The scholarship of Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921), one of the founders of Islamic studies in Europe, has not ceased to be in the focus of interest since his death. This volume addresses aspects of Goldziher’s intellectual trajectory together with the history of Islamic and Jewish studies as reflected in the letters exchanged between Goldziher and his peers from various countries that are preserved in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and elsewhere. The thirteen contributions deal with hitherto unexplored aspects of the correspondence addressing issues that are crucial to our understanding of the formative period of these disciplines. Contributors: Camilla Adang, Hans-Jürgen Becker, Kinga Dévényi, Sebastian Günther, Máté Hidvégi Livnat Holtzman, Amit Levy, Miriam Ovadia, Dóra Pataricza, Christoph Rauch, Valentina Sagaria Rossi, Sabine Schmidtke, Jan Thiele, Samuel Thrope, Tamás Turán, Maxim Yosefi, Dora Zsom.

Mohammed Arkoun was one of the most prominent and influential Arab intellectuals of his day. During a career spanning more than thirty years, he was revered as an outstanding research scholar, a bold critic of the theoretical tensions embedded within Islamic Studies and an outspoken public figure, upholding political, social and cultural modernism. This Festschrift honours Arkoun's scholarship, bringing together the contributions of eleven distinguished scholars of history, religious studies and philosophy. It offers a comprehensive selection of critical engagements with Arkoun's work, reflecting on his considerable influence on contemporary thinking about Islam and its ideological, philosophical and theological dimensions. The authoritative reference study on the work of Mohammed Arkoun, The Construction of Belief is essential reading for students and scholars of Islam, Muslim societies and cultures, modernity, religious studies, philosophy and semanti.

Philosophical Theology in Islam studies the later history of the Ashʿarī school of theology through in-depth probings of its thought, sources, scholarly networks and contexts. Starting with a review of al-Ghazālī’s role in the emergence of post-Avicennan philosophical theology, the book offers a series of case studies on hitherto unstudied texts by the towering thinker Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī as well as specific philosophical and theological topics treated in his works. Studies furthermore shed light on the transmission and reception of later Ashʿarī doctrines in periods and regions that have so far received little scholarly attention. This book is the first exploration of the later Ashʿarī tradition across the medieval and early-modern period through a trans-regional perspective. Contributors: Peter Adamson, Asad Q. Ahmed, Fedor Benevich, Xavier Casassas Canals, Jon Hoover, Bilal Ibrahim, Andreas Lammer, Reza Pourjavady, Harith Ramli, Ulrich Rudolph, Meryem Sebti, Delfina Serrano-Ruano, Ayman Shihadeh, Aaron Spevack, and Jan Thiele.

Islamic Thought is a fresh and contemporary introduction to the philosophies and doctrines of Islam. Abdullah Saeed, a distinguished Muslim scholar, traces the development of religious knowledge in Islam, from the pre-modern to the modern period. The book focuses on Muslim thought, as well as the development, production and transmission of religious knowledge, and the trends, schools and movements that have contributed to the production of this knowledge. Key topics in Islamic culture are explored, including the development of the Islamic intellectual tradition, the two foundation texts, the Qur’an and Hadith, legal thought, theological thought, mystical thought, Islamic Art, philosophical thought, political thought, and renewal, reform and rethinking today. Through this rich and varied discussion, Saeed presents a fascinating depiction of how Islam was lived in the past and how its adherents practise it in the present. Islamic Thought is essential reading for students beginning the study of Islam but will also interest anyone seeking to learn more about one of the world’s great religions.

Within the field of Islamic Studies, scientific research of Muslim theology is a comparatively young discipline. Much progress has been achieved over the past decades with respect both to discoveries of new materials and to scholarly approaches to the field. The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Theology provides a comprehensive and authoritative survey of the current state of the field. It provides a variegated picture of the state of the art and at the same time suggests new directions for future research. Part One covers the various strands of Islamic theology during the formative and early middle periods, rational as well as scripturalist. To demonstrate the continuous interaction among the various theological strands and its repercussions (during the formative and early middle period and beyond), Part Two offers a number of case studies. These focus on specific theological issues that have developed through the dilemmatic and often polemical interactions between the different theological schools and thinkers. Part Three covers Islamic theology during the later middle and early modern periods. One of the characteristics of this period is the growing amalgamation of theology with philosophy (Peripatetic and Illuminationist) and mysticism. Part Four addresses the impact of political and social developments on theology through a number of case studies: the famous mi?na instituted by al-Ma'mun (r. 189/813-218/833) as well as the mihna to which Ibn 'Aqil (d. 769/1367) was subjected; the religious policy of the Almohads; as well as the shifting interpretations throughout history (particularly during Mamluk and Ottoman times) of the relation between Ash'arism and Maturidism that were often motivated by political motives. Part Five considers Islamic theological thought from the end of the early modern and during the modern period.

The book consists of transcriptions and summary translations of two texts in, mostly, Ottoman Turkish, the first of which is the recently discovered second volume of the diary of the German orientalist Karl Süssheim, covering the years 1903-08 which he mostly spent in Istanbul. The second text is a printed memoir of a Young Turk officer called İsma’il Hakkı, in which the latter discusses his life, political engagement and the resulting problems. Süssheim met İsma’il Hakkı in Cairo in 1908 and kept in contact with him later. The texts offer a lively picture of Istanbul and Cairo in the early years of the 20th century, the repressive regime of Sultan Abdulhamid II and the heady days of the Young Turk revolution of July 1908.

The book you must read to understand the Islamist crisis—and the threat to us all Robert R. Reilly’s eye-opening book masterfully explains the frightening behavior coming out of the Islamic world. Terrorism, he shows, is only one manifestation of the spiritual pathology of Islamism. Reilly uncovers the root of our contemporary crisis: a pivotal struggle waged within the Muslim world nearly a millennium ago. In a heated battle over the role of reason, the side of irrationality won. The deformed theology that resulted, Reilly reveals, produced the spiritual pathology of Islamism, and a deeply dysfunctional culture. The Closing of the Muslim Mind solves such puzzles as: · Why the Arab world stands near the bottom of every measure of human development · Why scientific inquiry is nearly dead in the Islamic world · Why Spain translates more books in a single year than the entire Arab world has in the past thousand years · Why some people in Saudi Arabia still refuse to believe man has been to the moon

The Venture of Islam has been honored as a magisterial work of the mind since its publication in early 1975. In this three-volume study, illustrated with charts and maps, Hodgson traces and interprets the historical development of Islamic civilization from before the birth of Muhammad to the middle of the twentieth century. This work grew out of the famous course on Islamic civilization that Hodgson created and taught for many years at the University of Chicago. "This is a nonpareil work, not only because of its command of its subject but also because it demonstrates how, ideally, history should be written."—The New Yorker Volume 1, The Classical Age of Islam, analyzes the world before Islam, Muhammad's challenge, and the early Muslim state between 625 and 692. Hodgson then discusses the classical civilization of the High Caliphate. The volume also contains a general introduction to the complete work and a foreword by Reuben Smith, who, as Hodgson's colleague and friend, finished the Venture of Islam after the author's death and saw it through to publication.