New Books in Islamic Studies

In this conversation, we are entering an Indian Ocean world connected
by steamships, telegraphs, pilgrimage routes, and print. From Bombay
and the Gulf to Cairo and Mecca—and onward to Moscow and
Geneva—merchants, scholars, activists, and political exiles debated a
question that still feels urgent: how can different communities live
together without being reduced to permanent majorities and minorities?

Bombay
sits near the center of our story. Under British rule, it was a major
imperial port. But it was also a meeting place where Indian Ocean
merchants financed publications, hosted traveling scholars, and helped
ideas cross borders.

At the same time, British censuses and
representative politics produced a striking paradox. South Asia
contained the world’s largest Muslim population, yet Muslims were
increasingly classified as a political minority within India.

Dr. Roy Bar Sadeh
is a historian of modern South Asia and the broader Islamic world,
joining the University of Oxford in September 2026 as an Associate
Professor in the Faculty of History and at St Antony’s College. He is
currently a Lecturer at the University of Manchester.

His many articles and forthcoming book with University of Chicago Press, Muslims and the Minority Question: A Global History of South Asia, 1856–1947, follow
the people who refused to accept that minority label as their political
destiny. Along the way, we’ll talk about food and language, Gulf pearl
merchants and printing presses, rival plans for Mecca, an unlikely
Soviet-Saudi partnership, and the search for protection beyond the
nation-state.

Host: Dr. Ahmed Y. AlMaazmi, an assistant professor of history at New York University Abu Dhabi.

Co-host: Dr. Mohammed Alsudairi,
a Lecturer of Politics and International Relations of the
Arabic-speaking world at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the
Australian National University.
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Following Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1798 campaign in Egypt, new possibilities of travel and improvements in printing technology saw an emergence of publishing ventures in France and Britain dedicated to the production of albums and travel accounts featuring images of Muslim Egypt and Islamic architecture and catering to a growing European fascination with the East. In her debut book, Visualizing Egypt: European Travel, Book Publishing, and the Commercialization of the Middle East in the Nineteenth Century (American University in Cairo Press, 2025) Paulina Banas analyzes the context and process of production of these highly illustrated publications, from their conceptualization to the finished product and its afterlife, from marketing to the sales of these books, and from circulation to their reception by nineteenth-century audiences. By tracing the long, arduous, and often risky publishing journeys of the makers of these books, including publishers, writers, and artists, such as the Frenchman Émile Prisse d’Avennes, Banas reveals a complex terrain of changing market demands, collaborations, and conflicting views, and the unsettled authorship of these works, prompting us to think more profoundly about artistic and intellectual exchange in the world of nineteenth-century Orientalist book production. Visualizing Egypt considers nineteenth-century book illustrations on Egypt and the “Orient” not merely as expressions of enduring ideology and colonial propaganda, but as representations shaped by the often-overlooked commercial exigencies of the growing publishing industry and the reckless competition within it.

Paulina Banas is an Assistant Professor of Art History at The University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she teaches course on Islamic world arts, 19th century European visual culture, and cross-cultural encounters between Europe and the Middle East.

Saman Nasser holds an M.A. in history from James Madison University, where he currently works as an educational staff.
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Rahim Thawer and Maryam Khan's new edited volume Queer and Muslim: On Faith, Family and Healing (U Regina Press, 2026) is a powerful anthology that brings together writers, activists, and scholars who meditate, reflect, and share stories of queer Muslim life, that contains the complexity of rage, grief and resilience but also joy, love, and healing. In the process, Thawer and Khan deconstruct the limitations of western centric formulations of mental health and wellness, which is often individualistic and commodified, and invite readers to think through a decolonial approach that honours Muslim spirituality, religiosity, and culture, which can help us shift towards collectivistic and liberatory goals of healing. This anthology is a great resource for those who are mental health practitioners, and relevant to those who think about gender, sexuality, and Islam.
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Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan: State Violence and Resistance, 1949–2024
(Cornell University Press, 2026) by Dr. Xian Aubin Wang investigates
decades of contentious relations between the Communist party-state of
China and the Muslim community of southern Yunnan centered on the
village of Shadian, site of an incident of state violence in 1975 that
resulted in 1600 civilian deaths. Examining the causes and legacies of
the Shadian
massacre, Dr. Wang draws on an extensive review of internal official
documents, original written testimonies, and firsthand interviews with
Muslim villagers.

By exploring interactions among Beijing, the Yunnan provincial government, county officials, CCP Muslim cadres, and Shadian
villagers against the backdrop of the CCP's nationwide political
campaigns since the early 1950s, Dr. Wang shows how Islam and Maoism
influenced the ways that local villagers and party cadres saw and dealt
with each other—and how these encounters shaped the developing conflict
and its aftermath. Providing an in-depth account of Chinese religious
groups living under the CCP, Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan
reveals how religion and politics shaped Muslim villagers' responses to
the party-state's efforts to control and secularize them.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book
focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 
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Unruly Monuments: Disrupting the State at Delhi's Islamic Architecture (Cambridge University Press, 2025) examines
how Delhi's Sultanate and Mughal architecture, dating from the twelfth
to the seventeenth centuries, became modern monuments and were
assimilated and ordered into public consciousness as spaces for tourism,
leisure, and intellectual contemplation during the colonial and early
postcolonial eras (1828-1963). It examines the resistance that
challenges this ordering, rendering monuments unruly and unassimilable
despite state efforts to control their narrative. This exposes the
nation's contradictory claims of inclusivity while marginalizing
subaltern groups. It guides readers through picturesque landscapes,
museums, imperial displays, postcards, travel experiences, Partition
refugee camps, and cinema. Analyzing these forms reveals how the archive
of Indo-Islamic monuments was shaped through presences and absences.
Each chapter examines everyday life, untangles knowable public
transcripts, illuminates strategic excisions and hidden transcripts,
juxtaposes evidence that has not yet been analyzed in conjunction, reads
archival material against the grain, and finds archival layers in
unfamiliar places.

NBN Host: Sohini Majumdar

Sohini teaches history at University of San Francisco and Santa Clara University.
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