New Books in Islamic Studies

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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In her most recent publication, Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health, and Modernity in Indonesia (Stanford UP, 2025), Chiara Formichi argues that Muslim women in Java and Sumatra, from the late 1910s to the 1950s, were central to Indonesia's progress as guardians and promoters of health and piety through gendered activities of care work. While sidelined in the Dutch colonial project of hygienic modernity, women's labor of social reproduction became increasingly visible during the Japanese Occupation and early years of independence. Women from all walks of life were called upon to fulfill domestic and motherly roles for the production and socialization of laborers, soldiers, and citizens. The medicalization of cleanliness, intersecting with multiple patriarchal orders, marginalized women's traditional influence and knowledge. However, leveraging the critical importance of infant care, cleanliness, and nutrition, women pushed against the boundaries imposed on them by the colonial and postcolonial state. Largely absent from government archives, their words and acts are evident in vernacular magazines and visual sources drawn from official outreach, news and lifestyle media, and advertisements. Women writers rearticulated scientific mothering, nationalist maternalism, and Islamic ideals of motherhood to create a public voice through gendered care work. The framework of Domestic Nationalism proposes that as the modern Indonesian nation-state took shape capitalizing on the public function of mothering, so did homemaking become a crossroads of national and international approaches to development, blurring nonaligned self-reliance and global capitalist interests.

In this episode Dr. Chiara Formichi (Cornell University) and Leah Cargin (University of Oklahoma and Journal of Women’s History) discuss Domestic Nationalism. We converse about feminist theory and tensions between Indonesian women and colonial establishments. We talk about food, food choices, food preparation and nutrition to reveal an intersection of hygiene, nutrition, and imperialism. And last, we discuss how imperial and colonial invocation of novel hygiene practices was a global phenomenon in the mid-twentieth century.
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Tunisia’s Andalusians: The Cultural Identity of a North African Minority (Edinburgh UP, 2025) tells the captivating story of those Andalusians, descendants of Muslims expelled from Spain in the seventeenth century, who sought refuge in Tunisia. Rather than simply replicating Iberian traditions, Andalusian culture in Tunisia stands as a vibrant and evolving phenomenon, shaped by complex dynamics of interaction and adaptation over four centuries. The book dismantles the romanticised view of Andalusian culture as a mere transplantation of al-Andalus, analysing distinctive cultural features that distinguish Andalusians as an ethnic group within Tunisia’s diverse social fabric. Drawing on historical records and contemporary ethnographic data, including personal accounts and family archives, the book sheds light on how Andalusians navigate their unique cultural position amidst a Tunisian national narrative often focused on Arabo-Muslim homogeneity. By examining the complexities of cultural preservation and assimilation, the book offers a nuanced perspective on Andalusian identity, revealing its dynamism and resilience in the face of changing social, political, and economic circumstances.
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Examining sectarian divergence in the early modern Middle East, Ayşe
Baltacıoğlu-Brammer's study provides a fresh perspective on the
Sunni–Shi'i division. Drawing on Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and European
sources, Boundaries of Belonging: Sectarianism and Statecraft in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire
(Cambridge University Press, 2026) explores the paradox of an Ottoman
state that combined rigid ideological discourses with pragmatic
governance. Through an analysis of key figures, events, periods, and
policies, Boundaries of Belonging reveals how political, economic, and
religious forces intersected, challenging simplistic sectarian binaries.
Baltacıoğlu-Brammer provides a comprehensive historical account of
Ottoman governance during the long sixteenth century, focusing on its
relationship with non-Sunni Muslim subjects, particularly the Qizilbash.
As both the founders of the Safavid Empire and the largest
Shiʿi-affiliated group within the Ottoman realm, the Qizilbash occupied a
crucial yet often misunderstood position. Boundaries of Belonging
examines their role within the empire, challenging the notion that they
were merely persecuted outsiders by highlighting their agency in shaping
imperial policies, negotiating their status, and influencing the
Ottoman–Safavid rivalry in Anatolia, Kurdistan, and Iraq, and western
Iran.
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Youssef J. Carter’s The Vast Oceans: Remembering Allah and Self on the Mustafawiyya Sufi Path (UNC Press, 2026) is a stunning meditation on Black Atlantic Sufism, specifically as it travels between South Carolina and Senegal via the Mustafawiyya Sufi community and Shaykh Arona Faye. The book orbits around Sufi conceptual frameworks which are translated through the register of Black and Africana Studies. For example, bay’a is rendered as “solidarity” or khidma as “labour”; such attunement of Sufi concepts presents capacious possibilities for Sufi studies at the intersection of Black and Muslim studies. The book then uses deep ethnography to capture the flows of stories, rituals, and piety, and also Black radical labour, motherwork, and becoming to highlight how in spite of the ongoing violence of racial capitalism and plantation modernity, Black-Africana Sufi communities are vital spaces of worldmaking, one that is not merely metaphysical (such as through ritual piety) but also political, anti-racist, and anti-colonial and rooted in collective care. This book is necessary reading for scholars of Sufism, and those who work on Black and African Islam.
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