06.01.2015

Forthcoming, next six months (including translations but not paperback editions):

– Joseph Massad, Islam in Liberalism (Chicago, January)
– Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman, & Ku-ming Kevin Chang, eds., World Philology (Harvard, January)
– Navid Kermani, God is Beautiful: The Aesthetic Experience of the Qur’an, trans. Tony Crawford (Polity, January)
– Guy Burak, The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Hanafi School in the Early Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, January)
– Elizabeth Sirriyeh, Dreams and Visions in the World of Islam: A History of Muslim Dreaming and Foreknowing (IB Tauris, February)
– Jeanne Favret-Saada, The Anti-Witch, trans. Matthew Carey (Hau, February)
– Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination (OUP, February)
– S.R. Burge, ed., The Meaning of the Word: Lexicology and Qur’anic Exegesis (OUP, March)
– Jonathan Sheehan & Dror Wahrman, Invisible Hands: Self-Organization in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago, March)
– Samuli Schielke, Egypt in the Future Tense: Hope, Frustration, and Ambivalence before and after 2011 (Indiana, March)
– Abed Azzam, Nietzsche Versus Paul (Columbia, March)
– Hagar Kotef, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility (Duke, March)
– Brenna Bhandar & Jonathan Boldberg-Hiller, eds., Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work of Catherine Malabou (Duke, March)
– Jeanette Jouili, Pious Practice and Secular Constraints: Women in the Islamic Revival in Europe (Stanford, May)
– Agon Hamza, ed., Repeating Zizek (Duke, May)
– Etienne Balibar, Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy (Columbia, May)
– Jeffrey Sacks, Iterations of Loss: Mutilation and Aesthetic Form, al-Shidyaq to Darwish (Fordham, April)
– Muhsin al-Musawi, The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Arabic Knowledge Construction (Notre Dame, April)
– Ahmed Fekry Ibrahim, Pragmatism in Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History (Syracuse, April)
– Seema Alavi, Muslim Cosmopolitanism in an Age of Empire (Harvard, April)
– Markus Dressler, Writing Religion: The Making of Turkish Alevi Islam (OUP, April)
– Roberto Esposito, Categories of the Impolitical, trans. Connal Parsley (Fordham, April)
– Sara Guyer, Reading with John Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism (Fordham, May)
– Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Saba Mahmood, & Peter Danchin, eds., Politics of Religious Freedom (Chicago, June)
– Avner Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks, Alla Turca: Time and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire (Chicago, June)

04.07.14

Forthcoming, next six months (as always, including translations but not including new editions or those previously listed here):

