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Revival from Below tells the story of the Deoband movement, one of the most important Islamic revivalist movements of the modern era. Founded in 1866 in colonial northern India, the movement has expanded globally through the establishment of seminaries (madrasas) that are similar to the original Deobandi seminary, the Dar al-`Ulum in Deoband, India. Today the Deoband movement is best known for the fact that the Taliban emerged from Deobandi seminaries in Pakistan. Because of this connection, comparatively little scholarly work has been done on other, more central, aspects of the movement. This book focuses on the movement’s efforts to regulate and shape Muslim public life, especially through its scholars’ critiques of popular devotional practices (especially celebrations of the prophet Muhammad’s birthday and Sufi saints’ death anniversaries), despite the fact that Deobandi scholars themselves identify as Sufis. The book examines how Deobandi scholars used the publication of short texts to carry out this reformist mission. It then traces how these critiques travel through Indian Muslim networks to South Africa, where they intersect with Muslim publics and politics that are markedly different from the Indian context. Accordingly, this book is the first extensive study of Deobandis beyond South Asia and of their efforts to maintain the centrality of traditionally educated Islamic scholars (the `ulama) in Muslim public life.

This book explores the emotional space occupied by children in modern Islamic societies. Focusing on visual representations of children, primarily from modern Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan, it examines important concepts ranging from cuteness, innocence, devotion, violence, and sacrifice to emotion, aspiration, virtue, performance, nationhood, community, and gender. It grounds the study of the visual representation of children in a concise treatment of the history of childhood, education, and religion, as well as the national histories of the societies in question. In addition to exploring a topic that has never been studied comparatively before, it extends the boundaries of scholarship on emotion, religion, and visual culture, arguing for the centrality of conceptions of childhood to adult intentionalities at a societal level. It demonstrates the ways in which emotion is enacted in a sociocultural space that one might call an emotional habitus, ecosystem, or an emotional regime. It also uses the concept of an aesthetic social imagination to explain how public emotional acts shape the lives of more than the individual who enacts them. Emotions are kinetic and directional, directed inward at the individual's sense of self at the same time as they are directed at other members of society. This quality allows them to function morally as well as aspirationally.

While scholars have long studied how Muslims authenticated and transmitted Muhammad’s sayings and practices (hadith), the story of how Muslims interpreted and reinterpreted hadith across a millennium or more has yet to be told. Said the Prophet of God takes up this charge, illuminating the rich social and intellectual stakes of hadith commentary in the times and places it came to life: classical Andalusia, medieval Egypt, and modern India. The book closes with an epilogue on how commentary has been taken up by contemporary Islamist groups such as ISIS. Weaving together tales of high court rivalries, colonial politics, and contemporary field notes with explorations of the fine-grained debates among hadith commentators, Said the Prophet of God offers an interdisciplinary audience new avenues for understanding traditions of interpretation at the intersection of social and intellectual history across long periods of time.

In November, 1999, hundreds of thousands of Northern Nigerians took to the streets of Zamfara state to demand the (re)implementation of full shar’iah penal law. Insisting on the laws of God where the laws of man had failed, Nigerians believed shari’ah would stem massive corruption and deepening poverty in their society. Two years after shar’iah, a peasant woman from Katsina state, Amina Lawal, was sentenced to death by stoning for committing the crime of zinā, or illegal sexual activity, raising world wide concern about her fate and that of Nigeria. This book critically examines this western reaction, and asks how a revolution for total restructuring of society to bring justice and poverty alleviation most immediately affected a peasant woman accused of sexual crimes. Through the lens of Lawal’s case and its dramatic outcome, Eltantawi examines original Nigerian archival material, her ethnographic fieldwork in Northern Nigeria, premodern and modern Nigerian history, histories of Hausaland’s colonial encounter, the early legalization of stoning in Islam, Islamic legal theory, and contemporary debates around gender and geopolitics to piece together the histories that gave rise to latest Islamic revolution in Northern Nigeria -- the failure of which empowered terrorist group Boko Haram.

The violent partitioning of British India along religious lines and ongoing communalist aggression have compelled Indian citizens to contend with the notion that an exclusive, fixed religious identity is fundamental to selfhood. Even so, Muslim saint shrines known as dargahs attract a religiously diverse range of pilgrims. This ethnography traces the long-term healing processes of Muslim and Hindu devotees of a complex of dargahs in northwestern India. Drawing on pilgrims' narratives, ritual and everyday practices, archival documents, and popular publications in Hindi and Urdu, the book considers questions about the nature of religion in general and Indian religion in particular. Grounded in stories from individual lives and experiences, the book offers not only a humane, readable portrait of dargah culture, but also new insight into notions of selfhood and religious difference in contemporary India.

In this volume, the autobiographical writings of three leading women in today's Islamic revival movement reveal dramatic stories of religious transformation. As interpreted by this book, the autobiographies provide a powerful, groundbreaking portrayal of gender, religion, and discourses of the body in Arabo-Islamic culture. At the center of each story is a lively female Islamic spirituality that questions secular hierarchies while reaffirming patriarchal ones.