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Despite the importance of Islam in global affairs and the role of Islamic Studies in Religious Studies, little attention has been given to the basic questions of how Islam should be taught. This volume brings together a number of leading scholars of Islamic Studies with rich experience in teaching Islam in a diversity of undergraduate settings, from large public universities to small private colleges. Topics addressed include Islamic law, the Quran, Sufism, women in Islam, Islam in America, and teaching about Islam through Arabic literature and the use of new information technology.

Islam --- Islamic studies --- Study and teaching.

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Against the background of long-standing narratives in which Twelver Shi'ism is viewed as fundamentally authoritarian, The School of Hillah and the Formation of Twelver Shi'i Islamic Tradition builds upon recent scholarship in the fields of Religious Studies, Anthropology, and History to argue that Twelver Shi'ism is better understood as a discursive tradition. At a conceptual level, this solves the basic problem of how to integrate the extraordinary diversity of Twelver Shi'ism across time and space into a single historical category without engaging in a normative assessment of its underlying essence. Furthermore, in light of this conception of tradition, the School of Hillah stands out as a seminal period in the archive of Twelver Shi'ism, though it has seldom been recognized as such in European-language scholarship. Insofar as it gave birth to a conversation that would prove capable of encompassing the dynamism of Twelver Shi'ism, the School of Hillah should be considered the formative period of Twelver Shi'i tradition. Moreover, when the tradition is conceptualized in this manner, it is a bulwark against the very authoritarianism by which Twelver Shi'ism has been characterized for so long.

Social networks --- Islamic studies. --- Shīʻah --- History.

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"Modernist Islamic thought was an intellectual movement active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that aimed at redefining the relationship between Islam and western modernity. The movement took off at a pivotal time in Muslim history, when Muslim empires were either in serious decline or vanquished, and when the British and French were asserting their power as new colonial rulers in majority Muslim societies the world over. Muslim modernists sought to define how Muslims should orient themselves in this new world. And in particular, how their Islamic beliefs and practices should be reconciled with western ideas such as secularism, women's rights, democratic representation, and western forms of education. Teena Purohit's new account of Muslim modernism is distinctive in that she seeks to highlight something that has gone unnoticed in previous accounts of the Muslim modernist story: it has had a decided Sunni bias and has been linked to calls for suppression of minority Muslim communities. Such communities, including the Shi'a, Ismailis, Ahmadis, and Bahai's, have often been disparaged in Muslim modernist thought as sectarian or deviant and thus as not fully or authentically Muslim. In this book, Purohit reveals how a succession of key Muslim modernist thinker-activists from the colonial, anti-colonial/nationalist, and post-colonial/Islamist eras shared an obsession with Muslim "unity" that implicitly relied on a Sunni majoritarian perspective. Not coincidentally, this perspective was also held by European orientalist scholars of Islam who, like the Muslim modernists, were deeply influenced by notions of sect and heresy that had their origin in Christianity. This obsession with unity and the privileging of Sunnism that went with it was found in all forms of Muslim modernism. As Purohit shows via her close examination of a series of key modernist thinkers from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, repeated calls for "reform" or "reformation" of Islam or for a rediscovery of Islam's supposedly "lost unity" inclined the Muslim modernist project as a whole towards intolerance of Muslim minorities"-- "Muslim intellectuals who sought to establish the boundaries of modern Muslim identityMuslim modernism was a political and intellectual movement that sought to redefine the relationship between Islam and the colonial West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Spearheaded by Muslim leaders in Asia and the Middle East, the modernist project arose from a desire to reconcile Islamic beliefs and practices with European ideas of secularism, scientific progress, women's rights, and democratic representation. Teena Purohit provides innovative readings of the foundational thinkers of Muslim modernism, showing how their calls for unity and reform led to the marginalization of Muslim minority communities that is still with us today.Sunni Chauvinism and the Roots of Muslim Modernism offers fresh perspectives on figures such as Jamal al din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, Muhammad Iqbal, and Abul A'la Maududi. It sheds light on the exclusionary impulses and Sunni normative biases of modernist Muslim writers, and explores how their aim to unite the global Muslim community-which was stagnant and fragmented in their eyes-also created lasting divisions. While modernists claimed to represent all Muslims when they asserted the centrality and significance of unity, they questioned the status of groups such as Ahmadis, Bahais, and the Shia more broadly.Addressing timely questions about religious authority and reform in modern Islam, this incisive book reveals how modernist notions of Islam as a single homogeneous tradition gave rise to enduring debates about who belongs to the Muslim community and who should be excluded"--

Islamic modernism --- Sunna. --- RELIGION / Islam / History --- SOCIAL SCIENCE / Islamic Studies --- History.

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This book explores how to locate the sources which influenced the political, social, and ideological stance of a famous Turkestani Jadid thinker, writer, journalist and scholar, 'Abdurra'uf Fitrat (1886-1938), thus also putting in perspective some overall intellectual trends in Turkestan, especially in Bukhara in the early 1910s. Based on Fitrat's early publications the book discusses what intellectual milieu it was that shaped his worldview in the early 1910s, a worldview that could be designated as a first attempt at "freedom and sovereignty through Islam". A thorough review of these publications also brings greater clarity to the issue of Fitrat's ethnical identity, which sheds light on how he related to the worldwide community of Muslims and how he positioned himself towards political unity of the Muslim World.Furthermore, by scrutinizing Fitrat's intellectual legacy of 1910-1915, this book highlights some of the origins of Jadidism in Turkestan and places Turkestani Jadidism in the context of worldwide Muslim reformism at the turn of the 20th century.

Islam and politics --- Jadidism --- SOCIAL SCIENCE / Islamic Studies. --- 'Abdurra'uf Fitrat. --- Bukhara. --- Jadidism. --- Pan-Islam. --- Zhadidchilik --- Islamic education --- Islamic sects

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Over the last twenty years, the rise of Qur'anic studies has been one of the most remarkable developments within the wider framework of Islamic scholarship. This evolution can be viewed from three angles: exponential growth in the accessibility of relevant primary; the use of contemporary methods for developing new analytical agendas; a renewed appreciation of diverse hermeneutical orientations. A veritable gold-rush of publications, theses, colloquia and study projects devoted to the Qur'an in the past two decades illustrates these developments. This scholarly community subsists primarily in European countries and the United States, but its effects are not limited there. The reception and dissemination of this work in Muslim-majority countries is constant and bodes as a promising opportunity to establish a real dialogue between scholars and lived community. The present book contains expert contributions emerging from this nexus, with scholars from North African, Middle Eastern and Western backgrounds who share a common ambition: to advance academic study of the Qurʾan by promoting cooperation across global boundaries.

Arabic language --- Grammar. --- Qurʼan --- Criticism, interpretation, etc. --- Islamic studies. --- Qur'an. --- text and exegesis. --- theology and religion.