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This book documents and explores a ninth century Muslim thinker’s response to an emergent information technology—widely available books written on rag-paper. By 850, in Baghdad rag-paper books were all the rage. A book market, with its professionals: stationers, copyists, booksellers and authors, emerged. A cosmopolitan society responded enthusiastically. Al-Jā?i? had, for most of his life, earned his living as an influential counselor, a special adviser to the elite. By the time of his death in 868/9, he had become a professional author. Al-Jā?i? was a bibliomaniac and prided himself on his expertise in Kalām, a dialectical method for ascertaining the truth, the predominant intellectual discipline of his day, a rigorous study of the nature of God and the universe derived from close observation of creation and informed by inferential and analogical reasoning about the suprasensible world. Al-Jāḥiẓ: In Praise of Books concentrates on The Book of Living, the most important work by al-Jā?i?, a documentation of almost all creation, from insect life, such as beetles and flies, to reptiles, such as lizards and snakes, to birds and mammals. The primary focus of the study is the extensive praise of books that The Book of Living contains. This is also the story of how al-Jā?i? thought that his book would save his society from the disorder it had fallen into through its addiction to argument and dissent, an addiction that created social tumult.

More than any other issue in early and medieval Islamic theology, anthropomorphism (tashbīh) stood at the heart of many theological debates. These debates were not purely intellectual; they were intrinsically linked to political struggles over hegemony. The way a scholar interpreted the anthropomorphic descriptions of God in the Qur’an and the Hadith (for instance, God’s hand, God’s laughter or God’s sitting on the heavenly throne) often reflected his political and social stature, and his theological affinity. This book focuses on aḥādīth al-ṣifāt – the traditions that depict God and His attributes in an anthropomorphic language. The book reveals the way these traditions were studied and interpreted in the circles of Islamic traditionalism which included ultra-traditionalists (the Hanbalites and their forerunners) and middle-of-the-road traditionalists (Ash’arites and their forerunners). The book presents an in-depth literary analysis of aḥādīth al-ṣifāt while considering the role of the early scholars of Hadith in shaping the narrative of these anthropomorphic texts. The book also offers the first scholarly and systematic presentation of hand, face, and bodily gestures that the scholars performed while transmitting the anthropomorphic traditions. The book goes on to discuss the inner controversies in the prominent traditionalistic learning centres of the Islamic world regarding the way to understand and interpret these anthropomorphic traditions. Through a close, contextualized, and interdisciplinary reading in Hadith compilations, theological treatises, and historical sources, this book offers an evaluation and understanding of the traditionalistic endeavours to define anthropomorphism in the most crucial and indeed most formative period of Islamic thought.

Taking as its point of departure the symbolic and cognitive roles of language, this book investigates how Arabic is involved in ideological and cultural debates in which conflict is a defining feature. The book shows how discussions about the inimitability of the Qur’an in the pre-modern period were, at some deep level, concerned with issues of ethnic election against the background of inter-ethnic strife among Arabs and non-Arabs, mainly Persians. Discussions of the (un)translatability of the Qur’an in this period are further shown to be related to this notion of ethnic election. In this respect, theology and ethnicity emerge as partners in theorizing language. Staying within the symbolic role of language, the book further investigates the role of paratexts and literary production in disseminating language ideologies and in cultural contestation. Language symbolism is also shown to be relevant in ideological debates about hybrid or cross-national literary production in the Arab milieu. Language ideology appears to be everywhere, including in discussions of the cognitive role of language in linking thought to reality to which a whole chapter is devoted

This book history scrutinizes the production, advertising, contents, compilation and circulation – locally and globally – of an Arabic-language volume of biographies of world women, al-Durr al-manthur fi tabaqat rabbat al-khudur. The analysis of this volume of over 500 folio-size pages views it as an early work of Arab feminist history within the prolific career of Zaynab Fawwaz (c1850-1914), a Lebanese immigrant to Egypt and early feminist writer there. The study considers how Fawwaz drew on the venerable tradition of biography writing in Arabic but also turned to contemporary sources (magazines, an encyclopedia, world histories); how she centred Arab subjects and Islamic history but included women from across the world and from ancient eras right up to the fin-de-siècle; how she incorporated a quiet celebration of Shi‘i women (of which she was one), especially from the early Islamic period; how the work suggests a collective and cooperative female intellectual presence in the 1890s Arab capitals, and also responds to works on women’s history by her male contemporaries; and how Fawwaz’s writing became implicated in the project for a Women’s Library at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

This collection of nine case studies provides an understanding of genealogy in Muslim societies and highlights how ideas about kinship and descent have shaped communal and national identities in such societies. The volume provides a window onto Muslim societies, particularly with regard to the generation, preservation and manipulation of genealogical knowledge. The case studies draw on primary sources from across the Middle East, the Maghreb, and Sub-Saharan Africa, ranging from works of classical Arabic heritage to oral testimonies gained from fieldwork. They stress the malleability of kinship and memory, along with the interests that this malleability serves. They also address questions about how genealogical knowledge has been generated, how it has empowered political and religious elites, and how it has shaped our understanding of the past. Finally, the book examines the authenticity, legitimacy, and institutionalisation of genealogical knowledge, Muslim hierarchy, and the basis of sectarian, tribal, ethnic and other identities.

