Traversing Tradition

NEW As surrogacy becomes more widespread, Heraa Hashmi challenges the autonomy-based arguments used to justify it by building on Islamic bioethical critiques. traversingtradition.com/2026/04/02/who…

Khawla Nakata Kaori, the First Japanese Female Muslim Scholar traversingtradition.com/2022/10/05/kha…

[NEW] This essay contends that Australia’s proposed ban on Hizb ut Tahrir is a juridical lowering of the threshold for Muslim political expression. The authors argue that the deeper stake is not Hizb ut Tahrir, rather it’s the shrinking possibility of autonomous Muslim political imagination in Western public life. traversingtradition.com/2026/02/16/aus…

📢 Palestine is more than a modern political issue. It is a center of Muslim history and scholarship. Dr. Firas Alkhateeb (@khateeb88) invites you to join MARS 109: Palestine in the Islamic World and rediscover the region’s civilizational legacy from the first century after Hijra to the modern era. Studying this history helps us move beyond colonial narratives and reconnect with Palestine’s deeper role in the Muslim world. 📚 MARS Spring 2026 Post-Ramadan Courses Are Open
• MARS 102: Islamic Civilizational Values Through Hadith
• MARS 103: Introduction to Fiqh
• MARS 109: Palestine in the Islamic World ✅ No prerequisites
✅ No homework
✅ Flexible time slots Registration deadline: March 25
darulqasimcollege.org/mars/

What are the broader implications of permitting zakāt for political campaigns? This article by Tariq Elsaid, LMSW, examines the alleged fatwa through the lenses of Islamic scholarly methodology and communal psychology. Read full piece:
darulqasim.org/mediocrity-in-…

‘More than just a literary undertaking, it is a living testimony that illuminates the power of writing as a means of survival and preservation.’ - Traversing Tradition on Voices of Resistance traversingtradition.com/2025/11/17/the…

This is a good review of my book The Political Psychology of the Veil: The Impossible Body. It breaks down some of its theoretical concepts for non-academic audiences and raises useful questions for Muslims to think about. traversingtradition.com/2025/12/15/boo…

traversingtradition.com/2026/01/26/pre… NEW! Drawing on historic Islamic institution building and anarchist strategy, Nadeem Dawud calls for Muslims to move beyond appeals to power and toward building local, yet globally federated resources that contest systems reproducing harm across the ummah.

[NEW] Who abandoned Aafia Siddiqui, and what does that betrayal reveal about power in the Ummah? Aafia Siddiqui’s ordeal exposes the aggression of American security doctrine, the obedience of the Pakistani state, and the paralysis of a Muslim public sphere. As a new push for her release develops, Hibatuallah Bensaid discusses how her case forces a reckoning with the machinery that consumed her and the timidity that enabled it. traversingtradition.com/2025/11/24/for…

[NEW] This novella by Mollā Saaleh Baseer charts both the life and the afterlife of Shāh Walī Allāh al-Dihlawī, the preeminent thinker of the late Mughal empire, whose synthesis of revelation, philosophy, and mysticism sought to rescue Islam’s intellectual tradition amid imperial decay. Set within the luminous yet collapsing world of eighteenth-century Delhi, it follows Walī Allāh’s education, his journeys to the Ḥijāz, his metaphysical meditations on wujūd and tajallī, and his attempt to reconcile Ibn ʿArabī’s visionary cosmology with Ibn Taymiyya’s sober scripturalism. His son, Shāh ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dihlawī, emerges as both heir and interpreter, translating his father’s vision into a theology of resistance and continuity that sustained Muslim thought through the first shocks of colonial rule. From this Mughal crucible, the essay traces the transmission of Walī Allāh’s legacy through Deoband’s seminaries to the modern American Midwest, culminating in the figure of Shaykh Amin Kholwadia (@shaykhamin), a British scholar who revives the vows of Walī Allāh in a new cultural setting, in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Through history, theology, and memory, the author portrays Walī Allāh not as a vanished relic but as the abiding intellect of the Mughal empire’s conscience, his light refracted across time, a lasting memorial to the intellectual culture of Mughal India. 📖 Link below: traversingtradition.com/2025/11/10/how…

Mohammed Anas uses the Prophetic Hijrah as a moral lens to understand Uyghur diaspora community-building. He juxtaposes the post-migration sovereignty of the Madinan community with the statelessness and global silence surrounding Uyghur strife. traversingtradition.com/2026/01/05/the…

Tajuddin Ingram places Zohran Mamdani’s ascent in a long New York pattern where once-marginalized communities move from the edges to the center of power, reshaping the city’s coalitions. He warns that Muslim Americans now face the same pressures that absorbed earlier groups, and calls for stronger, Islamically grounded institutions to sustain long-term civic influence. traversingtradition.com/2025/12/29/the…

Great hobby!

[NEW] In his reading of Utku Barış Balaban’s ‘Industrial Islamism,’ Abdullah Alwi argues that Turkey’s Islamization is a class project. Post–Cold War industrialization produced the ‘faubourgeoisie’ (small manufacturers, subcontractors, contractors), and Islamism became the governing language that legitimised their ascent. traversingtradition.com/2025/12/22/ind…

Naoki Yamamoto "East Asia in the Islamic Civilization: Han-kitab as Minority Literature" Traversing Tradition traversingtradition.com/2023/10/11/eas…

[NEW] In continuing our series on Islam & China, Dr. Naoki Yamamoto turns to the work of Liu Zhi, who produced translations that preserved Islamic truth while expressing it through Confucian and Chinese conceptual vocabularies. traversingtradition.com/2025/12/08/ver…

[NEW] Can manga truly carry the weight of an Islamic moral universe? In this essay, Hibatuallah Bensaid responds to Dr. Naoki Yamamoto’s attempt to read shōnen series like Naruto and Anpanman through concepts such as futuwwa, tawba, and spiritual mentorship. She argues that their ethical worlds remain grounded in social harmony and narrative catharsis, and in doing so, while anime and manga can echo the fiṭrī intuition for compassion, perseverance, and justice, they lack the metaphysical and theological roots (tawḥīd, revelation, and Sharīʿa) that give Islamic virtues their coherence. Bensaid insists that these stories can be affectionately enjoyed and morally suggestive, but they cannot substitute for, or fully parallel, the revealed moral cosmos of Islam. traversingtradition.com/2025/12/03/nar…

This article I wrote in 2018 on @TraversingTrad has aged well I think: traversingtradition.com/2018/09/10/art…

Some stories demand to be told again. My contribution to @TraversingTrad "Daughter of The Ummah: The Regimes that Colluded on Dr. Aafia Sidiqui" @Aafiamovement Wishing @CliveSSmith success as he advances a motion for compassionate release. traversingtradition.com/2025/11/24/for…