BOOK LAUNCH DISCUSSION: ISLAMIC ETHICS AND SPIRITUAL SOVEREIGNTY

Organised by
Islamic Courses
with the support of
Ebrahim College
:
BOOK LAUNCH DISCUSSION: ISLAMIC ETHICS AND SPIRITUAL SOVEREIGNTY - GENRES OF TRADITION IN MUSLIM SOUTH ASIA
With author
*
Dr Ali Altaf Mian
[
University of Florida
]
Respondent: *
Dr. Shaykh Abdur‑Rahman ibn Yusuf Mangera
[
Whitethread Institute and White Thread Press
]
Date and time
: Thursday 26th November 2026, 6.30p
m - 8
pm
Venue
:
Ebrahim College, 399-401 High Street, Stratford, London E15 4QZ
Ali Altaf Mian demonstrates how attention to genre and embodiment illuminates the concepts and practices of the Islamic tradition—and how theologians, Sufi mystics, and ordinary Muslims respond to the incapacitating tribulations of creaturely existence in modernity.
Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty is grounded in the vast textual archive of one of modern South Asia's foremost Muslim theologians and Sufis: Maulānā Ashraf ʿAlī Thānavī (1863–1943). Through a close examination of Maulānā Thānavī's corpus of writings, Ali Altaf Mian offers new insights into tradition as a discursive and affective crucible of ethical transformation and spiritual sovereignty.
Philologically attuned and philosophically oriented, Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty elucidates connections between tradition's forms of life and forms of language. Mian shows how intended and unconscious movements between genres in the life of tradition attend to the felt and perceived needs of the ensouled body at the dual scales of singularity and collectivity. Through a novel attention to textuality and psychic life, Mian elaborates a trans-genre reading practice to appreciate ritual law and ethical agency in the modern world. Insofar as modernity has been about individualism, the rise of literalism, and the disciplining of desire, religious traditions' capacity to respond to these hardships depends on renewing community, engaging textuality and the play of genres, and bracing the unknowability of desire.
Reviews include:
"
Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty
is an insightful and textured case study of embodied, affective, and transformative elements of the religious tradition. The book opens up new avenues, not only in the study of Islam and modernity, but in broader dimensions of comparative religions and cultures." —Marcia Hermansen, co-editor of
Varieties of American Sufism
"This book is unmatched in the breadth of its engagement with Ashraf ʿAlī Thānavī’s vast oeuvre and in its sophistication. Mian has provided us with an extraordinarily vivid sense of how the constraints of particular genres shape articulations of the Islamic tradition and what it has meant to inhabit and experience that tradition in conditions of modernity." —Muhammad Qasim Zaman, author of
Islam in Pakistan
Copies of the book will be available for purchase and book signing by
Dr Ali Altaf Mian
[
University of Florida
]
.
Otherwise one can purchase the book online here: https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268210908/islamic-ethics-and-spiritual-sovereignty/
About the speaker:
*
Dr Ali Altaf Mian
[
University of Florida
] is the Izzat Hasan Sheikh Fellow in Islamic Studies and assistant professor of religion at the University of Florida. Ali Altaf Mian received his B.A. in Philosophy and M.A. in English from the University of Louisville, and his Ph.D. from the Graduate Program in Religion at Duke University. His research areas include Islam in South Asia, the history of classical Islamic theology, mysticism, and legalism (especially the Hanafi Law School), Qur’anic studies, Hadith studies, gender and sexuality in contemporary Islam, religion and modernity (with particular emphasis on how religious traditions changed in and through European colonialism), as well as method and theory in the study of religion (particularly the invocation of psychoanalytical theory for interpreting religious ideas, rituals, and institutions). He is the author of Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty: Genres of Tradition in Muslim South Asia (Notre Dame Press, 2026) and Muslims in South Asia (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming in 2029) and the editor of The Bruce B. Lawrence Reader: Islam Beyond Borders (Duke University Press, 2021). Mian also serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (since 2017) and his research has appeared in numerous journals, including History of Religions, Qui Parle, Journal of Islamic Studies, Der Islam, Journal of Urdu Studies, ReOrient, International Journal of Islam in Asia, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Respondent: *
Dr. Shaykh Abdur‑Rahman ibn Yusuf Mangera
[
Whitethread Institute and White Thread Press
] - Dr. Shaykh Abdur‑Rahman ibn Yusuf Mangera is a British Muslim scholar educated in both Islamic and Western traditions. He memorised the Qur’ān early, then graduated from Darul Uloom Bury (UK), and completed advanced fatwā specialisation at Maẓāhir ʿUlūm, Saharanpur (India). He later earned a BA Honours from the University of Johannesburg and an MA and PhD in Islamic Studies from SOAS, University of London. He also holds an honorary fellowship at The Royal Aal al‑Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought in Amman, Jordan. Shaykh Abdur‑Rahman has served Muslim communities on both sides of the Atlantic, including eight years as an imam in Southern California and over five years in London. His international lecturing and extensive pastoral experience allow him to address contemporary challenges facing Muslims in the West with clarity and relevance. He currently sits on several national advisory boards as a muftī and founded Whitethread Institute, a postgraduate centre for advanced Islamic scholarship and Menses Matters. He is an accomplished author with multiple publications and continues to contribute to scholarly work through White Thread Press. An active traveller and educator, he teaches hadith and delivers lectures available through www.zamzamacademy.com and Rayyan Courses.
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