New Releases

God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World

Alan Mikhail 2020. Pp. 496 + illus. HB. $39.95. PB. $29.92. Kindle. $19.24 Liveright, New York, N.Y.

At the height of the 16th century, the Ottoman Empire’s extraordinary military dominance and unparalleled trade route monopolies made it the world’s largest territorial and populous empire. This reality forced various fractured European kingdoms to look beyond the Mediterranean to counter it.

Mikael argues that despite its towering influence and centrality to the modern world’s rise, the empire’s history has been distorted, misrepresented and even suppressed for centuries in the West. He retells the empire’s conquest of the “world” through the biography of Sultan Selim I (1470-1520).

Selim, who was never supposed to become sultan, was enthroned in 1512. During his eight-year reign, he nearly tripled the empire’s size and built a governing structure that lasted into the twentieth century. At the same time, “God’s Shadow on Earth” fostered religious diversity, welcomed minority populations, especially those driven out of al-Andalus, encouraged learning and philosophy and wrote poetry.

Drawing on previously unexamined sources from multiple languages, Mikael also shows how the Ottomans allowed slaves to become the elite of society, while contemporaneous European kingdoms engaged in the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.

Life Against Death: Srebrenica

Kadir Habibović 2020. Bosnanski, English. Pp. 217. HB. $43.80. PB. $32.40 Behar Publishing LLC, Coral Springs, Fla.

“Imagine your town instead of my town, Srebrenica; your people instead of mine; and your name instead of my name. Then form your own judgment and try to answer this question aloud and without fear, so that everyone hears: ‘What did THEY do to the innocent people of Srebrenica?’”

The author recounts what happened to him, a Bosniak man separated from his family, lined with his hands bound and awaiting execution. But he survived, and his experience makes up this book.

This gripping, intense story of survival relates how he drew the strength to survive not only from his desire to see his family again, but also from the inspiration of his religious sensibility, his hope that the genocide would be remembered and that justice would one day be served.

Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina

David Henig 2020. Pp. 210. HB. $110.00. PB. $28.00. EBook. $19.95 University of Illinois Press, Champaign, Ill.

Yugoslavia’s violent disintegration during the 1990s and ensuing cultural and economic dispossession continue to force the Muslims living in one of its successor states, Bosnia and Herzegovina, to reconfigure their religious lives and societal values. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork spent examining the historical, social and emotional labor undertaken by people to live in an unfinished past, and how doing so shapes the present, Henig offers a rare sustained look at what it means to be — and live as — a Muslim in that country.

Henig questions how contemporary religious imagination, experience and practice infuse and interact with social forms like family and neighborhood and with the legacies of past ruptures and critical events.

A Universal Message Interpreted from the Holy Qur’an

Linda Ilham Barto 2020. Pp. 612. PB. $26.99. Kindle. $9.99 Light Switch Press, Ft. Collins, Colo.

Linda Barto, who pursued this work alongside Dr. Sheikh Ahmed Pandor, subtitles it as a simple, English version for young readers and youthful minds. She has made this translation of the Quran’s meaning simple enough for young readers, yet powerful enough to attract even the most sophisticated minds.

Barto, who embraced Islam in 1999, says she was guided in this effort by “This Book of Scriptures is perfected and clarified. It is from the One who is Perfectly Wise and Fully Aware” (11:1).

Arguing that many translations are inaccessible to children, she utilizes short, simple sentences and easy-to-understand words.

Pandor, a student of Skeikh Ahmad Deedat, is a hafiz, author and student of Jewish and Christian scriptures.

China’s Muslims & Japan’s Empire: Centering Islam in World War II

Kelly A. Hammond 2020. Pp. 314 + Illus. 2020. HB. $95.00. PB. $29.95. Kindle. $20.49 The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, N.C.

Hammond places Sino-Muslims — as distinct from Xinjiang’s Muslim Turkic Uyghurs — at the center of imperial Japan’s challenges to contemporary China’s nation-building efforts.

Revealing the little-known story of Imperial Japan’s interest in Islam during its occupation of northern China, Hammond shows how Tokyo worked to defeat the Nationalists’ attempt to win the hearts and minds of Sino-Muslims, a vital minority population. Presenting themselves as “protectors of Islam,” the Japanese sought to provide Muslims with a viable alternative and create new Muslim consumer markets that would hopefully subvert the existing capitalist world order and destabilize the Soviets.

This history can be told only by reinstating agency to China’s Muslims, who participated in the brokering and political jockeying between the two sides. Hammond argues that the competition for their loyalty was central to creating the ethnoreligious identity of mainland China’s Muslims. Their wartime experience ultimately helped shape the formation of Sino-Muslims’ religious identities within global Islamic networks, as well as their incorporation into the Chinese state. However, the conditions of that incorporation remain unstable and contested.

Women and Gender in the Qur’an

Celene Ibrahim 2020. Pp. 232. HB. $29.95 Oxford University Press, New York

Ibrahim, who explores the women mentioned in the Quran, argues that stories about gendered social relations permeate the text and that nearly 300 verses feature specific women or girls in its accounts of human origins, nations’ founding and destruction, conquests, romantic attractions and family devotion and strife. Overall, this material weaves theology and ethics together to reinforce central Quranic ideas regarding submission to God and moral accountability.

The author finds that the Quran regularly celebrates women’s aptitudes in the realms of spirituality and piety, political maneuvering and safeguarding their own wellbeing. And yet they also occasionally falter and use their agency toward nefarious ends.

Realizing Islam: The Tijaniyya in North Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Muslim World

Zachary Valentine Wright 2020. Pp. 326. HB. 95.00. PB. $29.95. Kindle. $20.49 The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, N.C.

In this analysis of West and North Africa’s largest Sufi order, Wright situates the Tijaniyya’s late 18th-century origins and development within the broader intellectual history of Islam in the early modern period. Introducing founder Ahmad al-Tijani (1737-1815), Wright focuses on the wider network in which he traveled, revealing it as a veritable global Islamic revival whose scholars commanded large followings, shared key ideas and produced literature that was read throughout the Muslim world. From their interlinked chains of knowledge transmission emerged vibrant discourses of renewal in the face of perceived social and political corruption.

The author argues that this constellation of remarkable intellectuals promoted personal verification in religious learning. The Tijaniyya, who were very concerned with human actualization and the universal human condition, emphasized the importance of people realizing their Muslim identity. Since the order’s beginning, its influence has attracted significant populations in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and North America.

The Son King: Reform and Repression in Saudi Arabia

Madawi Al-Rasheed 2021. Pp. 312. HB. $29.95 Oxford University Press, New York

Al-Rasheed, who challenges the inevitability of repression and dismisses defunct views that “Oriental despotism” is the only path to genuine reform, argues that the on-going wave of unprecedented repression springs from Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman’s (MBS) consolidation of personal power without the royal family and influential groups’ traditional consensus. MBS’ divisive domestic reforms, as well as his adoption of populist nationalism and repression of the critical voices of religious scholars, feminists and professionals, have failed to silence a vibrant Saudi society, including its articulate and connected youth, many of whom have left the country to seek freedom, equality and dignity abroad. While the regime pursues them and punishes their families at home, determined dissidents persist in their struggle against one of the Arab world’s most repressive monarchies. ih

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