Rethinking Islamic Studies: From Orientalism to Cosmopolitanism

Description

Rethinking Islamic Studies upends scholarly roadblocks in post-Orientalist discourse within contemporary Islamic studies and carves fresh inroads toward a robust new understanding of the discipline, one that includes religious studies and other politically infused fields of inquiry. Editors Carl W. Ernst and Richard C. Martin, along with a distinguished group of scholars, map the trajectory of the study of Islam and offer innovative approaches to the theoretical and methodological frameworks that have traditionally dominated the field. In the volume's first section the contributors reexamine the underlying notions of modernity in the East and West and allow for the possibility of multiple and incongruent modernities. This opens a discussion of fundamentalism as a manifestation of the tensions of modernity in Muslim cultures. The second section addresses the volatile character of Islamic religious identity as expressed in religious and political movements at national and local levels. In the third section, contributors focus on Muslim communities in Asia and examine the formation of religious models and concepts as they appear in this region. This study concludes with an afterword by accomplished Islamic studies scholar Bruce B. Lawrence reflecting on the evolution of this post-Orientalist approach to Islam and placing the volume within existing and emerging scholarship. Rethinking Islamic Studies offers original perspectives for the discipline, each utilizing the tools of modern academic inquiry, to help illuminate contemporary incarnations of Islam for a growing audience of those invested in a sharper understanding of the Muslim world. Cover Contents Series Editor’s Preface Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction: Toward a Post-Orientalist Approach to Islamic Religious Studies PART 1 Rethinking Modernity Islamic Perspectives Reasons Public and Divine: Liberal Democracy, Shari'a Fundamentalism, and the Epistemological Crisis of Islam The Misrecognition of a Modern Islamist Organization: Germany Faces “Fundamentalism” Between “Ijtihad of the Presupposition” and Gender Equality: Cross-Pollination between Progressive Islam and Iranian Reform Fundamentalism and the Transparency of the Arabic Qur'an Can We Define “True” Islam? African American Muslim Women Respond to Transnational Muslim Identities PART 2 Rethinking Religion Social Scientific and Humanistic Perspectives Who Are the Islamists? Sufism, Exemplary Lives, and Social Science in Pakistan Formations of Orthodoxy: Authority, Power, and Networks in Muslim Societies Caught between Enlightenment and Romanticism: On the Complex Relation of Religious, Ethnic, and Civic Identity in a Modern “Museum Culture” PART 3 Rethinking the Subject Asian Perspectives The Subject and the Ostensible Subject: Mapping the Genre of Hagiography among South Asian Chishtis Dancing with Khusro: Gender Ambiguities and Poetic Performance in a Delhi Dargah The Perils of Civilizational Islam in Malaysia History and Normativity in Traditional Indian Muslim Thought: Reading Shari'a in the Hermeneutics of Qari Muhammad Tayyab (d. 1983) Afterword: Competing Genealogies of Muslim Cosmopolitanism Contributors Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W