Shows
Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamMecca through Bosnian Eyes: Five Centuries of Pilgrimage Writing from Southeast EuropeThe Muslims of Bosnia in southeast Europe treasure a centuries-long tradition of writing about the journey to Mecca. These treatises and travelogues help us trace the changing ways in which the hajj was experienced and described by these European Muslims who lived under the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, then socialist Yugoslavia, before the emergence of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the mid-1990s. To explore these different meanings of the hajj for the Bosnian Muslims—or Bosniaks—this episode looks at the fascinating texts they wrote in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish as well as the Bosnian language. We’ll follow not only the im...2025-07-0156 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamIslamic Occultism: The ‘Hidden’ Sciences of the Premodern Muslim WorldIslam and the occult may seem like odd bedfellows. But during the medieval and early modern periods, Muslim thinkers wrote vast numbers of manuscripts on a panoply of occult sciences, ranging from numerology and astrology to alchemy and lettrism. Just as the English word occult derives from the Latin occultus (meaning ‘hidden’), so in Arabic were these arcane disciplines collectively known as the ‘ulum al-khafiyya (‘hidden sciences’). Both the Latin and Arabic terms were references to the invisible rather than visible dimensions of the cosmos that, as the scientists of their time, such occultists sought to manipulate. So important were these...2025-06-011h 04Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Muslim World: The History of an IdeaWhether in newspaper articles, books, or conversations about Islam, the ‘Muslim world’ is a commonplace term. Yet it was only coined in the late nineteenth century, and didn’t gain wider currency till the 1920s. Moreover, the ‘Muslim world’ wasn’t even a Muslim invention. In this episode, we trace the history of this term which, over the course of a century, came to serve many different purposes when it was taken up by a range of political and religious figures, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. We begin by asking how Muslims thought about geography before this new term was invented, th...2025-05-011h 00Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Muslim Veneration of Christian Saints: Arabic Accounts of the Excellence of ChristiansAs anyone will know who has so much has flicked through the pages of the Quran, the Islamic scripture contain many discussions of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. Yet Muslim tradition also venerates many Christian saints. The model was set by the Quran itself, in the chapter al-Kahf (‘The Cave’), which alludes to the Christian story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus as a moral lesson for Muslims. Over the following centuries, Muslim authors recounted the lives of various other Christian saints, ranging from such famous figures as the hermit St Anthony and the martyr St George to the less...2025-04-0159 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamPlumbing the Depths of Existence: Ibn Arabi on Human and Divine BeingThe influence of the great medieval mystic Ibn ‘Arabi is immeasurable, reaching from his home city of Murcia in Andalusia to Aceh in Indonesia and just about everywhere in between. His teachings similarly try to encompass, or at least articulate, the unfathomable depths of being, both human and divine, together with the links between God’s ultimate being and our own contingent existence. Whereas Ibn ‘Arabi’s terrestrial life played out between Seville and Tunis in his early career and Mecca and Damascus in his later years, his spiritual life unfolded through encounters with saints and prophets in the ‘imaginal w...2025-03-011h 03Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Swahili Poetry of Mozambique: A Muslim World Literature from Southeast AfricaMeaning ‘language of the coasts’ in Arabic, Swahili emerged in East Africa many centuries ago through contact with the wider Muslim world. Although the language is most often linked with Kenya and Tanzania, Swahili was also used as a lingua franca as far north as Somalia and as far south as Mozambique—a country whose name derives from that of a fifteenth century Muslim ruler, Musa Bin Mbiki. In this episode, we explore the little-known history of Swahili in Mozambique, where the language became a rich poetic vehicle of religious teachings. After an overview of Swahili under the Portuguese rulers...2025-02-0156 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Muslims of Ukraine: Empires, Mystics, and ManuscriptsIn libraries all across the Muslim world, old manuscripts survive by scholars whose names end with al-Qirimi: ‘The Crimean.’ Discussing all manner of religious topics, these texts form just part of the rich heritage of Muslims from regions in the east of Europe and to the north of the Black Sea that eventually became part of Ukraine. In this episode, we’ll learn how these manuscripts help reveal the long history of Islam in both western and eastern Ukraine, along with the changing forms of religious leadership that emerged under the rule of such different states as the Crimean Khanate, the Po...2025-01-011h 03Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamA Medieval Muslim on the Jewish and Christian ScripturesHow would a medieval Sufi Muslim view the Jewish and Christian scriptures? In this episode, we explore this question through the teachings of Abd al-Karim al-Jili. Born on the Malabar coast of India in 1365, Jili studied throughout the Middle East before settling in the town of Zabid in Yemen. It was there that he wrote his most famous work, al-Insan al-Kamil fi Ma‘rifat al-Awakhir wa-al-Awa’il (The Perfect Human in the Knowledge of the Last and First Things). In that book, Jili drew on the terminology of the Quran and the Sufi teachings of Ibn Arabi to summarize his v...2024-12-011h 04Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamOrientalism Reconsidered: Collecting Islamic Manuscripts in Seventeenth Century EuropeIn 1632, the University Library at Cambridge was transformed by the arrival of an extraordinary collection of manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew, and Malay. They were collected by an early Dutch orientalist, Thomas Van Erpe, better known by his Latinized name Erpinius. To mark the four hundredth anniversary of his death in 1624, Cambridge University Library has mounted a major exhibition of Erpinius's manuscript.
