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Bayana in Rajasthan and its monuments challenge the perceived but established view of the development of Indo-Muslim architecture and urban form. At the end of the 12th century the Ghurid conquerors took the mighty Hindu fort, building the first Muslim city below on virgin ground. It was the centre of an autonomous region during the 15th and 16th centuries and was even considered by Sikandar Lodī for the capital of his sultanate before he decided on Agra, then a mere village of Bayana. A peculiarity of historic sites in India is that whole towns with outstanding remains can, through political change or climatic events, be either built over by modern developments or fall into obscurity. The latter is the case with Bayana, abandoned following an earthquake in 1505. Going beyond a simple study of the historic, architectural and archaeological remains ‒ surveyed and illustrated in detail ‒ the book takes on the wider issues of how far the artistic traditions of Bayana, which developed independently from those of Delhi, later influenced North Indian architecture and were the forerunners of the Mughal architectural style, which draw many of its features from innovations developed first in Bayana.

Is it lawful to shed the blood of a man or a woman who insults the Prophet Muhammad? Does the Qur’an stipulate a worldly punishment for apostates? Beginning with a genealogy of religious freedom in contemporary Islam, this book tells the gripping story of Rafiq Taqi, an Azerbaijani journalist and writer, who was condemned to death by an Iranian cleric for a blasphemous news article in 2006. Delving into the most sacred sources for all Muslims – the Qur’an and Hadith – Mohsen Kadivar explores the subject of blasphemy and apostasy from the perspective of Shi’a jurisprudence to articulate a polarisation between secularism and extremist religious orthodoxy. In a series of online exchanges, he debates the case with Muhammad Jawad Fazel, the son of Grand Ayatollah Fazel Lankarani who issued the fatwa pronouncing death penalty on Taqi. While disapproving of the journalist’s writings, Kadivar takes a defensive stance against vigilante murders and asks whether death for apostasy reflects the true spirit of Islam. This book presents a back-and-forth debate between modern two Shi’a jurists (one conservative, one reformist) that locates the exact points of controversy surrounding apostasy and blasphemy. It engages with the broader subjects of religious freedom and human rights, addressing both secular and religious interests. The author’s extensive new introduction and annotations throughout the text brings the work up-to-date and place it in its academic and public contexts. Finally, the book takes a front-row seat to the debate on blasphemy and apostasy in Islam.

This book provides a long overdue reading of Scotland’s largest city as it was during the long eighteenth century. These formative years of Enlightenment, caught between the tumultuous ages of the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, cast Glasgow in a new and vibrant light. Far from being a dusty metropolis lying in wait for the famous age of shipbuilding, Glasgow was already an imperial hub: as implicated in mass migration and slavery as it was in civic growth and social progression. Craig Lamont incorporates case studies such as the Scottish Enlightenment, the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Eighteenth Century Print Culture to investigate how the city was shaped by the emergence of new trades and new ventures in philosophy, fine art, science, and religion. The book merges historical, literary and memory studies to provide an original blueprint for new research into other cities or civic spaces.

How can a widely hated, massively outnumbered and ludicrously outgunned organisation expands to occupy over 120 cities, towns and villages from the Southern Philippines to Western Libya? How can it endure and survive a military coalition of over 150 armed state and nonstate actors? How did ISIS/IS and their predecessors fight? And how can we account for their combat effectiveness? This book describes and analyses how ISIS/IS fights in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Egypt. It analyses the military-making of ISIS/IS and their predecessors. The analysis focuses on 17 urban battles in Fallujah, Mosul, Ramadi, Raqqa (City and Governorate), Derna, Sirte and Northeastern Sinai. The book is based on fieldwork, dozens of interviews with soldiers and fighters who engaged ISIS/IS and their predecessors, and hundreds of ISIS/IS combat-relevant publications, audio- and video-releases. The findings contribute to our understanding of insurgencies’ combat effectiveness and offer insights on how ISIS/IS, like-minded organisations, and other armed nonstate actors may or will fight in the future.

