CANR
WORK TITLE: Religion Is Not Done with You
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Children: two.
EDUCATION:Colgate University, B.A. (religion and Asian studies), 2005; Harvard Divinity School, M.T.S., 2007; University of North Carolina, Ph.D. (religious studies), 2012.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Educator, writer, and media host. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, associate director and FLAS coordinator for the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations, 2010; University of Vermont, Burlington, assistant professor, 2012-19, associate professor of religion, 2019–, Humanities Center associate director, 2019-22, director, 2022–; cohost, with Megan Goodwin, of podcast Keeping It 101: A Killjoy’s Introduction to Religion, 2020–. Gates Lecturer, Grinnell College, 2020-21. Board member, Vermont Humanities.
MEMBER:American Academy of Religion (cochair of Study of Islam unit, 2017-21), South Asian Muslim Studies Association, South Asian Literary Association, American Association of University Professors, United Academics.
AWARDS:Fulbright Scholarship, 2022.
WRITINGS
Coeditor, with Zahra M. S. Ayubi, of special edition of Muslim World, Vol. 106, no. 4, October 2016, Shifting Boundaries: The Study of Islam in the Humanities. Islam section editor, Religion Compass, 2016-22.
Contributor to anthologies, including Routledge Handbook of Islam and Gender, edited by Justine Howe, Routledge (New York, NY), 2020; and Routledge Handbook of Islam in Asia, edited by Chiara Formichi, Routledge (New York, NY), 2021. Contributor to periodicals, including Comparative Islamic Studies, English Historical Review, International Journal for Middle East Studies, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Journal of South Asian Religious History, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review.
SIDELIGHTS
[open new]A professor of religion at the University of Vermont, Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst specializes in Islamic and South Asian studies. She was raised in New Jersey, where she enjoyed reading as well as casual debating and multiple sports. In an interview with Anmol Ghavri for Chapati Mystery, Morgenstein Fuerst referred to herself as “a former and wannabe athlete,” with fair mastery of tennis, inclined to “rely on sports metaphors a lot.” She earned degrees in religion and theology from Colgate, Harvard, and the University of North Carolina (UNC), with concentrations on Asian studies as an undergraduate and Islamic studies for her doctorate. In 2012 she became an assistant professor of religion at the University of Vermont (UVM), where she directed the Middle East Studies program from 2016 to 2019 and rose to associate professor. Having helped direct the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations while pursuing her doctorate at UNC-Chapel Hill, Morgenstein Fuerst helped lead UVM’s Humanities Center, becoming full director in 2022.
Morgenstein Fuerst’s first monograph, Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels, and Jihad, treats the Sepoy Rebellion in British India and its seminal influence on the historical trend of racializing and minoritizing Muslims—treating them collectively as racial “others” and nonmajority groups to be subjugated. Her coedited volume Words of Experience: Translating Islam with Carl W. Ernst, grew out of a 2017 conference honoring a mentor of hers at UNC. She contributed an essay assessing Ernst’s post-9/11 volume Following Muhammad (2003) and his How to Read the Qur’an (2011), a response to American Islamophobia. Morgenstein Fuerst has also teamed up with Dr. Megan Goodwin, who specializes in gender and American religions, to cohost the self-produced podcast Keeping It 101: A Killjoy’s Introduction to Religion.
Morgenstein Fuerst and Goodwin took their collaboration further in coauthoring the book Religion Is Not Done with You; or, The Hidden Power of Religion on Race, Maps, Bodies, and Law. The authors’ project is to elucidate the ways that religions exert force in shaping society and government as well as in classifying and oppressing peoples. With the term religion not coined until the second millennium CE, the authors distinguish it from spirituality in recognizing the ways that organized religions, especially in the Judeo-Christian traditions, have built up power structures specifically to wield influence over followers and nonfollowers alike. The colonial era saw European Christians finding manifold spiritual practices around the world only to slight them as animism, fetishism, idol worship, or “minor” religions at best. Even when nonwhite “heathens” convert to Christianity, their credentials are often considered suspect. In the United States, the long dominance of the white Christian tradition has brought about a society where education, health care, and government have been molded to fit Christian interests, motivating aligned parties to both adhere to and demand the continuance of the status quo. Where Catholic organizations run hospitals, life-or-death decisions might be made based on Christian tenets about, for example, unborn life. Christian values have largely been encoded as “American values,” and community security initiatives like “See something, say something” largely reinforce stereotyping and prejudice against, for example, Arabic speakers boarding planes.
Reviewers were impressed by the scope of Religion Is Not Done with You, with a Kirkus Reviews writer affirming that the volume offers a “provocative, fresh way to look at the reach of religious belief in a supposedly secular society.” In a Feminism and Religion review, Esther Nelson observed that Morgenstein Fuerst and Goodwin’s “writing style has a youthful familiarity—probably purposively done—to broaden their reach to all audiences.” Nelson appreciated the book’s proactive angle, remarking that “when we understand how religion works in society, the authors’ admonishment, ‘Go be a problem who makes good trouble for great justice’ takes on a clarity and urgency—something we can only do by asking questions … and thinking critically.” The Kirkus Reviews writer hailed Religion Is Not Done with You as a “critical examination of the pervasive influence of religion in daily life.”[close new]
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Asian Ethnology, spring, 2023, Marcia Hermansen, review of Words of Experience: Translating Islam with Carl W. Ernst, p. 165.
Feminism and Religion, December 28, 2024, Esther Nelson, review of Religion Is Not Done with You; or, The Hidden Power of Religion on Race, Maps, Bodies, and Law.
Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 2024, review of Religion Is Not Done with You.
ONLINE
Chapati Mystery, https://www.chapatimystery.com/ (July 17, 2018), Anmol Ghavri, “XQs XIII—A Conversation with Ilyse R. Morgenstein Fuerst.”
Ilyse R. Morgenstein Fuerst website, https://www.profirmf.com (February 8, 2025).
University of Vermont website, https://www.uvm.edu/ (February 8, 2025), author profile.
Vermont Humanities website, https://www.vermonthumanities.org/ (February 8, 2025), author profile.
