Category Archives: Books You Should Read

Unveiling Traditions

Books You Should Read, Development, Islam: Introduction


Anouar Majid

Unveiling Traditions

By Anouar Majid

Manufactured cultural biases and antagonisms deflect people’s attention from the more pressing issues facing humanity as a whole and energize the real powers undermining world cultures and ‘imagined communities.’ Although power relations and configurations have shifted dramatically in the last few decades, the languages of politics and scholarship still operate on dated assumptions whose effect is to freeze live histories into immutable and misleading stereotypes. One can understand how people without sufficient access to academic scholarship continue to believe that nations and cultures as they imagine them are real; but how does one account for the persistence of such beliefs in whole fields of academic study, despite a continuous barrage of information telling us that the world is being dramatically reconfigured by the rising powers of multinational organizations and extraterritorial bodies and laws? Continue reading Unveiling Traditions →

What You Don’t Know About Gaza

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Books You Should Read, Palestine


Professor Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University, left

What You Don’t Know About Gaza
By RASHID KHALIDI, The New York Times, January 8, 2009

NEARLY everything you’ve been led to believe about Gaza is wrong. Below are a few essential points that seem to be missing from the conversation, much of which has taken place in the press, about Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip.

THE GAZANS Most of the people living in Gaza are not there by choice. The majority of the 1.5 million people crammed into the roughly 140 square miles of the Gaza Strip belong to families that came from towns and villages outside Gaza like Ashkelon and Beersheba. They were driven to Gaza by the Israeli Army in 1948.

THE OCCUPATION The Gazans have lived under Israeli occupation since the Six-Day War in 1967. Continue reading What You Don’t Know About Gaza →

Connecting Histories in Afghanistan

Afghanistan, Anthropology/Sociology, Books You Should Read, Orientalism


Landowners and Laborers in Kabul from the Burke collection that comprises the first series of photographs relevant to the market region and period of our concern that were taken in the context of the second Anglo-Afghan war. Image courtesy of the the National Army Museum, London.

Connecting Histories in Afghanistan: Market Relations and State Formation on a Colonial Frontier by Shah Mahmoud Hanifi. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

Preface

This book situates nineteenth-century Afghanistan in the context of British Indian colonialism. The general focus is commerce, mainly how local actors including Afghan nomads and Indian bankers responded to state policies regarding popular and lucrative commodities such as fruit and tea. Within those broad commercial concerns, specific attention is given to developments in and between the urban market settings of Kabul, Peshawar, and Qandahar. The colonial political emphasis on Kabul had significant commercial consequences for that city and its economic connections to the two cities it displaced to become the sole capital of the emerging state. The Kabul hypothesis therefore represents a colonial political strategy, and its effects on Kabul-Peshawar and Kabul-Qandahar economic relations are the subject of this book. Continue reading Connecting Histories in Afghanistan →

The OIC does not speak for Muslims

Books You Should Read, Islam in America, Islam in Europe, Islamic Law, Pakistan, Terrorism Issue

The OIC does not speak for Muslims

by Tarek Fatah, Muslim Canadian Congress, UN Geneva

I speak to you as a Muslim who was born in Pakistan and lived there for 30 years and moved to Saudi Arabia where I worked for 10 years. Since 1987 I have called Canada my home. As an author, journalist and Muslim activist, I have seen the role and agenda of both the soft and hardcore jihadis unfold before my eyes and across the Muslim world.

I approach the issue of freedom of speech and freedom of expression embodied in the 1948 UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights as defending a treasured right that few of my co-religionists can dream off, let alone cherish or possess. We are over a billion strong, but almost all of us live under varying forms and degrees of dictatorship and oppression. Barring a few exceptions such as Turkey, Malaysia and Indonesia, and very recently Pakistan, Muslims live under the tyranny of rulers like those of Iran and Saudi Arabia who have used the religion of Islam as a tool to secure absolute power, and to trample all over the human rights of their citizens.