For a brief tour of the exhibition, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kCe865F7Ek
Even today, the collection continues to teach researchers important new insights into not only the I...2024-11-011h 03Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamSicily under the Arabs and Normans: A Medieval Experiment in MulticulturalismFor more than four centuries, Muslims, Christians and Jews dwelt side by side on the Mediterranean island of Sicily. For around half of that time—from 827 to 1091—they lived under the rule of Arab Muslims, and for the other half under Norman then Swabian Christian kings, before the Muslims were finally expelled in 1245. Since Sicily had been part of the Byzantine Empire, its Arab conquerors inherited a population who spoke Greek, prompting centuries of linguistic, literary, and wider cultural exchanges that became richer still when the Normans introduced Latin. After sketching the historical background, this episode explores the complex soci...2024-10-011h 03Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamDaring to be Different: Muslim Debates about Imitating Non-BelieversIn a famous hadith, the Prophet Muhammad told his followers, “Be different!” He also warned them about the potential dangers of imitating non-Muslim communities. Over the next fourteen centuries, various Muslim scholars pondered and elaborated the possible meanings of this prophetic advice. In what ways should Muslims be different? Were all forms of imitation bad, or were the good and bad forms of imitation? How much did social and political circumstances affect whether a Muslim should visibly mark his or her difference from non-Muslims around them? And so, long before Western societies began theorizing ‘assimilation’ and ‘diversity,’ Muslim scholars were writing...2024-09-011h 06Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Long-Forgotten Qurans of Spain: A Muslim Scripture in Medieval SpanishMuslims lived in the Iberian Peninsula for best part of a millennium before their final expulsion of the early 1600s. During those nine centuries, there flourished a rich literary culture, not only in Arabic but also in Aljamiado—a version of Castilian Spanish that was written with the Arabic script. In this episode, we explore the fascinating Quran manuscripts—in Arabic and especially Aljamiado—written in the last few centuries of Moorish life in Iberia. We’ll learn how these rare manuscripts survived—sometimes hidden for centuries in the walls of old houses—and what they tell us about the people w...2024-08-011h 03Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamSoft Power Islam: The Geopolitical Contest over ‘Moderate Islam’The past few decades—since 9/11 in particular—have seen the increasing prominence of ‘moderate Islam’ in the public sphere. But who gets to define what this term means? How are these different definitions projected to wider Muslim, and non-Muslim, audiences? And what are the political implications of these varied versions of ‘moderate Islam,’ whether locally or internationally? In this episode, we focus on three major players in the geopolitical competition to define ‘moderate Islam,’ namely Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia, while also bringing in Qatar, Turkey, and Iran. By paying special attention to Indonesia—and its huge civil society...2024-07-011h 01Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamIslam and Jazz: An African American OdysseyThe mid-twentieth century was not only a time when some of the greatest jazz music was created. It was also a period when many African American musicians converted to Islam. By the 1940s, there was a variety of different versions of the faith from which to choose in America. The Ahmadiyya movement had arrived in the United States around 1920; the Nation of Islam had emerged out of Moorish Science a decade later; and by the 1940s different currents of Sunni Islam had been introduced to port cities like Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. By the 1950s and 60s, those...2024-06-011h 01Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamLessons from an Indian Village: Shared Hindu-Muslim Devotion in South IndiaJust 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...2024-04-301h 00Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamChinese Muslims and the Middle East: The Transformation of Islam in Modern ChinaChina 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 occa...2024-03-311h 18Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamSharia and the Modern State: How the British Empire—and its Muslim Subjects—Transformed Islamic LawMany 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...2024-02-291h 00Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Mongol Storm: How the Mongols Transformed the Middle EastIn 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 Khwarazmia...2024-02-0159 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamSaintly Infrastructures of Medieval Islam: The Shrine at Torbat-e JamThe 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...2024-01-0155 