Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk Islam

Islam and the occult may seem like odd bedfellows. But during the medieval and early modern periods, Muslim thinkers wrote vast numbers of manuscripts on a panoply of occult sciences, ranging from numerology and astrology to alchemy and lettrism. Just as the English word occult derives from the Latin occultus (meaning ‘hidden'), so in Arabic were these arcane disciplines collectively known as the ‘ulum al-khafiyya (‘hidden sciences'). Both the Latin and Arabic terms were references to the invisible rather than visible dimensions of the cosmos that, as the scientists of their time, such occultists sought to manipulate. So important were these Islamic occult sciences that they formed a crucial part of high imperial politics, patronized by emperors and other courtly elites who deployed these hidden sciences for everything from hiring personnel and military success to urban and even party planning. Nile Green talks to Matthew Melvin-Koushki, co-editor of Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice (Brill, 2021).

Whether in newspaper articles, books, or conversations about Islam, the ‘Muslim world' is a commonplace term. Yet it was only coined in the late nineteenth century, and didn't gain wider currency till the 1920s. Moreover, the ‘Muslim world' wasn't even a Muslim invention. In this episode, we trace the history of this term which, over the course of a century, came to serve many different purposes when it was taken up by a range of political and religious figures, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. We begin by asking how Muslims thought about geography before this new term was invented, then we follow the changing geopolitical contexts in which this relatively recent label acquired the familiarity of apparent commonsense. Along the way, we travel from the late Ottoman Empire and the US Philippines to the Muslim World Congress and Muslim World League through which Pakistan and Saudi Arabia staked rival claims of leadership over the Muslims of the world. Nile Green talks to Cemil Aydin, author of The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Harvard University Press, 2017).

As anyone will know who has so much has flicked through the pages of the Quran, the Islamic scripture contain many discussions of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. Yet Muslim tradition also venerates many Christian saints. The model was set by the Quran itself, in the chapter al-Kahf (‘The Cave'), which alludes to the Christian story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus as a moral lesson for Muslims. Over the following centuries, Muslim authors recounted the lives of various other Christian saints, ranging from such famous figures as the hermit St Anthony and the martyr St George to the less familiar likes of John of Edessa and Paul of Qentos. Writing in Arabic, Muslim authors highlighted the ‘excellent qualities,' or fada'il, of these Christians who had such steadfast faith in God. Underlying this collective veneration was a shared scriptural universe, in which the Quran referred to stories from the Bible, and a shared sacred landscape, in which Muslims venerated the shrines of Biblical prophets and Christian saints. Nile Green talks to Reyhan Durmaz, author of Stories between Christianity and Islam: Saints, Memory, and Cultural Exchange in Late Antiquity and Beyond (University of California Press, 2022). 

The influence of the great medieval mystic Ibn ‘Arabi is immeasurable, reaching from his home city of Murcia in Andalusia to Aceh in Indonesia and just about everywhere in between. His teachings similarly try to encompass, or at least articulate, the unfathomable depths of being, both human and divine, together with the links between God's ultimate being and our own contingent existence. Whereas Ibn ‘Arabi's terrestrial life played out between Seville and Tunis in his early career and Mecca and Damascus in his later years, his spiritual life unfolded through encounters with saints and prophets in the ‘imaginal world' (or ‘alam al-mithal) that was central to his cosmology. In this episode, we trace this double life and summarize his doctrines at large. We then turn to his two most famous works, the Futuhat al-Makiyya (‘Meccan Revelations') and Fusus al-Hikam (‘Ringstones of Wisdom'), to unravel the key concept of huwiyya (literally ‘He-ness'). Nile Green talks to Ismail Lala, author of Knowing God: Ibn ‘Arabi and ‘Abd al-Razzaq al-Qashani's Metaphysics of the Divine (Brill, 2020).

Meaning ‘language of the coasts' in Arabic, Swahili emerged in East Africa many centuries ago through contact with the wider Muslim world. Although the language is most often linked with Kenya and Tanzania, Swahili was also used as a lingua franca as far north as Somalia and as far south as Mozambique—a country whose name derives from that of a fifteenth century Muslim ruler, Musa Bin Mbiki. In this episode, we explore the little-known history of Swahili in Mozambique, where the language became a rich poetic vehicle of religious teachings. After an overview of Swahili under the Portuguese rulers and the sultans of Angoche, we take a closer look at performances of the Nazajina, an epic poem recounting the last days of the Prophet. Finally, we zoom back out to the big picture by asking how Mozambiquan Swahili helps us rethink the notion of ‘world literature.' Nile Green talks to Clarissa Vierke, author of On the Poetics of the Utendi: A Critical Edition of the Nineteenth-Century Swahili Poem “Utendi wa Haudaji” (Lit, 2011).

In libraries all across the Muslim world, old manuscripts survive by scholars whose names end with al-Qirimi: ‘The Crimean.' Discussing all manner of religious topics, these texts form just part of the rich heritage of Muslims from regions in the east of Europe and to the north of the Black Sea that eventually became part of Ukraine. In this episode, we'll learn how these manuscripts help reveal the long history of Islam in both western and eastern Ukraine, along with the changing forms of religious leadership that emerged under the rule of such different states as the Crimean Khanate, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Ottoman Empire, and the Soviet Union. From the cities of Bakhchysarai and Akkerman, we'll follow the trail of Qirimi mystics and scholars to trace the impact of Ukrainian Tatars on such distant places as Arabia and Indonesia. Nile Green talks to Mykhaylo Yakubovych, author of “A Neglected Ottoman Sufi Treatise from 16th Century: Mawahib al-Rahman fi bayan Maratib al-Akwan by Ibrahim al-Qirimi,” The Journal of Ottoman Studies 45 (2015).

