Youshaa Patel

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How did Muslims across time and place define the line between themselves and their neighbors? Youshaa Patel explores why the Prophet Muhammad first advised his followers to emulate Christians and Jews, but then allegedly reversed course, urging them to “be different!” He details how subsequent generations of Muslim scholars canonized the Prophet’s admonition into an influential doctrine against imitation that enjoined ordinary believers to embody and display their religious difference in public life.

Tracing this Islamic discourse from its origins in Arabia to Mamluk and Ottoman Damascus, colonial Egypt, and beyond, this sweeping intellectual and social history offers a panoramic view of Muslim identity, revealing unexpected intersections between religion and other markers of difference across ethnicity, gender, and status. Patel illustrates that contemporary debates in the West over visible expressions of Islam, from headscarves and beards to minarets and mosques, are just the latest iterations in a long history of how small differences have defined Muslim interreligious encounters.

This bibliographical essay documents for the first time the treatises written on the Sunni Islamic doctrine of tašabbuh—the reprehensible imitation of others, especially non-Muslims. Since the formative period of Islam, tašabbuh has played an important role in shaping both Islamic orthodoxy and Muslim inter-religious relations. But due to a focus on the doctrine’s historical origins, existing scholarship has yet to identify the Islamic literary genre that I call “the treatises against imitation,” which was a post-formative development. To fill this scholarly lacuna, this study traces the genre’s historical evolution by creating an archive of available treatises against imitation, pre-modern and modern. Chronologically arranged and periodized, the bibliographical entries include descriptive summaries of each treatise, with references to published and/or manuscript editions and existing scholarship on the text and its author.

This article examines the canonization of the Prophetic hadith, " Whoever imitates a people becomes one of them, " which became the keynote expression of tashabbuh (reprehensible imitation), a Sunni doctrine commonly invoked by religious authorities to distinguish Muslims from non-Muslims. First, I analyze how the Partisans of Hadith transmitted and classified the hadith, highlighting the pivotal role of Abū Dāwūd (d. 275/889) in canonizing the tradition. I then trace the divergent trajectories of its interpretation over time, especially the glosses of two brilliant Damascenes: Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) and Najm al-Dīn al-Ghazzī (d. 1061/1651). This study draws not only from hadith commentaries but also from treatises on law, ethics, and Sufism, illustrating how hadith interpretation takes place in multiple Islamic literary genres. A detailed appendix catalogues the collections of hadith that transmit the tradition; compares different narrations in order to date and locate its circulation; and visually maps its isnād networks.

This article examines the nexus of Islam, difference, and the
senses. Amidst the diverse ethno-religious landscape of
post-conquest Islam where communal boundaries often blurred,
religious and state authorities defined belonging in the Muslim
community through differences; they felt compelled to set apart
Muslims from non-Muslims and other “wayward” Muslims by
disciplining the physical body, including the sensorium. Building
upon a robust theory of the senses advanced by Abbasid Muslim
litterateur Jāḥiẓ (d. 868/9), I demonstrate how pre-modern (7th
– 14th centuries CE) Muslim discourses and practices of difference
configured the senses in specific ways, transforming body,
object and landscape into material signs of collective identity in
public life. Drawing upon literary and material sources, I narrate
four episodes set in the pre-modern Islamic Middle East where
Muslim authorities defined ritual and everyday quotidian practice
along lines of communal difference. Together, the episodes
highlight the multisensoriality of Muslim difference: the visibility
of Christian crosses; acoustic memories of the adhān (audible
call to prayer); the expensive taste of gold and silver metalware;
and, finally, sensory overload at commemorative public gatherings
(ʿīds)—holiday celebrations, tomb visitations, and funerals.

This chapter is the most comprehensive Europhone study to date of the famous hadith of the Prophet:

"Islam began strange, and will [one day] return to being strange–just as it began–so blessed are the strangers (ghuraba)!"

How did pre-modern Muslim scholars imagine stranger-ness (ghurba) as a virtue—as something positive, not negative? How/when would Islam return to being strange?  What is the connection of ghurba to orthodoxy, End Times, and jihad? The diverse group of all-star scholars whose interpretations of the hadith I explore include al-Ghazali, Ibn Taymiyya, al-Shaykh al-Saduq, Ibn al-Qayyim, al-Shatibi, al-Ajurri, Ibn Ata’ Allah, Rumi, Ibn Rajab, and others. I also study the transmission networks (isnads) of two of the hadith’s most widely circulated narrations‑‑illustrating a geographic connection to 8th century Kufa. What about Kufa may have facilitated the hadith's circulation there? I conclude with a brief reflection on how modern-day extremists call themselves strangers (ghuraba) as a mark of distinction—something that I demonstrate is largely absent in the pre-modern jihad manuals I examine.