What Is Islam?
What Is Islam?

Author: Shahab Ahmed

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-11-17

Total Pages: 629

ISBN-13: 1400873584

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A bold new conceptualization of Islam that reflects its contradictions and rich diversity 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 analytical term? 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. It also puts forward a new understanding of the historical constitution of Islamic law and its relationship to philosophical ethics and political theory. A book that is certain to provoke debate and significantly alter our understanding of Islam, What Is Islam? reveals how Muslims have historically conceived of and lived with Islam as norms and truths that are at once contradictory yet coherent.

The Meaning of Islam
The Meaning of Islam

Author: Abu Iyaad

Publisher:

Published: 2017-03-29

Total Pages: 80

ISBN-13: 9781640073807

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This book is intended for new Muslims who have just accepted Islām and non-Muslims interested in Islām or almost about to accept Islām. It is also useful for Muslims wishing to revise or learn the basics of Islām in a concise manner and parents wishing to give their children a good foundation in the basics. This book serves all of these purposes at once and has been written specifically with all of this in mind. Utterance of the two testifications (shahādatān) regarding monotheism (tawḥīḍ) and messengership (risālah) enter a person into Islām. This declaration has a meaning (maʿnā), requirements (muqtaḍā), conditions (shurūṭ) and nullifiers (nawāqiḍ) which must be understood well. After a person enters Islām, he or she establishes the remaining pillars of Islām whilst seeking knowledge to increase inward Īmān, which is faith. Thereafter, he or she strives for Iḥsān which is excellence, and for the perfection of character.

What the Qur'an Meant
What the Qur'an Meant

Author: Garry Wills

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2018-12-04

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1101981040

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America’s leading religious scholar and public intellectual introduces lay readers to the Qur’an with a measured, powerful reading of the ancient text Garry Wills has spent a lifetime thinking and writing about Christianity. In What the Qur’an Meant, Wills invites readers to join him as he embarks on a timely and necessary reconsideration of the Qur’an, leading us through perplexing passages with insight and erudition. What does the Qur’an actually say about veiling women? Does it justify religious war? There was a time when ordinary Americans did not have to know much about Islam. That is no longer the case. We blundered into the longest war in our history without knowing basic facts about the Islamic civilization with which we were dealing. We are constantly fed false information about Islam—claims that it is essentially a religion of violence, that its sacred book is a handbook for terrorists. There is no way to assess these claims unless we have at least some knowledge of the Qur’an. In this book Wills, as a non-Muslim with an open mind, reads the Qur’an with sympathy but with rigor, trying to discover why other non-Muslims—such as Pope Francis—find it an inspiring book, worthy to guide people down through the centuries. There are many traditions that add to and distort and blunt the actual words of the text. What Wills does resembles the work of art restorers who clean away accumulated layers of dust to find the original meaning. He compares the Qur’an with other sacred books, the Old Testament and the New Testament, to show many parallels between them. There are also parallel difficulties of interpretation, which call for patient exploration—and which offer some thrills of discovery. What the Qur’an Meant is the opening of a conversation on one of the world’s most practiced religions.

Islam: A Very Short Introduction
Islam: A Very Short Introduction

Author: Malise Ruthven

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2012-01-26

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 0199642877

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Islam features widely in the news, often in its most militant forms, but few people in the non-Muslim world really understand its nature. Malise Ruthven's Very Short Introduction, offers essential insights into the big issues, provides fresh perspectives on contemporary questions, and guides us through the complex debates.

