Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk Islam

Lessons from an Indian Village: Shared Hindu-Muslim Devotion in South India

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). 

Chinese Muslims and the Middle East: The Transformation of Islam in Modern China

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).

Sharia and the Modern State: How the British Empire—and its Muslim Subjects—Transformed Islamic Law

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).

The Mongol Storm: How the Mongols Transformed the Middle East

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).

Saintly Infrastructures of Medieval Islam: The Shrine at Torbat-e Jam

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).

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).