Why has the West developed and modernized, while the Muslim world has lagged behind? Why has democracy not found a hospitable home in much of the Muslim world? Why have the opponents of innovation found their message so resonant with ordinary Muslims? Featuring essays by a multidisciplinary group of leading scholars, this volume offers in-depth analyses of the history, causes, consequences, and obstacles to innovation in Islam. Focusing on the ways and means through which the teachings of Islam have been produced and perpetuated over time, the contributors investigate such areas as the arts and letters, jurisprudence, personal status, hermeneutics and epistemology, and Muslims’ perceptions of the self in the modern world.
Innovation in Islam illuminates a debate that extends beyond semantics into everyday politics and society—and one that has ramifications around the world.
Contributors: Nasr Abu-Zayd, Adonis, Mohammed Arkoun, Walter Denny, Nelly Hanna, Sherman Jackson, Patrick Laude, Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Tariq Ramadan, John Voll
قائمة المحتويات
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. Contextualizing: Innovation in Islam
Mehran Kamrava
Part I: The Intellectual Process
2. Knowledge and Hermeneutics in Islam Today: Which Reform?
Tariq Ramadan
3. Deconstructing Episteme(s)
Mohammed Arkoun
4. Iranian Shi‘ism at the Gates of Historic Change
Mehran Kamrava
Part II: The Arts and Letters
5. History from Below, Dictionary from Below
Nelly Hanna
6. The Translation of the Qur’an:
An Impossible Task
The Classical Linguistic-Theological Roots of the Debate
Nasr Abu-Zayd
7. Toward a New Understanding of Renewal in Islam
Adonis
8. Creation, Originality, and Innovation in Sufi Poetry
Patrick Laude
9. Innovation in the Visual Arts of Islam
Walter B. Denny
Part III: Islam in the Modern World
10. Liberal/Progressive, Modern, and Modernized Islam: Muslim Americans and the American State
Sherman A. Jackson
11. Hijab and Choice: Between Politics and Theology
Ziba Mir-Hosseini
12. Modern Movements in Islam
John O. Voll
List of Contributors
Index
عن المؤلف
Mehran Kamrava is Interim Dean of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar and also the Director of the School’s Center for International and Regional Studies. He is the author of The Modern Middle East: A Political History since the First World War (second edition, UC Press) and Iran’s Intellectual Revolution. He has also edited The New Voices of Islam: Rethinking Politics and Modernity (UC Press).