How would a medieval Sufi Muslim view the Jewish and Christian scriptures? In this episode, we explore this question through the teachings of Abd al-Karim al-Jili. Born on the Malabar coast of India in 1365, Jili studied throughout the Middle East before settling in the town of Zabid in Yemen. It was there that he wrote his most famous work, al-Insan al-Kamil fi Ma‘rifat al-Awakhir wa-al-Awa'il (The Perfect Human in the Knowledge of the Last and First Things).  In that book, Jili drew on the terminology of the Quran and the Sufi teachings of Ibn Arabi to summarize his vision of the relationship between God and humanity. Consequently, he was centrally concerned with scriptural revelation: how God reveals Himself to humankind through the holy books. This led Jili to write a mystical comparison of the Quran with the Hebrew Bible and New Testament (known in Arabic as the Tawrah and the Injil). Nile Green talks to Fitzroy Morrissey, the author of Sufism and the Scriptures: Metaphysics and Sacred History in the Thought of ‘Abd al-Karim al-Jili (I.B. Tauris, 2021).

In 1632, the University Library at Cambridge was transformed by the arrival of an extraordinary collection of manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew, and Malay. They were collected by an early Dutch orientalist, Thomas Van Erpe, better known by his Latinized name Erpinius. To mark the four hundredth anniversary of his death in 1624, Cambridge University Library has mounted a major exhibition of Erpinius's manuscript.  For a brief tour of the exhibition, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kCe865F7Ek Even today, the collection continues to teach researchers important new insights into not only the Islamic past, but also into the origins of European orientalism. In this episode, we trace the background of Erpinius's interest in Islam, before following his career as a linguist and manuscript collector that took him from his native Holland to the university cities of Europe, then Venice, before being appointed Professor of Arabic at Leiden University in 1613. Together with his writings and manuscript collection, this made him a key—but altogether complex—founder of orientalism.  Nile Green talks to Majid Daneshgar, the curator of the exhibition at Cambridge and the author of Studying the Quran in the Muslim Academy (Oxford, 2020).

For more than four centuries, Muslims, Christians and Jews dwelt side by side on the Mediterranean island of Sicily. For around half of that time—from 827 to 1091—they lived under the rule of Arab Muslims, and for the other half under Norman then Swabian Christian kings, before the Muslims were finally expelled in 1245. Since Sicily had been part of the Byzantine Empire, its Arab conquerors inherited a population who spoke Greek, prompting centuries of linguistic, literary, and wider cultural exchanges that became richer still when the Normans introduced Latin. After sketching the historical background, this episode explores the complex society that developed on Sicily, along with the literature and architecture that emerged from the collusion and shifting hierarchy of cultures. Through the Arabic geographical manual patronized by King Roger II, the translation of classical Greek works to Latin via Arabic, and the Arab-Norman churches of Palermo and Cefalù, Sicily was the lesser-known counterpart to al-Andalus. Nile Green talks to Alex Metcalfe, author of The Muslims of Medieval Italy (Edinburgh, 2009).

In a famous hadith, the Prophet Muhammad told his followers, “Be different!” He also warned them about the potential dangers of imitating non-Muslim communities. Over the next fourteen centuries, various Muslim scholars pondered and elaborated the possible meanings of this prophetic advice. In what ways should Muslims be different? Were all forms of imitation bad, or were the good and bad forms of imitation? How much did social and political circumstances affect whether a Muslim should visibly mark his or her difference from non-Muslims around them? And so, long before Western societies began theorizing ‘assimilation' and ‘diversity,' Muslim scholars were writing multi-volume studies devoted to the question of what it meant to live in a multiethnic and multireligious society. Nile Green talks to Youshaa Patel, author of The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present (Yale, 2023).

Muslims lived in the Iberian Peninsula for best part of a millennium before their final expulsion of the early 1600s. During those nine centuries, there flourished a rich literary culture, not only in Arabic but also in Aljamiado—a version of Castilian Spanish that was written with the Arabic script. In this episode, we explore the fascinating Quran manuscripts—in Arabic and especially Aljamiado—written in the last few centuries of Moorish life in Iberia. We'll learn how these rare manuscripts survived—sometimes hidden for centuries in the walls of old houses—and what they tell us about the people who wrote them, and the form of Islam they followed. In so doing, we'll learn about a long-forgotten chapter in European literary as much as religious history: the only surviving complete Quran in Aljamiado Spanish was written at exactly the same time as Cervantes' Don Quixote. Nile Green talks to Nuria de Castilla, author of “The Qur'an: Production, Transmission, and Reception in the Mudejar and Morisco Communities,” in The Qur'an and its Handwritten Transmission (Brill, 2024).

The past few decades—since 9/11 in particular—have seen the increasing prominence of ‘moderate Islam' in the public sphere. But who gets to define what this term means? How are these different definitions projected to wider Muslim, and non-Muslim, audiences? And what are the political implications of these varied versions of ‘moderate Islam,' whether locally or internationally? In this episode, we focus on three major players in the geopolitical competition to define ‘moderate Islam,' namely Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia, while also bringing in Qatar, Turkey, and Iran. By paying special attention to Indonesia—and its huge civil society organization called Nahdlatul Ulama—we see how Asian Muslims are becoming increasingly important arbiters of Islam for the twenty-first century.  Nile Green talks to James M. Dorsey, author of The Battle for the Soul of Islam: Defining the Muslim Faith in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