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst
Home » About Us » Our People » Board of Directors » Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst
Rep. John Lewis and Andrew Aydin with students in front of a schoolbus
Board of Directors
Professor Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst of South Burlington specializes in Islamic studies. Her areas of expertise include Islam, religions of South Asia, and theories and histories of religion. Morgenstein Fuerst’s research deals has addressed a range of issues, including racializations of religion, historiography, definitions of “religion,” Indo-Persian manuscripts, and colonialism and imperialism.
She earned her B.A. in Religion from Colgate University in 2005, an M.T.S. at Harvard Divinity School in 2007, and a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Islamic Studies concentration in the department of Religious Studies in 2012. At UVM, she has taught courses on Islam, South Asian religions, theory and method in the study of religion, modernity, race, and empire.
I’m a scholar of religion, race and racialization, and history. I mostly write about Muslims, often but not always located in South Asia, and imperialism. I’m currently working on Imperial Pandemics, an academic monograph that thinks about religion and race as global phenomena. I am also hard at work on Religion Isn’t Done with You (under contract, Beacon Press) with Dr. Megan Goodwin, which is a book for a general audience that draws on our popular, grant-funded podcast, Keeping It 101: a Killjoy’s Introduction to Religion.
I am associate professor of Religion and director of the Humanities Center at the University of Vermont, where I have taught since 2012. I have been recognized as an award-winning teacher whose courses are about the history of religion, Islamic practice and history, race and imperialism, and South Asian traditions.
I earned my PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in religious studies, with a specialization in Islamic studies; a Master’s of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School; and a BA from Colgate University in Religion and Asian Studies.
I serve on a number of editorial, steering, and leadership boards and was co-chair of the American Academy of Religion’s Study of Islam unit (2017-2021). I was the Islam section editor of Religion Compass (2016-2022). In 2022-2023, I was a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Awardee, and I will be completing the work on Imperial Pandemics at the University of Birmingham, UK.
I grew up playing all the sports and reading all the books and arguing all the time in New Jersey—and if you ever listen to my podcast or public talks, you’ll surely hear the accent (and the cursing; sorry, Ma). In my spare time, I raise two feisty kids, watch too much TV, read too many romance novels, and enjoy every single carbohydrate I’ve ever met.
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst
Associate Professor
Director UVM Humanities Center
ilyse.morgenstein-fuerst@uvm.edu
(802) 656-0232
94 University Pl
Old Mill Annex, Room A507
Burlington, VT 05405 United States
Alma mater(s)
Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
M.T.S., Harvard Divinity School
B.A., Colgate University
Document
Download CV
Bio
Professor Morgenstein Fuerst specializes in Islamic studies. Her areas of expertise include Islam, religions of South Asia, and theories and histories of religion. Morgenstein Fuerst's research deals has addressed a range of issues, including racializations of religion, historiography, definitions of “religion,” Indo-Persian manuscripts, and colonialism and imperialism. She earned her B.A. in Religion from Colgate University in 2005, an M.T.S. at Harvard Divinity School in 2007, and a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Islamic Studies concentration in the department of Religious Studies in 2012. At UVM, she has taught courses on Islam, South Asian religions, theory and method in the study of religion, modernity, race, and empire.
“My work centers on definitions: what is religion? How is it used? Who uses it—and when? To what avail? How is religion present and absent, cultivated and deployed across geographic location and historical eras? There are seemingly infinite answers to this complex questions. But my work in and outside the classroom seeks to think these through. Specifically, my research deals with how Muslims and other South Asians used the category of religion—and ones like it—to order political, social, and private aspects of their lives in the modern period and beyond. Understanding these complicated, historically rooted conversations is important if we are to attempt to understand how religion continues to shape South Asia—and the way we study it—today. In both my research and my teaching, I aim to bring historical contexts, conceptions, and debates to the fore; I want my students to wrestle with the legacies such an untidy history and topic undoubtedly leaves upon their world.”
Courses
REL 1230 - D2: Introducing Islam Introduces Islam in the context of the study of religion, focusing especially on its variation over time and location, as evidenced by texts, rituals, festivals, and competing interpretations. Credits: 3.0
REL 2050 - Interpretation of Religion Examination of major theories and methods used in studying and interpreting religious phenomena. Credits: 3.0
REL 1050 Religion, Politics and Power Introduction to major themes in the study of religion, tracing their development over time. Special
emphasis is placed on material effects of the category of religion, including case law, current events, analysis of social constructs
(gender, race, sexuality, time), and engagement with key theoretical texts in the study of religion. Credits 3.0
REL 2238. Islam and Race
Islam is not a race (religions are not races) but Islam and religions are racialized. Examines how Islam and Muslims come to be seen as a race and the effects thereof in the North American context.
Publications
List of Publications (DOCX)
Areas of Expertise
Religions in South Asia, history of religion, Islam and race, religion, and empire, and antisemitism and islamophobia.
Association and Affiliations
American Academy of Religion (co-chair, Study of Islam, term: 2018-2022)
South Asian Muslim Studies Association
South Asian Literary Association
American Association of University Professors
United Academics
XQs XIII — A Conversation with Ilyse R. Morgenstein Fuerst
Posted by patwari on July 17, 2018 · 35 mins read
[The XQs (Ten Questions) series is a conversation with the authors of new and exciting works in South Asian Studies, whose aim is not to “review” but to contextualize, historicize and promote new scholarship. We thank Anmol Ghavri for conducting this interview. Previously: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII.]
Ilyse R. Morgenstein Fuerst is assistant professor of religion and director of the Middle East Studies program at the University of Vermont. Her research centers on Islam and Muslims in South Asia as well as theories of religion, race, and imperialism. Her first book, Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels, and Jihad was published by I.B. Tauris in October 2017. At UVM, Morgenstein Fuerst teaches courses about theory and method in the study of religion, Islamic practice and history, and, occasionally, Hindu traditions.
