Yet, while Graham shows how "traditionalism" informs religious authority in Islam, he does not give much attention to the concept of tradition itself. [15] For that, we must turn to the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, whose conception of tradition, especially as mediated to Islamicists by the anthropologist Talal Asad, offers a potentially fruitful way of approaching and understanding Muslim institutions and discourses in the complexities of their development, change and continuity. [16]
To MacIntyre, tradition is, quite simply, "an argument extended through time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined in terms of two kinds of conflict: those with critics and enemies external to the tradition who reject all or at least key parts of those fundamental agreements, and those internal, interpretative debates through which the meaning and rationale of the fundamental agreements come to be expressed and by whose progress a tradition is constituted." [17] Traditions may be more or less successful in asking new questions or satisfactorily answering old ones, in meeting the challenges posed to their adherents and in adapting to change; but what remains key to their constitution as traditions is a history of argument and debate over certain fundamental doctrines in shared languages and styles of discourses. [18]-The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics)
by Muhammad Qasim Zaman, pg. 4
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