"This book provides guidelines--via 40 practical tips and processes--to fulfill anyone's natural ability. It's about becoming the master of your own fate, your own skills and your own success. Greatness is not a natural gift... It is something achieved through hard work and diligent practice--not from dreaming, but from working. Commit to becoming the best: work hard, have a positive mindset, and practice, practice, practice."--Back cover.

A Syria-born dancer offers his deeply personal story of war, statelessness, and the pursuit of the art of dance in this inspirational memoir. DANCE OR DIE is an autobiographical coming-of-age account of Ahmad Joudeh, a young refugee who grows up in Damascus with dreams of becoming a dancer. When he is recruited by one of Syria’s top dance companies, neither bombs nor family opposition can keep him from taking classes, practicing hard, and becoming a Middle Eastern celebrity on a Lebanese reality show. Despite death threats if Ahmad continues to dance, his father kicking him out of the house, and the war around him intensifying, he persists and even gets a tattoo on his neck right where the executioner's blade would fall that says, "Dance or Die." A powerful look at refugee life in Syria, DANCE OR DIE tells of the pursuit of personal expression in the most dangerous of circumstances and of the power of art to transcend war and suffering. It follows Ahmad from Damascus to Beirut to Amsterdam, where he finds a home with one of Europe's top ballet troupes, and from where he continues to fight for the human rights of refugees everywhere through his art, his activism, and his commitment to justice.

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES AND NPR WINNER OF THE 2023 L.A. TIMES BOOK PRIZE, ART SEIDENBAUM AWARD FOR FIRST FICTION “Stunning not only on account of the author’s talent, of which there is clearly plenty, but also in its humanity.” —New York Times Book Review (cover) Sent back to his birthplace—Lahore’s notorious red-light district—to hush up the murder of a girl, a man finds himself in an unexpected reckoning with his past. Not since childhood has Faraz returned to the Mohalla, in Lahore’s walled inner city, where women continue to pass down the art of courtesan from mother to daughter. But he still remembers the day he was abducted from the home he shared with his mother and sister there, at the direction of his powerful father, who wanted to give him a chance at a respectable life. Now Wajid, once more dictating his fate from afar, has sent Faraz back to Lahore, installing him as head of the Mohalla police station and charging him with a mission: to cover up the violent death of a young girl. It should be a simple assignment to carry out in a marginalized community, but for the first time in his career, Faraz finds himself unable to follow orders. As the city assails him with a jumble of memories, he cannot stop asking questions or winding through the walled city’s labyrinthine alleyways chasing the secrets—his family’s and his own—that risk shattering his precariously constructed existence. Profoundly intimate and propulsive, The Return of Faraz Ali is a spellbindingly assured first novel that poses a timeless question: Whom do we choose to protect, and at what price?

Irfan Ahmad makes the far-reaching argument that potent systems and modes for self-critique as well as critique of others are inherent in Islam--indeed, critique is integral to its fundamental tenets and practices. Challenging common views of Islam as hostile to critical thinking, Ahmad delineates thriving traditions of critique in Islamic culture, focusing in large part on South Asian traditions. Ahmad interrogates Greek and Enlightenment notions of reason and critique, and he notes how they are invoked in relation to "others," including Muslims. Drafting an alternative genealogy of critique in Islam, Ahmad reads religious teachings and texts, drawing on sources in Hindi, Urdu, Farsi, and English, and demonstrates how they serve as expressions of critique. Throughout, he depicts Islam as an agent, not an object, of critique. On a broader level, Ahmad expands the idea of critique itself. Drawing on his fieldwork among marketplace hawkers in Delhi and Aligarh, he construes critique anthropologically as a sociocultural activity in the everyday lives of ordinary Muslims, beyond the world of intellectuals. Religion as Critique allows space for new theoretical considerations of modernity and change, taking on such salient issues as nationhood, women's equality, the state, culture, democracy, and secularism.

Eqbal Ahmad (1930?–1999) was a bold and original activist, journalist, and theorist who brought uncommon perspective to the rise of militant Islam, the conflict in Kashmir, the involvement of the United States in Vietnam, and the geopolitics of the Cold War. A long-time friend and intellectual collaborator of Ahmad, Stuart Schaar presents in this book previously unseen materials by and about his colleague, having traveled through the United States, India, Pakistan, western Europe, and North Africa to connect Ahmad's experiences to the major currents of modern history. Ahmad was the first to recognize that former ally Osama bin Laden would turn against the United States. He anticipated the rapidly shifting loyalties of terrorists and understood that overthrowing Saddam Hussein would provoke violence and sectarian strife in Iraq. Ahmad had great compassion for the victims of the proxy wars waged by the leading Cold War powers, and he frequently championed unpopular causes, such as the need to extend the rights of Palestinians and protect Bosnians and Kosovars in a disintegrating Yugoslavia. Toward the end of his life, Ahmad worked tirelessly to broker a peace between India and Pakistan and to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons throughout the subcontinent. As novel and necessary as ever, Ahmad's remarkable vision is here preserved and extended to reveal the extent to which he was involved in the political and historical conflicts of his time.

Why are domestic workers converting to Islam in the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf region? In Everyday Conversions Attiya Ahmad presents us with an original analysis of this phenomenon. Using extensive fieldwork conducted among South Asian migrant women in Kuwait, Ahmad argues domestic workers’ Muslim belonging emerges from their work in Kuwaiti households as they develop Islamic piety in relation—but not opposition—to their existing religious practices, family ties, and ethnic and national belonging. Their conversion is less a clean break from their preexisting lives than it is a refashioning in response to their everyday experiences. In examining the connections between migration, labor, gender, and Islam, Ahmad complicates conventional understandings of the dynamics of religious conversion and the feminization of transnational labor migration while proposing the concept of everyday conversion as a way to think more broadly about emergent forms of subjectivity, affinity, and belonging.

In this pioneering biography, Christopher Melchert examines the forefather of the fourth of the four principal Sunni schools of jurisprudence, the Hanbali. Upholding the view that the Qur’an was uncreated and the direct word of God, Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855) thought that the holy text should be read literally, rejecting any possibility for metaphorical or revisionist interpretation. Showing that even in his own lifetime, ibn Hanbal’s followers were revising his doctrines in favour of a more commodious Islam, Melchert assesses the importance of ibn Hanbal’s teachings and analyses their relevance in modern Sunni Islam.