Barely a day goes by without news of gross violations of human rights of Muslims living in so-called Islamic countries. Whether it is honour killings of sisters and mothers or the harassment of gays and calls for their death; whether it is imprisonment of political opponents or attacks on minorities, we Muslims who live in the West are constantly reminded of the rights we enjoy under secular parliamentary democracies as individual human beings. Continue reading The OIC does not speak for Muslims →

Peaks of Yemeni poetry he summons

Anthropology/Sociology, Books You Should Read, Poetry, Travel, Yemen


[The following is Najwa Adra’s review of two books by anthropologist Steven C. Caton, who conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Yemen in 1979-1981. It was first published in Yemen Update, #48 (2006):46-50.]


“Peaks of Yemen I Summon”: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe, by Steven C. Caton
Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990
ISBN # 0-520-06766-5
351 pp., illus., maps, hardcover

Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation, by Steven C. Caton
New York, Hill and Wang, 2005
ISBN-13: 978-0-8090
341 pp., maps, no illus., hardcover (also available in paper)

Reviewed by Najwa Adra

“Peaks of Yemen I Summon”: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe and Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation, published 15 years apart, should be read as two complementary parts of a whole. They document Steven Caton’s field research on tribal poetry in Khawlan at-Tiyal in 1979-81. Together, these books are important contributions to theory in anthropology, the ethnography of Yemen, and perhaps literary theory and political science as well. The first book is a technical discussion of tribal poetry as cultural practice; the second is a personal, reflexive description of the author’s experiences in the field. It provides rich contextual data that shed light on, and help support, the author’s argument in the first book. Continue reading Peaks of Yemeni poetry he summons →

Holy Men and Social Discourse in Colonial Benaadir

Books You Should Read, Islamic History, Scholars, Somalia, Sufism

Renewers of the Age: Holy Men and Social Discourse in Colonial Benaadir
by Scott Reese (Leiden, Brill, 2008)

Studies of nineteenth and twentieth century Islamic reform have tended to focus more on the evolution of ideas than how those ideas emerge from local contexts or are disseminated to a broad audience. Using the urban culture of southern Somalia, known as the Benaadir, this book explores the role of local ʿulamāʾ as popular intellectuals in the early colonial period. Drawing on locally compiled hagiographies, religious poetry and Sufi manuals, it examines the place of religious discourse as social discourse and how religious leaders sought to guide society through a time of troubles through calls to greater piety but also by exhorting believers to examine their lives in the hopes of bringing society into line with their image of a proper Islamic society.

Table of contents
Chapter 1– Introduction— The Ê¿Ulamāʾ as “local intellectuals”
Chapter 2– Religious History as Social History
Chapter 3–Saints, Scholars and the Acquisition of Discursive Authority
Chapter 4–Urban Woes and Pious Remedies: Sufis, Urbanites and Managing Social Crises in the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 5–When is Kafāʾa Kifayah? – Sufi Leadership, Religious Authority and Questions of Social Inequality
Chapter 6–The Best of Guides: Sufi Poetry, theological writing and Comprehending Qadiriyya popularity in the Early 20th Century

Scott S. Reese, Ph.D. (1996) in History, University of Pennsylvania, is Associate Professor of Islamic History at Northern Arizona University. He has published extensively on Islam in Africa including the edited collection The Transmission of Learning in Islamic Africa (Brill, 2004).

Animal House in the 15th Century: Part 1

Animals, Books You Should Read, camels, Folklore and Proverbs, Literature

One of the most entertaining Arabic compendia on animal life, taken in the loose sense of the term for things that breathe or are thought to breathe, is the Hayât al-Hayawân (Life of Animals) of the Egyptian savant Kamâl al-Dîn Muhammad ibn Mûsâ al-Damîrî. Writing a century before Columbus discovered America, al-Damiri spins stories about animals with a variety of folklore about uses of animal products and parts. A scientist would no doubt shudder at the magical and literary focus of the text, only occasionally finding description useful today. A partial English translation was made by a British officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Jayakar, and published in two volumes in 1906 and 1908 in India. Unfortunately, this text is virtually inaccessible. I have looked at two copies, one in the New York Public Library and the other at the Library of Congress, and only with trepidation have I turned the fragile pages in this poorly bound volume. So far there is no digital version, which is a shame, since it is a delight to read.

Our author was a prolific copyist, quoting from over 800 other authors and providing a thousand entries, some simply an animal’s name and its more common synonym. Ironically, Jayakar’s Victorian sensitivity makes the translation as much an oddity as the primary work. Continue reading Animal House in the 15th Century: Part 1 →