What Is Islam?: The Importance of Being Islamic

629 Pages·2015·3.59 MB·English

by  Shahab Ahmed

What Is Islam?

What Is Islam?
The Importance of Being Islamic
Shahab Ahmed
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Princeton and Oxford
Copyright © 2016 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey
08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock,
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press.princeton.edu
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All Rights Reserved
ISBN 978- 0- 691- 16418- 2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015948828
British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Linux Libertino O
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Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Analysis is the distinguishing of things that exist sound and
true in combination—but that have become confused in the
mind—in such a way that each of them is rendered separate
from the others in its potential and in its definition; or in
such a way that each of them comes to indicate the exis-
tence of the other, so that when one considers the state of
one of them, one is transported from the one to the other.
—Al- Shaykh al- Ra’īs Abū ʿAlī Ibn Sīnā
[Avicenna] (980–1037 A.D.)
They do not comprehend how a thing agrees at variance
with itself; it is an attunement turning back on itself, like
that of the bow and the lyre.
—Heraclitus (fl. ca. 487–521 B.C.)

For my parents,
who raised me in the Islam of their cosmopolitanism
and in the cosmopolitanism of their Islam

Contents
List of Illustrations xi
Preface xiii
Part One Questions
What Is Islam? 3
Chapter 1
Six Questions about Islam 5
Part Two Conceptualizations
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 Three Re- 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 301