Book Talks

Watch our Book Talks with leading scholars and authors in Islamic studies, community development, interfaith engagement, and more!

Spring 2025

This book calls on educators to teach the whole child by including their faith as integral to their identity and offers suggestions for how to honor faith within a nurturing learning environment. ​

Fall 2023

The Women’s Mosque of America: Authority & Community in US Islam (NYU Press: November 2022) analyzes how American Muslim women negotiate the Islamic tradition to cultivate religious authority and build gender-equitable worship communities.

Neo-traditionalism in Islam in the West looks at an emerging trend within Anglo-American Islam that emphasises the primacy of a notion of ‘tradition’ and sees a moral and political imperative in its resurrection. ​

Brannon Wheeler uses both textual analysis and various types of material evidence to gain insight into the role of animal sacrifice in Islam. He provides a 'thick description' of the elaborate camel sacrifice performed by Muhammad, which serves as the model for future Hajj sacrifices. ​

Winter 2023

Abdulaziz Sachedina here calls attention to this third tradition of ethics, which has its home in legal literature. The problem is that Islamic jurists did not produce a genre of ethical manuals, and their form of ethics, which Sachedina terms juridical ethics, must be derived or extracted from works that ostensibly treat legal rulings and obligations, or scriptural hermeneutics and legal theory.

This is the first critical and theoretically grounded book-length study of Hajj literature (written texts about the experience of the Hajj) and Hajj practices of Bosnian Muslims. It redefines the ways pilgrimage can be understood and offers new methods for investigating the meaning and importance of Hajj for generations of premodern and modern believers.

Spring 2022 Series

Rebellious Wives, Neglectful Husbands brings into conversation the distinct fields of tafsīr (Qur'anic exegesis) studies and women's studies by exploring significant shifts in modern Qur'anic commentaries on the subject of women. ​

Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe shows that Muslims were citizens of modern Europe from its beginning and, in the process, rethinks Europe itself. Muslims are neither newcomers nor outsiders in Europe. In the twentieth century, they have been central to the continent's political development and the evolution of its traditions of equality and law. ​

Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean is the first academic work on Muslims in the English-speaking Caribbean. Khan focuses on the fiction, poetry, and music of Islam in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica. Aliyah Khan argues for a historical continuity of Afro- and Indo-Muslim presence and cultural production in the Caribbean.

Torture, Humiliate, Kill develops the author’s collective traumatization theory, which contends that the concentration camps set up by the Bosnian Serb authorities had the primary purpose of inflicting collective trauma on the non-Serb population of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Summer 2021 Series

Vertical Divider

In Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, David Henig draws on a decade of fieldwork to examine the historical, social, and emotional labor undertaken by people to live in an unfinished past--and how doing so shapes the present.
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​In Islam, Liberalism, and Ontology, Joseph Kaminski offers comparative ontologies of both Islam and liberalism as discourses more broadly construed. He argues that the fundamental categories that constitute "Islam" and "Liberalism" remain very different.
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In Buying Buddha, Selling Rumi, Sophia Rose Arjana examines the appropriation and sale of Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam in the West today, the role of mysticism and Orientalism in the religious marketplace, and how the commodification of religion impacts people’s lives.

Winter 2021 Series

Vertical Divider

In Dangerous Religious Ideas, Dr, Rachel Mikva reveals how faith traditions have always passed down tools for self-examination and debate, because all religious ideas—not just extremist ones—can cause harm, even as they also embody important moral teachings.​

How Millennials Can Lead Us Out of the Mess We're In: A Jew, a Muslim, and a Christian Share Leadership Lessons from the Life of Moses brings together an Israeli-born rabbi, a Pakistani-born Muslim scholar, and an ordained Midwestern American to inspire the next generation of leaders with a timeless story of the ancient prophet Moses.

Fall 2020 Series

Vertical Divider

In Political Islam, Justice, and Governance, Dr. Mbaye Lo argues that political Islam (represented by its moderate and militant forms) has failed to govern effectively or successfully due to its inability to reconcile its discursive understanding of Islam, centered on literal justice, with the dominant neo-liberal value of freedom.

Discussion Panel, Peaceful Families: American Muslim Efforts Against Domestic Violence with Dr. Juliane Hammer, Mohamed Magid, Salma Elkadi Abugideiri, and Zainab Alwani.

Formichi argues for Asia's centrality in the development of global Islam as a religious, social and political reality. In Islam in Asia: A History, Dr. Chiara Formichi explores the ways in which Islam and Asia have shaped each other's histories, societies and cultures from the seventh century to today.
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In The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought, Andrew March explores how, before this crisis, Islamists developed a unique theory of popular sovereignty, one that promised to determine the future of democracy in the Middle East. 

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Spring 2020 Series

Vertical Divider

I am the Night Sky, featuring local Muslim youth authors from Next Wave Muslim Initiative and Shout Mouse Press. Our book talk featured authors reading poetry and short stories that describe their diverse experiences as Muslim youth in our local area.

​In this groundbreaking study, SherAli Tareen presents the most comprehensive and theoretically engaged work to date on what is arguably the most long-running, complex, and contentious dispute in modern Islam: the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic.

In Gendered Morality, Zahra Ayubi rethinks the tradition of Islamic philosophical ethics from a feminist critical perspective. She calls for a philosophical turn in the study of gender in Islam based on resources for gender equality.
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In Modern Muslim Theology: Engaging God and the World with Faith and Imagination. Dr. Martin Nguyen aims to bring Muslim theology into the present day. The book presents a new theological vision rooted in the practice of the religious imagination.