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About SherAli Tareen

SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.

NBN Episodes hosted by SherAli:

Islamic Studies June 6, 2023

Nur Baba

A Sufi Novel of Late Ottoman Istanbul (Translated by Brett Wilson)

Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu

Hosted by SherAli Tareen
Listen:
This conversation is with Brett Wilson, who has composed the first English translation of the classic and controversial novel from late Ottoman Turkey Nur Baba--a classic of modern Turkish literature …
Islamic Studies May 5, 2023

Rebuilding Community

Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality

Shenila Khoja-Moolji

Hosted by SherAli Tareen
In her moving, sophisticated, and analytically groundbreaking new book Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality (Oxford UP, 2023), Shenila Khoja-Moolji recounts and engages …
Islamic Studies April 7, 2023

Islam and Blackness

Jonathan A. C. Brown

Hosted by SherAli Tareen
Jonathan Brown’s Islam and Blackness (Oneworld Academic, 2022) is a thorough and thoroughly riveting study of the tensions and conceptions of Blackness in Muslim intellectual traditions and social histories, premodern and …
Islamic Studies March 10, 2023

The Language of History

Sanskrit Narratives of Indo-Muslim Rule

Audrey Truschke

Hosted by SherAli Tareen
In her layered and theoretically astute new book The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of Indo-Muslim Rule (Columbia UP, 2021), Audrey Truschke documents and analyzes a range of Sanskrit texts …
Islamic Studies February 10, 2023

A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures

Shahzad Bashir

Hosted by SherAli Tareen
In his innovative and conceptually ingenious new online, open-access, interactive book A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures (MIT Press, 2022), Shahzad Bashir invites his readers to rethink and …
Islamic Studies October 21, 2022

Messianic Ideas and Movements in Sunni Islam

Yohanan Friedmann

Hosted by SherAli Tareen
In his fascinating and painstakingly research new book Messianic Ideas and Movements in Sunni Islam (Oneworld Academic, 2022), the noted scholar of Islam Yohanan Friedmann details the religious thought and …
Islamic Studies August 26, 2022

Palimpsests of Themselves

Logic and Commentary in Postclassical Muslim South Asia

Asad Q. Ahmed

Hosted by SherAli Tareen
In his dense yet delightful new book Palimpsests of Themselves: Logic and Commentary in Postclassical Muslim South Asia (University of California Press, 2022), Asad Ahmad examines in layered detail the textual and …
Islamic Studies July 1, 2022

The Unfinished History of the Iran-Iraq War

Faith, Firepower, and Iran's Revolutionary Guards

Annie Tracy Samuel

Hosted by SherAli Tareen
The Unfinished History of the Iran-Iraq War: Faith, Firepower, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (Cambridge UP, 2021) represents a fascinating and carefully documented intellectual history of how Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps …
Islamic Studies June 3, 2022

Fear in Our Hearts

What Islamophobia Teaches Us About America

Caleb Elfenbein

Hosted by SherAli Tareen
In his sparkling and politically urgent new book Fear in Our Hearts: What Islamophobia Teaches Us About America (NYU Press, 2021), Caleb Elfenbein shows with precision and panache the discursive …
Islamic Studies February 11, 2022

God, Science, and Self

Muhammad Iqbal's Reconstruction of Religious Thought

Nauman Faizi

Hosted by SherAli Tareen
In his brilliant and philosophically charged new book God, Science, and Self: Muhammad Iqbal's Reconstruction of Religious Thought (McGill-Queen's UP, 2021), Nauman Faizi conducts a close and often dazzling reading …
Islamic Studies January 24, 2022

Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit

Bruce B. Lawrence

Hosted by SherAli Tareen
In his new book cum manifesto, Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit (Wiley-Blackwell, 2021), legendary scholar of Islam Bruce Lawrence outlines his politico-conceptual manifesto for the study and place of Islam in the …
Islamic Studies December 17, 2021

Leaving Iberia

Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa

Jocelyn Hendrickson

Hosted by SherAli Tareen
In her landmark new book Leaving Iberia: Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa (Harvard UP, 2021), Jocelyn Hendrickson launches a searingly brilliant legal history centered on the …
Islamic Studies November 19, 2021

