Dr. Jackson on approaches to Muslim intellectual history

"The challenge, rather, has been and remains to produce approaches to Muslim intellectual history that can locate and monitor through time and space the semantic contributions of both the secular and the transcendent."-pg. 133

footnote no. 26:

"In my view, neither of the two contemporary tendencies, progressivism and conservatism, achieves this balance. Progressives (as well as some called liberals) tend toward impugning if not dismissing the entire past as well as the perspective of the ancients as entirely secular, that is, devoid of transcendent meaning, and this entirely-or almost entirely-nonnormative. "Conservatives," on the other hand, tend toward enshrining the entire past and the perspective of the ancients as the repository of nothing but transcendent meaning and this of totally (and totalizing) normative understandings of revelation." -pg. 207

from Dr. Sherman Abdal-Hakim Jackson's Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering