For much of the twentieth century Islamists maintained that Islam provided the perfect, authentic and natural solutions to the crisis of the state. In a life and death struggle with the state, Islamist movements were forced underground, only to surface for intermittent confrontations with the…

Around the year 1000, rounded scripts started to replace angular scripts in Islamic art and architecture. Scholarship on this transformation of Islamic art and epigraphy has focused on the replacement of one by the other, whilst the change is more of a displacement than a replacement, with cursive…

Ambassador Abhyankar will speak about themes from his recently published book. The book focuses, through multiple levels of international reality, on the pervasive and widespread effect of the Syrian civil war on the unravelling of established norms – both global or national – which have determined…

Islamic Finance has mainly replicated conventional finance methods inefficiently. It has thrived during periods of high oil prices, which allowed recycled petrodollars to implicitly subsidize its inefficient modes. As petrodollar flows end, the industry cannot afford the costs of its characteristic…

Ahmet T. Kuru will talk about his award-winning new book Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Why do Muslim-majority countries have high levels of authoritarianism and low levels of socio-economic development in…

Arguably the most prolific female scholar and mystic of her generation, Nana Asma’u bint Usman dan Fodio (d. 1864) hailed from a family of erudite Muslim scholars and rulers of the Fulani tribe. In 1804, her father, Shehu Usman Danfodiyo, launched his Islamic reform and revival movement (jihad),…

The use of field experiments in the social sciences has greatly increased over the past twenty years. These methodological advances can also be used to improve our understanding of religious life. This talk will describe some ways that randomized experiments can help answer important questions…

Professor Melchert here reviews various attempts to characterize the geography of hadith transmission in the early centuries. Case studies are Sufyān al-Thawrī (Kufan, d. 161/777?), Saʿīd ibn Jubayr (Kufan, d. 95/714?), al-Awzāʿī (Syrian, d. 157/773-4?), Ibn al-Mubārak (Khurasani, d. 181/797),…