Professor Rashid Khalidi: "Israel & UAE Deal to Normalize Relations Is New Chapter in 100-Year War on Palestine"

https://youtu.be/-64NFnc1xQM

Podcast episode on a new book by Khurram Hussain "Islam as Critique: Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Challenge of Modernity" (2019)

 KHURRAM HUSSAIN

Islam as Critique

Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Challenge of Modernity

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC 2019

July 31, 2020 SherAli Tareen 

Delighting in Khurram Hussain’s consistently sparkling prose is reason enough to read his new book Islam as Critique: Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Challenge of Modernity (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). But there is much more to this splendid book, framed around the profoundly consequential conceptual and political question of can Muslims serve not as friends or foes but as critics of Western modernity. Hussain addresses this question through a close and energetic reading of key selections from the scholarly oeuvre of the hugely influential yet often misunderstood modern South Asian Muslim scholar Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898). By putting Khan in contrapuntal conversation with a range of Western philosophers including Reinhold Niebuhr (d.1971), Hannah Arendt (d.1975), and Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-), Hussain explores ways in which Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s thought on profound questions of moral obligations, knowledge, Jihad, and time disrupts a politics of “either/or” whereby Muslim actors are invariably pulverized by the sledgehammer of modern Western commensurability to emerge as either friends or enemies. This provocative and thoughtful book will animate the interest of a range of scholars in Islamic Studies, South Asian Studies, Politics, Philosophy, and Postcolonial thought; it will also work as a great text to teach in courses on these and other topics.

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SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.

https://newbooksnetwork.com/khurram-hussain-islam-as-critique-sayyid-ahmad-khan-and-the-challenge-of-modernity-bloomsbury-academic-2019/ 

An audio recording of a reading of Riyāḍ al-Ṣāliḥīn

https://youtu.be/Gf_WIa3lv3w

Another podcast with Johanna Pink for her 2018 book "Muslim Qurʾānic Interpretation Today: Media, Genealogies and Interpretive Communities"

Qurʾanic interpretation in contemporary societies is shaped in a multitude of ways. There are educational institutions that inform how one understands the text, linguistic hurdles for readers and commentators, publicly accessible forms of media, editors and translators that shape what audiences have access to, and global interpretive positions among various Muslim denominations.

In Muslim Qurʾānic Interpretation Today: Media, Genealogies and Interpretive Communities (Equinox Publishing, 2018), Johanna Pink, Professor at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, explores the rich and varied expressions of Qur’anic materials and places them within these frameworks. The volume takes a genealogical approach to numerous contemporary cases studies to see where they come together and where they diverge in their assumptions, hermeneutics, and conclusions. Pink demonstrates that tensions around the Qur’an today extend from questions of who has the authority to interpreted, what is the best method to do so, and the new expanse of commentarial genres, including numerous recent media spaces available to new types of interpreters. In our conversation we discuss the factors shaping a contemporary interpretive position, the legacy of the pre-modern tafsir tradition, Ibn Kathir, the Qurʾan as source of guidance for everyday life, comics, Qur’an translations, televangelism, new media and online commentary, the use of scientific language to account for the Qur’an, gender relations, modernist, Islamist, and postmodern interpretation.

Interview by: 

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu.

 

https://newbooksnetwork.com/johanna-pink-muslim-qur%ca%beanic-interpretation-today-media-genealogies-and-interpretive-communities-equinox-2018/ 

Episode on Podcast "New Books in Islamic Studies": Tafsir and Islamic Intellectual History Exploring the Boundaries of a Genre (2015)

 

What does it mean to interpret the Qur’an? What kinds of literary genres have produced and continue to produce such inquiry? Is tafsir only a line-by-line commentary or could it be something broader, blended with genres of law, storytelling, or translation? Whose authority counts and why? Tafsir and Islamic Intellectual History: Exploring the Boundaries of a Genre (Oxford University Press, 2015) aims to address these questions in its ambitious agenda. Johanna Pink and Andreas Gorke have provided a great service to the field of Qur’anic studies by compiling this fine volume, penned by fifteen established as well as rising scholars in the field. The book is conveniently organized according to five sections, which explore the challenges of Qur’anic exegesis in modern and premodern contexts. The authors also explore a number of languages and geographical regions, which showcases the diverse expressions of exegesis that Muslims have produced over the centuries. Pink’s own chapter in the volume, for example, analyzes the exegetical works of Yemeni scholar, Muhammad al-Shawkani (d. 1835) and provocatively argues that labels (e.g., modern or Salafi) have their uses but can nonetheless introduce other problematics, and readers should be careful before assuming an easy fit. In addition to appealing to Qur’anic studies scholars of many stripes the edited volume also presents itself as a reference work, given its broad scope, meticulous notes, and extensive bibliography and should appeal to diverse readers accordingly.

