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In What Is Islam?, Shahab Ahmed presents a bold new conceptualization of Islam that challenges dominant understandings grounded in the categories of "religion" and "culture" or those that privilege law and scripture. He argues that these modes of thinking obstruct us from understanding Islam, distorting it, diminishing it, and rendering it incoherent. What Is Islam? formulates a new conceptual language for analyzing Islam. It presents a new paradigm of how Muslims have historically understood divine revelation - one that enables us to understand how and why Muslims through history have embraced values such as exploration, ambiguity, aestheticization, polyvalence, and relativism, as well as practices such as figural art, music, and even wine drinking as Islamic
About the author
Shahab Ahmed
Summary
What is Islam? How do we grasp a human and historical phenomenon characterized by such variety and contradiction? What is "Islamic" about Islamic philosophy or Islamic art? Should we speak of Islam or of islams? Should we distinguish the Islamic (the religious) from the Islamicate (the cultural)? Or should we abandon "Islamic" altogether as an anal
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"Ahmed brings a vast and impressive array of learning to his project, and What is Islam? is a milestone in efforts to theorize Islam in the modern academy."---Jon Hoover, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam
Report
"Anyone interested in exploring the intricacies and complexities of Islam as a religion, philosophical system and social text should study the new bookWhat Is Islam? [A] perfect antidote to our present discourse."--Hussein Ibish, New York Times