***
Your work deftly explicates the relationships between understandings of Islamic law, “jihad” and the loyalty of British Indian Muslims in the aftermath of the 1857 Rebellion in India — linking the imagined inherent disloyalty and militance of Indian Muslims by Britishers (and Indian refutations of that imagination) to the racialization of Indian Muslims. Could you describe the background and impulse behind your researching and writing of Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels, and Jihad? What drew you to the 1857 Rebellion (and why do you call it a rebellion and not a war of independence or revolt), to the two-particular works by W. W. Hunter and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan that form the backbone of your research?
This is a great set of questions—and since I could spend a lifetime answering them, I'll try to be concise. The Rebellion is inherently interesting: it's a major set of events, it's reported on widely and interpreted in real time as well as for decades after, and it still shows up symbolically, rhetorically, and as part of histories we teach at all levels of education around the world. What interested me, of course, was how this symbolic event of nationalism/imperialism involved and named Muslims.
The 1857 Rebellion has been called so many things: the Great Rebellion, the Uprising of 1857, the Sepoy Rebellion, the Indian Mutiny, India's First War of Independence, the Indian Rebellion, the Indian Revolt, the Sepoy Revolt, the Mahomedan Rebellion, and—commonly—the Sepoy Mutiny. But the term “mutiny” is too technically specific and does not capture what happened. Mutinies are carried out solely by military, disobeying commands from superiors. The Rebellion started among sepoys but was not limited to them, nor were the demands of rebels limited to military concerns. “Rebellion” best gets at what happened—Indians rebelled but it did not materialize into a revolution, since they were quashed by British forces—and narrates events rather than inscribe meaning onto them. This was important to me, since I try to tell the story of how the Rebellion and all its attending terminologies carry rhetorical and political significance. No term is apolitical, but Rebellion comes as close as possible, and highlights how these collective events rewrote political, social, and religio-cultural identifications.
“Why these sources?” Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and Sir William Wilson Hunter are notable figures, each representing a particular demographic especially refigured by the Rebellion. And because both of these notable figures were also loyalists, their writing and memorialization about the Rebellion and its aftermath(s) helped me center narratives of minoritization and racialization—the key theoretical nodes of the book.
Could you describe your usage of the terms “racialization” and “minoritization”?
The 1857 Rebellion fundamentally shifts the way Muslims are imagined in India, with global effects. The Rebellion and the way it is remembered help us see both when and how Muslims come to be racialized and minoritized in India, as imperial subjects of Britain, and as an imagined homogenous group worldwide.
Racialization and minoritization are processes by which a group comes to be known as a race (the former) and comes to be seen as a minority (the later). It's important to stress the process, because races are not natural—they are naturalized. Through systems of power, these constructed categories have become so ubiquitous as to seem permanent and utterly natural.
The Rebellion demonstrates how Muslims were both minoritized and racialized at the same time. Muslims were always a demographic minority in South Asia, but minoritization refers to access to power. Before the Rebellion, Muslims were (nominally) rulers of India and even though the great Mughal Empire was a shadow of its former self, elite Muslims held quite a good deal of power. After, making Muslims a minority was a purposeful tactic so that the British could step into positions of power. At the same time, Muslims were racialized. They were painted with one brush, despite official knowledge about the vast diversity of practice, language, interpretation, class, even caste. After the Rebellion, the most important thing to know about a Muslim was that she or he was Muslim; that is to say, “Muslim” had a naturalized meaning to those in power, and that meaning was one of violence, rebellion, and a threat to the imperial state.
You do an excellent job at explaining the unique racialized position of Indian Muslims in the 1857 Indian Rebellion as disloyal in British explanations of the rebellion, and as inherently fanatical due to British essentialized understandings of Islamic law and the duties it allegedly mandated (like “jihad” as holy war). Did you find any parallel British constructions of Hindu subjects or an eventual collapsing of imagined Muslim fanaticism with an all-India religious zealotry and despotism post-1857?
While I focused on Muslims, there are obviously constructions of Hindu subjects that are also racialized. Some of those predate 1857 and are intensified after: for example, the pre-Rebellion idea of the effeminate, religiously chaste and sensitive Brahmin becomes more prominent afterward and even in stories about the Rebellion. One author, attempting to demonstrate how seditious and dangerous Muslims are, specifically references the weak Brahmin Hindus, who are powerless against Muslims and must, therefore, rebel or risk death at their hands. Another highlights insults to Hindu (and Brahmin) religious praxis, suggesting that even the slightest insult to religion damages these thin-skinned subjects, making them vulnerable to Muslim calls for rebellion. In the immediate aftermath of the Rebellion, those in power characterize Hindus as racially weak and religiously sensitive, even zealous, to explain their supposed vulnerability to the “real” danger, Muslims.
My sources demonstrate two things: 1) despite being a demographic minority, Muslims were imagined by Britons as a real threat; and 2) Hindus were imagined as necessarily subservient to Muslims, a theme later taken up by nationalists and especially by far-right Hindu nationalists. These racialized religious definitions continue to have meaning in contemporary India as well as in global iterations about who and what Muslims and Hindus are.
Edward Said in his 2003 preface to Orientalism wrote that:
the major influences on George W. Bush's Pentagon and National Security Council were men such as Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, experts on the Arab and Islamic world who helped the American hawks to think about such preposterous phenomena as the Arab mind and centuries-old Islamic decline which only American power could reverse. Today bookstores in the US are filled with shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror, Islam exposed, the Arab threat and the Muslim menace, all of them written by political polemicists pretending to knowledge imparted to them and others by experts who have supposedly penetrated to the heart of these strange Oriental peoples. Accompanying such war-mongering expertise have been CNN and Fox, plus myriad evangelical and right-wing radio hosts, innumerable tabloids and even middle-brow journals, all of them re-cycling the same unverifiable fictions and vast generalisations so as to stir up "America" against the foreign devil. Without a well-organised sense that these people over there were not like "us" and didn't appreciate "our" values -- the very core of traditional Orientalist dogma -- there would have been no war. So from the very same directorate of paid professional scholars enlisted by the Dutch conquerors of Malaysia and Indonesia, the British armies of India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, West Africa, the French armies of Indochina and North Africa, came the American advisers to the Pentagon and the White House, using the same clichés, the same demeaning stereotypes, the same justifications for power and violence.
