Explore key questions shaping Muslim societies today, with a particular focus on religious authority, religion and politics, and modern Islamic thought. Drawing on seminars, lectures, and conversations with leading scholars, this podcast series is produced by the Contemporary Islamic Studies Programme at the Middle East Centre, University of Oxford. Episodes reflect the Programme’s commitment to rigorous scholarship and international academic exchange, highlighting research at the intersection of Islam, society, and contemporary global debates, and showcasing collaborations between Oxford and partner institutions.
Iraq's Shi'a warriors: From battlefield to parliament
Dr Inna Rudolf (KCL) discusses her new book 'Iraq's Shi'a warriors: From battlefield to parliament', chaired by Professor Raihan Ismail (St Antony’s College). By examining the PMU's self-positioning as a pillar of Iraq's defence infrastructure, this book offers a critical perspective on the prospects for Security Sector Reform (SSR) and highlights the limitations of externally driven Disarmament, Demobilisation, and Reintegration (DDR) efforts. It speaks to scholars of Iraq and the Middle East, as well as diplomats, security actors, and SSR practitioners. The book is also a valuable teaching resource for undergraduate and postgraduate courses on conflict, security, identity politics, terrorism, and peace building. Its unique fieldwork methodology offers guidance for researchers engaging with armed non-state and para-state actors in post-conflict settings. Altogether, the book addresses a strong academic and policy demand for evidence-based analysis of the PMU's complex identity - offering a flexible framework for studying hybrid security actors with transnational connections and domestic ambitions.
Published by Manchester University Press in 2026: https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526193063/
Dr. Inna Rudolf is a Fellow at the Centre for Statecraft and National Security (CSNS) and a Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Divided Societies in the Department of War Studies, King's College London.
19 May 2026
Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam
Professor Faisal Devji (Balliol College) discusses his new book 'Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam'. Chaired by Professor Raihan Ismail (St Antony’s College). About the Book:
A compelling examination of the rise of Islam as a global historical actor.
Until the nineteenth century, Islam was variously understood as a set of beliefs and practices. But after Muslims began to see their faith as an historical actor on the world stage, they needed to narrate Islam’s birth anew as well as to imagine its possible death. Faisal Devji argues that this change, sparked by the crisis of Muslim sovereignty in the age of European empire, provided a way of thinking about agency in a global context: an Islam liberated from the authority of kings and clerics had the potential to represent the human race itself as a newly empirical reality.
Ordinary Muslims, now recognized as the privileged representatives of Islam, were freed from traditional forms of Islamic authority. However, their conception of Islam as an impersonal actor in history meant that it could not be defined in either religious or political terms. Its existence as a civilizational and later ideological subject also deprived figures like God and the Prophet of their theological subjectivities while robbing the Muslim community of its political agency. Devji illuminates this history and explores its ramifications for the contemporary Muslim world.
Published by Yale University Press in 2025: https://yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300276633/waning-crescent/
About the Author:
Faisal Devji is Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History and Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He is the author of The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence and Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea.
7 May 2026
Brothers Behind Bars: A History of the Muslim Brotherhood from the Palestine War to Egypt’s Prisons
Mathias Ghyoot (Princeton University) discusses his new book 'Brothers Behind Bars'. Chaired by Professor Raihan Ismail (St Antony’s College). Over the course of three decades, between 1948 and 1975, more than 60,000 members of the Muslim Brotherhood were imprisoned in Egypt. What did these prison experiences mean for the social, intellectual, and organizational development of the Brotherhood? What role has the prison, more broadly, played in the history of Islamism? And how have interactions between the state and political prisoners of diverse ideological commitments shaped the debate over the role of religion and politics in twentieth-century Egypt? Brothers Behind Bars: A History of the Muslim Brotherhood from the Palestine War to Egypt’s Prisons (Oxford University Press, 2025) tells the harrowing yet fascinating history of the Muslim Brotherhood’s imprisonment, from the Palestine War through the consolidation of President Anwar al-Sadat’s rule. Drawing on a wide range of previously untapped sources—including prison memoirs written by Muslim Brothers and Sisters—Mathias Ghyoot will in this in this talk go behind prison walls to show how moderates and radicals, jailers and intelligence officers, clerics and communists were drawn into a prolonged struggle over the meaning of Islam in twentieth-century Egypt. Challenging dominant narratives about the prison experiences of the Muslim Brothers, and about the development of Islamism more broadly, the talk will foreground the role of memory in shaping collective experience and argue for the need to construct an alternative archive beyond both the Egyptian National Archives and the records of the Muslim Brotherhood. In doing so, the talk ultimately addresses a critical methodological question for historians of the modern Middle East: how to write the history of the carceral state that was—and remains—modern Egypt.
Published by Oxford University Press in 2025: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/brothers-behind-bars-9780197662731?cc=gb&lang=en&
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Mathias Ghyoot is a PhD candidate in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, specializing in the social and intellectual history of the modern Middle East and South Asia. His dissertation offers a global history of the rise of Islamism, tracing the development of organized Islamic activism from the late Ottoman Empire through the interwar Muslim world. Mathias is also working on an edition and translation of the lost travelogue of Sayyid Qutb, tentatively titled The America I Saw: The Travel Writings of an Islamist in the Making (forthcoming with Syracuse University Press).
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