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamA Muslim Book Collector in Late Ottoman EuropeToday, 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 al...2023-12-081h 01Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamWho Decides What is Islamic? Insights from AnthropologyAs 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...2023-11-011h 00Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Many Meanings of Muslim MartyrdomToday, 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 Jih...2023-09-3056 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Muslims of Sri Lanka: Custodians of Adam’s FootprintAs 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 wa...2023-09-011h 02Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamPraising the Prophet in West Africa: The Profound Eloquence of Arabic Madih PoemsWest 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 suc...2023-08-011h 01Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Archaeology of Islam: What Digging Tells us that Reading Doesn’tFor 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...2023-06-3054 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Most Influential Branch of Islam You’ve Never Heard Of: BarelwismFounded 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 de...2023-06-0158 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Architect of Global Jihad: The Exile Life of Abdallah AzzamBorn in Palestine in 1941, Abdallah Azzam became associated with the Muslim Brotherhood as an adult refugee in Jordan. Then, in his twenties and thirties, he moved between Amman, Cairo, and Jeddah, gaining religious qualifications and joining the Islamist opposition to Israel and Arab leftist movements alike. But it was only with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that Azzam found his calling: in calling others to participate in the Afghan jihad. In the 1980s, he set up an international infrastructure of both persuading overseas Muslims to join the Afghan jihad then practically enabling them to participate. As both rhetorician and...2023-05-0159 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamIslamic Law across the Indian Ocean: Shafi‘i Debates from Egypt to IndonesiaWhat is Islamic law? How does it work? And who decides what is and isn’t legally permitted? In this episode, we’ll be exploring these questions with regard to the followers of one of the four Sunni law schools, the Shafi‘i school. Named after its founder, Imam al-Shafi‘i (who died in Cairo in 820), over the following centuries the Shafi‘i school (or madhhab) was exported eastwards by teachers and traders around the Indian Ocean. From the late medieval period, it had spread from Egypt and Yemen to East Africa, southern India, Sri Lanka, and the islands of what ar...2023-03-3157 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Adventures of Joseph in Africa: Swahili Tales of the Prophet YusufThe story of Joseph is one of the greatest sagas in world history. A youth of stunning beauty, beloved of his father but envied by his brothers, who is sold into slavery, before resisting the seductions of his owner’s wife and rising up to be governor of Egypt after interpreting Pharoah’s dreams. It is a story that has everything: jealousy and love, ambition and humility, edification and adventure. Unsurprisingly, from its scriptural foundations in the Book of Genesis and the Quranic chapter Yusuf (‘Joseph’), the saga has been retold, and reinterpreted, countless times, whether in the influential medieval...2023-03-0156 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamA World of Wonders: A Muslim Guidebook to the CosmosWriting amid the tumult of the Mongol invasions, the polymath Zakariyya al-Qazwini compiled an account of the earth and heavens that rose above his dismal surroundings to depict a creation full of wonders and rarities. After leading readers through everything under the sun—animal, mineral, or vegetable-he then turned to the planets and stars, before looking back below, to the relations of the celestial and terrestrial domains. Not content to remain on the level of the physical cosmos, Qazwini tried to show how observation of the natural world contained metaphysical and even moral lessons, teaching the careful observer how to...2023-01-3159 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamHow Bengalis Became Muslim (and How Islam Became Bengali)Home to some 175 million Muslims, Bengal—incorporating today’s Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal—is one of the largest but least known regions of the Muslim world. Since the medieval period, it has also reared a rich literature in the Bangla language, written by both Muslims and Hindus alike. In this episode, we’ll examine how one particular text, the Nabivamśa, helped convert many Bengalis to Islam in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Written by Sayyid Sultan, the Nabivamśa was the first biography of the Prophet Muhammad to be written in Bangla. Yet rather than rejec...2023-01-011h 02Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Meanings of Muslim Mysticism: An Introduction to Classical Sufi TextsBetween the eighth and tenth century, a series of profound texts were written in Arabic that explored the deepest, darkest and ultimately the most brightly illuminated corners of the human psyche. Their authors were the founding figures of the Islamic mystical tradition known as Sufism. But inasmuch as these teachers were mystics, whose prayers and spiritual exercises had yielded extraordinary inner experiences, they were also psychologists whose writings laid bare the both the delights and delusions of the human personality, and the path to its perfection by the annihilation of the ego. Yet in order to share their experiences, a...2022-12-0159 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamSingapore Islam: How a Commercial Hub became a