Studies in Islamic Traditions and Literature

By Roberto Tottoli

Publisher: Routledge

Publication Date: December 18, 2024

Hardcover: 284 Pages

ISBN: 9780367531690

A collection of articles and studies discussing early Islamic tenets and beliefs based on Islamic traditions and literature. A number of studies appear for the first time in English. The topics dealt with relate to the Islamic prostration in ritual prayer, Islamic traditions which are discussed through the analysis of hadith literature and reports and narratives related to the literary genre of the qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā’ (Stories of the Prophets). The readers of this collection of essays are scholars and students of early Islam, of the development hadith literature and of the narratives on Islamic prophets; all together the studies bring to light the dynamics between the formation of early traditions and their role in the origin and developments of Islamic literature.

Table of Contents

About the Author

Roberto Tottoli is Professor of Islamic studies at the Università di Napoli L’Orientale, Italy. His fields of interest are early Islamic traditions and literature and the Qur’an in European history. He completed his bachelor’s degree in Oriental Languages and Literatures at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice and later earned a PhD from the University of Naples “L’Orientale. He studied from 1993 to 1994 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the tutelage of M.J. Kister.

Tottoli taught at the University of Turin from 1999 to 2002 and has been a faculty member at the University of Naples “L’Orientale since 2002. He became a full professor of Islamic studies in 2011 and took on the role of Rector in November 2020. He has held visiting positions at institutions such as Princeton, Harvard, the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, the Institute for Advanced Study in Tokyo, and the University of Pennsylvania. Additionally, he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

In 2019, he began serving as the principal investigator for the ERC-Synergy project EUQU—the European Qur’an, and he is a member of the Italian Academy of sciences.

Source: Routledge

Modern Debates on Prophecy and Prophethood in Islam: Muhammad Iqbal and Said Nursi

By Mahsheed Ansari

Publisher: Routledge

Publication Date: November 28, 2024

Hardcover: 288 pages

ISBN: 9781032231242

While prophethood is the backbone of the Islamic tradition and an uncompromised tenet of faith, the impact of modernity with its ambivalent status afforded to the prophet and institution of prophethood shook many Muslim scholars. Through analysis of these modern debates on prophethood in Islam, this book situates Muhammad Iqbal’s (1877–1938) and Said Nursi’s (1877–1960) discourses within it and assesses their implications on the modern period. This book introduces the “what, who and how” of the prophets in the Islamic tradition. It unveils the rich Islamic literature of both the classical and modern periods and analyses the construction of their philosophies and theologies. Concise in both historical and textual analyses, this book makes an important contribution to our understanding of contemporary debates on prophecy and prophethood in Islam and will be of great interest to postgraduate students and researchers of Islam, religious studies, medieval studies and contemporary studies of Islam and religion.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Demystifying the Prophetic Vocation in Islam
• 2. Theologising Resurgence of Prophetology in the Modern Muslim World
• 3. Iqbal’s and Nursi’s Methodology in Context of Their Global and Local Histories.
• 4. Rational Challenges and New Understandings of Prophethood
• 5. Traditional and Metaphysical Tensions of Prophethood
• 6. Conclusion: Towards a New Philosophy of Prophethood in Islam

About the Author

Mahsheed Ansari is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Islamic Studies and Civilization and a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Religion and Ethics and Society (CRES), Charles Sturt University. She is a community activist working in the areas of interfaith dialogue, education, social harmony and leadership-mentoring programes with Muslim youth and women. Her research interests include the history of Islamic thought, spirituality and culture. She has been working on the Australian Muslim Heritage Project, that captures the contributions of Muslim Pioneers Post World War II, and she is currently writing a book on the Institutional integration of the Muslim community in Australia and Dr. Ashfaq Ahmad’s contributions to it.

