A Genealogy of Islamic Law A Critical Approach to Late Antique Islamic Legal History Lena Salaymeh | March 23, 2017 Critical Approaches, Global Late Antiquity AboutCritical Approaches AboutGlobal Late Antiquity How to evaluate narrative-historical sources is the subject of intense controversies in Islamic Studies and beyond. Arguably, no student of Islamic history can escape the conundrum of debates surrounding these sources. Chase Robinson aptly observed, “it is a measure of just how conservative the professional study of Islamic history remains that the noisiest controversy of the last 25 years concerns the reliability of our written sources, rather than the models according to which we are to understand and use them.” When a scholar makes a claim about the supposed “unreliability” of late antique Islamic sources, she often operates under the positivist assumption of the existence of an “original Truth” that can be discovered through a specific methodology... Read the rest of this entry
Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam? as Disciplinary Critique Charting a Way Forward for Islamic Studies Michael Pregill | January 24, 2017 Critical Approaches / Pedagogy, Visual Culture AboutCritical Approaches Perhaps the main takeaway students and scholars of Islam should derive from Shahab Ahmed's What Is Islam? is that instead of avoiding definitions of Islam, blithely insisting that the sheer diversity of Muslim thought, practice, and experience makes such an enterprise impossible, we should tackle the question head-on and consider what that diversity really means for the problem of definition. But how to move forward? How best to explore the implications of such an argument, operationalizing the consequences of his observations in practical terms? Read the rest of this entry
The Possibilities of a Digital Life in Islamic Studies “Activism, Advocacy, and Scholarship on Islam in the Digital Realm” (Boston University, September 16-17, 2016) Kristian Petersen | December 1, 2016 Critical Approaches AboutCritical Approaches Engagement via digital media and technologies has transformed how scholars and activists do what they do. Digital platforms and tools have opened up new horizons for doing work – producing, analyzing, archiving, communicating – but also pose new challenges that need to be addressed when working in digital environments... Read the rest of this entry