Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk Islam
Episodes
What is a Madrasa? Life and Learning in an Islamic College
01 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the years after 9/11, madrasas became a major concern of serious newspapers throughout the Western world. But two decades later, how many of us can...
Translating the Untranslatable: The Curious History of Quran Translation
01 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How should one go about translating a text that is untranslatable? Especially when the text is believed to be the living word of God? Muslims have pon...
The Wolf King: The Forgotten Spanish Kingdom of Ibn Mardanish
01 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past few decades, archaeologists have excavated the remnants of a little-known Muslim kingdom from beneath hotels, parking lots, and even a c...
Pakistan’s Little Mecca: Architectural Marvels of Medieval Sindh
01 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Everyone has heard of Mecca. But few people outside Pakistan have heard of Makli, or “Little Mecca,” the sacred cemetery that is both the holiest ...
Islam in the Land of Bilal: The Rich Heritage of Ethiopia’s Muslims
01 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today nearly a third of Ethiopians are Muslims. At around 37 million, that’s a larger Muslim population than many Middle Eastern countries. Accordin...
Mecca through Bosnian Eyes: Five Centuries of Pilgrimage Writing from Southeast Europe
01 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Muslims of Bosnia in southeast Europe treasure a centuries-long tradition of writing about the journey to Mecca. These treatises and travelogues h...
Islamic Occultism: The ‘Hidden’ Sciences of the Premodern Muslim World
01 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Islam and the occult may seem like odd bedfellows. But during the medieval and early modern periods, Muslim thinkers wrote vast numbers of manuscripts...
The Muslim World: The History of an Idea
01 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Whether in newspaper articles, books, or conversations about Islam, the ‘Muslim world’ is a commonplace term. Yet it was only coined in the late n...
The Muslim Veneration of Christian Saints: Arabic Accounts of the Excellence of Christians
01 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As anyone will know who has so much has flicked through the pages of the Quran, the Islamic scripture contain many discussions of the Virgin Mary and ...
Plumbing the Depths of Existence: Ibn Arabi on Human and Divine Being
01 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The influence of the great medieval mystic Ibn ‘Arabi is immeasurable, reaching from his home city of Murcia in Andalusia to Aceh in Indonesia and j...
The Swahili Poetry of Mozambique: A Muslim World Literature from Southeast Africa
01 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Meaning ‘language of the coasts’ in Arabic, Swahili emerged in East Africa many centuries ago through contact with the wider Muslim world. Althoug...
The Muslims of Ukraine: Empires, Mystics, and Manuscripts
01 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In libraries all across the Muslim world, old manuscripts survive by scholars whose names end with al-Qirimi: ‘The Crimean.’ Discussing all manner...
A Medieval Muslim on the Jewish and Christian Scriptures
01 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How would a medieval Sufi Muslim view the Jewish and Christian scriptures? In this episode, we explore this question through the teachings of Abd al-K...
Orientalism Reconsidered: Collecting Islamic Manuscripts in Seventeenth Century Europe
01 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 1632, the University Library at Cambridge was transformed by the arrival of an extraordinary collection of manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Turkish,...
Sicily under the Arabs and Normans: A Medieval Experiment in Multiculturalism
01 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
For more than four centuries, Muslims, Christians and Jews dwelt side by side on the Mediterranean island of Sicily. For around half of that time—fr...
Daring to be Different: Muslim Debates about Imitating Non-Believers
01 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In a famous hadith, the Prophet Muhammad told his followers, “Be different!” He also warned them about the potential dangers of imitating non-Musl...
The Long-Forgotten Qurans of Spain: A Muslim Scripture in Medieval Spanish
01 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Muslims lived in the Iberian Peninsula for best part of a millennium before their final expulsion of the early 1600s. During those nine centuries, the...
Soft Power Islam: The Geopolitical Contest over ‘Moderate Islam’
01 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The past few decades—since 9/11 in particular—have seen the increasing prominence of ‘moderate Islam’ in the public sphere. But who gets to de...