https://newbooksnetwork.com/andreas-gorke-and-johanna-pink-tafsir-and-islamic-intellectual-history-exploring-the-boundaries-of-a-genre-oxford-up-2015/ 

Jawad Qureshi: "Ring Composition in Sūrat Yūsuf (Q 12)" IQSA 2 (2017): 149-168.

This paper focuses on the structure of Sūrat Yūsuf (Q 12), arguing that the sūrah demonstrates the most prominent features of ring composition more intricately than scholarship has thus far acknowledged. This paper first considers guidelines for arguing for ring composition, following critical scholarship on ring composition and Mary Douglas’ Thinking in Circles. It then demonstrates that Q 12 displays an intricate structure of mirroring, concentric composition, and parallelism, and draws attention to the literary markers and correspondences between mirrored elements throughout the narrative. The final section goes beyond the form of the sūrah to address its broader argument by placing it in the context of the third Meccan phase of the Prophet Muḥammad’s mission. The themes of betrayal, treachery, exile, reconciliation, forbearance, and reunion are central to this narrative and reflect the anxiety and despair of Muḥammad in this period. This paper demonstrates the utility of analyzing passages of the Qurʾān for ring composition, while adhering to stricter criteria for this type of analysis.

A copy of the article can be found on the author's academia page:

https://www.academia.edu/43650117/RING_COMPOSITION_IN_S%C5%AARAT_Y%C5%AASUF_Q_12_

"The Qur'an in the 21st Century" a talk by Professor Walid Saleh (2016)

Excerpt from an Interview with Angelika Neuwirth

"If one reads and interprets the Koran as a kind of information medium – as many contemporary Koranic researchers do – one does not do justice to it. The Koran is heavily poetic and contains a whole range of messages that it imparts at a semantic level – not at all explicitly, not at all unambiguously; it gets these messages across through poetic structures; if it didn't, it wouldn't be as vivid as it is. What makes the Koran unique is its complexity, its multiple layers, the fact that it speaks at different levels. On the one hand, of course, that is the huge aesthetic attraction. However, it is also, if you like, hugely attractive in rhetorical terms or in terms of its power of conviction.  

While it might be possible to sum up the mere information in the Koran in a short newspaper article, the effect would not have been the same. It really is about enchantment through language. Language itself is also praised in the Koran as the highest gift that humankind received from God. Naturally, this is related to knowledge. Language is the medium of knowledge. This is why one should never on top of everything else accuse the Islamic culture of being averse to knowledge. The entire Koran is basically a paean to knowledge, the knowledge that is articulated through speech."

https://en.qantara.de/content/interview-with-angelika-neuwirth-the-claim-that-islam-lacks-an-enlightenment-is-an-age-old

She's the author of The Qur'an and Late Antiquity: A Shared Heritage.

Session 1 - Hadith Criticism Muṣṭalaḥ - Origin And Evolution - Dr Issam...

on Orientalist book collecting

Instead of repeating earlier notions of Eastern wisdom to be discovered and learned from, Sprenger [(1813-93)] announces an alternative project: although the works he has collected have no useful substance whatsoever, they allow the reconstruction of a civilization that for him is clearly inferior to that of Europe but that can be studied on a larger historical scale than is possible in the European case. His analogy to the dissection of animals is revealing and suggests a particular explanation for the uneasiness of Muslim scholars who encountered Orientalist book collecting. Although this activity aimed at a comprehensive reconstruction of the Islamic intellectual heritage, it did not perceive its object as a living and breathing intellectual tradition. Rather, the collectors sought Oriental books as the raw material for the construction of a taxidermic replica, a stuffed corpse of the Islamic cultural edifice to be placed in the mental museum of European thought.

Ahmed El Shamsy, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), p. 16.