The mid-twentieth century was not only a time when some of the greatest jazz music was created. It was also a period when many African American musicians converted to Islam. By the 1940s, there was a variety of different versions of the faith from which to choose in America. The Ahmadiyya movement had arrived in the United States around 1920; the Nation of Islam had emerged out of Moorish Science a decade later; and by the 1940s different currents of Sunni Islam had been introduced to port cities like Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. By the 1950s and 60s, those ports became gateways to a wider world—to the Middle East and Africa—as African American Muslims set out on musical, religious, and political pilgrimages among their coreligionists overseas. In this episode, we'll be following those journeys by the likes of Art Blakey, Ahmed Abdul-Malik, and Yusuf Lateef, as well as Malcolm X and the great John Coltrane.  Nile Green talks to Richard Brent Turner, author of Soundtrack to a Movement: African American Islam, Jazz, and Black Internationalism (New York University Press, 2021).   Album Links: Ahmed Abdul-Malik, East Meets West https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmMR8J7yUEI Yusuf Lateef, Eastern Sounds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMTHsK3MlzA John Coltrane, ‘Naima' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPAC6zt_1ZM John Coltrane, A Love Supreme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll3CMgiUPuU

Just how much does Islam vary in different places around the world? And how have local forms of Islam evolved in rural regions where Muslims have lived side-by-side with Hindus for centuries? In this episode, we tackle these questions by looking at local religious practices in the south Indian village called Gugudu. Turning away from theoretical abstractions, we see how religion is practiced on the ground through sacred spaces and rituals that are shared by Hindu and Muslim devotees of a local Sufi saint called Pir Kullyapa. We also learn how the people of Gugudu use the Telugu language to conceptualize their religious practices— and how they creatively adapt and combine religious terms from Arabic and Sanskrit to formulate their own ‘village theology.' But in the twenty-first century, Indian villages have become increasingly connected to the outside world, not least through cellphones and the internet. So, we'll also ask how reformist global Islam is affecting the local Islam of Gugudu. Nile Green talks to Afsar Mohammad, author of The Festival of Pirs: Popular Islam and Shared Devotion in South India (Oxford University Press, 2013). 

China is not only home to around 20 million Muslims, it is also home to a variety of different Islamic traditions, and of various ethnic groups who follow those different versions of Islam. In this episode we focus on the Chinese-speaking (or ‘Sinophone') Muslims rather than the better-known Turkic-speaking (or Uyghur) Muslims. From the medieval period onwards, these Chinese-speaking followers of Islam developed their own religious traditions by drawing on classical Sufi mystical works and Hanafi legal texts written outside of China and applying them to local conditions, which often involved translating or writing religious texts in Chinese. Yet despite occasional contacts with the wider Muslim world, it wasn't till the late nineteenth century that these Sinophone Muslims established regular ties with their coreligionists in the Middle East. Those new contacts set in motion a century of religious change that was also shaped by political events as China was transformed from an empire to a nationalist republic, then a communist People's Republic. This episode traces the outcomes of these twentieth-century links between Muslims in China and Middle East. Nile Green talks to Mohammed Al-Sudairi, author of “Traditions of Maturidism and Anti-Wahhabism in China: An Account of the Yihewani Hard-liners of the Northwest,” Journal of Islamic Studies 32, 3 (2021).

Many people, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, might think of Sharia as ancient and unchanging. But like any form of law, it has a history. And like every aspect of religion, it was transformed in the modern era. This episode examines how Sharia changed during the two centuries when the British Empire ruled over large parts of the Muslim world. Surveying two transformational centuries—from around 1750 to around 1950—we'll hear what happened to Sharia as British rule fanned out from India (including what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh) to Malaya (including what is today Malaysia and Singapore) then Egypt. We'll learn how Sharia metamorphosed from a general societal discourse to a narrower notion of ‘Islamic law' then state law in turn. The result was what this episode's expert guest has called “the paradox of Islamic law,” by which Sharia was centralized by the state but at the same time marginalized by state institutions. Nile Green talks to Iza Hussin, author of The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority, and the Making of the Muslim State (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

In 1218, the pagan armies of the Mongols appeared on the horizon of the Middle East to begin a series of campaigns unparalleled in their scale of violence. In the deceptively mellifluous phrasing of the Persian historian Juvaini, “amadand o kandand o sokhtand o koshtand o bardand o raftand.” (“They came, they uprooted, they burned, they killed, they looted, and they left.”) And then they came back again, and again. Over the course of four decades, the Mongols subjugated or destroyed the whole gamut of states that comprised the region's medieval geopolitical jigsaw, from the Muslim-ruled states of the Khwarazmians, Saljuqs, Ayyubids, and Zangids to the different Christian polities of the Byzantines, Armenians, Georgians, and Crusaders. Three generations would pass by the time the Mongol emperor Ghazan Khan converted to Islam in 1295. By then, the Middle East had been irrevocably transformed. Exploring these decades of destruction and reconstruction, Nile Green talks to Nicholas Morton, author of The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East (Basic Books, 2022).

The importance of Christian monasteries to the socio-economic no less than the religious life of medieval Europe has long been recognized. Far less well-known is the comparable role of Muslim shrine complexes in providing a socio-economic infrastructure for their surrounding communities. This was especially the case in the eastern Islamic lands comprising what is today Iran, Afghanistan, and the other “stans” of Central Asia, as well as northwestern China. Yet whether through redistributing the wealth of rulers or managing the underground irrigation channels known as kariz or qanat, such shrines played crucial agricultural and economic no less than political and religious roles. In this episode, we trace the history of one such shrine—that of Ahmad-e Jam (1049-1141)—from the life of its founder to its patronage by such medieval conquerors as Sultan Sanjar and Tamerlane the Great to its links with the Timurid renaissance in nearby Herat. Nile Green talks to Shivan Mahendrarajah, author of The Sufi Saint of Jam: History, Religion, and Politics of a Sunni Shrine in Shi'i Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Today, thousands of Islamic manuscripts survive as testimony to the seven-hundred-year Muslim presence in southeastern Europe. But collections of manuscripts that belonged to a single person are exceedingly rare. And when the books of an individual person remain together as a collection, they tell us much more than they do when dispersed. In this episode, we peruse one such private library—of the judge and mystic Mustafa Muhibbi—as a storehouse of literary, religious, and cultural life in nineteenth century Bosnia, which remained part of the Ottoman Empire till 1878. We'll hear not only about the mixture of languages, but also the assortment of interests—law and poetry, magic and medicine, astrology and grammar—molded into coherent cultural unity by a curious individual mind. We'll also learn how a beloved personal library formed a biographical mirror to the arduous life of a provincial official who an 1841 register described as merely a medium-sized man with a grizzled beard. Nile Green talks to Tatjana Paić-Vukić, Senior Research Fellow at the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts and author of The World of Mustafa Muhibbi: A Kadi from Sarajevo (Isis Press, 2011).