Human Rights and Reformist Islam critiques traditional Islamic approaches to the question of compatibility between human rights and Islam and argues instead for their reconciliation from the perspective of a reformist Islam. The book focuses on six controversial case studies: religious discrimination; gender discrimination; slavery; freedom of religion; punishment of apostasy; and arbitrary or harsh punishments. Explaining the strengths of structural ijtihad, Mohsen Kadivar’s approach is based on the rational classification of Islamic teachings as temporal or permanent on the one hand, and four criteria of being Islamic on the other: reasonableness, justice, morality and efficiency. In the book, all of the verses of the Qur’an and the Hadith that are problematic in relation to human rights are abrogated rationally according to these criteria. The result is a powerful, solutions-based argument based on reformist Islam – providing a scholarly bridge between modernity and Islamic tradition in relation to human rights. The book’s fourteen chapters are organized in five sections, including freedoms of belief, religion and politics, women’s rights, and slavery in contemporary Islam. Adding an extensive new introduction and annotations throughout the text from Kadivar bring the work up-to-date and place it in its academic and public contexts. In the introduction, the author critically compares his approach to Islam and human rights with those of five leading contemporary scholars: Mahmoud M. Taha, Abdullahi A. an-Na’im, Ann E. Mayer, Mohammad M. Shabestari and Abdulaziz A. Sachedina.

This book aims to bring together all available biographical data on Jewish medical practitioners (physicians and pharmacists) across all the socio-economic strata, living in urban as well as in rural locations in the Muslim world during the 9^th-16^th centuries. The biographies are based mainly on information gathered from the wealth of primary sources found in the Cairo Genizah (letters, commercial documents, court orders, lists of donors) and Muslim Arabic sources (biographical dictionaries, historical and geographical literature). Each one of the biographies presented in the book is a small case study! The biographies enable a unique insight into all aspect of life of Jewish physicians/pharmacists in the medieval Muslim world. The analysis of the more than 600 biographies that are presented in the book exposes readers to various issues such as: professional, personal and daily lives; their successes and failures; families and dynasties of practitioners, clarifying their communal and even financial affairs as well as their inter-religious relationships. Both the biographies and the discussion elucidate various views and aspects of the medicine practiced at that period by Muslim, Jews and Christians. Therefore, the book demonstrates an important and different angle on medieval Arabic medicine.

This volume situates jihadi audio-visual media within a global communicative web, and provides perspectives that relate the production and dissemination of jihadi images and sound to various forms of engagement and appropriation. Through 12 case studies, this book examines the different ways in which Jihadi groups and their supporters use visualisation, sound production and aesthetic means to articulate their cause in online as well as offline contexts and how different actors relate to these media. Divided into four thematic sections, the chapters probe Jihadi appropriation of traditional and popular cultural expressions and show how, in turn, political activists appropriate extremist media to oppose and resist the propaganda. By conceptualising militant Islamist audio-visual productions as part of global media aesthetics and practices, the authors shed light on how religious actors, artists, civil society activists, global youth, political forces, security agencies and researchers engage with mediated manifestations of Jihadi ideology to deconstruct, reinforce, defy or oppose the messages.

This book is about the most sacred site of Islam, the cuboid, black-robed Kaʿba of Mecca, a building the Qur’an calls the ‘ancient house.’ It explains how the building has been used, conceptualised and represented by Muslims from the earliest period of Islam onwards, and reveals the strata in the Kaʿba’s many meaning and the profundity of its importance for the Islamic world. It does this by investigating six of the building’s spatial effects: as the qibla (the direction faced in prayer); as the axis and matrix mundi of the Islamic world; as an architectural principle in the bedrock of this world; as a circumambulated goal of pilgrimage and a site of spiritual union for mystics and Sufis; and as a dwelling that is imagined to shelter temporarily an animating force; but which otherwise, as a house, holds a void.

