内容简介

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.

作品目录

List of Illustrations xi
Preface xiii
Part OneQuestions
What Is Islam? 3
Chapter 1
Six Questions about Islam 5
Part TwoConceptualizations
Chapter 2
Islam as Law, islams-not-Islam, Islamic and Islamicate,
Religion and Culture, Culture and Civilization 113
Chapter 3
Religion and Secular, Sacred and Profane, Theocentric and
Anthropocentric, Total Social Fact, Family Resemblance 176
Chapter 4
Culture, Meaning, Symbol System, Core and Nucleus,
Whatever-Muslims-Say-It-Is, Discursive Tradition,
Orthodoxy, Process 246
Part ThreeRe-Conceptualizations
Chapter 5
Hermeneutical Engagement, Pre-Text, Text, and Con-Text,
Meaning-Making for the Self, Spatiality of Revelation,
Hierarchy, Exteriority-Interiority, Public and Private,
Language and Vocabulary, Ambivalence and Ambiguity,
Metaphor and Paradox
Chapter 6:
Applications and Implications: Coherent Contradiction,
Exploration, Diffusion, Form and Meaning, Modern 405
The Importance of Being Islamic 542
Works Cited 547
Index 593
· · · · · ·

作者简介

Shahab Ahmed (1966-2015) was postdoctoral associate in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University.