As any observer of the Islamic world—or regular listener to Akbar's Chamber—will know, there are a dizzying variety of different forms of Islam. Yet every Muslim who follows one of these different versions believes it represents the true version of the faith. This begs the question of who gets to decide what is, and isn't, Islam? In other words, who has the religious authority to define Islam? In this episode, we explore the social, historical, and doctrinal dimensions of religious authority through the lenses of anthropology.  Step by step, we unpack the key components of religious authority, from revered historic founder figures to their living representatives, along with the crucial components of respected texts and institutions that range from mosques and mystical orders to political parties and states. While looking at Islam from the analytical outside of the social sciences, we also examine how this approach relates to two foundational Islamic concepts: the Sunna (or Model of the Prophet Muhammad) and the Jama‘a (or Muslim Community). Nile Green talks to Ismail Fajrie Alatas, author of What is Religious Authority? Cultivating Islamic Communities in Indonesia (Princeton University Press, 2021).

Today, Muslim martyrdom is often most associated with the modern phenomenon of suicide bombing. But definitions about martyrdom—and its relationship to jihad—are complex and contested, being the subject of intense scrutiny and debate among Muslim scholars for nearly fourteen centuries. In this episode, we'll examine the development of the Islamic doctrine of martyrdom, from its surprising absence in the Quran through its appearance in the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, and the different ways in which medieval then modern religious leaders understood martyrdom, not least in its militant form. Nile Green talks to Asma Afsaruddin, author of Jihad:  What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2022).

As a crossroads of the Indian Ocean's monsoon winds, Sri Lanka has hosted Muslim traders, pilgrims, and settlers since the early centuries of Islamic history. From the early medieval period to the present day, this episode traces the development of Sri Lanka's several distinct Muslim communities, each with their own languages and traditions, with roots that stretch from Arabia and Persia to India and Java. We also explore their relationship with the island's Buddhist majority and Hindu minority, as well as with the several European empires that ruled Sri Lanka for over four hundred years. Along the way, we follow the footsteps of the medieval Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta to the giant footprint of Adam, the first human, located at the summit of the island's highest mountain. Nile Green talks to Alexander McKinley, author of Mountain at a Center of the World: Pilgrimage and Pluralism in Sri Lanka (Columbia University Press, 2024).  

West Africa has a rich history of the writing and reading of Arabic poetry that connects the region to the literary and philosophical traditions of the wider Muslim world. Building on praise poems composed by the Prophet Muhammad's own companions, and the work of medieval Egyptian masters such as al-Busiri, West African religious teachers developed their own tradition of writing madih, or praise poems. Yet these verses are not mere panegyrics; they are eloquently profound encapsulations of Islamic metaphysics in which the whole of creation is seen as an ongoing act of praise. And in the hands of such modern masters as Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse, madih poems were deployed as spiritual vehicles to transport both their writers and reciters into the metaphysical presence of the Prophet himself. Nile Green talks to Oludamini Ogunnaike, author of Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: A Study of West African Arabic Madih Poetry and its Precedents (Cambridge, 2020).

For Muslims and non-Muslims alike, the study of Islam usually equates to the reading of books. But in recent decades, archaeological excavations have revealed a more complex picture of the Muslim past than written sources have recorded. This has been especially the case for the history of Islam in Africa, where excavations in different regions of the continent have shown not only distinctive local patterns of Islamization, but also the connections of locales such as Gao in Mali with Andalusia and Harlaa in Ethiopia with India. In this episode we'll learn about of excavations ranging from Madinat al-Zahra in Spain to Bilad al-Qadim in Bahrain and Ethiopian Harar, as well as the implications of what was discovered in these digs. Shedding light on periods, places, or social groups that scarcely registered in the textual tradition, Nile Green talks to Timothy Insoll, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Archaeology (Oxford, 2020).

Founded in north India in the late nineteenth century, the Barelwi (or Barelvi) movement has since gained more than 200 million followers across India, Pakistan, and the South Asian diaspora from Southeast Asia to Africa, Europe, and the United States. Yet even its name remains unfamiliar, let alone its doctrines. So, in this episode, we'll explore the development of Barelwi teachings through the life of its founder and namesake: Ahmed Raza Khan Barelwi (1856-1921). What distinguished him from the more famous Muslim reformers of the modern era was his support for many traditional Sufi teachings, as well as for devotional practices centered around the figure of the Prophet Muhammad and the shrines of Sufi saints. But in a period of increasing inter-Muslim polemics, such positions brought criticism. And this in turn forced Ahmed Raza and his followers to defend their positions in increasingly assertive terms, paving the way for the Barelwi-Deobandi tensions that continue to shape South Asian Islam today. Nile Green talks to Usha Sanyal, author of Ahmed Riza Khan Barelwi: In the Path of the Prophet (Oneworld, 2005).

