Ebrahim Moosa, “What is a Madrasa?” (U of Nor...

Slavery was a key part of pre-modern Islamic society, spanning from soldiers to concubines. And one of the most revealing repositories of evidence we have for how slavery worked in practice comes from the Cairo Geniza, a cache of hundreds of thousands of discarded documents from ...  Show more

In Free Enough to Grow: The Turkish Protestant Movement, 1961-2016 (Springer Nature, 2026), James Bultema identifies and investigates four central factors that gave rise to the Turkish Protestant movement in the latter half of the twentieth century and the early years of the twen ...  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

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

Art historian, educator and author Jonathan Bloom joins us on the afikra podcast to talk about paper, print and the Islamic world. He talks us t ...

In this episode, we explore the fascinating and controversial Qalandariyya and similar movements like the Haydais & Shams-i Tabrizis. We also dive into the historical development of this movement, from the early Malamatis to the extreme ascetic dervishes in the Ottoman emp ...