Book Recommendations from MEMOs: February 2021 (Part 9)
Here’s a line-up of some recommended reading materials which relate to the wider research areas of our team here at MEMOs. If they’re interesting to you too, click on the links below to learn more:
Inal-Wafā’ bi asmā’ al-Nisā - The Lives of Female Hadith Scholars, by Akram Nadwi
MEMOs is excited to share that Shaykh Akram Nadwi’s 43-volume work on women hadith scholars is complete and has been completed and published in Arabic under the title Inal-Wafā’ bi asmā’ al-Nisā by Dar al-Minhaj press, Jeddah. ’. The multi-volume publication is the culmination of over a decade of Dr. Nadwi’s study on women scholars in Islam. The book is expected to reach UK booksellers soon!
For an introduction to the content of this extensive and exciting multi-volume work, we recommend reading Dr. Nadwi’s work Al-Muhaddithat: The Women Scholars in Islam which was first published in 2007:
This book is an English introduction to Dr Mohammad Akram Nadwi's 43-volume Arabic compendium of female hadith scholars. Dr Nadwi's work reveals the high public standing and authority enjoyed by learned women in the formative years of Islam. For centuries thereafter, women travelled extensively to seek religious knowledge and routinely attended the most prestigious mosques and madrasas across the Islamic world, teaching, learning and making important contributions to the study and transmission of Prophetic hadith. This previously unexplored history is uncovered through painstaking analysis of documents such as class registers and ijazahs from women authorizing men to teach, and the glowing testimonies from the most revered 'ulema about their female teachers. "Al-Muhaddithat: The Women Scholars in Islam" gives the reader a real insight into the most important lessons from Dr Nadwi's extensive research on this issue, and is essential reading for anyone interested in developing a balanced understanding of the role of women in Islamic societies, past and present.
https://store.alsalam.ac.uk/products/al-muhaddithat-the-women-scholars-in-islam
Tasting Difference: Food, Race, and Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Literature, by Gitanjali Shahani
Tasting Difference examines early modern discourses of racial, cultural, and religious difference that emerged in the wake of contact with foreign peoples and foreign foods from across the globe. Gitanjali Shahani reimagines the contact zone between Western Europe and the global South in culinary terms, emphasizing the gut rather than the gaze in colonial encounters. From household manuals that instructed English housewives how to use newly imported foodstuffs to "the spicèd Indian air" of A Midsummer Night's Dream, from the repurposing of Othello as an early modern pitchman for coffee in ballads to the performance of disgust in travel narratives, Shahani shows how early modern genres negotiated the allure and danger of foreign tastes.
Turning maxims such as "We are what we eat" on their head, Shahani asks how did we (the colonized subjects) become what you (the colonizing subjects) eat? How did we become alternately the object of fear and appetite, loathing and craving? Shahani takes us back several centuries to the process by which food came to be inscribed with racial character and the racial other came to be marked as edible, showing how the racializing of food began in an era well before chicken tikka masala and Balti cuisine. Bringing into conversation critical paradigms in early modern studies, food studies, and postcolonial studies, she argues that it is in the writing on food and eating that we see among the earliest configurations of racial difference, and it is experienced both as a different taste and as a taste of difference.
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501748714/tasting-difference/
Gentile Bellini's Portrait of Sultan Mehmed II: Lives and Afterlives of an Iconic Image, by Elizabeth Rodini
In 1479, the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini arrived at the Ottoman court in Istanbul, where he produced his celebrated portrait of Sultan Mehmed II. An important moment of cultural diplomacy, this was the first of many intriguing episodes in the picture's history. Elizabeth Rodini traces Gentile's portrait from Mehmed's court to the Venetian lagoon, from the railway stations of war-torn Europe to the walls of London's National Gallery, exploring its life as a painting and its afterlife as a famous, often puzzling image.