Muslim Melting PotFew people today would think of Singapore as being a religious center, still less a Muslim one. But even before it began its great commercial climb in modern times, the city was already linked to the spiritual and mercantile networks of Indian Ocean Islam. Then, from nineteenth century, Singapore played host to as varied a spectrum of Asian Muslims as might be imagined, whether Yemeni Sufis and merchants, Indian laborers and missionaries, or publishers and miracle workers from across Southeast Asia. From Arabic to Tamil and Malay, these migrants brought along their own traditions and languages, which melded into...2022-10-311h 03Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk Islam‘The Master of Illumination’: The Teachings of SuhrawardiFew philosophers can be said to have been watershed figures, in the wake of whose teachings a tradition of philosophy forever changed its course. Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi was such a figure for the development of Islamic philosophy. Trained in the Aristotelian school of Ibn Sina (known in the West as Avicenna), Suhrawardi nonetheless became a mystical philosopher who not only demonstrated the limits of rational deduction, but also insisted there was an alternative mode of knowledge. This he called ‘ilm al-huzuri—literally ‘knowledge by presence’—that derived from our direct experiences. As a mystic, such experiences included not only the common...2022-09-301h 06Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamGod’s Unruly Friends: Rule Breaking World Renouncers of Medieval IslamAccording to a famous saying of the Prophet Muhammad, “Poverty is my pride.” Perhaps no group of Muslims took that adage so seriously as the qalandars and other dervishes who not only renounced the comforts of family and domestic life, but also rejected every trace of social respectability. Nothing mattered more to them—they took pride in nothing else—than their vows of complete poverty. For to renounce the world, and punish the flesh through a life of daily discomfort, was the surest way to negate the self and so fully submit to the will of God. Paradoxically, this logic al...2022-09-011h 11Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Salafi Search for AuthenticitySalafism has gained a great deal of media attention over the past twenty years, but for all that remains poorly understood. Part of the reason is a paradox at the heart of the name and goals of the Salafis themselves. In taking their name from the pious ‘ancestors’ (al-salaf)—the first generations of Muslims in the seventh century—the Salafis are deeply concerned with following the original and authentic Islam practiced by those who were closest to the Prophet Muhammad. But since the Salafi movement developed in the twentieth century, it inevitably emerged in modern settings, begging the question of its r...2022-08-0159 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Meaning of Muslim Dreams: Landscapes of the Imagination in EgyptAccording to a famous saying of the Prophet Muhammad, “A true dream constitutes one forty-sixth part of prophethood.” Over the following centuries, countless Muslim thinkers discussed the hidden problem in that saying: how to distinguish a ‘true dream’ from other kinds of dreams, whether mundane ones caused by illness and indigestion or more worrying ones sent by Satan. Consequently, Muslims developed a rich tradition of dream theory, drawing on sources as varied as ancient Greek texts, Sufi theosophy, and in more recent times European psychology. In this episode, we’ll see how these theories and debates play out in the modern...2022-07-011h 05Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Medieval Arabic World of Books: A Tour of a Lost Syrian LibraryIn this episode we explore the contents of a remarkable medieval library: the Ashrafiya of Damascus. What makes the Ashrafiya important isn’t so much its fame in its own time, but the survival of an extraordinary document: the oldest Arabic library catalogue ever discovered. Using this as our guide, we take a tour of the library, from its location between the eighth century Umayyad mosque and the mausoleum of Saladin’s nephew to the bookshelves placed opposite the windows to avoid the risk of burning lamps. Although the Ashrafiya was far from the largest medieval Arabic library when the...2022-06-011h 02Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamComparing Christianity & Islam: Debating Religions in the Age of PrintUsually in Akbar’s Chamber we pursue questions of inter-religious understanding. But in this episode, we explore its flip side by way of the religious misunderstandings—and plain disagreements—between Christians and Muslims which were amplified in modern period by the spread of printing through the Middle East. After outlining the context in which Muslim scholars began both debating Christianity and debating with Christian missionaries, we’ll turn to a case study of an especially important figure in the Muslim public sphere: Rashid Rida (1865-1935). By examining his sources of information on Christianity, we’ll see the curious co-dependence of Christi...2022-05-011h 08Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamRediscovering and Reconnecting: How the Hui Muslims of China Encountered their Co-ReligionistsStudies of 19th and 20th century Chinese history often focus on Christian missionary activities in China. But the same period saw members of China’s Hui (or Sino-Muslim) community reconnect with their co-religionists overseas. Armed with knowledge of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, and trained in new religious schools overseas, these Hui scholars began to "rediscover" aspects of Islam and in the process rewrite the history of Islam in China both for audiences within China and for non-Chinese audiences elsewhere. In this episode, we examine