Harvard Islamica Podcast

Feb 25 2025 18 ep. 63 mins 29
Harvard Islamica Podcast artwork

Harvard Islamica, the podcast of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard University, explores topics related to the scholarly study of Islam and Muslim societies at Harvard and beyond.

  Education  History
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Ep. 18 | Islam in North America | Dr. Hussein Rashid

Feb 25 2025 42 mins  
In this episode, Dr. Hussein Rashid talks about his recently published volume, Islam in North America: An Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2024), which he co-edited with Huma Mohibullah and Vincent Biondo. Hussein discusses his trajectory as a scholar and how beginning his academic career in the post-9/11 world led him to believe in the importance of public-facing and accessible scholarsh

Ep. 17 | Design as Commons, Oases, and a Changing Climate | Dr. Safouan Azouzi

Aug 29 2024 71 mins  
In the first podcast episode of our "Climate Change and Muslim Societies" series, Dr. Safouan Azouzi discusses his research on Design for Social Innovation. Design, historically rooted in Eurocentric perspectives tied to capitalism and overconsumption, has contributed significantly to the climate crisis, disproportionately affecting the poor and disadvantaged. Safouan questions how

Ep. 16 | The Making of the Modern Muslim State | Prof. Malika Zeghal

Aug 16 2024 63 mins  
In her recent book, The Making of the Modern Muslim State: Islam and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa (Princeton University Press, 2024), Professor Malika Zeghal shows how Muslim states negotiated the role of Islam in governance in the 19th-21st centuries by exploring the history of constitution making, the impact of religious minorities on debates about Islam and dem

Ep. 15 | Reconstructing Alamut: New Approaches to the Study of the Nizari Ismaili Polity in Iran | Dr. Shiraz Hajiani

Jul 31 2023 96 mins  
Dr. Shiraz Hajiani's research contributes to the scant scholarship on the early Nizari Ismaili community. After a succession crisis in the Fatimid Empire in 1095 divided the Ismailis, the community in Iran accepted the crown-prince, Nizar, as the legitimate Imam and successor to the Imam-Caliph al-Mustanṣir and established a polity in Iran at the fortress of Alamut. While the Niz

Ep. 14 | Ottoman Boston: Discovering Little Syria | Chloe Bordewich and Lydia Harrington

Apr 03 2023 83 mins  
In this episode, we leave Harvard and Cambridge to explore the little-known history of immigration from the former Ottoman Empire to Boston in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While completing their PhDs at Boston University and Harvard, Dr. Lydia Harrington and Dr. Chloe Bordewich began to research the history of the neighborhood in today's Chinatown and South End once know

Ep. 13 | The Ties That Bind: Child Custody in Andalusī Mālikism, 3rd/9th to 6th/12 c. | Dr. Janan Delgado

Dec 19 2022 73 mins  
Dr. Janan Delgado is the winner of the 2022 Alwaleed Bin Talal Dissertation Prize in Islamic Studies for her dissertation entitled, "The Ties That Bind: Child Custody in Andalusī Mālikism, 3rd/9th to 6th/12th c." While scholars of Islamic law have produced numerous studies on marriage and divorce in recent decades, the topic of ḥaḍāna, or child custody, has received scant sc

Ep. 12 | Revisiting 'Women and Gender in Islam' | Leila Ahmed and Kecia Ali

Oct 04 2022 39 mins  
Professor Leila Ahmed's book, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (1992) was published in a time in which there was little scholarship on the history of women in Islam. Over the years, it became a classic and was re-published in 2021 with a new foreword by Professor Kecia Ali, who has used it in her own scholarship and also consistently in her teaching. I

Ep. 11 | Preserving Islamicate Cultural Heritage from Harvard’s Libraries to the Balkans | András Riedlmayer

Dec 17 2021 66 mins  
The Alwaleed Program team speaks with András Riedlmayer, former Aga Khan Bibliographer of Islamic Art and Architecture at Harvard's Fine Arts Library, about his career as a librarian, the development of the field of the history of Islamic art and architecture, and how his passion for cultural heritage preservation took him from working in Harvard's libraries to conducting field re

Ep. 10 | Islamic Scholarship in Africa | Ousmane Kane and Ebrima Sall

Oct 22 2021 57 mins  
In this episode, we discuss the new edited volume, Islamic Scholarship in Africa: New Directions and Global Contexts, with its editor, Professor Ousmane Kane, and his colleague, Dr. Ebrima Sall, who wrote the conclusion. This volume is the product of two conferences convened at Harvard by Professor Kane in 2017 on "Texts, Knowledge, and Practice: The Meaning of Scholarship in Musli

Ep. 9 | Beyond the Realm of Religion: The Idea of the Secular in Premodern Islam | Dr. Rushain Abbasi

Aug 12 2021 67 mins  
The Alwaleed Program team speaks with Dr. Rushain Abbasi, winner of the 2021 Alwaleed bin Talal Prize for Best Dissertation in Islamic Studies for his dissertation entitled, "Beyond the Realm of Religion: The Idea of the Secular in Premodern Islam." In this study, Rushain challenges the prevailing view that maintains that premodern Muslims did not distinguish between the religious