Modern Islamic thought in a radical age
Subtitle: religious authority and internal criticism
By: Muhammad Qasim Zaman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Cambridge; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 374
ISBN-13: 9781107096455
Subjects: Doctrines; Islamic sociology; Islam
Description: Among traditionally educated scholars in the Islamic world there is much disagreement on the crises that afflict modern Muslim societies and how best to deal with them, and the debates have grown more urgent since 9/11. Through an analysis of the work of Muhammad Rashid Rida and Yusuf al-Qaradawi in the Arab Middle East and a number of scholars belonging to the Deobandi orientation in colonial and contemporary South Asia, this book examines some of the most important issues facing the Muslim world since the late nineteenth century. These include the challenges to the binding claims of a long-established scholarly consensus, evolving conceptions of the common good, and discourses on religious education, the legal rights of women, social and economic justice, and violence and terrorism. The debates, marked by extensive engagement with Islam's foundational texts and legal tradition, afford vital insights into the ongoing contestations on religious authority and on evolving conceptions of Islam in the Muslim public sphere. This wide-ranging study by a leading scholar of Islamic intellectual history provides the depth and the comparative perspective necessary for an understanding of the ferment that characterizes contemporary Islam.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: Rethinking consensus; title: The language of ijtihad; title: Bridging traditions: madrasas and their internal critics; title: Women, law, and society; title: Socio-economic justice; title: Denouncing violence: the ambiguities of a discourse; title: Epilogue: the paradoxes of internal criticism.