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Although theories of disenchantment have been both utilized and critiqued by scholars of Islam, they have not received sufficient critical scrutiny within historical studies on Islamic reformism, a novel religiosity associated with modernity's emergence in Muslim societies. Indeed, histories of Islamic reformism often portray this novel religiosity as an exclusive force of disenchantment, which is unhelpful for understanding the views of Muslims with reformist commitments and attachments to Sufi practices that invest supernatural powers into bodies and objects. Through an analysis of the Sufi Islamic reformist project of the ʿAshira Muhammadiyya organization in Egypt during the Nasser years (1954–1970), this article highlights how the history of Islamic reformism resonates with and diverges from disenchantment theories. Specifically, it foregrounds the way this Sufi reformism not only framed its objectives in terms of progress, science, and socialism but also presumed a reformist Sufi subject constituted through encounters with unseen supernatural agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Specialists in Islamic studies have taken virtually no interest in the influential emerging field of cognitive science of religion (CSR). The present article addresses this problem by considering how insights from CSR can be used to reconceptualize classical Islamic theology. The article analyzes a number of theological topics, including predestination and the uncreated Qurʾān. However, it focuses on five key Islamic theological claims, namely (1) God is a single first cause who brings the universe into being; (2) God lacks an anthropomorphic body; (3) it is possible to arrive at some knowledge of God independently of scripture through human nature (fiṭra) and reason; (4) God is a bringer of benefit and harm, thereby rewarding, punishing, testing, and blessing human beings; and (5) prophethood exists and it is proven through miracles. In analyzing the preceding theological issues, the article utilizes the Arabic writings of the renowned medieval theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Job advertisements for Islamic studies faculty positions provide material and significant insight into the construction and reification of a normative Islam. These ads serve to further entrench inaccurate notions of "authentic" Islam. Quantitative and qualitative data demonstrate how religious studies colleagues craft job calls that replicate stereotypes about Islam and Muslims, how the study of Islam functions, and an Arab and Arabic-centric emphasis. Such ads prefer specific regions (the Middle East), languages (Arabic), and subjects (texts). Ironically, this archive shows that ads for jobs in the field of Islamic studies frequently instantiate biases and stereotypes that Islamic studies scholars dedicate their careers to dismantling. Stated hiring preferences, including teaching obligations, entrench an "essence" of Islam or Islamic studies at odds with scholarly discourse about Islam, Islamic studies, and religious studies that may be summarized as a simple, troubling equation: Islam = Middle East + Arabic + texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her article, "Islamic Legal Studies: A Critical Historiography," published in The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Law , Ayesha Chaudhry criticizes the field of Islamic law, and Islamic studies more broadly, for promoting two hegemonic methodologies: White Supremacist Islamic Studies and Patriarchal Islamic Studies. She argues that these modes of scholarship perpetuate patriarchy, decenter Muslim narratives, privilege precolonial texts, and create barriers to entry into academia. Her resolution is a new form of Islamic studies—Intersectional Islamic Studies—which seeks to recenter Muslim narratives, is committed to social justice, and exposes the problematic power structures within academic inquiry. Chaudhry argues that scholarship produced using the first two methods is "bad scholarship," whereas scholarship produced using the third method is "good scholarship." In this article, I problematize the dichotomy between "good" and "bad" scholarship and argue that Chaudhry's methodology is restrictive, hegemonic, and detrimental to meaningful scholarly engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes a case as to why the topic of Islamic origins, long ignored in religious studies on account of its Orientalist pedigree, ought to be revisited. Rather than reverting back to Orientalism, however, it argues that a more appropriate model for understanding Islamic origins is one that is aware of the fluidity of religious and social identity in late antiquity. Rather than simply reading later Islamic sources back onto the emergence of Islam, it is important to examine late antique sources responsible for the complexity of all identity formations (not only Muslim) in sixth-century Arabia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the limits of the debate surrounding Robert A. Orsi's call for a "third way" in scholar-practitioner encounters in religious studies research. It argues that the debate has reached an impasse and that, as Joel Robbins suggests, an alternative approach might exist within theology-- particularly, theological discussions of how the Christian is to relate to the non-Christian other. The article tests this notion by probing the writings of A. Kenneth Cragg, an Anglican theologian and Islamic Studies specialist who proposed the possibility of expanding the Christian canon within the context of interfaith encounters. The article concludes that although religious studies remains, as a field, unprepared to countenance the kind of hybridization toward which Cragg's conception of the interfaith situation leads, his notion of "bi-scripturalism" has the potential nevertheless of opening up new questions for religious studies scholars concerned with alterity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To the longstanding debate about normativity in religious studies, and more specifically in the field of Islamic studies, this contribution to the roundtable adds a new dimension: the claim that it is important to recognize a variety of normativities at work in any field of the humanities, which in turn decenters the exclusive focus on religious normativity in our field. My contribution is based on the particular dynamics of a research project on American Muslim efforts against domestic violence. I argue that as a feminist scholar of Islam, I am faced with a number of particular challenges, including the politics of public representations of Islam and Muslims and critiques of both feminist theory and Muslim communal practice, all toward the larger and deeply political goal of working in the humanities to change the world in which we live. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The category of "orthodoxy" remains one of the most vexed and undertheorized in religious studies. Although the common-sense usage of orthodoxy presumes it is static, fixed, and timeless, Muslims are at least as conscious of the diversity of interpretation and practice of Islam as are Western scholars of religion. Yet, Muslims are generally theologically invested in the universality and coherence of Islam. Contrary to critics who reduce the postcolonial turn in anthropology and religious studies to apologetics, I demonstrate how orthodoxy claims can be critically appraised in a discursive framework rather than constructivist or nominalist analytical modes. I write against deployments of orthodoxy framed in narrow, sectarian terms. In my analysis, orthodoxy emerges as a dynamic relation of power through the placement of contemporary Sunni intellectuals with large followings in the United States (such as Tariq Ramadan, Hamza Yusuf, and Yasir Qadhi) in a broader American Islamic intellectual history with religious leaders and thinkers such as Elijah Muhammad and Drew Ali. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addressing a certain type of "normativity" in Islamic studies, each contribution to the roundtable offers a corrective in turn. Authors' justifications for these prescriptions are commitments to academic methods shared across religious studies. This points to a methodological horizon in Islamic studies within the American Academy of Religion (AAR): how ethical engagements, such as "progressive Islam," shape scholarly representation. I discuss an example from my own research, the treatment of the topic "Islam and the environment." I call for methodologically disciplined steps in order to take Islam, when it is cast instrumentally as a production of projects for change (possibly our own) also to be an object of phenomenological study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concepts of "postmodernity" and "postcoloniality" are often used interchangeably in the study of nonwestern cultures. These terms are both temporal markers and signifiers of a set of affects and values. This contribution to the roundtable argues that the slippage in the multivalent meanings of these terms ends up misrepresenting the empirical ethos that animates contemporary Northern Nigeria. The disjuncture, fracture, and violence experienced in the Nigerian colonial period produces a contemporary society that values wholeness, absolutes, and fixed truths, a set of values quite different from what is typically associated with postmodernity. The evidence for contemporary Nigeria's drive to wholeness is found through the ethnographic data I recount here: a reflection of how the stoning punishment in Islam is expressed in the Nigerian present, and in the form taken by the trial of Amina Lawal, a peasant woman from the north of Nigeria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of Islamic origins has received much attention by both popular writers and militants who seek to define Islam on the basis of its past. The academic response to this attention is often dismissive, arguing that the past is contested and so any single-minded construction is reductionist and simplistic. This is certainly true, but it risks ignoring both the power of this polemic and also the new consensus that has emerged among scholars who work on Islamic origins. Most scholars now accept a mid-seventh century date for the basic text (rasm) of the Qur'an; they also agree that the writings of later historians must be subjected to a literary, not literal, reading. Yet material evidence from the first Islamic centuries is still poorly understood. I briefly describe some of this evidence to show how it undermines two forms of what I call incidental normativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the variety of normative claims that both Muslims and non-Muslims have held about the Qur'an by asking two key questions: (1) What separates normative and non-normative approaches to scholarship? (2) What separates study of a tradition from contribution to that tradition? By surveying a multiplicity of scholars--spanning two millennia and disparate geographical regions--this article argues that objectivity is scarcely if ever possible in Qur'anic studies scholarship and that scholars of the Qur'an, Muslim or not, almost always have a normative agenda, whether implicit or explicit. Because the epistemological boundaries between insiders and outsiders are often fluid, recognizing the similarities between so-called insider and outsider approaches to Qur'anic exegesis across the centuries contributes to debates about normative scholarship by helping us to reimagine boundaries of identity, authority, and the struggle for normativity in religious studies scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2013 speech "Islam in the Public Square" by religion scholar John L. Esposito, given as the American Academy of Religion (AAR) Presidential Address, is presented. Topics include his experience as a scholar of Islam during the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, the notion of a clash of civilizations between Islam and Western countries, and the prevalence of Islamophobia in U.S. culture.

This essay explains several aspects of the intellectual and political environment in which Islamic studies came of age and became a field of study in America during the last four decades. It describes a time in which Orientalism came under attack and Islamist activism came into Western public view and debate, beginning with the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and continually highlighted by such events as 9/11 and the controversy over the attempt to build an Islamic center near Ground Zero. Finding space in the AAR as a venue for the academic study of Islamic religion is described as a conflicted process, with different and competing visions of the mission of Islamic studies scholarship in the Academy. Despite an array of continuing challenges, the successes of the retiring and ongoing groups of Islamicists in the AAR have overall served well the professional interests of the Academy and Islamic studies specialists. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On the basis of participant observation in a weekly “fiqh class,” this paper is a study of casuistry and pedagogy in one mosque in a major French urban center. It analyzes the construction of religious authority through the genre of “question and answer,” focusing on the relationship between the religious education of converts and that of lifelong Muslims. Through a detailed analysis of three exchanges from my field research, and drawing on Aristotelian categories of rhetoric, I argue that in this community, question and answer as a genre of pedagogy is used to: (1) propagate uniform ethical instruction across a diverse group of Muslims, (2) construct the authority of the imam as inherently dialogical and based in his relationship to the mosque community, (3) both highlight and normalize the experiences of convert Muslims, and (4) distinguish the ideal Islamic ethics of this community from alternative ethical practices or systems, both inside and outside of Islam. I also attend to the performative aspects of question and answer, examining how community members use this genre to discern their relationship to this hermeneutic community and to its center of authority, the imam, as well as to inform themselves, express themselves, and dissent from the mosque discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Excerpts from studies in this issue are presented, including those from "Translation and the Study of Indian Religions," by John Nemec, "State Intervention and Holy Violence: Timgad/Paleostrovsk/Waco," by Brent D. Shaw and "Sanctified Violence: Monotheist Militancy as the Tie That Bound Christian Rome and Islam," by Thomas Sizgorich.