Islam Is a Foreign Country
Islam Is a Foreign Country

Author: Zareena Grewal

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 1479800562

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Considers the question: what does it mean to be Muslim and American? In Islam Is a Foreign Country, Zareena Grewal explores some of the most pressing debates about and among American Muslims: what does it mean to be Muslim and American? Who has the authority to speak for Islam and to lead the stunningly diverse population of American Muslims? Do their ties to the larger Muslim world undermine their efforts to make Islam an American religion? Offering rich insights into these questions and more, Grewal follows the journeys of American Muslim youth who travel in global, underground Islamic networks. Devoutly religious and often politically disaffected, these young men and women are in search of a home for themselves and their tradition. Through their stories, Grewal captures the multiple directions of the global flows of people, practices, and ideas that connect U.S. mosques to the Muslim world. By examining the tension between American Muslims’ ambivalence toward the American mainstream and their desire to enter it, Grewal puts contemporary debates about Islam in the context of a long history of American racial and religious exclusions. Probing the competing obligations of American Muslims to the nation and to the umma (the global community of Muslim believers), Islam is a Foreign Country investigates the meaning of American citizenship and the place of Islam in a global age.

The Meaning of Mecca
The Meaning of Mecca

Author: M E McMillan

Publisher: Saqi

Published: 2012-01-16

Total Pages: 139

ISBN-13: 0863568955

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The hajj, the fifth pillar of Islam, is a religious duty to be performed once in a lifetime by all Muslims who are able. The Prophet Muhammad set out the rituals of hajj when he led what became known as the Farewell Hajj in 10 AH / 632AD. This set the seal on Muhammad's career as the founder of a religion and the leader of a political entity based on that religion. The convergence of the Prophet with the politician infuses the hajj with political, as well as religious, significance. For the caliphs who led the Islamic community after Muhammad's death, leadership of the hajj became a position of enormous political relevance as it presented them with an unrivalled opportunity to proclaim their pious credentials and reinforce their political legitimacy. Exhaustively researched, The Meaning of Mecca is the first study to analyse the leadership of the hajj in the formative and medieval periods and to assess the political subtext of Islam's most high-profile religious ritual.

Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica

Author: Hugh Chisholm

Publisher:

Published: 1910

Total Pages: 1090

ISBN-13:

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This eleventh edition was developed during the encyclopaedia's transition from a British to an American publication. Some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time and it is considered to be a landmark encyclopaedia for scholarship and literary style.

Muslim Cool
Muslim Cool

Author: Su'ad Abdul Khabeer

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2016-12-06

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1479894508

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Interviews with young Muslims in Chicago explore the complexity of identities formed at the crossroads of Islam and hip hop This groundbreaking study of race, religion and popular culture in the 21st century United States focuses on a new concept, “Muslim Cool.” Muslim Cool is a way of being an American Muslim—displayed in ideas, dress, social activism in the ’hood, and in complex relationships to state power. Constructed through hip hop and the performance of Blackness, Muslim Cool is a way of engaging with the Black American experience by both Black and non-Black young Muslims that challenges racist norms in the U.S. as well as dominant ethnic and religious structures within American Muslim communities. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic research, Su'ad Abdul Khabeer illuminates the ways in which young and multiethnic US Muslims draw on Blackness to construct their identities as Muslims. This is a form of critical Muslim self-making that builds on interconnections and intersections, rather than divisions between “Black” and “Muslim.” Thus, by countering the notion that Blackness and the Muslim experience are fundamentally different, Muslim Cool poses a critical challenge to dominant ideas that Muslims are “foreign” to the United States and puts Blackness at the center of the study of American Islam. Yet Muslim Cool also demonstrates that connections to Blackness made through hip hop are critical and contested—critical because they push back against the pervasive phenomenon of anti-Blackness and contested because questions of race, class, gender, and nationality continue to complicate self-making in the United States.

Islam
Islam

Author: Feisal Abdul Rauf

Publisher:

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13:

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Lastly, the author links knowledge to love as poles that, although exoterically appearing as opposites, esoterically define the global human reality vis-a-vis the Divine mandate. Throughout this book the author is concerned not only with the philosophical and logical basis of Islam in isolation, but with the nature of this basis as it establishes the intellectual, religious and spiritual foundations of the modern Muslim, enabling him, at a personal level, to shed the mysteries and paradoxes of the human condition.