Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk Islam

The Muslims of Sri Lanka: Custodians of Adam’s Footprint

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).

 

Praising the Prophet in West Africa: The Profound Eloquence of Arabic Madih Poems

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).

The Archaeology of Islam: What Digging Tells us that Reading Doesn’t

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).

The Most Influential Branch of Islam You’ve Never Heard Of: Barelwism

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).

The Architect of Global Jihad: The Exile Life of Abdallah Azzam

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).

Islamic Law across the Indian Ocean: Shafi‘i Debates from Egypt to Indonesia

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 Adventures of Joseph in Africa: Swahili Tales of the Prophet Yusuf

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).

 

A World of Wonders: A Muslim Guidebook to the Cosmos

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).

How Bengalis Became Muslim (and How Islam Became Bengali)

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.

The Meanings of Muslim Mysticism: An Introduction to Classical Sufi Texts

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).

Singapore Islam: How a Commercial Hub became a Muslim Melting Pot

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.

‘The Master of Illumination’: The Teachings of Suhrawardi

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).