Reviews

• “Mahsheed Ansari offers a rigorous study of prophethood in Islam, focusing on the twentieth century responses of two major thinkers, Said Nursi and Muhammad Iqbal. The potential for the continued development of constructive contemporary Islamic approaches to this topic is enriched through Ansari’s detailed exposition of classical doctrines on prophecy as well as the South Asian and Turkish contexts during this period of challenges from modernity. Through its presentation of the creative responses of Nursi and Iqbal, who employed both critical intellectual analysis and mystical sensitivities in understanding both the historical human and the cosmic significance of the Prophet for their age, this work provides an important contribution in the field of Islamic religious thought and a resource for interfaith dialogue and understanding.” – Marcia Hermansen, Loyola University Chicago

Source: Routledge

Shiʿi Materiality Beyond Karbala: Religion That Matters

Volume Editors: Fouad Gehad Marei, Yafa Shanneik, and Christian Funke

Series: Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 1 The Near and Middle East (Vol. 179)

Publisher: Brill

Publication Date: May 23, 2024

Pages: 424

ISBN: 9789004691339

This book examines material and multi-sensorial expressions of Shiʿi Islam in diverse, and understudied demographic and geographic contexts. It engages with conceptual debates and makes several propositions that push the frontiers of scholarship on Islamic and Religious Studies, Material Religion, Heritage Studies, and Anthropology and Sociology of Religion. The contributions presented in this volume demonstrate how material things and less thing-like materialities make the praesentia and potentia of the Sacred tangible, how they cultivate intimate relations between human and more-than-human beings, and how they act as links and gateways to the Elsewhere and Otherworldly. The volume posits that materialities of religion are integral to processes of heritagization shaped by competing social and political actors involved in the construction and canonization of religious–in this case, Shiʿi–heritage.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
  Religion That Matters: Shiʿi Materiality Beyond Karbala, by Fouad Gehad Marei and Yafa Shanneik
• Part 1: The Visuality and Aurality of Shiʿi Materiality
  • Ch 1. The Literal and the Hidden:
    Some Bektashi Religious Materialities, by Sara Kuehn
  • Ch 2. Mediated Devotion
    Sound and Media in Transnational Azeri-Turkish Twelver Shiʿism, by Stefan Williamson Fa
  • Ch 3. Sonic Messages
    Hizbullah’s Mawlid an-Nabi Celebrations in Lebanon, by Ines Weinrich
  • Ch 4. Materializing Cultural Memory
    From Wartime Eulogies to Panegyric Pop in Contemporary Iran, by Maryam Aras
• Part 2: Gendered Perspectives on Shiʿi Materiality
  • Ch 5. Affective Consanguinity
    Blood, Mothers and Martyrs on the Battlefields of theIran-Iraq War, by Sana Chavoshian
  • Ch 6. Zur-khane
    A Material Approach to the Embodiment of Twelver Shiʿi Male Virtue Ethics, by Ingvild Flaskerud
  • Ch 7. Khidma: In the Service of Ahl al-Bayt
    Gender, Agency and Social Capital in Shiʿi Religious Statue Art in Kuwait, by Nada Al-Hudaid
  • Ch 8. A Price for a Wife or a Token of Love?
    Negotiating the Materiality of Mahr in Diasporic Shiʿi Marriage, by Marianne Hafnor Bøe
• Part 3: Sacred Objects and the Materiality of Shiʿi Life-Worlds
  • Ch 9. Turbat al-Husayn
    Development of a Tabarruk Ritual in Early Shiʿi Community, by S. M. Hadi Gerami and Ali Imran Syed
  • Ch 10. The Place of Material Objects in the Alawi Ziyāra
    by Amelia Gallagher
  • Ch 11. Festive Illumination, Prayers, and Grave Visitation
    Jashn-i Nisf Shaʿban in Kashmir, by Hakim Sameer Hamdani
  • Ch 12. Wishing Trees and Whirling Rocks
    Eco-material Rituals at the Alevi Shrine of Abdal Musa, by Christiane Gruber

About the Editors

• Fouad Gehad Marei is a Research Fellow at Lund University in Sweden. He is specialized in Middle East politics, Muslim societies and cultures, Material Religion, Digital Religion, and conflict stabilization and transformation. He has published in the journals of Religion and Society, Political Geography, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, and Leadership and Developing Societies.
• Yafa Shanneik is Visiting Professor of Islamic Studies at Lund University in Sweden. Her book The Art of Resistance in Islam: The Performance of Politics among Shi‘i Women in the Middle East and Beyond was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.
• Christian Funke is an independent scholar of religious studies, with a focus on Iran and Islamic societies. His research spans Ritual Studies, Material Religion, and Islam and politics in contemporary societies.

To download this book (PDF) click HERE.

Source: Brill