Despite his contemporaries and W. W. Hunter himself certainly not describing his work as such, Hunter could be viewed as an early purveyor of a form of Islamophobia and the Islam-expertise-punditry industry Edward Said described above in the context of justifying British Imperialism (versus justifying American Imperialism). Your chapter on W. W. Hunter and his Indian Musalmans; Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel Against the Queen? does not dismiss Hunter's lengthy work by modern standards as ridiculous but instead interrogates it as a critical piece of colonial knowledge of British imperial understandings of Indian Muslims post-1857 because of his “demi-official” role in the British administration of India and relationship to decision makers who undoubtedly read his work. You write that Hunter in his work dismissed a Calcutta fatwa declaring post-1857 violence by Muslims against the British colonial state as dar-ul-harb as invalid because it was not rooted in fiqh he found to be to his scholarly standards and logically misguided in its usage of dar-ul-harb and dar-ul-islam. Essentially, Hunter thought he “knew” Islam better than Muslims themselves and looked to out of context original Arabic Islamic legal sources in bolstering his analysis of the essentially disloyal and militant Indian Muslim subject. Do you see any parallels between the influence that Hunter's work had in British imperial understandings of Indian Muslims by virtue of his positionality and modern day US imperial productions of knowledge by political pundits and purveyors of so-called “expertise” for use in the American imperial project, and how do you as a scholar of Islam avoid making value judgements on interpretations of mutable concepts like “jihad” even when those of writers like Hunter are incredibly un-nuanced?
I absolutely do see parallels between scholar-officials like Hunter and scholar-officials in today's world, especially in the US and UK. It is terrible history to suggest that these are part of a continuous linear progression. It is equally bad scholarship, however, to pretend like these discursive continuities don't exist.
A lot of scholarship about race, and race and religion is limited to the American context and, even more so, the United States. This makes sense—the legacies of enslavement, of forced conversions, of persecution and genocide of Native folks, the racialization of waves of immigrants, and prominent white supremacy is fodder for these kinds of analysis. But racialization isn't a uniquely American phenomenon, and especially in the case of Islam/Muslims, thinking about global antecedents is critical.
British racialization of Muslims after the Rebellion was not an “ignorant” enterprise. It was not some evil stereotypes with evil imperialists bandying them about willy-nilly. It was—to reference Said as you do, Anmol—a purposeful wielding of imperial power in the form of knowledge-making. When the British arrive, they bring armies as well as armies of scholars. So it's important for me, as a scholar of this period and religion in this period specifically, to take Hunter seriously, to demonstrate how his writings were deeply important, scholarly works, and how the study of religion (in particular) ought to take them seriously as part of a long history of the racialization of Muslims in specific terms.
The way that “jihad” came to be the prominent term to think about Muslims and Islam, and the simultaneous way that “Muslim” and “jihad” became inextricably linked as normative is something we see all the time in contemporary politics, policies, and news. But I argued that one of the first places we saw it was after the Rebellion and most clearly in works like Hunter's, which is why it's such a valuable source to South Asian studies, Islamic studies, and religious studies—all of which should be concerned with the study and development of racial categories.
As to how to write about this without making value judgments? I don't agree with anything Hunter says, his bigotry is painful to read at times, and his “solutions” for how the British ought to manage their inherently untrustworthy Muslim subjects are appalling. He suggested removing children from families to teach them better, weakening Islamic teachings as the only way to ensure Muslims could maybe become pliant and compliant subjects. With the benefit of historical records, I can also see how some of those suggestions were taken up, to great determent to real people, real communities. My job in the book is to think about the legacies of his words and the words of scholar-officials like him, but it is also to take seriously how his words came to be seen as scholarly and official in the first place. Hunter is a person, writing what he was hired to write in light of what he was trained to do as an expert. He is a primary source, his context is part of the tapestry in which the racialization of Muslims is possible. He is also part of how Islam comes to be defined and interpreted. As a scholar of religion, I take seriously Hunter's role in shaping definitions of Islam. I disagree with them, I challenge them, but I have to see them as part of how empires, officials, Britons, Indians, and Muslims come to define Islam.
In your chapter on Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and his Review on Dr. Hunter's Indian Musalmans; Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel Against the Queen? you argue that even as Khan refuted the points of evidence used by Hunter to construct Indian Muslims subjects as essentially militant, disloyal and a threat, he continued the process of racializing and minoritizing Indian Muslims within British India as a discrete unit, nonetheless, by relying on the same frameworks and “game” as Hunter. What do you mean by this and what was the main argument of this chapter?
It would be easy to say something like Hunter and scholars like him did this racialization and minoritization to Indian Muslims. That's true, but also far too simplistic. Hunter's work and Khan's review of it, the central nodes of my book, both further the racialized, homogenized, minoritized version of Islam and Muslims that Hunter (and others) establishes.
As a former and wannabe athlete, I rely on sports metaphors a lot—so bear with me. Let's call the game tennis (because despite years of trying I cannot master that other British game, cricket). Hunter set up the game—its rules, its boundaries, its name, the names of the equipment, and so forth. Hunter had been playing tennis with other folks like him for years; they had an all-white, all-male, all-Christian club, of course. Khan, however, is smart—respectable—he learns the rules, he respects them, he wants to play. He writes the Review, and it follows all of Hunter's rules: Hunter has served a work that insists “jihad” is the only category that matters, and Khan returns that volley. He does not suggest a radical revisioning of Islam compared to Hunter, throwing jihad out or calling a foul; he volleys every single ball Hunter has served, literally point by point, page by page. In doing so, one imagines that Khan thinks he is winning the argument: he has strongly returned each and every ball and an objective observer might conclude that he has, therefore, won points, tallied a score, defeated Hunter.