– Adam Talib, Marle Hammond, and Arie Schippers (eds), The Rude, the Bad and the Bawdy: Essays in honour of Professor Geert Jan van Gelder (Gibb Memorial Trust, June 2014)
– Miguel Vatter, The Republic of the Living: Biopolitics and the Critique of Civil Society (Fordham UP, July 2014)
– Beth Baron, The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood (Stanford UP, July 2014)
– Joyce Dalsheim, Producing Spoilers: Peacemaking and the Production of Enmity in a Secular Age (Oxford UP, July 2014)
– Pierre Bourdieu, On the State (Polity, July 2014)
– Clayton Crockett, B. Keith Pubb, and Jeffrey W. Robbins (eds), The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion (Indiana UP, July 2014)
– Romano Coles, Mark Reinhardt, and George Shulman (eds), Radical Future Pasts: Untimely Political Theory (University Press of Kentucky, July 2014)
– Glenda Abramson (ed), Sites of Jewish Memory: Jews in and From Islamic Lands in Modern Times (Routledge, Aug 2014)
– Gregoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone (The New Press, Aug 2014)
– Edmund Burke III, The Ethnographic State: France and the Invention of Moroccan Islam (University of California Press, Sept 2014)
– Jonathan A.C. Brown, Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy (Oneworld, Sept 2014)
– David Crawford and Bart Deseyn, Nostalgia for the Present: Ethnography and Photography in a Moroccan Berber Village (Leiden UP, Sept 2014)
– Marion Katz, Women in the Mosque: A History of Legal Thought and Social Practice (Columbia UP, Sept 2014)
– David Nirenberg, Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today (U Chicago Press, Sept 2014)
– Kecia Ali, The Lives of Muhammad (Harvard UP, Sept 2014)
– Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, A Ministry of Presence: Chaplaincy, Spiritual Care, and the Law (U Chicago Press, Sept 2014)
– Mayanthi Fernando, The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Duke UP, Sept 2014)
– Banu Bargu, Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons (Columbia UP, Sept 2014)
– Nicole Schippen, Decolonizing Time: Work, Leisure, and Freedom (Palgrave, Sept 2014)
– James Grehan, Twilight of the Saints: Everyday Religion in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (Oxford UP, Oct 2014)
– Aaron Spevack, The Archetypal Sunni Scholar: Law, Theology, and Mysticism in the Synthesis of al-Bajuri (SUNY Press, Oct 2014)
– Caner Dagli, Ibn al-Arabi and Islamic Intellectual Culture: From Mysticism to Philosophy (Routledge, Oct 2014)
– Roma Chatterji (ed), Wording the World: Veena Das and Scenes of Inheritance (Fordham UP, Oct 2014)
– David Motadel (ed), Islam and the European Empires (Oxford UP, Oct 2014)
– Juan Obarrio, The Spirit of the Laws in Mozambique (U Chicago Press, Oct 2014)
– M. Brett Wilson, Translating the Qur’an in an Age of Nationalism: Print Culture and Modern Islam in Turkey (Oxford UP, Oct 2014)
– Abdelfattah Kilito, Arabs and the Art of Storytelling (Syracuse UP, Oct 2014)
– Khaled Abou El Fadl, Reasoning with God: Reclaiming Shari’ah in the Modern Age (Rowman & Littlefield, Oct 2014)
– Agnes Nilufer Kefeli, Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia: Conversion, Apostasy, and Literacy (Cornell UP, Nov 2014)
– Esra Ozyurek, Being German, Becoming Muslim: Race, Religion, and Conversion in the New Europe (Princeton UP, Nov 2014)
– Intisar Rabb, Doubt in Islamic Law: A History of Legal Maxims, Interpretation, and Islamic Criminal Law (Cambridge UP, Nov 2014)
– Jeffrey Einboden, Islam and Romanticism: Muslim Currents from Goethe to Emerson (Oneworld, Dec 2014)
– Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Transgression and the Inexistent: A Philosophical Vocabulary (Bloomsbury, Dec 2014)

26.06.14

a poem for moving (leaving this neighbourhood, city, province, country), transcribed under transatlantic jetlag:

Country of no messiah, country of no
testament, country for whom there are
no seals to break: to speak your name
is to mouth gall, to utter a-a-a
and hear light crash in familiar streets,
the dust rising yellow beneath the sun

and faces crumpled in, bitter fruit
suspended on the autumn trees, mute
as lemons, fixed in cold decay, they look
straight ahead, to pinpoint space, to put
something on the ground. Small towns,

stuck in fall, facing the air and sure
of where they are: to find them is how losing
begins, straying beyond maps, to look
somewhere under Ca-, perhaps, or other
sounds, mirrored gasps growing old,
frozen hiatus, spaced into solecisms

of slow expirations, winter’s one
harvest. In this field the simplest words
deceive most: I want to say the,
but how do I stand to know where all that
finitude would rise, so precise
it stands, early winter unseen before,

a winter where a-a-a is no trick
of light, no dullness of lemons un-
remembered, no rot of small towns
choking air, but one beast of no
name, calling, untrapped by myth,
at large in absence of apocalypse,

standing over Saskatchewan its roads
stretching north to locate, to get lost,
to start decaying at four in the afternoon,
the year now forgotten, standing within
the space of lost heart and dead end,
calling, a merest the in an autumn of sighs,

wind in the small towns blowing, my arms
become tangents, and snow as space falling,
infinite end of seasons striking the void
of somewhere saying a, Lucretian sound
of snow intact. What place is this
of asymptotic skies, of white errata?

— E.D. Blodgett, “O Canada,” Arché/elegies (Edmonton: Longspoon Press), 24-25.

Reading it again this poem is unsatisfying: yes, O Canada lies between the desire for the and the utterance of a, but this means that the story to be told is one of asymptote in the mode of mediation rather than white aporia. Maybe this dissatisfaction is an effort to discipline myself toward ethnography (we’ll see how that goes). In any event I appreciate its suspension of Canada as Survival or as Two (Plus) Solitudes and westward brace myself for an American education.

