The AbuSulayman Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University (ACGIS) and The Maydan, the Center’s public-facing scholarship platform, present the Ninth Annual Graduate Student Book Review Colloquium on Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies to be held virtually on Thursday, December...
While the Arab Gulf states are often portrayed through the familiar lens of the oil world, international diplomacy, tourism attractions, and rapid urbanization, the deeper social and political foundations that sustain them remain comparatively underexplored....
Since 2014, substantial ink has been spilled on chronicling, explaining, and contesting the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s predominance in national politics in India. Scholars have studied the ever-intensifying waves of anti-minority violence in the country,...
How is the practice of religious rituals already a political act and a movement of justice? What do bodies share between themselves as they learn and convey rituals and genres? Is this mode of teaching...
Maydan Book forum on Rethinking Marital and Sexual Ethics in Islamic Law: The Case of Temporary Marriage, (Lexington Books/ Bloomsbury, 2023) by Roshan Iqbal. ISBN 9781793606280; ix+120 pages; hardback $144.85 Judd King | Fatima Razvi |...
As Donald Trump commemorated the 250th day of his second presidential term by ordering the National Guard to invade Portland, over 7000 people gathered in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania to eat halal food. Vendors lined the festival...
[Deadline October 1] Call for Papers: Ninth Annual Graduate Student Book Review Colloquium
[Book Review] Mariam Al-Kuwari, Tribal Reawakening and the Future of State-Building in Kuwait and Qatar (Springer, 2025). Reviewed by Abdullah Eren
[Book Review] Practices of the State: Muslims, Law and Violence in India by Tanweer Fazal (Three Essays Collective, 2024). Reviewed by Rushnae Kabir
Resourcing Ritualization: Transference and Spiritual Sovereignty in the Islamic Tradition
BOOK FORUM on Rethinking Marital and Sexual Ethics in Islamic Law: The Case of Temporary Marriage by Roshan Iqbal | Contributions from Judd King, Fatima Razvi, and Roshan Iqbal
“More than a Celebration of Food” at the Philly Halal Food Festival
In his Tabaqat al-Hanabila, Ibn Abi Ya‘la describes the extraordinary growth of al-Barbahari’s influence. Al-Barbahari was the leading Hanbali figure in Baghdad at the beginning of the fourth Islamic century. According to Ibn Abi Ya‘la,…
The Maydan Podcast · History Speaks EP 19 | Missionaries, Gender, and the Making of Islamophobia | Roshan Iqbal with Deanna Womack In this episode of History Speaks, Dr. Roshan Iqbal speaks with Dr. Deanna…
The Maydan Podcast · A Common Word | EP 12 – Younus Mirza with Paul Heck | Emotions in Islam As I look closely at Qur’anic figures, I am struck by how they speak about…
In this book, the author makes a comparison between the literature of fiction novels and short stories written in Arabic and Persian that cover the narratives about the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq in…
What does it mean to be “lucky” after surviving state-sanctioned mass violence? In The Lucky Ones: A Memoir, Zara Chowdhary interrogates this very notion through her account of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom that claimed over…
On June 28, 1971, the Supreme Court of the United States did something it had spent nearly a year trying to avoid: it sided with a Muslim. In Clay v. United States, the justices unanimously…
Functioning as a passe-partout, Kalyani Devaki Menon’s Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India1 opens up critical pathways into the expanding literature on the ‘everyday’ experiences of Indian Muslims. Menon’s work, grounded in Anthropology, is…
The conversation below focuses on Professor of Near Eastern Islamic Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ) Sabine Schmidtke’s new book Scholar of Islam, Victim of the Holocaust: The Tragic Life of Hedwig…
The passing of the late Royal Laureate Professor Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas on March 8, 2026 (18 Ramadan 1447), at the age of 94, has been mourned by diverse segments of the global Muslim community,…
With its unique context, skillful execution, and monumental calling, Palestinian literature is an inspiring and fertile ground for study. In my own Arabic courses, it is by far the most popular subject. This term, the…
Muslim Futures (RSVP) This conference seeks to explore the effects of new and emerging technologies on the Muslim world, broadly construed, and to inquire into the ways in which diverse actors imagine and speculate…
Over the past several decades, the South Asian Muslim intellectual tradition has emerged as a crucial site of scholarly inquiry within the broader academic study of Islam. Historians, anthropologists, and scholars of Islamic law have…
