Jonathan A. C. Brown, "Slavery and Islam" (On...

In the public eye, Najati Sidqi was known as a journalist and writer, a translator of Russian classics, and an outspoken opponent of Nazism. However, Sidqi concealed a critical component of his life from the world and his family. He was an underground activist for the Palestinian ...  Show more

Today, much of the Middle East is “Arab”—an identity that now extends across North Africa and up through the Near East to Syria. Yet how did this region become Arab? How did this identity spread? Was it due to migration, or conquest? Historian Yossef Rapoport, in his book Becomi ...  Show more

Carl Ernst’s and Mbaye Lo’s new book I Cannot Write My Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar Ibn Said's America (UNC Press, 2023) is a fascinating and rivetting book that offers the most authoritative account to date of the life and Arabic writings of Omar Ibn Said, a scholar ...  Show more

Is there a problem with Muslim public intellectuals and scholars that engage with the political right? My guest this week, Yayha Birt, believes that white convert scholars that interact with the likes of Jordan Peterson should evaluate whether they risk confirming their anti-Isla ...  Show more

In her magnificent and lyrical new book, The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India (Harvard UP, 2020), Supriya Gandhi reorients and adds unprecedented depth to our understanding of the much memorialized but less understood Mughal prince and thinker Dara Shukoh (d. 16 ...  Show more

Anti-blackness has until recently been a taboo topic within Arab society. This began to change when Nader Kadhem, a prominent Arab and Muslim thinker from Bahrain, published the first in-depth investigation of anti-black racism in the Arab world in 2004. This translation of the n ...  Show more