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Akbar’s Chamber offers a non-political, non-sectarian and non-partisan space for exploring the past and present of Islam. It has no political or theological bias other than a commitment to the Socratic method (which is to say that questions lead us to understanding) and the empirical record (which is to say the evidence of the world around us). By these methods, Akbar’s Chamber is devoted to enriching public awareness of Islam and Muslims both past and present. The podcast aims to improve understanding of Islam in all its variety, in all regions of the world, by inviting experts to share their specialist knowledge in terms that we can all understand.
Episodes
Friday Nov 01, 2024
Friday Nov 01, 2024
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).
Tuesday Oct 01, 2024
Sicily under the Arabs and Normans: A Medieval Experiment in Multiculturalism
Tuesday Oct 01, 2024
Tuesday Oct 01, 2024
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).
Sunday Sep 01, 2024
Daring to be Different: Muslim Debates about Imitating Non-Believers
Sunday Sep 01, 2024
Sunday Sep 01, 2024
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).
Thursday Aug 01, 2024
The Long-Forgotten Qurans of Spain: A Muslim Scripture in Medieval Spanish
Thursday Aug 01, 2024
Thursday Aug 01, 2024
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).
Monday Jul 01, 2024
Soft Power Islam: The Geopolitical Contest over ‘Moderate Islam’
Monday Jul 01, 2024
Monday Jul 01, 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).
Friday May 31, 2024
Islam and Jazz: An African American Odyssey
Friday May 31, 2024
Friday May 31, 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
Tuesday Apr 30, 2024
Lessons from an Indian Village: Shared Hindu-Muslim Devotion in South India
Tuesday Apr 30, 2024
Tuesday Apr 30, 2024
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).
Sunday Mar 31, 2024
Sunday Mar 31, 2024
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).
Thursday Feb 29, 2024
Thursday Feb 29, 2024
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).
Thursday Feb 01, 2024
The Mongol Storm: How the Mongols Transformed the Middle East
Thursday Feb 01, 2024
Thursday Feb 01, 2024
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).
Monday Jan 01, 2024
Saintly Infrastructures of Medieval Islam: The Shrine at Torbat-e Jam
Monday Jan 01, 2024
Monday Jan 01, 2024
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).
Friday Dec 08, 2023
A Muslim Book Collector in Late Ottoman Europe
Friday Dec 08, 2023
Friday Dec 08, 2023
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).