Islam and Jazz: An African American Odyssey
31 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The mid-twentieth century was not only a time when some of the greatest jazz music was created. It was also a period when many African American musici...
Lessons from an Indian Village: Shared Hindu-Muslim Devotion in South India
30 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Just how much does Islam vary in different places around the world? And how have local forms of Islam evolved in rural regions where Muslims have live...
Chinese Muslims and the Middle East: The Transformation of Islam in Modern China
31 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
China is not only home to around 20 million Muslims, it is also home to a variety of different Islamic traditions, and of various ethnic groups who fo...
Sharia and the Modern State: How the British Empire—and its Muslim Subjects—Transformed Islamic Law
29 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Many people, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, might think of Sharia as ancient and unchanging. But like any form of law, it has a history. And like every...
The Mongol Storm: How the Mongols Transformed the Middle East
01 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 1218, the pagan armies of the Mongols appeared on the horizon of the Middle East to begin a series of campaigns unparalleled in their scale of viol...
Saintly Infrastructures of Medieval Islam: The Shrine at Torbat-e Jam
01 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The importance of Christian monasteries to the socio-economic no less than the religious life of medieval Europe has long been recognized. Far less we...
A Muslim Book Collector in Late Ottoman Europe
08 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today, thousands of Islamic manuscripts survive as testimony to the seven-hundred-year Muslim presence in southeastern Europe. But collections of manu...
Who Decides What is Islamic? Insights from Anthropology
01 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
As any observer of the Islamic world—or regular listener to Akbar’s Chamber—will know, there are a dizzying variety of different forms of Islam....
The Many Meanings of Muslim Martyrdom
30 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today, Muslim martyrdom is often most associated with the modern phenomenon of suicide bombing. But definitions about martyrdom—and its relationship...
The Muslims of Sri Lanka: Custodians of Adam’s Footprint
01 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
As a crossroads of the Indian Ocean’s monsoon winds, Sri Lanka has hosted Muslim traders, pilgrims, and settlers since the early centuries of Islami...
Praising the Prophet in West Africa: The Profound Eloquence of Arabic Madih Poems
01 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
West Africa has a rich history of the writing and reading of Arabic poetry that connects the region to the literary and philosophical traditions of th...
The Archaeology of Islam: What Digging Tells us that Reading Doesn’t
30 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For Muslims and non-Muslims alike, the study of Islam usually equates to the reading of books. But in recent decades, archaeological excavations have ...
The Most Influential Branch of Islam You’ve Never Heard Of: Barelwism
01 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Founded in north India in the late nineteenth century, the Barelwi (or Barelvi) movement has since gained more than 200 million followers across India...
The Architect of Global Jihad: The Exile Life of Abdallah Azzam
01 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Born in Palestine in 1941, Abdallah Azzam became associated with the Muslim Brotherhood as an adult refugee in Jordan. Then, in his twenties and thirt...
Islamic Law across the Indian Ocean: Shafi‘i Debates from Egypt to Indonesia
31 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What is Islamic law? How does it work? And who decides what is and isn’t legally permitted? In this episode, we’ll be exploring these questions wi...
The Adventures of Joseph in Africa: Swahili Tales of the Prophet Yusuf
01 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 i...
A World of Wonders: A Muslim Guidebook to the Cosmos
31 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Writing amid the tumult of the Mongol invasions, the polymath Zakariyya al-Qazwini compiled an account of the earth and heavens that rose above his di...
How Bengalis Became Muslim (and How Islam Became Bengali)
01 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Home to some 175 million Muslims, Bengal—incorporating today’s Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal—is one of the largest but least kn...
The Meanings of Muslim Mysticism: An Introduction to Classical Sufi Texts
01 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Between the eighth and tenth century, a series of profound texts were written in Arabic that explored the deepest, darkest and ultimately the most bri...
