‘FROM WOLVERHAMPTON TO THE WIDE WORLD OF ISLAM’

Professor Nile Green (OW 1990) holds the Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to write Global Islam: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2020), which is now available on Amazon.

globalisation. So last year, I published a short book on global Islam for Oxford’s Very Short Introduction series.

When I left WGS in 1990, Religious Studies seemed an unusual choice for a degree programme. Over the years since then, global Islam has become a pervasive but opaque topic of contemporary debate. In writing a book for the general reader, I tried therefore to cut through the complexity and confusion by addressing two simple questions: What is global Islam, and where did it come from? By way of answer, looking at three phases of globalisation from 1870 to 2020, the book explains how the religion was radically transformed in modern times.

My research for the book built on travels that began in Turkey when I was awarded WGS’s Peter Stroud Travel Scholarship, then expanded over the decades to: Pakistan, India, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Jordan, Morocco, Sri Lanka, South Africa, East Africa, Myanmar, Malaysia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Chinese Central Asia, the Caucasus, and most recently, the Balkans.

After thirty years of travelling through the Muslim world - journeys that began during my last two summer vacations at WGS - I decided to draw together what I’d learned, both as a historian and as an observer of Islam’s recent decades of

After introducing the concept of ‘global Islam’, three core chapters show how the religion was repeatedly reinterpreted as increasing numbers of activists, organisations, then states claimed the authority to define Islam, and acquired new methods to propagate their preferred version of the faith. From the rise of Arabic printing to the spread of smartphones, increasing access to the communicational toolkit of globalisation made it ever easier to do so. Yet paradoxically, the global religious landscape that resulted was not one of homogeneity and unity, but of fragmentation and, in some cases, conflict.

Consequently, the book covers not only the Middle East and Europe – the familiar story of ‘Islam and the West’ – but pays equal attention to Asia and Africa. In doing so, it summarises the doctrines of a wide variety of political and non-political versions of Islam, across the wide spectrum from Sufism to Salafism. My overall aim was to help readers recognise and compare the many competing organisations claiming to represent the true version of Islam.

Read more about other recent OW book releases on page 68.