I argue that investigation of Islamic movements in South Asia and elsewhere should be informed by anthropological concerns with subject-formation within historically specific cultural regimes. This entails a widening of the conventional emphasis on the public-formal aspects of I…
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This dissertation addresses a range of questions about language and the body through an ethnographic study of cassette-sermons in Egypt. Three dimensions of cassette-sermon practice were central to my project. First, I examined cassette-sermon listening as an ethical exercise ai…
Studies of formal education on modern Egypt have tended to mute local voices that harbor alternative aspirations and disregard the complex processes through which the state, indigenous social reformers, and individual social actors negotiate educational and social change; this s…
This dissertation is about the fundamental role of ambiguity in the formation, perception, social reception, and aesthetics of Islamic architecture. My argument stands against mainstream academic views, which stress the primacy of social needs in the interpretation of the ambigu…
This work is a social history of death in the early Islamic world. It concentrates on the representation of death rites in the sacred law of Islam. My principal concern has been to show how, over the course of the late seventh, eighth and early ninth centuries, early Islamic pie…
This study examines the participation of different social groups at an Islamic festival in Jerusalem honouring the Prophet Moses (al-Nabi Musa ), during the period of British rule in Palestine, from 1917 to 1937. These different social groups included Arab nationalist leaders, I…
This dissertation offers a thematic study of narratives of the Prophet Muh[dotbelow]ammad's ascension (mi`raj ) and the variety of images such narratives engendered between 1300 and 1600 in Arab, Persian, and Turkic lands. It proves that ascension tales exited the realm of the b…
This dissertation suggests that the Patristic conceptualization of salvation as theosis (deification, divinization) can provide Evangelical missionaries with a paradigm useful for the explanation of the gospel to Muslims. Two major questions are addressed. The first concerns the…
This dissertation explores ways in which Jewish, Christian, and Islamic authorities define and fortify the boundaries of their communities through the articulation of foreign food restrictions. Laws relating to the involvement of religious outsiders in food preparation and share…
This dissertation undertakes an examination of conceptions of human equality in Islamic law. The dissertation uses the history of slavery and its abolition in several Muslim locales as a vehicle for uncovering juridical and sociolegal factors that play a role in shaping ideas ab…
This dissertation places the Chinese Muslim literatus Liu Zhi (1660?-1730?) and his writings in their historical, cultural, social and religio-philosophical context. Liu Zhi was affiliated with a burgeoning network of Sinicized Muslim scholars of the late Ming-early Qing period,…
The writings attributed to Ahmad ibn Ali al-Buni represent the earliest surviving collection of "Islamic magic"---efforts to influence the world through the manipulation of Islamic symbols. A representative selection of these texts, including Shams al-maarif (al-Buni's most famo…
This thesis examines the methods by which the Ottoman Empire conquered and endeavored to control the city of Aleppo--a cosmopolitan urban center now in northern Syria. It employs a broad understanding of conquest, one that considers engagements and orientations stretching far ar…
In 203/818, 'Ali b. Musa al-Rid[dotbelow]a, eighth Shi`i Imam and heir apparent of the `Abbasid caliph al-Ma`mun, passed away in the Iranian province of Tus. Mashhad, the place of his burial, emerged as a site of visitation during the late tenth century, and assumed increasing i…
The central question addressed in this study is: "How do two Islamic civil society associations in Indonesia conceptualize and operationalize democracy, citizenship, and education for democratic citizenship?" Using qualitative methods, I explored the ideas and practices of membe…
This dissertation critically examines competing views of man and nature in mainstream, or "neoclassical," economic theory and Islamic economics. Ironically, the contemporary literature in Islamic economics often uncritically adopts the key philosophical presuppositions of neocla…
The rise of Islamically-based insurgencies since 1978 has received considerable popular and academic attention. Much of this attention, however, has been somewhat atheoretical, with Islamist insurgencies being treated as a rather unique phenomenon not comparable with other such …
Stories about `Abd Allah b. al-Zubayr, his brother, Mus[dotbelow]`ab, and their roles in the contest over the caliphate during the second civil war are used in this study to examine how later Muslims remembered particular figures and events from early Islamic history. A number o…
What has been done and what is being done in the misrepresentation of the Palestine question is, on the one hand, an attempt to establish territorial claims through a selective portrayal of historical chronology which lends maximum support to a particular argument, namely the ri…