Singapore Islam: How a Commercial Hub became a Muslim Melting Pot
31 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Few people today would think of Singapore as being a religious center, still less a Muslim one. But even before it began its great commercial climb in...
‘The Master of Illumination’: The Teachings of Suhrawardi
30 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Few philosophers can be said to have been watershed figures, in the wake of whose teachings a tradition of philosophy forever changed its course. Shih...
God’s Unruly Friends: Rule Breaking World Renouncers of Medieval Islam
01 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
According to a famous saying of the Prophet Muhammad, “Poverty is my pride.” Perhaps no group of Muslims took that adage so seriously as the qalan...
The Salafi Search for Authenticity
01 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Salafism has gained a great deal of media attention over the past twenty years, but for all that remains poorly understood. Part of the reason is a pa...
The Meaning of Muslim Dreams: Landscapes of the Imagination in Egypt
01 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
According to a famous saying of the Prophet Muhammad, “A true dream constitutes one forty-sixth part of prophethood.” Over the following centuries...
The Medieval Arabic World of Books: A Tour of a Lost Syrian Library
01 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode we explore the contents of a remarkable medieval library: the Ashrafiya of Damascus. What makes the Ashrafiya important isn’t so muc...
Comparing Christianity & Islam: Debating Religions in the Age of Print
01 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Usually in Akbar’s Chamber we pursue questions of inter-religious understanding. But in this episode, we explore its flip side by way of the religio...
Rediscovering and Reconnecting: How the Hui Muslims of China Encountered their Co-Religionists
01 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Studies of 19th and 20th century Chinese history often focus on Christian missionary activities in China. But the same period saw members of China’s...
The Other Shi‘ites: Recreating Karbala in Pakistan and India
01 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Shi‘ism is usually thought of in relation to the Middle East, especially Iran and Iraq. But India and Pakistan have a combined population of up to 5...
One Islam or Many? Making Sense of the Varieties of Islam
01 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Two facts confront someone studying Islam. One is the astounding variety of practices and beliefs that from place to place and time to time are con...
From ‘Failed States’ to ‘Hidden Caliphs’: How Muslim Scholar-Saints became Pillars of Social Order
01 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode we’ll explore the history of a ‘hidden caliphate’ through which scholar-saints of the Naqshbandi Sufi order provided social stab...
An African Spiritual Odyssey: The ‘Ajami Traditions of African Islam
01 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Africa’s Islamic traditions receive far less attention than is warranted by their intellectual and spiritual wealth. Because African Muslims have no...
Islam and Yoga: Sitting Together, or Worlds Apart?
01 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
For anyone entering a yoga studio today, the world of Islam might feel a million miles away. Yet for more than a thousand years, practitioners of Yoga...
Science, Faith, and the Search for True Knowledge: The Thought of Said Nursi
01 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the twentieth century, the rise of science and secularism became major preoccupations for countless religious thinkers, Muslim or otherwise. Among ...
The Ottoman Legacy in Southeast Europe: The Deep Roots of Balkan Islam
01 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Discussions of Islam in Europe often focus on the northern and western regions of the continent, where Muslim communities only evolved in the late twe...
Technology and Religious Change: How Printing Transformed the Islamic Tradition
01 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Historians have long recognized how the spread of printing in early modern Europe was a major contributor to the Reformation and Renaissance. So, when...
Islam in East Africa: Arabic Traditions of the Swahili Coast
01 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Since early Islamic times, the shores and islands of East Africa have been closely linked to the Arabian Peninsula by monsoon winds that carried trade...
At the Court of the Malay Sultans: The Making of Southeast Asian Islam
01 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Today Indonesia is home to the largest Muslim population of any nation on the planet. But when, and how, was this region converted? And how were Islam...
The Many Forms of Muslim Charity: A Brief History of Islamic Almsgiving
30 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
From the verses of the Quran and the deeds of the Prophet Muhammad, charity has taken on many different forms over the fourteen centuries of Muslim hi...
