Read an excerpt from "Beyond the Binary," an exploration of early Hanafi legal thought that reveals early Muslim jurists imagined a world built not on a binary distinction between male and female but on multiple intersecting hierarchies of gender, age, enslavement, lineage, class, and other social roles.
Emrah Yıldız discusses the values—religious, political, economic, or social—behind the eight-hundred-mile journey across two international borders to the Sayyida Zainab shrine.
By SpearIt, author of Muslim Prisoner Litigation: An Unsung American Tradition“Prison jihad” is a real thing happening in American prisons across the country. While this idea might conjure up all sorts of stereotypical imagery — including bearded, turbaned, militant Muslims, radicalized and read
UC Press is proud to publish award-winning authors and books across many disciplines. Below are several of our February 2023 award winners. Please join us in celebrating these scholars by sharing the news!Kaveh Askari 2023 Katherine Singer Kovàcs Book AwardSociety for Cinema and Medi
By Reyhan Durmaz, author of Stories between Christianity and Islam: Saints, Memory, and Cultural Exchange in Late Antiquity and BeyondWe all tell stories to create meaning. A far-gone event in a distant time and place often works as a lens through which we remember the past, interpret the presen
by David M. Freidenreich, author of Jewish Muslims: How Christians Imagined Islam as the EnemyAntisemitism is becoming increasingly overt—and so too is its close relative, anti-Judaism. To respond and resist effectively, we need to recognize the differences between these two forms of rhetoric, w
By Brian Catlos, co-author of The Sea in the Middle: The Mediterranean World, 650–1650If Medieval Studies, as some say, has a “whiteness problem,” Mediterranean Studies does not. Recentering the narrative of the pre-Modern West on the region of the sea and the lands that surround it better refle
By Sahar Aziz, author of The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious FreedomOn his first day in office, President Biden repealed the “Muslim Ban,” an executive order issued by Trump on January 27, 2017. This repeal was a welcome development for the hundreds of thousands of Muslims whose liv
This post is part of our #MESA2020 blog series. Learn more at our MESA virtual exhibit.For this year’s virtual MESA conference, Luke Yarbrough joined us to talk about the new co-edited book Conversion to Islam in the Premodern Age and why understanding Islamic conversion is a crucial par
