New Books in Islamic Studies

From its birth in seventh-century Arabia, Islam has been a faith on the move. In Worlds of Islam: A Global History (Basic Books, 2026), James McDougall explores its origins and transformations from Late Antiquity to the digital age.

Over the span of a thousand years, armies, missionaries, and merchants carried it to the edges of Europe, the coasts of Southeast Asia, and the remote interior of China. By the nineteenth century, Islam encompassed a world of great diversity, from Muslim-ruled empires to nations where Muslims lived out their faith among many others. In the twentieth century, while monarchs in the Gulf asserted dynastic privilege and fundamentalists in Egypt and Pakistan preached social morality, revolutionaries from Algeria to Indonesia fought for national self-determination, and activists in North America and Europe campaigned for civil liberties and social justice.

As empires fell and new superpowers rose, Muslims proved to be as adaptable and dynamic as modernity itself. Sweeping and authoritative, Worlds of Islam narrates the epic story of how Muslims emerged as a community, built empires, traversed the globe, came to number in the billions, and became modern.

James McDougall is a Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and a Fellow of Trinity College, University of Oxford. He previously taught at Princeton and at SOAS, London.
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How do people justify what others see as transgression? Taking that question to the Persian-Muslim and Latin-Christian worlds over the period 1200 to 1700, Justifying Transgression: Muslims, Christians, and the Law - 1200 to 1700(de Gruyter, 2023) shows that people in both these worlds invested considerable energy in worrying, debating, and writing about proscribed practices. It compares how people in the two worlds came to terms with the proscriptions of sodomy, idolatry, and usury. When historians speak of the gap between premodern practice and the legal theory of the time, they tend to ignore the myriad of justifications that filled this gap. Moreover, a focus on justification evens out many of the contrasts that have been alleged to exist between the two worlds, or the Muslim and Christian worlds more generally. The similarities outweigh the differences in the ways people came to terms with the various rules of divine law. The level of flexibility of the theologians and jurists in charge of divine law varied more over time and by topic than between the two worlds. Both worlds also saw the development of ever more sophisticated justifications. Amid the increasing complexity of justifications, a particular kind of reasoning emerged: that good outcomes are more important than upholding rules for their own sake.
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Ken Chitwood's Borícua Muslims: Everyday Cosmopolitanism among Puerto Rican Converts to Islam (University of Texas Press, 2025), uses rich ethnographic fieldwork across multiple cities and the digital space to capture the complex lived realities of Puerto Rican Muslims both on the island and in the United States. The study is attuned to the archipelago’s context that accents Puerto Rican Islam, such as through histories that link it to Andalusian Spain, and culture, especially through foodscapes. Puerto Rico also has a diverse Arab Muslim diasporic population, especially Palestinians. Due to this diversity of Muslim experiences, throughout the book there emerge conversations about the boundaries of Islam in relation to culture, ethnicity, and theology. At times, when these varied communities share ritual and communal space together, questions of authenticity unfold, such as over language or notions of piety. Despite moments of tension around tribalism and questions of legitimacy, we learn that often Islam for both these communities is understood through their experiences of colonialism, and so anti-colonial registers of Islam influence the solidarity building and social justice organizing that unites Puerto Rican and Palestinian Muslims. The book also has an accompanying Spotify playlist that you definitely should check out. This book will be of interest to anyone working on Islam in South America and/or North America, and Arab and Palestinian diasporic studies, and food studies.

Ken Chitwood is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer with the Department for the Study of Religion at Universität Bayreuth and Affiliate of the University of Southern California's Center for Religion and Civic Culture.

Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here. She may be reached at [email protected].
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Manuela Ceballos’ new book Between Dung and Blood: Purity, Sainthood, and Power in the Early Modern Western Mediterranean (University of California Press, 2025) engages with the life and legacies of two sixteenth-century saints; the Spanish Christian Teresa de Jesús (also known as Teresa of Avila) and the Moroccan Sufi Sidi Ridwan al-Januwi. The book draws from rich Arabic and Spanish sources that moves us between Morocco and Iberia. In the process, we learn that these saints both descent from families of converts and as such blood and bodily pollution operated as material and metaphoric symbols to define their identities. Through this generative comparison, we see how constructions of blood and dung circulate across these varied but entangled temporal geographies to constitute notions of impurity and purity, such as in the case of the deathly hemorrhaging experienced by Teresa. In end though blood is used to set different boundaries around religious or racial identities, and even at times gender norms. As such, the discourses that are utilized for such argumentations are not stable, and so blood and how it is deployed is not the same across the stories of these two saints and their enduring legacies nor does it refract power consistently. This book will be of interest to those who think about embodiment, material culture, the early modern Mediterranean world, and Christian-Muslim mysticism.

Manuela Ceballos is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here. She may be reached at [email protected].
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Can someone be Chinese and Muslim? For some academics, this has been a surprisingly fraught question, with some asserting that Chinese Muslims are not really Chinese, or not really Muslim.

Rian Thum, in his book Islamic China: An Asian History (Harvard UP, 2025), strives to make Chinese Muslims “ordinary”, placing them in both Chinese and global history by following pilgrims, merchants, and others across the Ming, Qing, and Republican eras.

Rian is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Manchester. A contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Nation, he is the author of The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History, winner of the Fairbank Prize for East Asian History from the American Historical Association and the Hsu Prize for East Asian Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Islamic China. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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