Born in Palestine in 1941, Abdallah Azzam became associated with the Muslim Brotherhood as an adult refugee in Jordan. Then, in his twenties and thirties, he moved between Amman, Cairo, and Jeddah, gaining religious qualifications and joining the Islamist opposition to Israel and Arab leftist movements alike. But it was only with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that Azzam found his calling: in calling others to participate in the Afghan jihad. In the 1980s, he set up an international infrastructure of both persuading overseas Muslims to join the Afghan jihad then practically enabling them to participate. As both rhetorician and logistician, propagandist and organizer, Azzam acted as both the architect of the transnational jihadism that grew out of the earlier national activism of the Muslim Brotherhood. Among his many recruits and colleagues was a man who would later become far better-known—Osama bin Laden. But it was Azzam who set in motion the doctrinal and organizational developments that enabled many other competing jihadist groups to emerge in the decades after his assassination in 1989. Nile Green talks to Thomas Hegghammer, author of The Caravan: Abdallah Azzam and the Rise of Global Jihad (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

What is Islamic law? How does it work? And who decides what is and isn't legally permitted? In this episode, we'll be exploring these questions with regard to the followers of one of the four Sunni law schools, the Shafi‘i school. Named after its founder, Imam al-Shafi‘i (who died in Cairo in 820), over the following centuries the Shafi‘i school (or madhhab) was exported eastwards by teachers and traders around the Indian Ocean. From the late medieval period, it had spread from Egypt and Yemen to East Africa, southern India, Sri Lanka, and the islands of what are today Indonesia and the Philippines. As the school put down roots in so many different regions, the legal principles of its founder were used to debate a series of new questions that emerged from local lifestyles. The outcome was a conversation that continued for centuries based around the shared use of Arabic and the common framework of Shafi‘i legal methods. Nile Green talks to Mahmood Kooria, author of Islamic Law in Circulation: Shafiʿi Texts across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

The story of Joseph is one of the greatest sagas in world history. A youth of stunning beauty, beloved of his father but envied by his brothers, who is sold into slavery, before resisting the seductions of his owner's wife and rising up to be governor of Egypt after interpreting Pharoah's dreams. It is a story that has everything: jealousy and love, ambition and humility, edification and adventure. Unsurprisingly, from its scriptural foundations in the Book of Genesis and the Quranic chapter Yusuf (‘Joseph'), the saga has been retold, and reinterpreted, countless times, whether in the influential medieval Persian version of the poet Jami or the masterly modern retelling of the novelist Thomas Mann. In this episode, though, we focus on African versions of the life of Joseph as recounted by generations of Swahili Muslims through utendi poems and qissa tales. Working our way from medieval manuscripts and modern printed texts to more recent online tellings, we hear how East African Muslims have been both entertained and elevated by the memory of the prophet Yusuf. Nile Green talks to Annachiara Raia, author of Rewriting Yusuf: A Philological and Intertextual Study of a Swahili Islamic Manuscript Poem (Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe, 2020).  

Writing amid the tumult of the Mongol invasions, the polymath Zakariyya al-Qazwini compiled an account of the earth and heavens that rose above his dismal surroundings to depict a creation full of wonders and rarities. After leading readers through everything under the sun—animal, mineral, or vegetable-he then turned to the planets and stars, before looking back below, to the relations of the celestial and terrestrial domains. Not content to remain on the level of the physical cosmos, Qazwini tried to show how observation of the natural world contained metaphysical and even moral lessons, teaching the careful observer how to live a better, and fuller, existence. At the core of this approach was the concept of wonder, a disposition Qazwini aimed to inculcate in his readers as they looked up and out from the pages of his book to the marvels of the cosmos around them. Nile Green talks to Travis Zadeh, author of Wonders and Rarities: The Marvelous Book That Traveled the World and Mapped the Cosmos (Harvard University Press, 2023).

Home to some 175 million Muslims, Bengal—incorporating today's Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal—is one of the largest but least known regions of the Muslim world. Since the medieval period, it has also reared a rich literature in the Bangla language, written by both Muslims and Hindus alike. In this episode, we'll examine how one particular text, the Nabivamśa, helped convert many Bengalis to Islam in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Written by Sayyid Sultan, the Nabivamśa was the first biography of the Prophet Muhammad to be written in Bangla. Yet rather than rejecting Bengal's Vaishnava Hindu traditions, Sayyid Sultan incorporated them into his cosmic history of divine revelation. And so, as much as it was a biography of an Arabian prophet, the Nabivamśa was also a story of a Muslim Krishna who was sent by God as an heir to Abraham and a forerunner of Muhammad. Nile Green talks to Ayesha Irani, author of The Muhammad Avatara: Salvation History, Translation, and the Making of Bengali Islam (Oxford University Press, 2021), which was a finalist for the American Academy of Religion's Book Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion.

Between the eighth and tenth century, a series of profound texts were written in Arabic that explored the deepest, darkest and ultimately the most brightly illuminated corners of the human psyche.  Their authors were the founding figures of the Islamic mystical tradition known as Sufism. But inasmuch as these teachers were mystics, whose prayers and spiritual exercises had yielded extraordinary inner experiences, they were also psychologists whose writings laid bare the both the delights and delusions of the human personality, and the path to its perfection by the annihilation of the ego. Yet in order to share their experiences, and the lessons that were the fruit of them, the Sufis needed to wrestle with another set of issues: the problem of language. And so, after explaining the key terms and concepts of classical Sufism, in this episode we'll learn how the early Sufi masters tackled the problem of translating mystical experiences into language that ordinary people could understand. Then, turning to our own times, we'll examine how those Arabic texts can be made comprehensible in English. Fortunately, we're joined in Akbar's Chamber by Michael Sells, who has devoted his career to translating classical Arabic and especially Sufi texts. He is the author and translator of Early Islamic Mysticism: Sufi, Qur'an, Mi‘raj, Poetic and Theological Writings (Paulist Press, 1996).

