New Books in Islamic Studies

In this episode, Claudia Radiven and Saeed Khan spoke with Haris Tagari about his recent journey to Sarajevo in a 20 year old Toyota Yaris. Along the way he documented lost Islamic history throughout Europe, before arriving in Bosnia where he discusses genocide, solidarity and Muslim identity. Haris is a freelance journalist working as a reporter and videographer, with a degree in history from the University of Lancaster. Haris is widely known for his Instagram series, travelling to and reporting on destroyed and lost Muslim heritage across the world. He has filmed documentaries and political explainers from Syria, Iraq, Turkiye, Bosnia, Kosovo, Hungary, Serbia and Montenegro. You can follow the journeys of Haris in a Yaris on Instagram @harristory.
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Edith Szanto’s Twelver Shi'i Self-Flagellation Rites in Contemporary Syria: Mourning Sayyida Zaynab (Edinburgh UP, 2025) is a striking and deeply immersive ethnographic study that takes the reader into the shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab in Syria. This town was a vibrant center of Shi‘i life, pilgrimage, and healing, especially for Iraqi refugees until the 2011 Syrian uprising. By combining meticulous fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2010 with rich historical and social context, Szanto shows how these contested rituals served as both spiritual expression and pathways to worldly and psychological healing. The book examines controversial Muharram practices, especially self-flagellation, not simply as ritual acts but as deeply meaningful responses to trauma, displacement, and the search for justice and healing. In doing so, Szanto pays close attention to how people actually live their religion: through relationships with saints, engagement with religious authorities, media, ritual performance, and forms of spiritual healing.

In this conversation, Szanto and I explore specific Muharram practices, including self-flagellation, the wedding of Qasim, and other ritualized forms of mourning, as well as gendered dynamics in who participates and why. We discuss what these practices looked like on the ground—what Muharram in Sayyida Zaynab felt like, how different communities understood and debated these rituals, and what purposes they served for those who participated in them. We talk about the Zaynabiyya seminary and how changes in its physical and institutional structure reshaped how knowledge was taught and who held authority. We also discuss relationships with saints, spiritual healers like Shaykh Abu Ahmad, and the ways that media, music, and ritual performance mediate piety. Szanto also treats us to reflecting on some of her experiences observing and engaging with these rituals.

This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Islamic studies generally, Shi‘i studies, Middle Eastern religious life, or the ways that communities navigate devotion, trauma, and healing through ritual.
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Racializing the Ummah: Muslim Humanitarians Beyond Black, Brown and White (U Minnesota Press, 2026) is an ethnography of Islamic Relief (IR), the largest Islamic NGO based in the West. Racializing the Ummah explores how a Muslim organization can do good in a world that defines Muslimness as less than human. Rooted in more than a decade of international research, Rhea Rahman’s study on the organization’s projects, methods, and limitations reveals how racial capitalism permeates all aspects of humanitarianism.

Beginning with a counterhistory of Muslims in the United Kingdom following World War II, Rahman analyzes IR’s mission and transnational activities in and across places including the UK, South Africa, and Mali in the broader context of global white supremacy. She shows how IR’s approaches often effectively secularize Islam to evade anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia, implicating concepts such as the “good” Muslim aid worker, who complies with War on Terror surveillance while attending to victims of Western colonialism. Meanwhile, Rahman theorizes the tactics of aid workers on the ground, who creatively draw on an Islamic Black radical tradition to drive real change.
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In this episode, Dr Fatima Rajina is joined by Marieha Hussain to talk about her experience of the Coconuts trial. A case that saw the political activist being charged with, and eventually proven innocent of, a racially aggravated public order offence for showcasing a satirical placard labelling Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman as “coconuts” prompting the fundamental question “Who has the right to police your language”?

In November 2023, Marieha was arrested for displaying a placard labelling prominent exponents of the then-Tory government as “coconuts” during a pro-Palestine protest. According to the charges put on her, the term coconut was equivalent to a racist slur. Yet, Black and Brown activists have historically used it to call out members of their communities who aligned with colonial powers and white supremacists. This episode was initially aired by Stephen Lawrence Research Centre Podcast.
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In this episode, Claudia Radiven and Saeed Khan spoke with Dr Izram Chaudry about his recent report (written with Dr Yunis Alam) regarding Islamophobia on Campus. Whilst discussing Islamophobia in the context of higher education we also delved into the issue of Everyday Islamophobia, microaggressions and academic freedoms in the current UK context as well as more broadly. Izram Chaudry is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Bradford and is the author of ‘BrAsian Family Practices and Reflexivity: Beyond the Boxing Ropes’ (2024). He is also the co-editor of the forthcoming collected edition ‘Social Class, Physical Education and Community Sport’.
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