New Books in Islamic Studies

Why Muslims in South India observe hierarchical intra-communal relationships despite the egalitarianism of their religionIn Seeking Allah’s Hierarchy: Caste, Labor, and Islam in India (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025), P. C. Saidalavi provides an ethnographic study of a Muslim barber community in South India, unraveling how these barbers negotiated concepts of hierarchy through Islamic values of piety, genealogy, morality, and wealth. Through this close-drawn study, Saidalavi argues that Muslim hierarchy exists and it works on its own terms. It both draws upon Islamic jurisprudential and moral discourses and is shaped by the larger economic, cultural, and political environment, including that of Hinduism. Yet ultimately, Muslim hierarchy is neither a replica nor a watered-down version of caste in Hinduism.Seeking Allah’s Hierarchy contends that the Islamization process in South Asia cannot be reduced to conceptual schemas or patterns dictating religious practice. Instead, this process works within a “lived tradition,” in which Muslims attempt to infuse and rationalize their practices using their interpretations of Islamic values, meanings, and purpose. In this case, barbers challenged other Muslims’ perception of them as hierarchically inferior by emphasizing their religious piety. Yet those same Muslims also drew on Islam to provide a rationale for categorizing barbers’ work as morally obligatory but undignified, thus rendering the barbers “lower.”P. C. Saidalavi is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi-NCR.

Khadeeja Amenda is a doctoral candidate at the National University of Singapore. 
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Alaina Morgan's Atlantic Crescent: Building Geographies of Black and Muslim Liberation in the African Diaspora (UNC Press, 2025) introduces the conceptual framework of the “Atlantic Crescent” to capture the overlapping encounters between Black, Afro-Caribbean, and South Asian Muslims in the United States and the Caribbean. Using rich archival material, such as the Nation of Islam’s Muhammad Speaks, we learn about 20th century Black Muslim movements such as the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam as they encounter and engage with South Asian Muslim communities, like the Ahmadiyya movement in the US, as their discourses of global anti-imperial and decolonial struggles shaped or overlapped with each other. The second half of the book takes us to Bermuda to trace the translation of these Black Muslim liberation movements into the Caribbean. By focusing on the flow and encounters of these overlapping diasporas, we learn how anti-imperial and ant-colonial discourses were inhabited by varied South Asian, Black, and Afro-Caribbean diasporic communities, and how organizing, be it around labour and education, framed Islam through Black and Afro-diasporic liberatory registers. Morgan’s sharp analysis of these rich diasporic flows charts new imagined geographies of freedom struggles and resistance. This study will be of interest to scholars who think and write on Islam in the global west and the Caribbean, diaspora studies, anti-colonial and anti-imperial Muslim organizing and much more.
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Adam Bursi’s Traces of the Prophets: Relics and Sacred Spaces in Early Islam (Edinburg University Press, 2024) uses writings by early Muslims to map a history of material objects, relics, and tombs of prophetic figures as they were conceptualized in the 8th and 9th centuries. The book draws from various genres of writings, including biographies and hadith of the Prophet Muhammad and Qur’an commentaries and juristic compilations to capture the tensions and practices around tomb and relic veneration. Some of the discussion of Muslim relic veneration are polemical as they aim to establish some boundaries around similar pious practices amongst Jewish and Christian communities. In the process, we learn that there were indeed debates with regards to the post-mortem “traces” or “athar” of Muhammad’s tomb, which then impacted how spaces associated with him were also perceived, as well as other prophetic figures like Ibrahim (Abraham) or Daniel. Such examples raise conceptual questions of absence and presence and Prophet Muhammad’s capacity for intercession and obligatory versus non-obligatory rituals. In charting these early Muslim debates and narratives, Bursi masterfully captures the differing approaches Muslims had to holy bodies and sacred spaces. The book will be of interest to scholars who think about early Islamic history and also for scholars who work on contemporary Islamic material and shrine cultures.
Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at [email protected]. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier.
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The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius was one of the medieval world’s most popular and widely translated texts. Composed in Syriac in Mesopotamia in the seventh century, this supposed revelation presented a new, salvific role for the Roman Empire, whose last emperor, it prophesied, would help bring about the end of the ages. In this first book-length study of Pseudo-Methodius, Christopher J. Bonura uncovers the under-appreciated Syriac origins of this apocalyptic tract, revealing it as a remarkable response to political realities faced by Christians living under a new Islamic regime. Tracing the spread of Pseudo-Methodius from the early medieval Mediterranean to its dissemination via the printing presses of early modern Europe, Bonura then demonstrates how different cultures used this new vision of empire’s role in the end times to reconfigure their own realities. The book also features a new, complete, and annotated English translation of the Syriac text of Pseudo-Methodius.

New books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review.

Christopher J. Bonura is Assistant Professor of History at Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland, and Visiting Assistant Professor Costigan Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Washington.

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston
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In The New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims (U California Press, 2023), Khaled A. Beydoun details how the American War on Terror has facilitated and intensified the network of anti-Muslim campaigns unfolding across the world. The New Crusades is the first book of its kind, offering a critical and intimate examination of global Islamophobia and its manifestations in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and regions beyond and in between. Through trenchant analysis and direct testimony from Muslims on the ground, Beydoun interrogates how Islamophobia acts as a unifying global thread of state and social bigotry, instigating both liberal and right-wing hate-mongering. Whether imposed by way of hijab bans in France, state-sponsored hate speech and violence in India, or the network of concentration camps in China, Islamophobia unravels into distinct systems of demonization and oppression across the post-9/11 geopolitical landscape. Lucid and poignant, The New Crusades reveals that Islamophobia is not only a worldwide phenomenon—it stands as one of the world's last bastions of acceptable hate.
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