Few people today would think of Singapore as being a religious center, still less a Muslim one. But even before it began its great commercial climb in modern times, the city was already linked to the spiritual and mercantile networks of Indian Ocean Islam. Then, from nineteenth century, Singapore played host to as varied a spectrum of Asian Muslims as might be imagined, whether Yemeni Sufis and merchants, Indian laborers and missionaries, or publishers and miracle workers from across Southeast Asia. From Arabic to Tamil and Malay, these migrants brought along their own traditions and languages, which melded into the many rich expressions of ‘Singapore Islam.' Nile Green talks to Teren Sevea, author of Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which won the Harry J. Benda Prize of the Association for Asian Studies.

Few philosophers can be said to have been watershed figures, in the wake of whose teachings a tradition of philosophy forever changed its course. Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi was such a figure for the development of Islamic philosophy. Trained in the Aristotelian school of Ibn Sina (known in the West as Avicenna), Suhrawardi nonetheless became a mystical philosopher who not only demonstrated the limits of rational deduction, but also insisted there was an alternative mode of knowledge. This he called ‘ilm al-huzuri—literally ‘knowledge by presence'—that derived from our direct experiences. As a mystic, such experiences included not only the commonsensical realm of ordinary everyday experience. It also included the mystical states that he argued allowed human beings to come into the presence of their own true being and in turn the ultimate Being of God. Both, he claimed, were pure light: divine light that that was at once the basis of all existence and the source of all knowledge. Drawing from the famous Light Verse of the Quran, from his philosophical studies, and from his own mystical experiences, Suhrawardi called his teachings the ‘Wisdom of Illumination' (hikmat al-ishraq).  Nile Green talks to John Walbridge, author of God and Logic in Islam: The Caliphate of Reason (Cambridge University Press, 2010).  

According to a famous saying of the Prophet Muhammad, “Poverty is my pride.” Perhaps no group of Muslims took that adage so seriously as the qalandars and other dervishes who not only renounced the comforts of family and domestic life, but also rejected every trace of social respectability. Nothing mattered more to them—they took pride in nothing else—than their vows of complete poverty. For to renounce the world, and punish the flesh through a life of daily discomfort, was the surest way to negate the self and so fully submit to the will of God. Paradoxically, this logic also led them to renounce the Sharia, since they believed poverty turned them into God's unruly but saintly friends. For their critics, this was hypocrisy at best and heresy at worst. Yet from the Balkans to India, qalandars wandered from town to town and tribe to tribe, winning followers from the lower classes and literati alike by living up to their arduous principles. Nile Green talks to Ahmet Karamustafa, author of God's Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Later Middle Period, 1200–1550 (University of Utah Press, 1994).  

Salafism has gained a great deal of media attention over the past twenty years, but for all that remains poorly understood. Part of the reason is a paradox at the heart of the name and goals of the Salafis themselves. In taking their name from the pious ‘ancestors' (al-salaf)—the first generations of Muslims in the seventh century—the Salafis are deeply concerned with following the original and authentic Islam practiced by those who were closest to the Prophet Muhammad. But since the Salafi movement developed in the twentieth century, it inevitably emerged in modern settings, begging the question of its relationship with modernity. Focusing on the majority non-violent Salafi movements, this episode begins by defining Salafism, before identifying its key concerns—not least with the outward visible expressions of ‘ancestral' piety that, surprisingly, include wearing shoes within mosques. We'll then dig deeper into the entanglement of Salafi practices with the no less radical transformations of modernity to which the Salafi Muslims have responded.  Nile Green talks to Aaron Rock-Singer, In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the Twentieth-Century Middle East (University of California Press, 2022).

According to a famous saying of the Prophet Muhammad, “A true dream constitutes one forty-sixth part of prophethood.” Over the following centuries, countless Muslim thinkers discussed the hidden problem in that saying: how to distinguish a ‘true dream' from other kinds of dreams, whether mundane ones caused by illness and indigestion or more worrying ones sent by Satan. Consequently, Muslims developed a rich tradition of dream theory, drawing on sources as varied as ancient Greek texts, Sufi theosophy, and in more recent times European psychology. In this episode, we'll see how these theories and debates play out in the modern Middle East. Focusing on Egypt, we'll examine how the dreams of ordinary Muslims are understood by Sufi masters, TV dream interpreters, religious reformists, and secular psychoanalysts. Nile Green talks to Amira Mittermaier, author of Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (University of California Press, 2010), which won the Clifford Geertz Prize from the American Academy of Religion.

In this episode we explore the contents of a remarkable medieval library: the Ashrafiya of Damascus. What makes the Ashrafiya important isn't so much its fame in its own time, but the survival of an extraordinary document: the oldest Arabic library catalogue ever discovered. Using this as our guide, we take a tour of the library, from its location between the eighth century Umayyad mosque and the mausoleum of Saladin's nephew to the bookshelves placed opposite the windows to avoid the risk of burning lamps. Although the Ashrafiya was far from the largest medieval Arabic library when the catalogue was written in the 1270s, it still held over 2000 books – a number that even the University of Cambridge wouldn't reach for another century. Still more significant is the sheer variety of subjects it covered, helping us reconstruct the larger intellectual context in which Muslim religious ideas took shape. Nile Green talks to Konrad Hirschler, the author of Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), which was awarded the biennial Best Book prize by the Middle East Medievalists society. It is available open-access here: https://www.academia.edu/13464354/Medieval_Damascus_Plurality_and_Diversity_in_an_Arabic_Library_-_The_Ashrafiya_Library_Catalogue