But I contend that he has not. Drawing on Audre Lorde's better metaphor about masters, tools, and oppression, I suggest that Khan has merely played Hunter's game. Khan is not the server; Khan does not have the advantage. And this is not actually tennis—this game does not have servers take turns for fairness, it does not have a referee to ensure fair play or make decisions on close points. Khan is on the defensive from the start. More importantly, though, because Khan is a respectable Muslim—because he is loyal to the throne, because his own actions during the Rebellion were to save Britons, an act for which he later earns his title—he can be read in two ways. First, he can be seen as assenting to the terms Hunter has set. He is, after all, playing tennis. In playing Hunter's game, in agreeing to hit back every volley, he has given those volleys legitimizing authority to both the British and non-Muslim readers as well as elite Muslims in his own intellectual and social circles. Second, Khan can be read as the exception that proves the rule. He is a good tennis player—loyal, educated, “modern”—but the fact that he and he alone are given access to the court proves that other Muslims cannot play, should not be allowed to play, do not agree with his playing in the first place.
Khan's work tries to win against Hunter, and when we read it we might say that it does a good job of scoring points. Ultimately, though, it becomes a part of the narrative against which it struggles. He may have found that every ball he was served was ridiculous, and yet because he plays, because he continues to keep the ball in motion and in-bounds, suddenly what is in-bounds is ridiculous.
To be clear, I do not expect Khan to have challenged Hunter to, say, a game of backgammon, to have reset the game and the rules entirely; the power was already asymmetrical between the two, between Indian Muslims and British Christians. Now, dropping tennis for a moment, none of this is to say that I think an historical record that fully ignores, omits, and obliterates non-white, non-Christian, non-male authors is acceptable. I am glad that Khan's retort to Hunter has been preserved, translated, and much more recently made digitally available through a variety of libraries and initiatives worldwide. But discursively and historically, it is important to see how Khan's resistance against Hunter can and does fortify Hunter's claims.
In both texts, jihad becomes central, Muslims as a cogent whole is a theme, and a unified Muslim minority with credible grievances against a British ruling elite can be found in these pages. If the themes are the same and repeated by authorities like Khan and Hunter, then those themes are authorized and proliferated. That's the point of the chapter: thinking through how the hegemon of imperialism fundamentally restructures what counts as knowledge and fact, and how everyone—including those whom that hegemonic power harms—can reinforce the very definitions they seek to change.
Right! In the same chapter, you mention how Khan understood that his positionality as an Indian Muslim critiquing a Britisher meant that his words automatically lost some weight. This points to a larger question of critiquing power even as one remains a subject to it — and the anxiety-inducing subjecthood of Muslims expected to profess loyalty continues to this day. Like Indian Muslim subjects post-1857 (who were considered doubly disloyal due to their role in the revolt and their religion), American Muslims post-9/11 are expected to explicitly disavow “jihad” and reaffirm their loyalty to extents others are not. In your epilogue, you succinctly and poignantly reflect on and relate the essentializing processes of racialization and minoritization of Muslim-subjects in post-1857 British India linking colonial knowledge and imperial anxieties over conceptualizations of “jihad” in colonial India to current political discourse on Muslim-subjects in the United States during the 2016 Presidential Election. You write that serious political figures in both mainstream US political parties partake in this phenomenon to various degrees, whether by explicitly denying Islam as a monolithic and essential religion is compatible with so-called “Western” values (like Dr. Ben Carson and Donald Trump) or by reifying a good-Muslim/bad-Muslim dichotomy (like Hillary and Bill Clinton). What are your thoughts on the matter now, with all that's transpired since you wrote that epilogue (SCOTUS upholding Trump's immigration ban on select Muslim majority countries, the appointment of known Islamophobes like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton to positions of authority, and the ongoing political and popular discourse in European countries on the compatibility of Muslims with “Western” values and the symbol of the Burqa, etc.)? How do you grapple with the current historical moment we live in, as a scholar and an educator?
I think most of us engage with the past best when we can make connections to the present. Teaching about Muslims' histories, for me, means balancing historical subjects with current iterations of similar debates or issues. Classroom spaces are experimental spaces for me, often; I want students to learn but also to think. Sometimes we line up primary sources like Hunter and Khan next to contemporary officials' remarks and Muslim critiques of it. Sometimes we'll look at debates about women in colonial contexts and then debates about women today, noting, of course, how much more interesting history might be if the record actually recorded what women said, did, wore, instead of men's debates about it. No classroom is apolitical; my pedagogy does not assume some sort of apolitical space. We read multiple perspectives, we discuss, but we also name racism as racism, sexism as sexism, etc.
As a scholar, I find that because I'm working at a nexus of race, religion, Islam, and discourse that I want to do more work that is public-facing, contemporary, accessible. Some of that is political, of course, but a lot of that is about how I imagine expertise. A quick glance at Amazon top selling book lists about Islam will reveal that my book is not there but anti-Islam books by non-academics are. Why is that? Where are the scholarly-but-legible works that avoid polemics? Surely Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion is not a public-facing work. But in shorter pieces, blogs, public lectures I find I want to connect the theory and subjects I know and study to folks outside small academic bubbles. Additionally, I find that I deal with the politicization of Islamic studies by seeking to write academic pieces for bubbles that aren't my own. What might my work on Indian history, race, and Islam have to say to folks in Jewish studies, American studies, European studies?
As I was reading your book, I was struck by the centrality of postcolonial theory in your work and the confluence of religious studies, history, sociology and postcolonial studies. One could certainly trace an intellectual genealogy and scholarly impulse to critically deconstruct notions which have become popularly essentialized in the post-9/11 world like “jihad,” “Muslim” and “Islam” back to works like Orientalism and the thousands of works it inspired and influenced like those of Cohn and Dirks. What do you see the role of postcolonial studies in your work as a scholar of religion and its future and directions for junior scholars like myself?
