Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchRussell T. McCutcheon, "Religion and the Domestication of Dissent: Or, How to Live in a Less Than Perfect Nation" (Routledge, 2025)
Episode 850
In its first edition, this book focused on the representations of Islam that circulated in the wake of the 9/11 attacks – representations that schola…
1 year, 2 months ago
Omid Safi, “Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition” (Yale UP, 2018)
Episode 139
It's often touted that Rumi is one of the best-selling poets in the United States. That may be the case but popular renderings of the writings of thi…
1 year, 2 months ago
David Commins, "Saudi Arabia: A Modern History" (Yale UP, 2025)
Episode 848
A major new history of Saudi Arabia, from its eighteenth-century origins to the present day
Saudi Arabia is one of the wealthiest countries in the w…
1 year, 2 months ago
Adriana Carranca, "Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Episode 34
US-born Protestant evangelicalism has gone global to an extent of which many of us might be unaware. Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread …
1 year, 2 months ago
Nabil Yasien Mohamed, "Ghazālī’s Epistemology: A Critical Study of Doubt and Certainty" (Routledge, 2024)
Episode 846
Focusing on Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) – one of the foremost scholars and authorities in the Muslim world who is central to the Islamic intellect…
1 year, 2 months ago
Isabel Toral and Beatrice Gruendler, "An Unruly Classic: Kalīla and Dimna and Its Syriac, Arabic, and Early Persian Versions" (Brill, 2024)
Episode 361
The collection of wisdom fables known as Kalila and Dimna began its long literary life in Sanskrit more than two millennia ago, and was subsequently …
1 year, 2 months ago
Murad Idris, "War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought" (Oxford UP, 2019)
Episode 406
Murad Idris, a political theorist in the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics at the University of Virginia, explores the concept of peace, the term…
1 year, 2 months ago
Ankur Barua, "The Hindu Self and Its Muslim Neighbors: Contested Borderlines on Bengali Landscapes" (Lexington, 2022)
Episode 286
In The Hindu Self and its Muslim Neighbors, the author sketches the contours of relations between Hindus and Muslims in Bengal.
The central argument …
1 year, 2 months ago
Chiara Formichi, "Islam and Asia: A History" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
Episode 182
Challenging the geographical narrative of the history of Islam, Chiara Formichi’s new book Islam and Asia: A History (Cambridge University Press, 202…
1 year, 3 months ago
Ian Johnson, "The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao" (Pantheon, 2017)
Episode 106
Ian Johnson’s new book, The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao (Pantheon, 2017), was called "a masterpiece of observation and empathy"…
1 year, 3 months ago