The first book to explore the modern history of Islam in South Asia

The first modern state to be founded in the name of Islam, Pakistan was the largest Muslim country in the world at the time of its establishment in 1947. Today it is the second-most populous, after Indonesia. Islam in Pakistan is the…

Ashraf `Ali Thanawi (1863-1943) was one of the most prominent religious scholars in Islamic history. Author of over a thousand books on different aspects of Islam, his work sought to defend the Islamic scholarly tradition and to articulate its authority in an age of momentous religious and political change. In this authoritative biography,…

From the cleric-led Iranian revolution to the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, many people have been surprised by what they see as the modern reemergence of an antimodern phenomenon. This book helps account for the increasingly visible public role of traditionally educated Muslim religious scholars (the `ulama) across contemporary Muslim…

The main concern of this book is the religious policies of the early ‘Abbāsid caliphs. It focuses on the religious trends which went into the making of Sunnī Islam, and traces the emergence of the nascent Sunnī elite in relation to the ‘Abbāsids.
Various aspects of the caliphs' evolving relationship with the religious scholars are studied…

Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in the Scholarship category, granted by the Jewish Book Council

Living with the Law explores the marital disputes of Jews in medieval Islamic Egypt (1000-1250). Examining the rich documents of the Cairo Geniza, a unique repository of discarded paper discovered in Cairo synagogue, the book…