There is little I can think about without thinking about it through postcolonial lenses. Cohn, Dirks, Spivak, Chakrabarty, Guha, Mahmood—I return again and again to these foundational authors for a reason: it's just that important. I'd add that I see the future of postcolonial scholarship really interrogating and honing its theoretical foci on race and religion. I think, especially from the history side of things, religion is often a passing fact or a simplified explanation. I'm not sure I can overstate the importance of religion and how it's racialized—historically or contemporarily. We can't think about postcolonial diasporas without thinking about how imperialism defined and deployed new definitions of race and religion, and how diaspora also transmutes and reifies those definitions. We can't think about religious movements that appear reactionary or revolutionary without thinking about postcolonial realities in which religion is seen not as voluntary but as inherent, racialized. My hope for the future of South Asian studies is that it continues to pick up on themes of race and religion and integrate them more holistically into phenomenal work in postcolonial theory and history already published. Race, religion, colonialism, and imperialism appear definitionally at the same historical period. Let's do more work that tries to get at this complicated palimpsest!
What five works would you say your book is in conversation with, building upon and/or influenced by?
I'm rooted in religious studies, so three of the biggest influences here are Religion, Science, and Empire by Peter Gottschalk, Empire of Religion by David Chidester, and The Invention of World Religions by Tomoko Masuzawa. Masuzawa's now-classic text does so much work to demonstrate how religions are invented as part of European imperialism and her chapter on Islam (“Islam, a Semitic religion”) is really instructive. Gottshalk and Chidester both nimbly weave definitions of religion and imperial practices together. I've been really influenced by Sylvester Johnson's masterful book, African American Religions 1500-2000; the innocuous title belies an intense global history of how imperialism is about race, racialization, and religion all at once. And, while I read this after my own book was off to the press, I hope my book is in conversation with Cemil Aydin's The Idea of the Muslim World, since that global history attends to issues I get at in my book, especially when he talks about making Muslims a homogenous, anti-imperial unit. There are many more whose work I rely on and look up to (Avril Powell, Yasmin Saikia, and Margit Pernau especially). These stand out off the top of my head as books I've returned to time and again and alongside which I hope my book stands.
Did this work grow out of your dissertation? If so, what was the process of going from dissertation to publishing your first book and grad-student to professor?
I did what no early-career scholar is supposed to do: I got a tenure-track job, defended my dissertation, moved across the country, and immediately left my dissertation behind to work on something new. My department chair was barely able to conceal his terror when I told him my plan; advisors—gently but with pregnant wording—asked when I would return to the “work I had already finished.”
I was proud of my dissertation work but it needed more time and specifically more time abroad, more time doing in-person manuscript work on a text. (I do intend to return to it and have published one article—with another in process—on it.) I'll be honest, though: I was new to the tenure-track and newly expecting my first child. I knew I did not have the luxury of international research and hours upon hours of more translation and manuscript work. I chose to dive head first into a project I was excited about, had done preliminary research on, and most importantly, could do with one or two short(er) trips abroad. The book grew out of research that didn't fit the dissertation but ultimately fit the kind of labor I could do and do well at that point in my life.
My advice to current students is the same: write the book you can write well. For me that meant brutal honesty with myself about what I could do and then switching gears. For many it means making the dissertation a book. Tenure-track jobs are few and far between, so do the work you need to do and can do well to keep it.
What are you currently working on as your next project?
I have a bunch of small projects and two new book projects going on—the post-first-book and tenure-packet-nearly-submitted excitement means I'm working on a lot of new material. The smaller projects are about gender and Islam in colonial South Asia and, in a different direction altogether, how academic job ads script the boundaries of Islamic studies. The book projects are in research stages at this point. One is tracing connections between anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish rhetoric, policies, and norms in colonial/imperial settings. The other revisits the Rebellion and memorialization by way of examining the various tours of rebellion sites in northern India as sites of meaning-making and religio-national definitions. All of these projects try to build upon and expand the work in Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion; they each take a facet of race, religion, Islam, and the definitions thereof and think about them in new locations or historical contexts.
***
Anmol Ghavri is a student studying South Asian history at Dartmouth College.
[wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow]Goodwin, Megan and Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, Religion Is Not Done With You: Or, The Hidden Power of Religion on Race, Maps, Bodies, and Law. Boston, Massachusetts, Beacon Press, 2024, 165 pages.[wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow]
If I were still teaching university classes in Religious Studies, I would certainly choose Goodwin and Fuerst's book as an introduction to this broad, often misunderstood, subject we call religion. Their writing style has a youthful familiarity--probably purposively done--to broaden their reach to all audiences. The theme running throughout their work is religion is what people do." "Religion isn't just feelings or beliefs--it's systems and assumptions...that shape our lives every day."
Both authors have master's degrees and doctorates in religion. Goodwin focuses on gender, sexuality, and American religions. Fuerst puts her attention on Islam, race and racialization, and South Asia. Both women claim to be religious people who "care about justice and repairing our broken world." They understand that "religion is a force for change--not always bad, not inherently good, but always changed and changing." It's important, they assert, "to call out bullshit takes on religion: takes that insist religion is always and everywhere good and takes that want to write religion off as irrelevant, irrational, or regressive."
Goodwin and Fuerst clearly demonstrate that religion shapes all of our institutions--educational, government, healthcare, and even our calendars. Not only is religion about what people do including prayers, rituals, leadership, morality, and fancy buildings, it's also about "why we vote on Tuesdays in the US and where our understandings of race, gender, and sexuality come from." But above all, "religion is always about power."
Because people are "messy, alive, and always changing," religion also is messy, alive, and always changing. "Our job," the authors state, "isn't to police religious belonging--our job is just to try to keep up with all the many millions of ways people are doing religion."
Contending that religion has no place in polite conversation is an "effective way to hide systems of power in plain sight." If religion is hidden from view, it's impossible to understand "white supremacy, or misogyny, or classism, or ableism." We must call out religion when it encourages Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and anti-Black racism. "[T]o not talk about religion lets injustice flourish." It's also possible to understand and celebrate the positive potential of religion in promoting a kinder world.
The authors give an excellent example demonstrating the systemic influence of religion on healthcare. What happens if you're pregnant, in a severe car wreck, injured, and unconscious? The law requires you be transported to the closest trauma 1 response center. To treat you effectively risks terminating your pregnancy. If the trauma center is owned by a corporation controlled by the Roman Catholic Church (and many are), the care you get will not depend just on your doctor's expert judgment. The religious organization will deliver the care they think is proper for you to receive. Even if you want to terminate your pregnancy to save your life, the facility will default to the Church's decree.
