Akbar’s Chamber - Experts Talk Islam
Education
The story of Joseph is one of the greatest sagas in world history. A youth of stunning beauty, beloved of his father but envied by his brothers, who is sold into slavery, before resisting the seductions of his owner’s wife and rising up to be governor of Egypt after interpreting Pharoah’s dreams. It is a story that has everything: jealousy and love, ambition and humility, edification and adventure. Unsurprisingly, from its scriptural foundations in the Book of Genesis and the Quranic chapter Yusuf (‘Joseph’), the saga has been retold, and reinterpreted, countless times, whether in the influential medieval Persian version of the poet Jami or the masterly modern retelling of the novelist Thomas Mann. In this episode, though, we focus on African versions of the life of Joseph as recounted by generations of Swahili Muslims through utendi poems and qissa tales. Working our way from medieval manuscripts and modern printed texts to more recent online tellings, we hear how East African Muslims have been both entertained and elevated by the memory of the prophet Yusuf. Nile Green talks to Annachiara Raia, author of Rewriting Yusuf: A Philological and Intertextual Study of a Swahili Islamic Manuscript Poem (Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe, 2020).
The Sacred Muslim Geographies of Chinese Central Asia
Dervish Poets and ‘Vernacular Islam’ in Medieval Turkey
The Magazine That Took Salafism to the World
Introduction to Akbar's Chamber
What the Prophet Muhammad Said… (and How We Know)
Deobandism: The Indian Origins of a Global Muslim Reform Movement
Ismaili Entanglements in the Indian Ocean World
The Man Who Founded the Muslim Brotherhood
Between Indo-Persian and Anglo-Persian: Cultural Encounters in the Bay of Bengal
Pakistan: Bastion and Battlefield of Islamic Modernism
The Mystic Companions of Rumi: Sufi Poetry in Classical Persian
Making Sense of ‘Multiple Islams’: The View from the Indian South
At the Religious Crossroads of Central Asia
Muslim Imperial Entanglements: The Hajj under the British Empire
The Peculiar Tale of Occultism in the Islamic Republic of Iran
The Martin Luther of the Muslim World?
The Strange Fate of the Sufi Shrine
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Navigating Life After 40
Teaching Learning Leading K-12
Regenerative Skills
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Mel Robbins Podcast