concentrating on the epitomes of Islamic architecture, mosques, especially those built at the turn of the twenty-first century, the study elucidates their significance as sites for both the validation of religious praxis and the construction of national and religious ideology.

Taking us inside the world of the madrasa—the most common type of school for religious instruction in the Islamic world—this book provides a resource on orthodox Islam in global affairs. Focusing on postsecondary-level religious institutions in the Indo-Pakistan heartlands, the text explains how a madrasa can simultaneously be a place of learning revered by many and an institution feared by many others, especially in a post-9/11 world. The book describes the daily routine for teachers and students today. It shows how classical theological, legal, and Qur'anic texts are taught, and it illuminates the history of ideas and politics behind the madrasa system. Addressing the contemporary political scene, the book introduces us to madrasa leaders who hold diverse and conflicting perspectives on the place of religion in society. Some admit that they face intractable problems and challenges, including militancy; others, the text states, hide their heads in the sand and fail to address the crucial issues of the day. Offering practical suggestions to both madrasa leaders and U.S. policymakers for reform and understanding, the book demonstrates how madrasas today still embody the highest aspirations and deeply felt needs of traditional Muslims.

Two poets lived separate lives in the Deccan during the eighteenth century. Comparing them, this book illustrates the complexity of gender, sexuality, and religious practice in Islamic culture. Shah Siraj Awrangabadi (1715–1763), whose name means "Sun," was a Sunni Muslim who, after a youthful love affair, gave up sexual relationships to follow Sufi mysticism. Mah Laqa Bai Chanda (1768–1820), whose name means "Moon," was a Shi'i Muslim and courtesan who transferred her seduction of men to the pursuit of mystical love. Both were Urdu poets who specialized in the ghazal, often fusing a spiritual quest with erotic imagery. This book features translations of Urdu and Persian poetry previously unavailable in English. Shah Siraj and Mah Laqa Bai were exceptions to the gender norms common in their patriarchal society. Their poetry lets us understand the reach and the limitations of gender roles and erotic imagery in Islamic and Indian culture. This study shows how poetry, music, and dance are integral to Islamic devotional traditions.

This introduction to the heart of Islam offers a unique approach to understanding Allah, the central focus of Muslim religious expression. Drawing on history, culture, theology, politics, and the media, the book identifies key religious practices by which Allah is revered and remembered, illuminating how the very name of Allah is interwoven into the everyday experience of millions of Muslims. For Muslims, as for adherents of other religions, intentions as well as practices are paramount in a religious life. The book elucidates how public utterances, together with private pursuits, reflect the emotive, sensory, and intellectual aspirations of the devout. Ranging from the practice of the tongue (speaking) to practices in cyberspace (online religious activities), the text explores how Allah is invoked, defined, remembered, and also debated. While the practice of the heart demonstrates how Allah is remembered in Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, the practice of the mind examines how theologians and philosophers have defined Allah in numerous contexts, often with conflicting aims. The practice of the ear marks the contemporary period, in which the text locates and then assesses competing calls for jihad, or religious struggle, within the cacophony of an immensely diverse umma, the worldwide Muslim community.