01.25.14

It seems I mostly post booklists here. Again, titles that have caught my eye forthcoming in the next six months (not including those delayed from the last list). **updated

• Jan-Peter Hartung, A System of Life: Mawdudi and the Ideologisation of Islam (Hurst, December 2013)
• miriam cooke, Tribal Modern: Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf (California, January 2014)
• Andreas Gorke and Johanna Pink, eds., Tafsir and Islamic Intellectual History: Exploring the Boundaries of a Genre (Oxford, January 2014)
• Angelika Neuwirth, Scripture, Poetry, and the Making of a Community: Reading the Qur’an as a Literary Text (Oxford, January 2014)
• Elisabeth Roudinesco, Revisiting the Jewish Question (Polity, January 2014)
• Barbara Cassin et al., eds., Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton, February 2014)
• Jeff Fort, The Imperative to Write: Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett (Fordham, February 2014)
• A. Kevin Reinhart and Robert Gleave, eds., Islamic Law in Theory: Studies in Jurisprudence in Honor of Bernard Weiss (Brill, February 2014)
• Ernst van den Hemel and Asja Szafraniec, eds., Words: Religious Language Matters (Fordham, February 2014)
• ‘A’ishah al-Ba’uniyyah, The Principles of Sufism, trans. Th. Emil Homerin (NYU, February 2014)
• Aaron Hughes, Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism (Oxford, February 2014)
• Steven Miller, War After Death: On Violence and Its Limits (Fordham, March 2014)
• Etty Terem, Old Texts, New Practices: Islamic Reform in Modern Morocco (Stanford, March 2014)
• Ali Mirsepassi and Tadd Graham Fernée, Islam, Democracy, and Cosmopolitanism: At Home and in the World (Cambridge, March 2014)
• Ahmad al-Alawi, The Qur’an and the Prophet in the Writings of Shaykh Ahmad al-Alawi, trans. Khalid Williams (Islamic Texts Society, March 2014)
• Sadia Abbas, At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament (Fordham, April 2014)
• Kabir Tambar, The Reckoning of Pluralism: Political Belonging and the Demands of History in Turkey (Stanford, April 2014)
• Akeel Bilgrami, Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment (Harvard, April 2014)
• Gil Anidjar, Blood: A Critique of Christianity (Columbia, May 2014)
• Veena Das, Michael Jackson, and Arthur Kleinman, eds., The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy (Duke, May 2014)
• Rudolph T. Ware III, Walking Qur’an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge and History in West Africa (UNC, May 2014)
• Sarah Bowen Savant and Helena de Filipe, eds., Genealogy and Knowledge in Muslim Societies: Understanding the Past (Edinburgh, May 2014)
• Tracy McNulty, Wrestling with the Angel: Experiments in Symbolic Life (Columbia, June 2014)

29.10.13

smelling the hint of spring in a cool winter breeze and
how it makes me feel alive.

the purple shade of your leaves as they leave to die.

sailor moon smoking a cigarette on front street, joined
by a hundred other cosplay enthusiasts on a sunday
afternoon.

humans being dragons that chinese new year’s eve.

a happy lesbian couple holding hands walking down the
street. well, i don’t know if they were happy. maybe they’d
just had a huge fight and were holding hands as a way to
overcompensate and hide their anger. i don’t know i only
saw them passing from across the street. i didn’t have a
chance to peek into their souls.

on a rainy ramadan day, a muslim man uses his jaanamaz
(prayer rug) to shade himself from the wetness as he runs
towards a bus, carrying in his hands the food he will use
to break his fast.

all of this over time, but within a mile.

the feeling of living poetry.

toronto, this is why.

— Adnan Ali, “why i love you so.,” nothing, vol. 1, p. 18.

27.09.13

They were small waves,
More the likeness of time
Than sorrow —
Sorrow is great and breaks
Along the beach
Lonely under the search
Of gulls and white
With seafoam:
Crest and
Sky the gulls carve —
These were sidelong,
Hurrying swiftly
To the coming tide.
The bay lay curved
Within the land,
Gulls crossed the moon
Southeast
The light came on
The hook of headland
Beating up the course
Of ships home.
The air was autumn.
More than the swiftness of her cheek
Were the waves
shortly borne.

— Ralph Gustafson, “In time of fall,” Rivers Among Rocks (McClelland and Stewart, 1960), 28.