Rethinking Islamic Studies: From Orientalism to Cosmopolitanism

by Carl W. Ernst (Editor), Richard C. Martin (Editor), Bruce B. Lawrence (Afterword)

Overview

A groundbreaking response to the challenges of interpreting Islamic religion in the post-9/11 and post-Orientalist era

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781570038938
Publisher:	University of South Carolina Press
Publication date:	07/17/2010
Series:	Studies in Comparative Religion
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Carl W. Ernst is the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies and director of the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His previous books include Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World.

Table of Contents

Series Editor's Preface vii

Preface and Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Toward a Post-Orientalist Approach to Islamic Religious Studies Carl W. Ernst Richard C. Martin 1

Part I Rethinking Modernity: Islamic Perspectives

Reasons Public and Divine: Liberal Democracy, Shari'a Fundamentalism, and the Epistemological Crisis of Islam Vincent J. Cornell 23

The Misrecognition of a Modern Islamist Organization: Germany Faces "Fundamentalism" Katherine Pratt Ewing 52

Between "Ijtihad of the Presupposition? and Gender Equality: Cross-Pollination between Progressive Islam and Iranian Reform Omid Safi 72

Fundamentalism and the Transparency of the Arabic Qur'an A. Kevin Reinhart 97

Can We Define "True" Islam? African American Muslim Women Respond to Transnational Muslim Identities Jamillah Karim 114

Part 2 Rethinking Religion: Social Scientific and Humanistic Perspectives

Who Are the Islamists? Charles Kurzman Ijlal Naqvi 133

Sufism, Exemplary Lives, and Social Science in Pakistan David Gilmartin 159

Formations of Orthodoxy: Authority, Power, and Networks in Muslim Societies Richard C. Martin Abbas Barzegar 179

Caught between Enlightenment and Romanticism: On the Complex Relation of Religious, Ethnic, and Civic Identity in a Modern "Museum Culture" Louis A. Ruprecht Jr 203

Part 3 Rethinking the Subject: Asian Perspectives

The Subject and the Ostensible Subject: Mapping the Genre of Hagiography among South Asian Chishtis Tony K. Stewart 227

Dancing with Khusro: Gender Ambiguities and Poetic Performance in a Delhi Dargah Scott Kugle 245

The Perils of Civilizational Islam in Malaysia Carl W. Ernst 266

History and Normativity in Traditional Indian Muslim Thought: Reading Shari'a in the Hermeneutics of Qari Muhammad Tayyab (d. 1983) Ebrahim Moosa 281

Afterword: Competing Genealogies of Muslim Cosmopolitanism Bruce B. Lawrence 302

Contributors 325

Index 329

What People are Saying About This

Brannon Wheeler

Offering a fresh approach to the sophisticated state of contemporary studies on Islam, this collection from some of the best scholars writing today undermines entrenched and outdated views that have previously served to stagnate and distort the fruitful place of Islamic Studies in the broader academic discourse.

Ahmet T. Karamustafa

This is the first sustained and theoretically exciting consideration of the academic study of Islam to appear in a quarter century. The essays explore Islamic approaches to modernity, probe the relevance of new perspectives on religion to Islam and examine Asian Muslim subjectivities in innovative ways. Bookending these chapters are an inviting historiographical introduction by Ernst and Martin and a characteristically searching conclusion by Lawrence highlighting the theme of cosmopolitanism. This is an elegant testimony to the vibrancy of Islamic studies.

Bruce B. Lawrence

The essays of this volume have taken up precisely the challenge to redefine Islam apart from both fundamentalists/Islamists and their statist/nationalist opponents. Collectively, the contributors try to project a larger cosmopolitan canopy for Islam beyond the iterations, at once local and ideological, of several Muslim actors.