The first comprehensive social and intellectual biography of Jalal Al-e Ahmad, this book explores the life and legacy of Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923-69), arguably the most prominent Iranian public intellectual of his time and contends that he was the last Muslim intellectual to have articulated a vision of Muslim worldly cosmopolitanism, before the militant Islamism of the last half a century degenerated into sectarian politics and intellectual alienation from the world at large. This unprecedented engagement with Al-e Ahmad’s life and legacy is a prelude to what Dabashi calls a post-Islamist Liberation Theology. The Last Muslim Intellectual is about expanding the wide spectrum of anticolonial thinking beyond its established canonicity and adding a critical Muslim thinker to it is an urgent task, if the future of Muslim critical thinking is to be considered in liberated terms beyond the dead-end of its current sectarian predicament. A full social and intellectual biography of Jalal Al-e Ahmad, a seminal Muslim public intellectual of the mid-20th century, this book places Al-e Ahmad’s writing and activities alongside other influential anticolonial thinkers of his time, including Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and Edward Said. Chapters cover Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s intellectual and political life; his relationship with his wife, the novelist Simin Daneshvar; his essays; his fiction; his travel writing; his translations; and his legacy.

This book explores the history of the Israeli Socialist Organization – Matzpen (compass) – that splintered off from the Communist Party of Israel in 1962. After the Six Day War of June 1967, Matzpen shook Israeli society, calling for a withdrawal from the recently occupied territories, and placing itself outside the national consensus. Even before the war, the group emphasised the colonial dimension of the conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, which was irresolvable within the paradigm of the nation-state. Matzpen instead advocated for Israel’s de-Zionisation and a socialist revolution in the Middle East in order to both restore the rights of Palestinian Arabs and guarantee the existence of Israeli Jews as a new Hebrew nation. However, in the era after Auschwitz, when the Jewish world stood in almost unanimous solidarity with the Jewish state, Matzpen’s radical perspective was at odds with the history and memory of the Holocaust. Against this backdrop, this study places Matzpen’s political stance in its historical context and sheds new light on the political culture of Israel.

This book is a study on the history of polemical exchanges between Catholic missionaries and Muslim ʿulama in Safavid Iran. The book is centred around the figure of ʿAli Quli Jadid al-Islam, a Portuguese missionary who embraced Islam and worked as a court translator for Shah Sultan Husayn. The book explores the context in which he worked, focusing on broader conditions of Muslim-Christian relations in Iran, and examining his interreligious polemical writings. The latter, conceived in response to cycles of polemics linking Iran to Rome and Mughal India, adapted the historical conventions of polemical writing to serve the specificities of a Shiʿi Iranian context. The book contributes to debates on intellectual history of Shiʿism, confessionalisation in the early modern Middle East, Conversion, biblical translation projects and commentaries, and Muslim-Christian relations in the early modern period.

This book assesses the impact of political, non-violent resolution efforts in the Northern Irish and Turkish-Kurdish peace processes. It offers an important contribution to conflict-resolution research, theorising the various stages involved in the attempted resolution of asymmetric conflicts. By relying on primary sources, including interviews and recently declassified archival papers, it presents an innovative framework for conflict resolution, a starting-point for further research on managing peace processes and ethno-nationalist conflicts. This book challenges the notion of ‘conflict resolution’ in these two peace processes, both far-reaching ethno-nationalist conflicts in the post-Cold War era. Incorporating fieldwork carried out until 2015, the book compares these conflicts during major peace attempts, from early secret talks and semi-official peace initiatives, to multilateral and internationalised conflict-resolution processes through not only main armed protagonists, but also independent third parties. It analyses the political resolution efforts for ending the IRA and PKK’s armed campaigns and establishing a peace agreement. It argues that peace initiatives are ongoing processes which contain not only formal peace initiatives, but also informal and secret peace efforts. It suggests that formal and informal initiatives together embody conflict resolution processes through three major aspects: backchannel communications as the unofficial aspect, peace organisations as the informal and semi-official aspect, and negotiations as the official aspect of conflict resolution efforts, which operate at the elite level of conflict resolution.