Mosques of Colonial South Asia

A Social and Legal History of Muslim Worship

Sana Haroon

Hosted by SherAli Tareen
In her multilayered and thoroughly researched new book The Mosques of Colonial South Asia: A Social and Legal History of Muslim Worship (I. B. Tauris, 2021), Sana Haroon examines the interaction …
Islamic Studies October 22, 2021

The Beauty of the Houri

Heavenly Virgins and Feminine Ideals

Nerina Rustomji

Hosted by SherAli Tareen
In her scintillating new book, The Beauty of the Houri: Heavenly Virgins, Feminine Ideals (Oxford UP, 2021), Nerina Rustomji presents a fascinating and multilayered intellectual and cultural history of the category …
Islamic Studies September 27, 2021

God's Property

Islam, Charity, and the Modern State

Nada Moumtaz

Hosted by SherAli Tareen
In her phenomenal new book God’s Property: Islam, Charity, and the Modern State (U California Press, 2021), Nada Moumtaz charts the historical continuities and disjunctures as well contemporary paradoxes shadowing the intellectual …
Islamic Studies September 24, 2021

Sculpting the Self

Islam, Selfhood, and Human Flourishing

Muhammad Umar Faruque

Hosted by SherAli Tareen
In his painstakingly researched and splendid new book Sculpting the Self: Islam, Selfhood, and Human Flourishing (U Michigan Press, 2021), Muhammad Faruque charts and examines the multiplicity of ways in …
Islamic Studies July 30, 2021

The Emperor Who Never Was

Dara Shukoh in Mughal India

Supriya Gandhi

Hosted by SherAli Tareen
In her magnificent and lyrical new book, The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India (Harvard UP, 2020), Supriya Gandhi reorients and adds unprecedented depth to our understanding of …
Islamic Studies June 4, 2021

Law, Empire, and the Sultan

Ottoman Imperial Authority and Late Hanafi Jurisprudence

Samy Ayoub

Hosted by SherAli Tareen
In his majestic and magisterial new book Law, Empire, and the Sultan: Ottoman Imperial Authority and Late Hanafi Jurisprudence (Oxford UP, 2020), Samy Ayoub examines and demonstrates the entanglement of Islamic law …
Islamic Studies May 7, 2021

Words of Experience

Translating Islam with Carl W. Ernst

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst and Brannon M. Wheeler

Hosted by SherAli Tareen
For more than three decades now, Carl Ernst, through his scholarship and his public engagement on the study of Islam and Muslim societies, has modeled the finest form of intellectual …
Islamic Studies April 9, 2021

Transformations of Tradition

Islamic Law in Colonial Modernity

Junaid Quadri

Hosted by SherAli Tareen
In his much anticipated and equally brilliant book Transformations of Tradition: Islamic Law in Colonial Modernity (Oxford UP, 2021), Junaid Quadri explores the productive tensions, fissures, and creative interpretive projects …
Islamic Studies April 8, 2021

Soundtrack to a Movement

African American Islam, Jazz, and Black Internationalism

Richard Brent Turner

Hosted by SherAli Tareen
In his fascinating and riveting new book Soundtrack to a Movement: African American Islam, Jazz, and Black Internationalism (NYU Press, 2021), historian Richard Brent Turner tells a moving though rarely discussed narrative …
Islamic Studies March 12, 2021

Print and the Urdu Public

Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life in Colonial India

Megan Eaton Robb

Hosted by SherAli Tareen
What is the relationship between print culture, religious identity, and formations of social consciousness in the modern period? In her brilliant new book, Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers …
Islamic Studies February 12, 2021

The Feeling of History

Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia

Charles Hirschkind

Hosted by SherAli Tareen
Charles Hirschkind’s lyrical and majestic new book The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia (University of Chicago Press, 2020) represents a profound work of retrieval that launches and executes a …
Islamic Studies January 15, 2021

The Bruce B. Lawrence Reader

Islam Beyond Borders

Bruce B. Lawrence and Ali Altaf Mian

Hosted by SherAli Tareen
For more than four decades, Bruce Lawrence’s multivalent and fulsomely prolific scholarship has influenced and imprinted the Western study of Islam and Religious Studies more broadly in singularly profound ways …