why these Sino-Muslim exchanges with colonial India and Egypt took place and explore some of th...2022-04-011h 00Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Other Shi‘ites: Recreating Karbala in Pakistan and IndiaShi‘ism is usually thought of in relation to the Middle East, especially Iran and Iraq. But India and Pakistan have a combined population of up to 50 million Shi‘ite Muslims. While venerating the sacred history of the battle of Karbala—where the third Shi‘i imam Husayn was martyred in 680 CE—these Indian and Pakistani Shi‘ites have developed their own rich regional traditions, especially in terms of ceremonies, buildings, and material culture. Such is the aesthetic and emotional appeal of these traditions that they have also attracted not only Sunni participants, but even certain Hindus, such as the centurie...2022-03-011h 02Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamOne Islam or Many? Making Sense of the Varieties of Islam“Two facts confront someone studying Islam. One is the astounding variety of practices and beliefs that from place to place and time to time are considered to be Islam. The other is that Muslims, despite their manifest differences in practice and belief, tend to recognize one another as fellow Muslims”. So writes Kevin Reinhart in explaining the problem that confronts anyone, Muslim or non-Muslim, in facing the visible facts of Islam in practice. In this episode, we explore ways to make sense of what is at once the plurality and unity of lived Islam. By using the analogy of langu...2022-02-011h 02Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamFrom ‘Failed States’ to ‘Hidden Caliphs’: How Muslim Scholar-Saints became Pillars of Social OrderIn this episode we’ll explore the history of a ‘hidden caliphate’ through which scholar-saints of the Naqshbandi Sufi order provided social stability during times of tremendous political upheaval. The Sufis in question were followers of Ahmad Sirhindi, who in the years after his death in 1624 – or 1034 in the Muslim calendar – designated him as the ‘Renewer of the Second Millennium.’ In the following centuries, his network expanded from northern India through Afghanistan to Central Asia, Russia and China, bringing his teachings to men and women from every rank of society. We’ll explore the doctrines, both moral and mystical, practical and sp...2022-01-0159 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamAn African Spiritual Odyssey: The ‘Ajami Traditions of African IslamAfrica’s Islamic traditions receive far less attention than is warranted by their intellectual and spiritual wealth. Because African Muslims have not only been major contributors to Arabic learning for a millennium or more. They also developed writings in their own languages that enriched Islam through insights and idioms drawn from the experience of African life. Known collectively as ‘Ajami literatures, these “African languages in Arabic-script” range from Fulani and Wolof in the west of the continent to Somali and Swahili in the east. In this episode of Akbar’s Chamber, we trace the emergence of these African traditions and dip ou...2021-12-0159 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamIslam and Yoga: Sitting Together, or Worlds Apart?For anyone entering a yoga studio today, the world of Islam might feel a million miles away. Yet for more than a thousand years, practitioners of Yoga have lived side by side with the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. The history of Islam and Yoga, of Muslims and Hindus, is more than a tale of simple coexistence, though. It’s also a story of close interactions and careful comparisons, of Persian translations of Sanskrit texts, and Arabic investigations of Yogi doctrines, along with a shared concern with the spiritual value of breath-control. In this episode of Akbar’s Chamber, we’l...2021-11-0151 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamScience, Faith, and the Search for True Knowledge: The Thought of Said NursiIn the twentieth century, the rise of science and secularism became major preoccupations for countless religious thinkers, Muslim or otherwise. Among them was Said Nursi, an influential Kurdish-Turkish thinker who grappled with such timeless questions as what is a human being, and what constitutes true knowledge? After living through the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and spending years in Siberia as a prisoner-of-war, Nursi spent the second half of his life trying to expand the insights of traditional Islam in ways that were relevant to modern times. The result was his 6000-page Risala-i Nur (‘Epistles of Light’), which he smug...2021-10-0159 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Ottoman Legacy in Southeast Europe: The Deep Roots of Balkan IslamDiscussions of Islam in Europe often focus on the northern and western regions of the continent, where Muslim communities only evolved in the late twentieth century. But the history of Islam in southeastern Europe is far older, reaching back to the mid-1300s. Over the course of almost seven centuries, the Balkan region – encompassing today’s Greece, Albania, Romania, and Bulgaria, as well as the former Yugoslavian republics – fostered a variety of Muslim communities, and correspondingly varied forms of Islam. Through centuries of coexistence as well as conflict, these European Muslims shared countless cultural traditions with their Christian and Jewish...2021-09-011h 06Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamTechnology and Religious Change: How Printing Transformed the Islamic TraditionHistorians have long recognized how the spread of printing in early modern Europe was a major contributor to the Reformation and Renaissance. So, when printing spread across the Islamic world in the nineteenth century, what were the consequences for the religious and cultural life of Muslims? In this episode, we’ll explore this question by looking at the Middle East, with a particular focus on Cairo, which became the epicenter for not only Arabic printing but also for the ‘Arab renaissance,’ or nahda, and the religious reform movement that was later dubbed ‘Salafism.’ By bringing to light a technological revolution...2021-08-011h 00Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamIslam in East Africa: Arabic Traditions of the Swahili CoastSince early Islamic times, the shores and islands of East Africa have been closely linked to the Arabian Peninsula by monsoon winds that carried traders, scholars and mystics to sultanates that flourished along the Swahili Coast for almost a millennium. As well as contributing to the rich Swahili culture that developed through these Afro-Arabian interactions, these contacts fostered traditions of Arabic learning which have continued in the region into modern times. Today, the Swahili Coast encompasses parts of Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique, which we’ll be exploring along with the islands of Zanzibar, Lamu and the Comoros, where collections of...2021-07-011h 07Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamAt the Court of the Malay Sultans: The Making of Southeast Asian IslamToday Indonesia is home to the largest Muslim population of any nation on the planet. But when, and how, was this region converted? And how were Islamic ideas and texts translated into the Malay language that became a regional lingua franca for Muslims across Southeast Asia at large? In this episode, we’ll survey over a thousand years of Southeast Asia’s religious history, from the arrival of early Arab merchants to the emergence of sultanates ruled by local Muslim rulers and the subsequent dynamics – and disputes – between mystical and legalist visions of the faith. We’ll also look at the ove...2021-06-0157 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Many Forms of Muslim Charity: A Brief History of Islamic AlmsgivingFrom the verses of the Quran and the deeds of the Prophet Muhammad, charity has taken on many different forms over the fourteen centuries of Muslim history. The terms for obligatory and voluntary charity – zakat and sadaqa – are mentioned nearly sixty times in the Quran, while Sunni Muslims consider zakat to be one of the Five Pillars of the faith. Yet since the early centuries of Islam, such ethical ideals have prompted practical and legal considerations of how individual donations can be most effectively organized, and institutionalized, without surrendering the moral value of voluntary acts of conscience. In this episode o...2021-04-3056 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Islam of the Afghan-Pakistan BorderlandsIn this episode, we explore the interplay between religion and geography through a case study of the mountain regions that formed the borderlands between Afghanistan and British India then, from 1947, Pakistan. In recent years, the region entered the headlines through its association with the so-called Pakistani Taliban. But this was only the latest in a series of movements to emerge from a region whose innate social structures and enforced political autonomy fostered a distinct trajectory of religious development. Beginning with the formation of this ‘tribal borderland’ through the cartographic boundary-marking of the colonial Great Game, we’ll trace the interpl...2021-04-011h 01Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Muslims of Russia: Europe’s Largest, Oldest and Least Known Muslim MinoritySince the middle of the sixteenth century, Russia has been home to a large but little-known Muslim community that stretches from the Caucasus mountains across the Volga-Ural plains to Siberia. Today, Russia’s Muslims make up between 10 and 15 percent of the overall population, between two and three times the proportion of Muslims in the European Union. In this episode of Akbar’s Chamber, we’ll trace the history of Russia’s multiethnic Muslim mosaic, from its origins and expansion under the Tsarist empire through the persecutions of the Soviet period to the religious revival of more recent decades. We’ll pay part...2021-03-0159 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Original Akbar’s Chamber: Inter-Religious Dialogue at the Court of a Mughal EmperorIn 1575, the Mughal emperor Akbar established the Ibadat-khana, or ‘House of Worship,’ at his Indian capital of Fatehpur Sikri. Over the following years, it would act as a space of religious dialogue between Muslims, Hindus, Zoroastrians, and Jews, along with Christian missionaries of the Jesuit order. By emphasizing the use of aql, or ‘reason,’ these discussions fostered a deeper understanding of other religions that fed in turn into translations of Christian and Hindu religious works into Persian. Through examining the surviving evidence, both architectural and textual, we’ll ask what motivated Akbar, as well as what topics were discussed in the ori...2021-02-031h 01Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Sacred Muslim Geographies of Chinese Central AsiaThe Uyghurs of the Xinjiang region of China have been the focus of much media attention in the past few years. In this episode, we journey beyond the headlines to explore the religious and cultural history of the Turkic Muslim people who in the modern era came to be called Uyghurs. We’ll pay special attention to their relationship with their homeland by looking at the many places of pilgrimage that, over the course of a millennium, emerged around such oasis towns as Kashgar, Yarkand and Turpan, as well as in remote regions of the Taklamakan desert. These shrines be...2021-01-0457 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamDervish Poets and ‘Vernacular Islam’ in Medieval TurkeyWhile the Quran was revealed in Arabic, for more than a thousand years Muslims have explored