The Islam of the Afghan-Pakistan Borderlands
01 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we explore the interplay between religion and geography through a case study of the mountain regions that formed the borderlands betw...
The Muslims of Russia: Europe’s Largest, Oldest and Least Known Muslim Minority
01 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Since the middle of the sixteenth century, Russia has been home to a large but little-known Muslim community that stretches from the Caucasus mountain...
The Original Akbar’s Chamber: Inter-Religious Dialogue at the Court of a Mughal Emperor
02 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 1575, the Mughal emperor Akbar established the Ibadat-khana, or ‘House of Worship,’ at his Indian capital of Fatehpur Sikri. Over the following...
The Sacred Muslim Geographies of Chinese Central Asia
04 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Uyghurs of the Xinjiang region of China have been the focus of much media attention in the past few years. In this episode, we journey beyond the ...
Dervish Poets and ‘Vernacular Islam’ in Medieval Turkey
02 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
While the Quran was revealed in Arabic, for more than a thousand years Muslims have explored its meanings and implications in many other languages. ...
The Magazine That Took Salafism to the World
14 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1898, an obscure Syrian scholar called Rashid Rida founded a magazine in Cairo called al-Manar (‘The Lighthouse’). Over the next forty years,...
Introduction to Akbar's Chamber
10 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Akbar’s Chamber offers a non-political, non-sectarian and non-partisan space for exploring the past and present of Islam. It has no political or the...
What the Prophet Muhammad Said… (and How We Know)
10 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Almost everyone nowadays has heard of the Quran. But what about the Hadith? Far larger than the Quran itself, the Hadith comprise several hundred thou...
Deobandism: The Indian Origins of a Global Muslim Reform Movement
10 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
From its humble origins as a small-town madrasa founded in colonial India in 1866, the Deoband movement has become one of the most influential molders...
Ismaili Entanglements in the Indian Ocean World
10 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Among the many varieties of Islam, and the numerous Muslim minorities, few are less known but more fascinating than the Bohras. A minority within a mi...
The Man Who Founded the Muslim Brotherhood
10 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Founded in Egypt in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood became the key promoter of the political visions of Islam that spread more widely as the century prog...
Between Indo-Persian and Anglo-Persian: Cultural Encounters in the Bay of Bengal
10 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How did Muslims encounter and interpret other cultures before the modern era of globalization? To answer this question, we turn to the testimony of on...
Pakistan: Bastion and Battlefield of Islamic Modernism
10 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the decades either side of 1900, a series of influential Muslim thinkers tried to reconcile Islam with the modern world. As their ideas gained prom...
The Mystic Companions of Rumi: Sufi Poetry in Classical Persian
10 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
For almost a thousand years, cultured Muslims from many regions of the world turned for inspiration and solace to the Persian mystical poetry of the S...
Making Sense of ‘Multiple Islams’: The View from the Indian South
10 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Over its long history, Islam has taken on many distinctive regional forms. With its many languages and countless cultural influences, South Asia – c...
At the Religious Crossroads of Central Asia
10 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Situated in northern Afghanistan, the ancient city of Balkh was one of the great cultural crossroads of world history. Following its transformation fr...
Muslim Imperial Entanglements: The Hajj under the British Empire
10 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In terms of geographical breadth no less than population numbers, the British Empire was the largest ‘empire of Muslims’ in history, reaching from...
The Peculiar Tale of Occultism in the Islamic Republic of Iran
10 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
When Middle Eastern students were sent to study medicine in Europe, one of the unexpected outcomes was the introduction to Iran of the fashionable occ...
The Martin Luther of the Muslim World?
10 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The late nineteenth century saw the onset of a great religious transformation that might well be called the Muslim reformation. Among Sunnis at least,...
The Strange Fate of the Sufi Shrine
09 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past millennium, pilgrimages to the shrines of Sufi saints have played an important part in religious and cultural life for most regions of t...