Islam does not unfold in abstraction. It takes root in places – in languages, histories, landscapes, and lifeworlds. The Regions section maps this grounded complexity by organizing scholarship according to the diverse contexts in which Islam and Muslim societies have been imagined, practiced, and studied. This is not a catalogue of where scholars reside, but a cartography of where ideas live. Regional classifications can serve as an indexing tool for tracing how intellectual traditions, political realities, and cultural forms shape not only Muslim lives but also the study of Islam across time and space. Here, disciplinary boundaries give way to contextual depth. From the Maghreb to Southeast Asia, from diasporic Europe to sub-Saharan Africa, each entry orients readers within a web of relations, i.e. linguistic, historical, conceptual, etc. This collection embraces the multilingual nature of the field, drawing on scholarship in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Malay, French, German, English, and beyond. In foregrounding regional location as an epistemic lens, this section invites readers to think with place – not just about it – and to rediscover Islamic Studies as a field textured by difference, shaped by encounter, and rooted in the lived realities of the world.