This is the first single-volume study of the Islamisation of Indonesia from the first evidence of the acceptance of Islam by indigenous peoples until the present day. It offers an overview of the religion’s growing significance in the formation of what is now the largest and most populous Muslim country in the world, the greatest political power in Southeast Asia, and a growing player on the world scene. With close to a quarter of a billion Muslims, Indonesia is still overlooked by historians of Islam and other specialists in the Muslim world, while Southeast Asianists often underestimate the importance of Islam in the shaping of Indonesia. This survey provides a comprehensive insight into the different roles played by Islam in Indonesia throughout history: From the earliest evidence of its presence in the late thirteenth century; the importance of Indian Ocean networks for connecting Indonesians with the wider Islamic world; the religion’s role as a means of resistance and tool for nation building; and postcolonial attempts to forge an ‘Indonesian Islam’.

This book explores the ways in which Islam and European colonialism shaped modernity in the Indo-Malay world. Focusing on Indonesia and Malaysia, it looks at how European colonial and Islamic modernising powers operated in the common and parallel domains of organization, government and politics, law and education in the first half of the twentieth century. Through its critical approach to the interplay of Islamic religious rfrom and dynamics of both British and Dutch colonialisms, this work of comparative history illuminates perspective on the rather different shapes that Islam and Muslim societies have taken in the neighboring nation-states of modern Malaysia and Indonesia. It shows that colonialisation was able to co-exist with Islamisation, arguing that Islamic movements were not necessarily antithetical to modernisation, nor that Western modernity was always anathema to Islamic and local custom. Rather, in distinguishing religious from worldly affairs, they were able to adopt and adapt modern ideas and practices that were useful or relevant while maintaining the Islamic faith and ritual that they believed to be essential. Moving beyond binaries such as Orientalist versus Islamic and modernity versus Islam, it offers historical evidence and theoretical engagement with Islamic religious reform and European colonial modernisation in particular, and with religion, modernity, and tradition in general. In developing an understanding of the common ways in which Islam was defined and treated in Indonesia and Malaysia, we can gain a new insight to Muslim politics and culture in Southeast Asia.

This book asks a number of questions: Do Islamic financial institutions perform better than their Western counterparts during periods of financial crisis? How do Islamic financial institutions manage risk, given their unique characteristics and the need for Sharī’ah compliance? The book looks at the challenges for Islamic financial institutions in an international post-Basel II system where banks are required to have more capital and liquidity. It also examines the influence of governance on client and investor perceptions and their implications for institutional stability and sustainability. It concludes by suggesting how the Islamic financial industry can better fulfil both the legal and social requirements of Sharī’ah.

The eight essays in this volume, written by scholars from six countries, narrate the continuing translations and adaptations of Islam and Muslims within Chinese culture through the writings of Sino-Muslim intellectuals. Progressing chronologically and interlocking thematically, they help the reader develop a coherent understanding of the intellectual issues at stake. How can people belong simultaneously to two cultures without alienating themselves from either? Muslims have lived in the Chinese culture area for over a millennium, and intellectuals among them have wrestled with this problem in print since the 17^th century. The Chinese written language never adopted vocabulary from “Islamic languages” to enable precise understanding of Islam’s religious and philosophical foundations, so Islam had to be translated into Chinese, a language dominated by Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, which lacks words and arguments to justify monotheism. Even in the 21^st century, culturally Chinese Muslims must still defend their devotion to a single God, avoidance of pork, regular worship at the mosque and other markers of their communities’ distinctiveness. These essays trace the intellectual evolution of Islam in Chinese, answering questions about the translation of exogenous traditions and opening new possibilities for comparison with other imported ideas, such as Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Marxism, and modernism. Sino-Muslim intellectuals thought about Islam in Chinese, so close readings of their writings provide direct evidence of the contradictions and triumphs of their cultural simultaneity.

Lyrics of Life: Sa’di on Love, Cosmopolitanism, and care of the Self is an accessible study of the lyrical, humorous, and social and education aspects of classical Persian poetry through the ghazals of Sa’di of Shiraz (d.1291) the poet, traveller, and ethicist. In six chapters and on epilogue, the author focuses on Sa’di’s worldly wisdom, his cosmopolitan perspectives, his sense of humour, his ethical legacy, and the lyrical quality that has made his work immune to the ravishes of time. The study provides hundreds of verses in English translation in order to enable the reader to experience Sa’di’s poetic art first hand. The discussions emphasize the relation between this poetry and lived experience, the central communicative role of poetry in the medieval Muslim world and the elegance of the poetic language as a social tool for ethical and political education. At the same time, it describes, in fine details, the lyrical strategies that the poet used in order to keep his poetry fresh, lyrical, humorous and entertaining.