Chapter 1 "Religion is (not) Baseball" deepens the authors' discussion of religion as they reassert there is no religion without people and no such thing as a "religiously inherent" person. Religion is a social construct. That means we (people) inculcate the word with meaning. Like all social constructs, "religion is a way of not just identifying but organizing humans for the purposes of maintaining existing hierarchies." People use religion to "create culture through community and ritual" as well as "cultivate and disrupt power." As human beings, it's not possible to opt out of culture. Religion, understood as belief, is a miniscule part of what forms community, identity, and practice. Religion and belief ought not to be used interchangeably. "Systemic and structural power is what matters when we are thinking about religion."
Chapter 2 "Religion is Global" discusses the term "world religions," noting that the term "divides traditions, cultures, even whole populations, into ‘major' and ‘minor' religious traditions." The phrase obfuscates "violent imperial histories." World religions made (and continue to make) borders. "Empires use religion to draw and redraw physical and political borders," deciding (intentionally or not) whose humanity is worth defending. Western European empires used religion (a word created in the 17th century) to divide and conquer, but also, people use religion "to survive, disrupt, and resist empire...in the wake of colonialism and imperialism." Systems are made by people. Those same systems can be remade to become more just.
Chapter 3 "Race is (made of) Religion" asserts that white Western European Christianity created race in an American context. Race is a modern social construct, and people use religion to construct it. "When systems and institutions privilege one group of people to the material and social disadvantage of other groups of people, this is oppression." It's not about individuals and whether or not they feel oppressed. The question is: "Which group benefits the most from existing systems and thus fights hardest to preserve those systems?" Guys with guns and pens seized land that became the United States, murdered and terrorized Native peoples. Then, wrote that forcible conversion is for Native People's own good. Somehow, though, even when victims convert, "there's something a little bit less sacred, a little bit (to a lot) less human about Christianity when it's done by non-Europeans."
Chapter 4 "Religion is Politics" attempts to show how "nations create contemporary systems like courts and healthcare...drawing on religious understanding of what bodies are for." Politics is a word used for institutions and systems that shape and govern everything about our lives. (Americans vote on Tuesdays because the Founders assumed everyone would be in church on Sundays and folks might need Mondays to travel to the polls.) The United States "codes specific Christian commitments and worldviews as good old American values" while simultaneously attempting to make the whole world into its image.
The concluding chapter "Religion is a Flight Risk" focuses on air travel--see something, say something--meaning relying on stereotypical visual (turban} and auditory (Arabic) cues to report.
When we understand how religion works in society, the authors' admonishment, "Go be a problem who makes good trouble for great justice" takes on a clarity and urgency--something we can only do by asking questions (no sacred cows) and thinking critically (who benefits?).
Discover more from
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Author: Esther Nelson
Esther Nelson teaches courses in Religious Studies (Human Spirituality, Global Ethics, Religions of the World, and Women in Islam) at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia. She has published two books. VOICE OF AN EXILE REFLECTIONS ON ISLAM was written in close collaboration with Nasr Abu Zaid, an Egyptian, Islamic Studies scholar who fled Egypt (1995) when he was labeled an apostate by the Cairo court of appeals. She co-authored WHAT IS RELIGIOUS STUDIES? A JOURNEY OF INQUIRY with Kristin Swenson, a former colleague. When not teaching, Esther travels to various places throughout the world. (https://feminismandreligion.com/author/auntessie70/) View all posts by Esther Nelson
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Newstex LLC
https://aci.info/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"BOOK REVIEW: Religion is Not Done With You by Esther Nelson." Feminism and Religion, 28 Dec. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A821562905/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a9c77481. Accessed 30 Jan. 2025.
Morgenstein Fuerst, Ilyse RELIGION IS NOT DONE WITH YOU Beacon Press (NonFiction None) $24.95 11, 5 ISBN: 9780807012758
A critical examination of the pervasive influence of religion in daily life.
Though both Goodwin and Morgenstein Fuerst are scholars of religion, they denounce "bullshit takes on religion that insist religion is always and everywhere good." At the same time, they dispute the view that religion is retrograde and irrational: there's a place for it, they insist, if perhaps not so all-encroaching as it is in American society. On that note, they observe, for instance, that Christianity effectively dictates the calendar, not just because it's a Christian invention, courtesy of Pope Gregory XIII, but also because it deprecates holidays that are not Christian in nature. "Even working in liberal Massachusetts is not a guarantee your employer will be cool with you calling out of work as witchy," they write of Goodwin's Wiccan views. The authors go further still in their critique of religion-fueled patriarchy: if you privilege white male Christian worldviews over any other, they hold, you get Jan. 6, 2021. Religion shapes health care, as arguments over abortion highlight, and it shapes politics and policing. Noting that "nominally secular systems like laws and courts codify white Christian nationalism" even in the face of the Constitution's establishment clause, they rightly observe too that no one is really free to opt out of the system: A Sikh with a turban cannot opt out of being looked at with fear and suspicion at the airport any more than someone named Ahmed can remove himself from candidacy for the no-fly list even were he to move to South Dakota and convert to Lutheranism. In all these ways, then, religion truly is not done with us, no matter how much we might want to be done with it.
A provocative, fresh way to look at the reach of religious belief in a supposedly secular society.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Morgenstein Fuerst, Ilyse: RELIGION IS NOT DONE WITH YOU." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A813883561/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=478a367c. Accessed 30 Jan. 2025.
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst and Brannon M. Wheeler, eds. Words of Experience: Translating Islam with Carl W. Ernst
Sheffield: Equinox, 2021. 308 pages, 3 figures. Hardcover, $100.00; ebook, $100.00. ISBN 9781781799109 (hardcover), 9781781799116 (ebook).
