INTERPRETING ISLAM pdf download

Interpreting Islam

INTERPRETING ISLAM

From the Book

Disciplinarity and Islam is known in a bewildering diversity of ways in an increasingly inter¬ connected world.

 What one knows about Islam, one knows, inevitably and inescapably, with reference to the ways in which other people come to know about Islam.

 How one goes about constructing an argument, or articulating a point, about the Muslim world increasingly relies on a knowledge of how other people might use the same facts to construct another kind of argument, or articulate another kind of point.

Islamist arguments thus increasingly demand familiarity with the terminologies and procedures of secularist arguments. The reverse is every bit as true, as many have noted with regard to secularism in Turkey (Gellner 1981: 60).

 Selves rely on and involve Others with an increasing self- consciousness, in today’s Muslim world and elsewhere.

This does not imply, of course, the inevitable emergence of broad areas of agreement and consensus in the management of difference – the liberal dream.

 If anything, an awareness of intellectual diversity seems to have increased the vociferousness of those who claim particularity, and the imperative of managing difference on their terms only.

 This book constitutes, we believe, a different kind of response to the diversity of contemporary knowledge about Islam.

Its implicit argument, throughout, is that patterns can be observed in the bewildering and seemingly anarchic diversity of disciplinary approaches to Islam, and that we, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, might learn much by reflecting on them.