James Grehan, Associate Professor, Department of History, Portland State University

James Grehan is Associate Professor of History in Portland State University. He received his doctoral degree in history from the University of Texas at Austin. He currently lives in Portland with his wife and son.

"Grehan provides new and important insights into religious faith and practice in Ottoman Syria and Palestine, but more broadly, his utilization of the concept of agrarian religion is a major contribution to understanding pre-modern religion. This book should be of help to anyone interested in the world history of religion." - John Voll, Professor Emeritus of Islamic History, Georgetown University

"Too often, the religious attitudes of pre-modern societies such as those of Syria and Palestine during the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries are interpreted through the prism of modern conceptions of religion. In a long-overdue intervention, Grehan demonstrates that these views warp our understanding of their history, and project our modern conflicts over religion onto the past in misleading ways. It will be an essential reader for decades to come." - John Curry, author of The Transformation of Muslim Mystical Thought: The Rise of the Halveti Order 1350-1650 (2010)

"Grehan's book is a pioneering study of folk religion in the Middle East on the eve of modernity. Looking for evidence 'on the ground' rather than in the texts of ulama or Islamic modernists, this richly documented historical ethnography of Syria and Palestine charts a world of saints and tombs, caves, and trees, genies and rites of blood which was shared by Muslims, Christians, and Jews of all walks of life." - Itzchak Weismann, author of Taste of Modernity: Sufism, Salafiyya and Arabism in Late Ottoman Damascus

"This work is an important caution of how true Islam can be corrupted in the absence of ulema guidance." - Ali Abd al-Malik, The Islamic Quarterly