Usually in Akbar's Chamber we pursue questions of inter-religious understanding. But in this episode, we explore its flip side by way of the religious misunderstandings—and plain disagreements—between Christians and Muslims which were amplified in modern period by the spread of printing through the Middle East. After outlining the context in which Muslim scholars began both debating Christianity and debating with Christian missionaries, we'll turn to a case study of an especially important figure in the Muslim public sphere: Rashid Rida (1865-1935). By examining his sources of information on Christianity, we'll see the curious co-dependence of Christian and Muslim scholars who increasingly relied on the same sources of information, and misinformation. Nile Green talks to Prof. Umar Ryad (Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Leuven in Belgium and the Director of the Leuven Centre for the Study of Islam, Culture and Society). He is he the author of Islamic Reformism and Christianity: A Critical Reading of the Works of Muhammad Rashid Rida and his Associates (1898-1935) (Leiden: Brill, 2009), which is available open-access here: https://brill.com/view/title/16450  

Studies of 19th and 20th century Chinese history often focus on Christian missionary activities in China. But the same period saw members of China's Hui (or Sino-Muslim) community reconnect with their co-religionists overseas. Armed with knowledge of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, and trained in new religious schools overseas, these Hui scholars began to "rediscover" aspects of Islam and in the process rewrite the history of Islam in China both for audiences within China and for non-Chinese audiences elsewhere. In this episode, we examine why these Sino-Muslim exchanges with colonial India and Egypt took place and explore some of the implications for Islam in China. Yiming Ha of the Chinese History Podcast talks to Nile Green, the regular host of Akbar's Chamber, about some of the themes of his new book, How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding (Yale University Press, fall 2022). This episode is a collaboration with The Chinese History Podcast.

Shi‘ism is usually thought of in relation to the Middle East, especially Iran and Iraq. But India and Pakistan have a combined population of up to 50 million Shi‘ite Muslims. While venerating the sacred history of the battle of Karbala—where the third Shi‘i imam Husayn was martyred in 680 CE—these Indian and Pakistani Shi‘ites have developed their own rich regional traditions, especially in terms of ceremonies, buildings, and material culture. Such is the aesthetic and emotional appeal of these traditions that they have also attracted not only Sunni participants, but even certain Hindus, such as the centuries-old community of Husayni Brahmins. In this episode, we'll learn about the rituals, relics, and sacred sites through which the Shi‘is of South Asia and their non-Shi‘i sympathizers annually recreate Karbala in cities and villages across the subcontinent. Nile Green talks to Karen Ruffle (Associate Professor of History of Religions at the University of Toronto), the author of Everyday Shiʿism in South Asia (Wiley-Blackwell, 2021).

“Two facts confront someone studying Islam. One is the astounding variety of practices and beliefs that from place to place and time to time are considered to be Islam. The other is that Muslims, despite their manifest differences in practice and belief, tend to recognize one another as fellow Muslims”.  So writes Kevin Reinhart in explaining the problem that confronts anyone, Muslim or non-Muslim, in facing the visible facts of Islam in practice. In this episode, we explore ways to make sense of what is at once the plurality and unity of lived Islam. By using the analogy of language, we see how Islam can be interpreted as being ‘like' a language that has ‘dialect' features and ‘shared' (or koiné) features, as well as a ‘standard' version that, like the English of grammatical textbooks, isn't necessarily followed by most speakers of English. Nile Green talks to A. Kevin Reinhart (Associate Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College), the author of Lived Islam: Colloquial Religion in a Cosmopolitan Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

In this episode we'll explore the history of a ‘hidden caliphate' through which scholar-saints of the Naqshbandi Sufi order provided social stability during times of tremendous political upheaval. The Sufis in question were followers of Ahmad Sirhindi, who in the years after his death in 1624 – or 1034 in the Muslim calendar – designated him as the ‘Renewer of the Second Millennium.' In the following centuries, his network expanded from northern India through Afghanistan to Central Asia, Russia and China, bringing his teachings to men and women from every rank of society. We'll explore the doctrines, both moral and mystical, practical and spiritual, that enabled these ‘scholar-saints' to maintain social order and justice after the tumultuous collapse of the Mughal Empire. Nile Green talks to Waleed Ziad, the author of Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints Beyond the Oxus and Indus (Harvard University Press, 2021).

Africa's Islamic traditions receive far less attention than is warranted by their intellectual and spiritual wealth. Because African Muslims have not only been major contributors to Arabic learning for a millennium or more. They also developed writings in their own languages that enriched Islam through insights and idioms drawn from the experience of African life. Known collectively as ‘Ajami literatures, these “African languages in Arabic-script” range from Fulani and Wolof in the west of the continent to Somali and Swahili in the east. In this episode of Akbar's Chamber, we trace the emergence of these African traditions and dip our toes into the deep waters of their moral and spiritual doctrines. By way of example, we'll also talk about the teachings of the great Senegalese master, Shaykh Ahmadu Bamba (1850-1927). Leading us on our journey is Fallou Ngom, the author of Muslims beyond the Arab World: The Odyssey of ʿAjami and the Muridiyya (Oxford University Press, 2016).

For anyone entering a yoga studio today, the world of Islam might feel a million miles away. Yet for more than a thousand years, practitioners of Yoga have lived side by side with the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. The history of Islam and Yoga, of Muslims and Hindus, is more than a tale of simple coexistence, though. It's also a story of close interactions and careful comparisons, of Persian translations of Sanskrit texts, and Arabic investigations of Yogi doctrines, along with a shared concern with the spiritual value of breath-control. In this episode of Akbar's Chamber, we'll be looking at some of the most influential Muslim authors on such topics, including al-Biruni (d.1048) and Muhammad Ghaws (d.1562). But far from burying our heads in recondite manuscripts, we'll be placing these figures in their living environments, where Sufis regularly encountered ‘Jogis,' and wondered what they had in common. We'll also be asking how these medieval encounters can inform our understanding of religious pluralism in Asia today. Nile Green talks to Carl W. Ernst, the author of Refractions of Islam in India: Situating Sufism and Yoga (Sage, 2016).

