Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk Islam

A Muslim Book Collector in Late Ottoman Europe

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).

Who Decides What is Islamic? Insights from Anthropology

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).

The Many Meanings of Muslim Martyrdom

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).

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.