its meanings and implications in many other languages. In the medieval period, this process of ‘vernacularization’ accelerated as wandering holy men — known as dervishes and abdals — preached profound mystical doctrines in languages understood by ordinary people. Their preferred medium was poetry, leading distant contemporaries like Yunus Emre (d.1321) in Anatolia and Amir Khusro (d.1325) in Delhi to lay the foundations of Turkish and Hindi literature. This episode looks at these developments through the Turkish poems of Kaygusuz Abdal, whose verses are still read — and sung —...2020-12-0258 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Magazine That Took Salafism to the WorldIn 1898, an obscure Syrian scholar called Rashid Rida founded a magazine in Cairo called al-Manar (‘The Lighthouse’). Over the next forty years, it reached readers as far apart as India and Argentina, Africa and Indonesia, spreading worldwide the new form of Islam called Salafism. Despite never holding any formal religious office, by seizing the opportunities of the Arabic media revolution Rida became the preeminent Muslim influencer of the age of print. Urging readers to return to the pure Islam of the ‘pious ancestors,’ he aimed to free his fellow believers from the shackles of tradition that prevented them from embracing...2020-11-1457 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamIntroduction to Akbar's ChamberAkbar’s Chamber offers a non-political, non-sectarian and non-partisan space for exploring the past and present of Islam. It has no political or theological bias other than a commitment to the Socratic method (which is to say that questions lead us to understanding) and the empirical record (which is to say the evidence of the world around us). By these methods, Akbar’s Chamber is devoted to enriching public awareness of Islam and Muslims both past and present.
The podcast aims to improve understanding of Islam in all its variety, in all regions of the world, by invi...2020-09-1006 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamWhat the Prophet Muhammad Said… (and How We Know)Almost everyone nowadays has heard of the Quran. But what about the Hadith? Far larger than the Quran itself, the Hadith comprise several hundred thousand reports about what the Prophet Muhammad said and did. For almost fourteen centuries, learned Muslim have drawn on these reports for myriad purposes, whether moral or mystical, political or legal. With such high stakes, assessing the authenticity of sometimes contradictory reports became a core intellectual discipline, leading both male and female scholars to memorize thousands of Hadith and debate their implications. Turning from past to present, we’ll finally ask how the Hadith are in...2020-09-1045 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamDeobandism: The Indian Origins of a Global Muslim Reform MovementFrom its humble origins as a small-town madrasa founded in colonial India in 1866, the Deoband movement has become one of the most influential molders of contemporary Islam. By tracing its trajectory of expansion, and unpacking its doctrines, this podcast follows Deobandism from provincial India to the world, before turning to its complex relationship with Sufism, on the one hand, and the Taliban, on the other. Together with its allied Tablighi Jamaat missionary society, the impact of Deobandism points us to the leading but little-recognized role of South Asia in contemporary global Islam. Nile Green talks to Brannon D. Ingram...2020-09-1047 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamIsmaili Entanglements in the Indian Ocean WorldAmong the many varieties of Islam, and the numerous Muslim minorities, few are less known but more fascinating than the Bohras. A minority within a minority, this million-strong community of Ismaili Shi‘is emerged in Egypt before their leaders fled to Yemen then finally found refuge in India. In this podcast, we’ll follow the Bohras from medieval Cairo via the remote Haraz mountains of Arabia to their third homeland in Gujarat, where they adopted many aspects of Indian culture, and grew rich from the Indian Ocean trade. But they maintained throughout their loyalty to their hereditary leaders, telling us m...2020-09-1046 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Man Who Founded the Muslim BrotherhoodFounded in Egypt in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood became the key promoter of the political visions of Islam that spread more widely as the century progressed. By following the biography of its founder, Hasan al-Banna, this episode examines the circumstances, debates and idiosyncrasies that gave shape to the world’s most influential Islamist movement. As well as al-Banna’s adept organizational skills, we’ll look closely at his teachings as recorded in his various Arabic writings. At the center of his mission, at once practical and ideological, lay the leading political role which Islam had to play in a modern world...2020-09-1048 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamBetween Indo-Persian and Anglo-Persian: Cultural Encounters in the Bay of BengalHow did Muslims encounter and interpret other cultures before the modern era of globalization? To answer this question, we turn to the testimony of one of the great genres of Muslim literature: the travelogue. In this podcast, we’ll rove around the Bay of Bengal, where the Persian lingua franca promoted by the Mughal then British empires became the intermediary language between Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists finally Christian Britons. Poring through unpublished manuscripts, we’ll ask what these Indo-Persian – and ‘Anglo-Persian’ – travelogues can tell us about the ways in which Muslims have understood and interacted with other cultures. Nile Green talks to Ara...2020-09-1048 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamPakistan: Bastion and Battlefield of Islamic ModernismIn the decades either side of 1900, a series of influential Muslim thinkers tried to reconcile Islam with the modern world. As their ideas gained prominence in late colonial India, the doctrines of Islamic modernism formed an informal religious charter for the founding of Pakistan in 1947. But over the subsequent seventy years, Pakistan’s ruling elite found their modernist ideals questioned from many corners, not least as they failed to live up to their democratic promises. In this podcast, we’ll follow the travails of Islamic modernism as rival religious authorities promoted competing visions of the place of Islam in the...2020-09-1054 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Mystic Companions of Rumi: Sufi Poetry in Classical PersianFor almost a thousand years, cultured Muslims from many regions of the world turned for inspiration and solace to the Persian mystical poetry of the Sufis. Originating in medieval Iran and Afghanistan, these poems spread as far as the Balkans, Bengal and beyond, shaping the religious and cultural life of South and Central Asia no less than the Middle East. In this podcast, we’ll be introduced to the most important poets and their main spiritual themes, brought alive by sample verses recited in the original Farsi and English translation. Whether the celebrated Rumi or lesser known mystics like Sa...2020-09-1044 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamMaking Sense of ‘Multiple Islams’: The View from the Indian SouthOver its long history, Islam has taken on many distinctive regional forms. With its many languages and countless cultural influences, South Asia – comprising India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka – has produced a particularly rich variety of these localized versions of Islam. Taking the example of the Tamil-speaking Muslims of southern India and Sri Lanka, in this podcast we’ll explore how living by the shores of the Indian Ocean shaped the contours of their maritime Islam. Turning to more recent times, we’ll also see how religious reformists from Pakistan and the Gulf have tried to ‘purify’ or ‘standardize’ the way Tamils pr...2020-09-1043 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamAt the Religious Crossroads of Central AsiaSituated in northern Afghanistan, the ancient city of Balkh was one of the great cultural crossroads of world history. Following its transformation from a sacred Buddhist center into one of the holy cities of Islam, this podcast delves into the little-known interactions of Muslim, Buddhist and Jewish peoples along the pilgrimage and trade routes of Central Asia. We’ll hear what the recent discovery of medieval manuscripts in arcane languages like Bactrian and Judeo-Arabic tells us about everyday life in this pluralistic society, as well as the gradual process of conversion as Balkh’s Buddhist stupas gave way to a ne...2020-09-1051 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamMuslim Imperial Entanglements: The Hajj under the British EmpireIn terms of geographical breadth no less than population numbers, the British Empire was the largest ‘empire of Muslims’ in history, reaching from West to East Africa via Egypt and Palestine through India (and what is now Pakistan) to the Maldives and Malaysia. Right in the middle – in easy reach of the colonial transport hubs of Aden and Suez – lay the holy cities of Arabia, under Ottoman then Saudi jurisdiction. Taking the hajj as its focus, in this podcast we unravel the policies and compromises of empire that enabled larger numbers of pilgrims than ever to make the journey to Mecca...2020-09-1048 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Peculiar Tale of Occultism in the Islamic Republic of IranWhen Middle Eastern students were sent to study medicine in Europe, one of the unexpected outcomes was the introduction to Iran of the fashionable occult movements that flourished in the West amid the decline of traditional Christianity. Using the scientific language of laboratory-like seances, Iran’s occult impresarios presented their methods as a modernized route to reliable religious knowledge. As Muslim clerics responded in similar terms, even Ayatollah Khomeini drew on occult ideas in his early writings. Following this imported ‘metafizik’ as it gave shape to new expressions of Iranian spirituality, in this podcast we’ll explore how many Iranian...2020-09-1045 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Martin Luther of the Muslim World?The late nineteenth century saw the onset of a great religious transformation that might well be called the Muslim reformation. Among Sunnis at least, arguably the most influential figure was the Egyptian thinker Muhammad Abduh. In this podcast, we’ll follow Abduh from his rural upbringing through his youthful years of political activism and debates with Christian missionaries to his later cooperation with Egypt’s colonial rulers and the rationalist theology of his Treatise on Divine Unity. Turning finally to his legacy, we’ll ask whether his key role in this reformation makes it useful to consider him the ‘Martin L...2020-09-1046 minAkbar's Chamber - Experts Talk IslamThe Strange Fate of the Sufi ShrineOver the past millennium, pilgrimages to the shrines of Sufi saints have played an important part in religious and cultural life for most regions of the Muslim world. But in modern times, these shrines have become the focus of intense criticism by Muslim reformists, who see them as sites of superstitious deviation from true religion. In this podcast, we’ll follow these developments in South Asia, home to the largest Muslim population of any world region. After explaining the general characteristics of shrine-based Islam, we’ll look at how the Pakistani state joined the larger program of Muslim reform by s...2020-09-0949 min