In the twenty-first century academic world, a surge of literature is being produced on Islam, especially on its primary sources —the noble Qur’an and Hadith/ Seerah. Globally reputed publishers—such as Ashgate, Brill, Cambridge, Edinburg, Harvard,…
Rumee Ahmed is a brilliant Islamic legal expert at the University of British Columbia. He is both traditionally and academically trained. His book “Sharia Compliant: A User’s Guide to Hacking Islamic Law” was published in…
Introduction There is a color line in the Muslim world. How and why? While there are multiple forms of racism based on notions of color and ethnicity that exist within the Muslim world – such…
My recent research has led to an encounter with a critical question for Muslims who live in and must now engage with an increasingly diverse religious landscape: what is da’wa (the Muslim mission to share…
Though we conceptualize the political and the religious as distinct, in practice, they remain very intertwined, especially in many Muslim-majority countries. Understanding one is crucial in understanding the other. In the case of Muslim-majority countries,…
Introduction In a recent article titled “Atheism and Radical Skepticism: Ibn Taymiyyah’s Epistemic Critique,” Dr. Nazir Khan argues that rational inquiry is unnecessary for justifying our belief in God; that, in fact, syllogistic reasoning is…
(Recent) Bibliographical Works on the ‘Qur’anic Studies’ (from India)
Hacking Islamic Law
Anti-Blackness in the Muslim World: Beyond Apologetics and Orientalism
Qur’anic Ethics and the Moral Imperative of Humanist Da’wa
The UAE-sponsored “Islams”: Mapping the Terrain
Is Fiṭra a Replacement for Rational Inquiry? Kalām, Logic, and the Belief in God
Introduction In a recent article titled “Atheism and Radical Skepticism: Ibn Taymiyyah’s Epistemic Critique,” Dr. Nazir Khan argues that rational inquiry is unnecessary for justifying our belief in God; that, in fact, syllogistic reasoning is…
Shaykh Abdullah Bin Bayyah’s justification for Islamic autocracy is far from a throwback to an imagined premodern world of Muslim scholars united with pious sultans, but rather, deeply indebted to the reformist idioms of Islamic…
Islam, as a historical tradition, began in early seventh century Arabia. The formative canons of Islamic thought – the Qur’an as well as the voluminous literature describing the early community of Muslims – contain a…
In Charles Taylor’s magnum opus, A Secular Age, he makes a series of wonderful distinctions about the pre-modern and modern worlds. Among these is the idea that modernity entails a loss of enchantment, a move…
Introduction Anyone who has been homeless can tell you it is not a place you want to be. The pangs of hunger, the cold, lonely nights roaming the street or countryside, the uncomfortable position of…
The Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies (AVACGIS) at George Mason University is organizing a webinar series that will explore the impact of Covid-19 on various dimensions of Muslim religious life in global…
The Covid-19 pandemic has been disruptive to all religious communities in the US, including American Muslims. What happens to the rituals of religion—Durkheim’s “eminently social phenomenon”—when the social is withdrawn from them? Believers find themselves…
In Indonesia, like elsewhere, Islam and Marxism have an historical relationship largely characterized by opposition. Notably, there was an historical moment during the late colonial and early independence eras when a tradition of Islamic communism…
While browsing through old journals we often encounter a name that repeats itself frequently enough to be noticed, yet buried away from the allure of the front page. Throughout many months and years, these semi-visible…
Since January 2016, I’ve been conducting ethnographic research on the progressive Muslim community globally, both face to face in six North American groups and in three online groups. Some of this work, which I report…