In the twentieth century, the rise of science and secularism became major preoccupations for countless religious thinkers, Muslim or otherwise. Among them was Said Nursi, an influential Kurdish-Turkish thinker who grappled with such timeless questions as what is a human being, and what constitutes true knowledge? After living through the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and spending years in Siberia as a prisoner-of-war, Nursi spent the second half of his life trying to expand the insights of traditional Islam in ways that were relevant to modern times. The result was his 6000-page Risala-i Nur (‘Epistles of Light'), which he smuggled out of the remote Anatolian village where the secularizing rulers of republican Turkey had condemned him to internal exile. In this episode, we draw on the Risala-i Nur to explore Nursi's ideas about knowledge, science and the human condition. Nile Green talks to Mustafa Tuna, the co-author of A Glossary of Islamic Terms in the Light of the Risale-i Nur (Neşriyat, 2021).

Discussions of Islam in Europe often focus on the northern and western regions of the continent, where Muslim communities only evolved in the late twentieth century. But the history of Islam in southeastern Europe is far older, reaching back to the mid-1300s. Over the course of almost seven centuries, the Balkan region – encompassing today's Greece, Albania, Romania, and Bulgaria, as well as the former Yugoslavian republics – fostered a variety of Muslim communities, and correspondingly varied forms of Islam. Through centuries of coexistence as well as conflict, these European Muslims shared countless cultural traditions with their Christian and Jewish neighbors. This episode delves into this long, enduring and intertwined history by following these developments down to the present day. Nile Green talks to Nathalie Clayer, the author (with Xavier Bougarel) of Europe's Balkan Muslims: A New History (Hurst, 2017).

Historians have long recognized how the spread of printing in early modern Europe was a major contributor to the Reformation and Renaissance. So, when printing spread across the Islamic world in the nineteenth century, what were the consequences for the religious and cultural life of Muslims? In this episode, we'll explore this question by looking at the Middle East, with a particular focus on Cairo, which became the epicenter for not only Arabic printing but also for the ‘Arab renaissance,' or nahda, and the religious reform movement that was later dubbed ‘Salafism.' By bringing to light a technological revolution so successful that it's now all but invisible, we'll see how many of the things we take for granted about Islam were shaped by decisions made by the first few generations of Arab editors and printers. Nile Green talks to Ahmed El Shamsy, the author of Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2020).

Since early Islamic times, the shores and islands of East Africa have been closely linked to the Arabian Peninsula by monsoon winds that carried traders, scholars and mystics to sultanates that flourished along the Swahili Coast for almost a millennium. As well as contributing to the rich Swahili culture that developed through these Afro-Arabian interactions, these contacts fostered traditions of Arabic learning which have continued in the region into modern times. Today, the Swahili Coast encompasses parts of Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique, which we'll be exploring along with the islands of Zanzibar, Lamu and the Comoros, where collections of Arabic manuscripts help us investigate the history of East African Islam. Nile Green talks to Anne K. Bang, the author of Islamic Sufi Networks in the Western Indian Ocean (c.1880-1940): Ripples of Reform (Brill, 2014).

Today Indonesia is home to the largest Muslim population of any nation on the planet. But when, and how, was this region converted? And how were Islamic ideas and texts translated into the Malay language that became a regional lingua franca for Muslims across Southeast Asia at large? In this episode, we’ll survey over a thousand years of Southeast Asia’s religious history, from the arrival of early Arab merchants to the emergence of sultanates ruled by local Muslim rulers and the subsequent dynamics – and disputes – between mystical and legalist visions of the faith. We’ll also look at the overarching process of translation, both of cultural practices and particular texts, by taking a look at the emergence of the ‘Jawi’ literary tradition and the first complete commentary on the Quran in Malay. Bringing the story up to the present, we’ll finally ask how the relationship between local and global forms of Islam plays out across the region today. Nile Green talks to Peter G. Riddell, the author of Islam and the Malay-Indonesian World: Transmission and Responses (University of Hawaii Press, 2001).

From the verses of the Quran and the deeds of the Prophet Muhammad, charity has taken on many different forms over the fourteen centuries of Muslim history. The terms for obligatory and voluntary charity – zakat and sadaqa – are mentioned nearly sixty times in the Quran, while Sunni Muslims consider zakat to be one of the Five Pillars of the faith. Yet since the early centuries of Islam, such ethical ideals have prompted practical and legal considerations of how individual donations can be most effectively organized, and institutionalized, without surrendering the moral value of voluntary acts of conscience. In this episode of Akbar’s Chamber, we’ll follow this interplay between ethical ideals and practical realities from legal debates to booming medieval cities like Damascus and Cairo, where the rising problem of urban poverty led to large-scale complexes that comprise some of the most abundant remains of classical Islamic architecture. We’ll also examine how such traditional forms of charity changed, and survived, in the modern era.  Nile Green talks to Adam Sabra, the author of Poverty and Charity in Medieval Islam: Mamluk Egypt, 1250-1517 (Cambridge University Press, 2000).  

In this episode, we explore the interplay between religion and geography through a case study of the mountain regions that formed the borderlands between Afghanistan and British India then, from 1947, Pakistan. In recent years, the region entered the headlines through its association with the so-called Pakistani Taliban. But this was only the latest in a series of movements to emerge from a region whose innate social structures and enforced political autonomy fostered a distinct trajectory of religious development.  Beginning with the formation of this ‘tribal borderland’ through the cartographic boundary-marking of the colonial Great Game, we’ll trace the interplay of religion and geography from the mid-nineteenth century to the present-day as British rule was replaced by Pakistan. Along the way, we’ll follow the transformation of this borderland Islam as traditional Sufi leaders lost influence to reformists associated with the Deoband movement of the lowlands, which was in turn forced to adapt to what had become local religious as well as political modes of self-rule. Nile Green talks to Sana Haroon, the author of Frontier of Faith: Islam in the Indo-Afghan Borderland (Columbia University Press, 2007).