Both because Islam arose later than Christianity and because of its present largely negative reputation, this chapter is structured somewhat differently from its predecessors. A first section looks at its historical relations with culture, stressing first positive aspects and then the distortions noted by Edward Said and his followers, as well as the more general, detrimental effect of western imperialism. The second section then explores historical restraints upon fundamentalism; first in the four Sunni schools through analogy, abrogation and chains of transmission. Mystical Sufism is then portrayed as an unjustifiably marginalised alternative. The final section then looks at contemporary options, taking first modern Muslim contextualisation before noting possible reasons why Christians could legitimately endorse Mohammad’s modification of earlier biblical stories. The variety of its present forms demonstrates the extent to which it can be seen to be pulled in opposing directions, hope in openness to new ideas restrained by warning pressures to ossify its past.

The article contributes to the unsettling of the Western paradigm of “law and religion,” by examining the overlapping of the two categories in the context of Jewish, Islamic, and Zoroastrian discussions of legality and revelation in the early Abbasid period. With regard to all three legal traditions, the article traces a process of theologization of the law (and minimization of the role of human agency in effecting the content of revelation), on the one hand, and one of textual demarcation and confinement of the law (in line with the principle of “legality”), on the other hand.

The article argues that Sherira, Shāfiʽī and Manuščihr played a particularly significant role in framing and articulating these broad processes, by insisting on the textual confinement of God’s revelation as pronounced at the initial revelatory moment in the Mishnah-cum-Talmud, Hadith, and Zand (alongside the Torah, Quran and Avesta). This, in turn, paved the way for regarding these corpora as the exclusive, complete, and authoritative articulation of the law. Indeed, the parallel diachronic shifts evident in the three religious traditions points to a broader legal-theological turn in the early Abbasid period, which bears significant implications on the history of the dynamics of law and religion.

Chittick focuses on Sufism or “Islamic mysticism” as a prominent influence in Islamic history regarding religious experience, noting that its mystical emphasis among Muslims traces back to Mohammad and the Qur’an.He finds that according to the Sufi literature of Ibn Arabi, a soul must be prepared for mystical experience to reap its benefits and to avoid the mistaken assumption that it removes one from the obligation to follow the teachings of the Qur’an.

When discussing violence in the Islamic milieu, the word jihad inevitably comes to mind, especially in the contemporary world. Jihad is almost invariably translated as “armed combat” or “fighting” in both academic and non-academic circles; and even as “terrorism” in politically-charged contexts. Such a monovalent understanding of jihad emerges primarily through consultation of the juridical literature and official histories that were produced after the eighth century of the Common Era and that are unduly privileged in academic discussions of this subject.

Jihad however emerges as a much more complex term when a broader range of primary Arabic sources are consulted. Such sources include the Qur’an and Qur’an commentaries (tafsir), collections of hadith, which refer to the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, as well as legal works.The central premise of this essay is that a closer study of relevant Qur’anic verses and a comparison of early and late extra-Qur’anic sources drawn from the above genres allows one to chart both the constancies and shifts in the spectrum of meanings assigned to the term jihad.This in turn allows us to better understand how changing socio-political circumstances affected the way Muslim scholars of different stripes conceived of the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate violence over time.

This chapter focuses on the military/political leadership of the favorite wife of the Prophet Muhammad, ‘A’isha, and her involvement in the Battle of the Camel. ‘A’isha’s actual presence on the battlefield leading the army caused neither unanimous dissent nor anxiety among her generals or the rank and file, though her military leadership was contested in the aftermath of her defeat. Though her religious authority is almost universally acknowledged, her political authority is contested and the subject of much hand-wringing and controversial commentary, invariably leading to the invocation of the alleged Prophetic hadith, “Never will succeed such a nation as makes a woman their ruler.” Conveniently ignoring the Queen of Sheba’s sovereignty, the male political/religious elite has historically upheld this hadith as a “sacred” principle against women’s political authority. In view of the actual leadership of some charismatic Muslim women in medieval or modern times, the question is how to interpret the incongruity between the Quranic revelations and the prophetic tradition regarding women’s political authority – one supporting, and the other opposing. I argue that it is dynastic power, the dynamics of the father-daughter relationship, and her own charisma that enables a woman to wear the crown.

Why is the so-called image prohibition made out to be so important? Why does the historic plenitude of all sorts of images in the Islamic world, ranging from theological narratives to pornography, fail to automatically refute their supposed absence? The repetition of the accusation, despite all evidence to the contrary, suggests that the ‘image’ at hand is never a picture, but a symbol of alterity that establishes distinction between ‘Islam’ and ‘the West.’ Chapter 1 unravels the supposed ‘prohibition of the image’ in Islam. Explaining the logic of Islamic law through the history of its development during the first centuries of Islam, it traces contemporary Islamic assertions of the prohibition against an abridged history of Islamic legal interpretation. It then examines how the sources through which European scholars describe this ban conceive of images. Far from expressing the same concerns about iconoclasm as in Abrahamic scripture, Islamic sources reflect an understanding of mimesis deeply intertwined with philosophical traditions inherited through late antiquity. This observation institutes two themes in the work: the affinities of Islamic thought with Greek, Abrahamic, and Buddhist legacies; and how modern interpretations of similar sources led Europe to distinct interpretive practices.