First, I want to thank everyone who contributed to this forum. It is an honor to have this impressive group…
The Kingdom of God Has No Borders—A reply
Book blog
Scholars from varying disciplines engage in critical discussions of recent books. Additionally, scholars introduce their books with an original essay or, occasionally, an original essay reviews an important new book, connecting it to other threads of conversation in the academy and beyond.
You can read our very first book forum, on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and the continued discussion around Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age here.
Science and the soul—An introduction
“Science and the soul: New inquiries into Islamic ethics” offers a unique forum not merely for review or commentary on…
Thoughts on tradition in The Iranian Metaphysicals
While this book is an extraordinary accomplishment, rich in its ethnographic wanderings and sophisticated in its theoretical framing, my interest…
The future of enlightenment: Comparison, tradition, temporality
In The Iranian Metaphysicals, Alireza Doostdar describes his work as contributing to “comparative anthropologies of epistemology”—“how people know things and…
On epistemic possibility: A reply to Hirschkind and Tambar
In their thoughtful reflections on The Iranian Metaphysicals, Charles Hirschkind and Kabir Tambar focus on my analysis of how different…
Hidden figures in Jinnealogy
Visiting Firoz Shah Kotla has much to tell us about Islamic epistemologies, and much to tell us about how to…
Islam in shadows
Anand Vivek Taneja’s Jinnealogy is an elegant contemplation of the ruins of the fortress built by Firoz Shah Tughlaq, who ruled…
A wind from the invisible: A reply to Spadola and Khan
I am honored and humbled by the great care and critical attention with which Naveeda Khan and Emilio Spadola have…
The Arabic Freud: Discourse interruptus
The Arabic Freud masterfully excavates the neglected archives of psychoanalysis in mid-twentieth century Egypt, and offers a doubly contrapuntal account…
Vectors of translation
Omnia El Shakry’s The Arabic Freud is both admirably ambitious in its quest to map “the topography of modern selfhood”…