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Key Words in Islam
Ron Geaves
Georgetown University Press, 2006

Daily political events and the steady inevitability of globalism require that informed students and citizens learn something about religious traditions foreign to their own. Designed for both classroom and general use, these handy Key Words guidebooks are essential resources for those who want clear and concise explanations of common terms and unfamiliar concepts of major world religions.

Each pocket-sized volume contains definitions for over 400 terms from religious principles and significant periods to noteworthy figures.

A quick sampling of terms from this volume:

AhwalDa'waHajjIzzatMadrasaRamadanShari'aWatanZakat

Sample Definitions:

Izzat (Urdu) The concept of honour or family pride. Izzat functions as an eclectic mixture of Islamic codes and local customs which the family members are expected to observe. Non-observance leads to disgrace for the individual and the family.

Ramadan/Ramazan (U) The ninth month of the Muslim year which is observed as a fast lasting from sunrise to sunset. The fast is one of the five pillars of Islam and during this period Muslims should abstain from food, water and sexual activity. The fast is commanded by Allah in the Qur'an and is therefore obligatory for all adult Muslims except in special circumstances such as illness or menstruation. In such circumstances it is permissible to make up the period of the fast at a later date. The period of Ramadan includes some of the holiest occasions of the Muslim year such as the Night of Power that marks the first revelation of the Qur'an to Muhammad. The fast ends with the festival of Eid al-Fitr. The month of Ramadan is a period of extra religious sensitivity and many Muslims who are not usually observant will attend the mosque and perform their prayers five times a day. The fast provides an opportunity to reflect on religious matters and pass a month in prayer but is also considered to be a means of creating empathy for the poor and needy in the community (see itikaf, Eid al-Fitr, Laylat ul-Qadr).

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front cover of Knot of the Soul
Knot of the Soul
Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam
Stefania Pandolfo
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Through a dual engagement with the unconscious in psychoanalysis and Islamic theological-medical reasoning, Stefania Pandolfo’s unsettling and innovative book reflects on the maladies of the soul at a time of tremendous global upheaval. Drawing on in-depth historical research and testimonies of contemporary patients and therapists in Morocco, Knot of the Soul offers both an ethnographic journey through madness and contemporary formations of despair and a philosophical and theological exploration of the vicissitudes of the soul.
 
Knot of the Soul moves from the experience of psychosis in psychiatric hospitals, to the visionary torments of the soul in poor urban neighborhoods, to the melancholy and religious imaginary of undocumented migration, culminating in the liturgical stage of the Qur’anic cure. Demonstrating how contemporary Islamic cures for madness address some of the core preoccupations of the psychoanalytic approach, she reveals how a religious and ethical relation to the “ordeal” of madness might actually allow for spiritual transformation.
 
This sophisticated and evocative work illuminates new dimensions of psychoanalysis and the ethical imagination while also sensitively examining the collective psychic strife that so many communities endure today.
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front cover of The Krio of West Africa
The Krio of West Africa
Islam, Culture, Creolization, and Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century
Gibril R. Cole
Ohio University Press, 2013

Sierra Leone’s unique history, especially in the development and consolidation of British colonialism in West Africa, has made it an important site of historical investigation since the 1950s. Much of the scholarship produced in subsequent decades has focused on the “Krio,” descendants of freed slaves from the West Indies, North America, England, and other areas of West Africa, who settled Freetown, beginning in the late eighteenth century. Two foundational and enduring assumptions have characterized this historiography: the concepts of “Creole” and “Krio” are virtually interchangeable; and the community to which these terms apply was and is largely self-contained, Christian, and English in worldview.

In a bold challenge to the long-standing historiography on Sierra Leone, Gibril Cole carefully disentangles “Krio” from “Creole,” revealing the diversity and permeability of a community that included many who, in fact, were not Christian. In Cole’s persuasive and engaging analysis, Muslim settlers take center stage as critical actors in the dynamic growth of Freetown’s Krio society.

The Krio of West Africa represents the results of some of the first sustained historical research to be undertaken since the end of Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war. It speaks clearly and powerfully not only to those with an interest in the specific history of Sierra Leone, but to histories of Islam in West Africa, the British empire, the Black Atlantic, the Yoruban diaspora, and the slave trade and its aftermath.

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