- In Ethnographic Reflections on Marriage in Dhofar, Oman (Anthem Press), Marielle Risse (Dhofar University) “examines how middle-class Muslim men and women in Dhofar, Oman, make and negotiate marital choices, tracing every stage of marriage through their own personal accounts.”
- In “Echoes of Empire: Persian Kingship in the Medieval Islamic World” (The Multicultural Middle Ages Podcast), Natasha Parnian (Macquarie University) “revisits the centuries after the fall of the Sasanian Empire to uncover the surprising afterlife of Persian kingship. Far from vanishing under Arab rule, ideas of sacred monarchy, justice, and divine glory were translated, adapted, and woven into Islamic political thought. Through figures like Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ and evolving genealogies linking caliphs to Sasanian royalty, this episode reveals how Persian imperial memory became a powerful language of legitimacy in the medieval Islamic world.”
- In The Politics of Islamic Ethics (Cambridge University Press), Raissa A Von Doetinchem de Rande (University of Chicago Divinity School) argues that “fundamental to Islamic thought is the idea that there is a way that human beings simply are, by nature or creation. This concept is called fiṭra. Rooting her investigation in the two central passages in the Qur’an and Hadith literature, where it is asserted that God created human beings in a certain way, the author moves beyond discussion of the usual figures who have commented on those texts to look instead at a group of classical Islamic philosophers rarely discussed in conjunction with ethical matters. Tracing the development of fiṭra through this overlooked strand of medieval thinking, von Doetinchem de Rande uses fiṭra as an entrée to wider topics in Islamic ethics. She shows that the notion of fiṭra articulated by al-Farabi, Ibn Bajja, Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd highlights important issues about organizational hierachies of human nature.” This, she argues, has major implications for contemporary political and legal debates.