Why did modern Arabic grammarians fall in love with language again? Rather than raise the philological question of origins, the love of language poses a philosophical question: why is there language rather than nothing? Language does not provide a resolute sense of home; rather it is a love-object that allows the rejection of tradition. This love arises at the moment when the Arab world is integrated into the capitalist world market and traditional symbolic functions collapse, calling into question the relation between words and things. The problems of language speak for a subject of the unconscious, divided by language, desire, and enjoyment.

This book approaches the Qur’ān as a literary, religious and oral text that affects its audience, drawing on narratology, rhetoric and Qur’ānic studies to develop a new methodology to analyze stories that represent some of the variety of Qur’ānic narrative, stories that are repeated and one that is not: Sūrat Yūsuf, SūratĀl ‘Imrān, SūratMaryam, SūratṬaha and Sūratal-Qaṣaṣ. It looks at how Qur’ānic stories function as narrative: how characters and dialogues are portrayed, what themes are repeated, what verbal echoes and conceptual links are present, what structure is established, and what beliefs these narrative choices strengthen. The book argues that in the Qur’ān, some narrative features that are otherwise puzzling can be seen as instances in which God, as the narrator, centers himself while putting the audience in its place, making the act of reading an interaction between God and the readers. This book examines the themes of: knowledge, control, and consonance, while examining the interaction of the text, the audience, characters and the narrator. This book utilizes and analyzes Qur’ānic commentary: classical and modern, Sunnī, Sufi and Shī‘ī, and demonstrates that a narratological and rhetorical approach to the canonized text can contribute new insights to our understanding of the Qur’ān and its worldview.

Turkey and its recent ethno-religious transformation have had a strong impact on the state identity and country’s relation to the Balkan Peninsula. This book examines Turkey’s ethno-religious activism and power-related political strategies in the Balkans between 2002 and 2020, the period under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), to determine the scopes of its activities in the region. This study illuminates an often-neglected aspect of Turkey’s relations with its Balkan neighbours that emerged as a result of the much discussed ‘authoritarian turn’ – a broader shift in Turkish domestic and foreign policy from a realist-secular to a Sunni Islamic orientation with ethno-nationalist policies. In order to understand how these concepts have been received locally, the author draws on personal testimonies given by both Turkish and non-Turkish, Muslim and non-Muslim interviewees in three country cases: Republic of Bulgaria, Republic of North Macedonia and Republic of Albania. The findings shed light on contemporary issues surrounding the continuous redefinition of Turkish secularism under the AKP rule and the emergence of a new Muslim elite in Turkey.

This book draws on Edward Said, Aamir Mufti, Jacques Derrida, and world-systems theory to address the institutionalized construct of “world literature” from its origins in Goethe and Marx to the present day.  It argues that through its history, this construct has served to incorporate if not annul local literatures and the concept of “local literature” itself, and to universalize the novel, the lyric poem, and the stage play as the only literary forms appropriate to modernity.  It demonstrates this thesis through a comparative reading of the reinscription of the classical Arabic-Islamic concept of “adab” as “literature” in the modern, European sense in Egypt, Turkey, and Iran in the 19^th to mid-20^th centuries.  It then turns to the Middle Eastern novel in the global contexts of its production, translation, circulation, and reception today.  Through new readings of novels and other literary works by Abdelrahman Munif, Naguib Mahfouz, Orhan Pamuk, Azar Nafisi, Yasmin Crowther, and Marjane Satrapi, and with reference to landmarks of Middle Eastern and world literary history ranging from the Mu‘allaqāt and Alf Layla wa Layla to Don Quixote, it argues that these texts—like “world literature” itself—are constitutively haunted by specters of the literary forms and traditions, of the life-worlds that they expressed, cast aside by modernity.  In the case of the Middle Eastern novel, it is adab and all that it encompassed in the classical Arab-Islamic world that is suppressed or othered, but that spectral, yet returns in new, genuinely worldly constellations of form.