New Books in Islamic Studies

In this episode Chella Ward and Amina Easat-Daas spoke with Dr Martijn de Koning about the nature of Islamophobia in the Netherlands and how this sits in relation to common perceptions about Dutch society as a liberal and tolerant society and the Islamophobic realities of the Netherlands. De Koning also spoke at length of the recent NTA affair in the Netherlands, the exceptionalising of surveilling Muslim communities and how Muslims in the Dutch context have begun to challenge this. Dr de Koning is an Associate Professor in Islam, Politics and Society at Radboud University and has published extensively on Islamophobia in the Netherlands.
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In the first half of the twentieth century, the United States attempted to build a colony in the Philippines in its own image—one fraught with racist notions of what it means to be civilized, developed, and worthy of self-rule. These imported notions of race and modernity left a profound imprint on the nation. More recently, we have seen a menacing rise of Islamic "terrorism," political polarization, populism, xenophobia, and isolationism. Conventional wisdom has attributed this rise to a "failed state" or economic insecurity and cultural backlash.

In ⁠Emotional Filipinos: The American Myth of the "Lazy Native" and Islamic Separatism in the Philippines⁠ (University of Georgia Press, 2026), however, Dr. George Baylon Radics explains this forgotten part of U.S. history with emotions as a driving force behind social action. The Philippines is currently experiencing the longest-running Muslim-Christian conflict in the modern world and an increasingly anti-Western populist government. By unpacking the role of emotions from the American colonial period to the present, Emotional Filipinos blurs the line between American colonizer and Muslim-Filipino "terrorist," highlighting the lasting effects of America's footprint in Southeast Asia. Radics humanizes this fraught history and reveals unexplored connections between past and present.

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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What explains the rise of religious populism in contemporary Turkish
politics and society? How does industrialization help to explain change
and continuity in social and religious life in Muslim majority
countries? In his new book Industrial Islamism: How Authoritarian Movements Mobilize Workers (University of California Press, 2025), Utku Balaban examines Turkey’s rapid post-Cold War industrialization and argues that the answers to
these questions lie in a class analysis centered on the relationships
between employers and employees situated within larger contexts of
globalization and historical Islamization. Political and religious
transformations occurring in the 1980s and 1990s are not the result of a
cultural backlash to or rejection of “Westernization,” or a nostalgia
for an idealistic past. Rather, Balaban argues they are related to the
rise of a socio-economic-political class he calls the “faubourgeosie” that strategically employ Islamic populism as a method of protecting their interests against other primary class actors. These
changes are internal to the mechanics and logics of capitalism as
shifts in the traditional relations of production produced new alliances
and networks based on small-scale capital accumulation.
Balaban’s Turkish case study can be applied to other Muslim-majority
countries in which small-scale industrialists similarly dealt with
economic anxiety and aspirations through recourse to popular Islamist
rhetoric not as a specifically moral strategy, but as a political one.

Industrial Islamism recently received the best new book in the category of international political economy from the International Studies Association.

Dr. Utku Balaban is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Xavier University. He is the author of A Conveyor Belt of Flesh: Urban Space and the Proliferation of Industrial Labor Practices in Istanbul’s Garment Industry (2011) and Social Inclusion Practices in Turkey (2015).

Dr. Jaclyn Michael is an Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (USA). She is the author of several articles on Muslim cultural representation, performance, and religious belonging in India and in the United States.
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In this episode hosts Claudia Radiven and Amina Easat-Daas were joined by Amani Hassani, to discuss her most recent work around Islamophobia and Muslimness in Denmark. Hassani discussed Danish colonial histories and the surveilling nature of the Danish welfare state, and how these are employed to construct a narrative of Danish benevolence while simultaneously marking Muslims in Denmark as ‘other’ and deserving of intolerance in an otherwise tolerant nation. Amani Hassani is a lecturer at Brunel University and her work spans urban ethnography, sociology, anthropology and human geography.
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Samiha Rahman’s Black Muslim Freedom Dreams: Islamic Education, Pan-Africanism, and Collective Care (New York University Press, 2026) follows three generations of Black American Muslims as they pursue education through the Tijani Sufi order in Medina Baye, Senegal, outside the anti-Black and anti-Muslim racism of the United States. This deeply rich ethnographic book captures the transatlantic flows of Black American religious life through the prism of Black mothers and othermothers (as conceptualized by Patricia Hill Collins “motherwork”) and the young people whose lives are transformed through the process. By focusing on the Islamic education offered by the Tijani Order, such as Qur’an education, we learn about the intricate networks of kin that step in to support the young Black Muslims who have migrated for schooling, highlighting the tangible realities of collective care and service that circulates within the Tijani Order. These registers of care and service are informed by Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse, the Senegalese Islamic scholar, Sufi Shaykh, and pan-Africanist, whose teachings define these networks of education, organizing, and care work. The book then offers critical insights into the flow of one particular Sufi community between the United States and Senegal, and how dreams of better futures for Black Muslim youth and the liberatory goals of Pan-Africanism intersect to co-constitute a significant economy of collective care, Sufi service, and Islamic piety. This book will be of interest to anyone who works on education, Sufism, Black and African Islam and much more.
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