Youshaa Patel

Professor Patel’s scholarship explores how Islam has shaped—and been shaped—by Muslim interfaith encounters in the Middle East and beyond. He is author of The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present (Yale University Press, 2022), which was named a finalist for two American Academy of Religion book awards: “Best First Book in the History of Religions” and “Award for Excellence in the Study of
Religion, Textual Studies.”  His work has been supported by grants from Mellon, Fulbright, and the American Institute of Yemeni Studies, and includes extended research stays in India, Qatar, Yemen, Jordan, and Syria. Most recently, Professor Patel was the Abdul Aziz Al-Mutawa visiting fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, an independent center of the University of Oxford.

Courses taught at Lafayette College
REL 101: Religions in World Cultures
REL 207: The Quran
REL 215: Islam
REL 222: Interreligious Cooperation and Conflict
REL 260: Global Muslim Literature and Film
REL 304: Spirituality and Transformation: From Sufism to Self-Help
Selected Publications

Books

• The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present, New York: Yale University Press, 2022
• Finalist, “Best First Book in the History of Religions,” American Academy of Religion (AAR)
• Finalist, “Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, Textual Studies,” American Academy of Religion (AAR)
• Audiobook narrated by actor, Fajer Al-Kaisi can be accessed here
• Interview about The Muslim Difference on the New Books Network

Articles and Essay

• “Najm al-Dīn al-Ghazzī (d. 1651), The Virtue of Awakening to what has been transmitted about Imitation,” in Sensory History of the Islamic World: A Primary Source Reader, edited by Adam Bursi and Christian Lange, forthcoming with E. J. Brill”
• ’Blessed are the strangers’: An Apocalyptic Hadith on the Virtues of Loneliness, Sadness, and Exile,” in Hadith Commentary, edited by Joel Blecher and Stefanie Brinkmann, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023
• “On Copycats,” Critical Muslim 44:3, December 2022
• “The Treatises Against Imitation: A Bibliographical History,” Arabica 65:5-6 (2018): 597-639
• “’Whoever imitates a people becomes one of them’: A Hadith and its Interpreters,” Islamic Law and Society 25:4 (2018): 359-426
• “What is Islam?” Journal of Religion 98:1 (2018): 114-20
• “Sensing Muslim Difference,” in Senses and Sensation: Critical and Primary Sources, edited by David Howes, New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2018, 179-200
• “’Their fires shall not be visible’: The Sense of Muslim Difference,” Material Religion 14:1 (2018): 1-29