Preaching Pious and Learned Rulership in Medieval Islam: Ibn al-Jawzi's Political Thought

Liew's current book project “Preaching Pious and Learned Rulership in Medieval Islam: Ibn al-Jawzi's Political Thought”  (under contract with Edinburgh University Press), examines the relationship between preaching and political thought in medieval Islam. It focuses on the political discourses of Ibn al-Jawzi, a twelfth-century Muslim religious scholar and preacher in late Abbasid Baghdad. Through an intertextual analysis of Ibn al-Jawzi’s political writings, preaching manuals, collections of sermons, and historical and biographical writings, this book sparks new approaches in the study of Islamic political thought and probes the interconnections between politics, rhetoric, and emotions.