Rediscovered by the archaeologist Austen Henry Layard at the height of Orientalist outlooks in Britain, the picture was also the subject of a lawsuit over what defines a “portrait”; it was claimed by Italians seeking to hold onto national patrimony around 1900; and it starred in a solo exhibition in Istanbul in 1999. Rodini's focused inquiry also ranges broadly, considering the nature of historical evidence, the shifting status of authenticity and verisimilitude, and the contemporary political resonance of Old Master paintings. Told as an object biography and imagined as an exploration of art historical methodologies, this book situates Gentile's portrait in evolving dialogues between East and West, uncovering the many and varied ways that objects construct meaning.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/gentile-bellinis-portrait-of-sultan-mehmed-ii-9780755616619/
Translating Wisdom: Hindu-Muslim Intellectual Interactions in Early Modern South Asia, by Shanka Nair
During the height of Muslim power in Mughal South Asia, Hindu and Muslim scholars worked collaboratively to translate a large body of Hindu Sanskrit texts into the Persian language. Translating Wisdom reconstructs the intellectual processes and exchanges that underlay these translations. Using as a case study the 1597 Persian rendition of the Yoga-Vasistha—an influential Sanskrit philosophical tale whose popularity stretched across the subcontinent—Shankar Nair illustrates how these early modern Muslim and Hindu scholars drew upon their respective religious, philosophical, and literary traditions to forge a common vocabulary through which to understand one another. These scholars thus achieved, Nair argues, a nuanced cultural exchange and interreligious and cross-philosophical dialogue significant not only to South Asia’s past but also its present.
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520345683/translating-wisdom
The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India, by Supriya Gandhi
Dara Shukoh was the eldest son of Shah Jahan, the fifth Mughal emperor, best known for commissioning the Taj Mahal as a mausoleum for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal. Although the Mughals did not practice primogeniture, Dara, a Sufi who studied Hindu thought, was the presumed heir to the throne and prepared himself to be India’s next ruler. In this exquisite narrative biography, the most comprehensive ever written, Supriya Gandhi draws on archival sources to tell the story of the four brothers—Dara, Shuja, Murad, and Aurangzeb—who with their older sister Jahanara Begum clashed during a war of succession. Emerging victorious, Aurangzeb executed his brothers, jailed his father, and became the sixth and last great Mughal. After Aurangzeb’s reign, the Mughal Empire began to disintegrate. Endless battles with rival rulers depleted the royal coffers, until by the end of the seventeenth century Europeans would start gaining a foothold along the edges of the subcontinent.
Historians have long wondered whether the Mughal Empire would have crumbled when it did, allowing European traders to seize control of India, if Dara Shukoh had ascended the throne. To many in South Asia, Aurangzeb is the scholastic bigot who imposed a strict form of Islam and alienated his non-Muslim subjects. Dara, by contrast, is mythologized as a poet and mystic. Gandhi’s nuanced biography gives us a more complex and revealing portrait of this Mughal prince than we have ever had.
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674987296
Shakespeare and East Asia, by Alexa Alice Joubin
Structured around modes in which one might encounter Asian-themed performances and adaptations, Shakespeare and East Asia identifies four themes that distinguish post-1950s East Asian cinemas and theatres from works in other parts of the world: Japanese formalistic innovations in sound and spectacle; reparative adaptations from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; the politics of gender and reception of films and touring productions in South Korea and the UK; and multilingual, diaspora works in Singapore and the UK. These adaptations break new ground in sound and spectacle; they serve as a vehicle for artistic and political remediation or, in some cases, the critique of the myth of reparative interpretations of literature; they provide a forum where diasporic artists and audiences can grapple with contemporary issues; and, through international circulation, they are reshaping debates about the relationship between East Asia and Europe.
Bringing film and theatre studies together, this book sheds new light on the two major genres in a comparative context and reveals deep structural and narratological connections among Asian and Anglophone performances. These adaptations are products of metacinematic and metatheatrical operations, contestations among genres for primacy, or experimentations with features of both film and theatre.