This edited volume is a Festschrift for the noted American scholar of Islam Carl Ernst, derived from a 2017 conference convened in his honor. In developing a work of this sort there are always challenges of coherence and selecting contributors. In this case, the writers are primarily, but not exclusively, students of Ernst associated with the University of North Carolina and Duke University. Their assignment here was to engage his work in chapters across broad themes, which preface-writer and Ernst's long-term colleague Bruce Lawrence notes, draw on Ernst's contributions across the academic career spectrum of research, teaching, and service. The material therefore encompasses not only Ernst's exemplary scholarship, leadership at his institution, and professional service, but also his public role, since Ernst is both a scholar of Islam and a public intellectual, translating the contested topics of Islam and religion to an increasingly broad, and an increasingly polarized, public.
An underlying cohesive theme of the book is the concept of "translating," often conducted methodologically through establishing parameters of the semantic field of an established term or concept, such as "religion" or "syncretism," and then tracing its transformations through time so as to complicate, situate, and deconstruct essentialist assumptions. While this harkens back to the approach of one of Ernst's Harvard mentors, the late Wilfred Cantwell Smith, it also reflects the trajectory of a rich and varied scholarly career in Islamic studies that emerged alongside the watershed events of Edward Said's postcolonial critique of Orientalism and the Iranian Revolution, and then, post-millennium, was called to respond to the 9/11 attacks and rising Islamophobia, both in the West and India.
The volume's thirteen chapters are somewhat loosely grouped into two parts: those grappling with a more narrow or specific theme derived from Ernst's broad corpus of books and articles, and those that confront broader issues or challenges within the academic study of religion. The chapters therefore primarily engage South Asian Sufism, Sufi studies in other contexts, the academic study of religion, and the field of Islamic studies, along with contemporary issues such as Islamophobia.
As the author of the introduction, Bruce Lawrence, points out, the essays in part 1 are variously inspired by books, essays, or unique insights of Ernst that are then engaged by the authors in stimulating and productive ways. For example, chapter 1, "Is Islam a 'Religion?'" by Brannon Ingram, explores the term "religion" (Arabic, din) across a range of contemporary Muslim sources and academic usages.
Among the volume's "case study" chapters is one by Michael Muhammad Knight, who situates an articulation of Sufism in a particular local context, that of the African American movement, the Ansar Allah/Nubian Islamic Hebrews of the 1970s and 1980s. The sheer scope and richness of the material highlights the author's observation regarding how African American trends have been thus far largely neglected among studies of Western Sufism, despite both actual impact and their intrinsically fascinating elements for the study of religion.
The chapter by Samah Choudry, focusing on the post-9/11 American Muslim play Disgraced, is related to Ernst's more recent publications that critique colonialism and Islamophobia, as well as to more broad themes of public and artistic expression of religion. Those interested in textual analysis as skillfully employed by Ernst from the time of his first study on ecstatic mystical utterances can find this strand developed in Frederick S. Colby's essay on visionary rhetoric in Sufi ascension narratives.
Translation can also encompass the trenchant critique of terms too facilely bandied about such as "influence" and "syncretism," which of course may be politically and culturally loaded, if not pejorative, as noted in the chapter by Joy Laine and James W. Laine, a chapter that picks up on another of Ernst's interests, Sufism and yoga. Coeditor Brannon Wheeler also explores some of the methodological challenges of religious comparison in terms of what "syncretism" can imply, distort, or illuminate in his essay in part 2 of the volume.
Part 2 addresses disparate themes across seven chapters, only a few of which I can touch upon here, for example, the evolving impact of the "public" on both the scholarly career and interests, and through the impact of the internet and social media on academics and the material they study.
Katherine Pratt Ewing, a senior colleague of Ernst, sensitizes us to some of the more recent political currents across scholarship and public discourses around Sufism. This includes the colonial invention of the term "Sufism," more recent "Sufiphobia" among Salafis and Islamists, and instances of governments and rulers promoting Sufism as a strategy to combat radicalism, thus pointing to the challenges of defining and understanding this complex topic.
A further essay focusing on a specifically American manifestation of local Sufism and media outreach is Robert Rozehnal's chapter on the Inayatiyya Order and its recent initiatives over the internet, a subject that Rozehnal treated at length in his monograph Cyber Sufis: Virtual Expressions of the American Muslim Experience (2019).
Insights into Ernst's leadership in the profession and at his home institution come from Candace Mixon's review of the impact of networking and state funding on academic careers. In addition to these efforts, she highlights Ernst's involvement in expanding academic analysis to incorporate expressions through the arts and material culture. Volume coeditor Ilyse R. Morgenstein Fuerst further reviews the more public-facing contributions made by Ernst in his studies Following Muhammad (2003) and How to Read the Qur'an (2011). The former could be seen as a response to 9/11 and the latter to an unfortunate 2002 incident in which conservative forces in North Carolina attempted to repress the assignment of readings from the Qur'an as an exercise for incoming students. From a related angle, Katie Merriman not only addresses Ernst's oeuvre but also his paradigmatic efforts in scholarly collaboration, promoting international exchanges, and institution building.
On the whole, celebrations of influential scholars and their impact over time on students, colleagues, and broader fields of knowledge may be both inspiring and informative. They situate for us a field and its pursuit, and may, in fact, humanize our intellectual endeavors. Perhaps a concluding epigraph could be derived from the title of Ernst's own (2018) collection of articles: "It's not just academic!"
References
Ernst, Carl W. 2003. Following Muhammad. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
--. 2011. How to Read the Qur'an: A New Guide with Select Translations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
--. 2018. It's Not Just Academic: Essays on Sufism and Islamic Studies. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE. Rozehnal, Robert. 2019. Cyber Sufis: Virtual Expressions of the American Muslim Experience. Oxford: Oneworld.
Marcia Hermansen
Loyola University Chicago
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Nanzan University
http://www.nanzan-u.ac.jp/English/index.html
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Hermansen, Marcia. "Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst and Brannon M. Wheeler, eds.: Words of Experience: Translating Islam with Carl W. Ernst." Asian Ethnology, vol. 82, no. 1, spring 2023, pp. 165+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A758800185/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4b39d391. Accessed 30 Jan. 2025.