Drawing on canon studies, this book investigates the origins, development and functions of the core of the Sunni ?ad?th canon, the 'Authentic' ?ad?th collections of al-Bukh?r? and Muslim, from the time of their authors to the modern period.

What happens when authorities you venerate condone something you know is wrong? Every major religion and philosophy once condoned or approved of slavery, but in modern times nothing is seen as more evil. Americans confront this crisis of authority when they erect statues of Founding Fathers who slept with their slaves. And Muslims faced it when ISIS revived sex slavery, justifying it with verses from the Quran and the practice of Muhammad. Exploring the moral and ultimately theological problem of slavery, Jonathan A.C. Brown traces how the Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions have tried to reconcile modern moral certainties with the infallibility of God’s message. He lays out how Islam viewed slavery in theory, and the reality of how it was practiced across Islamic civilization. Finally, Brown carefully examines arguments put forward by Muslims for the abolition of slavery.

AN INDEPENDENT BEST BOOKS ON RELIGION 2014 PICK Few things provoke controversy in the modern world like the religion brought by Prophet Muhammad. Modern media are replete with alarm over jihad, underage marriage and the threat of amputation or stoning under Shariah law. Sometimes rumor, sometimes based on fact and often misunderstood, the tenets of Islamic law and dogma were not set in the religion’s founding moments. They were developed, like in other world religions, over centuries by the clerical class of Muslim scholars. Misquoting Muhammad takes the reader back in time through Islamic civilization and traces how and why such controversies developed, offering an inside view into how key and controversial aspects of Islam took shape. From the protests of the Arab Spring to Istanbul at the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and from the ochre red walls of Delhi’s great mosques to the trade routes of the Indian Ocean world, Misquoting Muhammad lays out how Muslim intellectuals have sought to balance reason and revelation, weigh science and religion, and negotiate the eternal truths of scripture amid shifting values.

Drawing on traditional Muslim sources, Michael Cook describes Muhammad's life and teaching. He also attempts to stand back from this traditional picture to show how far it is historically justified.

Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī is unsurprisingly the most widely recognized book among Muslims after the Qurʾān. Curious readers of Bukhārī’s magnum opus are often left with burning questions that lie beyond its contents. Who was Imām Bukhārī? How and why did he write the Ṣaḥīḥ? How was it transmitted? Are there any reliable extant manuscripts of the work? In this introduction, Dr. Muṣṭafā al-Aʿẓamī answers these questions in a simple and accessible manner. This translation, alongside added annotations and appendices, presents and expands on al-Aʿẓamī’s research for an English readership, for whom there is a dearth of resources on the subject.

I want to begin by congratulating my colleagues at the helm of the American Journal of Islam and Society (AJIS), as well as readers and contributors, that the journal is now finally SCOPUS-indexed. Consistently in circulation since its establishment in 1984, AJIS is now an open-access, biannual, double-blind peer-reviewed and interdisciplinary journal with global reach. Its newly acquired formal status speaks to its consistently high standards of scholarship and invites an ever-larger group of aspiring and senior scholars to publish their finest work on a variety of areas in Islamic thought and society. The issue of the American Journal of Islam and Society comprises four contributions, each exploring a different way in which Islam and society interact. Wardah AlKatiri proposes an Islamic vision to address the world’s deteriorating environmental prospects; Yousef Wahb addresses the challenge of upholding Islamic communal norms in North America; Sami al-Daghistani aspires to put the field of Islamic economics into conversation with classical Islamic ethics and spirituality; and Tabinda Khan addresses a theoretical lacuna in Western political scientists’ study of Islamism. Ovamir Anjum Editor

Contrary to popular opinion, the bulk of Islamic law does not come from the Quran but from hadith, first-hand reports of the Prophet Muhammad’s words and deeds, passed from generation to generation. However, with varying accounts often only committed to paper a century after the death of Muhammad, Islamic scholars, past and present, have been faced with complex questions of historical authenticity. In this wide-ranging introduction, Jonathan A. C. Brown explores the collection and criticism of hadith, and the controversy surrounding its role in modern Islam. This edition, revised and updated with additional case studies and attention to the very latest scholarship, also features a new chapter on how hadiths have been used politically, both historically and in the Arab Spring and its aftermath. Informative and accessible, it is perfectly suited to students, scholars and general readers interested in this critical element of Islam.

This book explores how traditional Sunni Muslim conceptions have informed or shaped Islamization strategies in contemporary Turkey. In particular, the author proposes to examine the teaching curriculum of the Ministry of Education, which oversees Turkish public religious education; the activities and teachings of Diyanet, the constitutional organ responsible for managing all religious affairs; and the ideas and activities of three Muslim religious groups currently operating in Turkey. The monograph explains how the interpretation and practice of Islam affects various situations in the Muslim world and analyzes the concept of nature in Islam, which has been an indivisible component of Islamic tradition since the beginning.

This volume provides a comprehensive survey of the contemporary study of Islamic law and a critical analysis of its deficiencies. Written by outstanding senior and emerging scholars in their fields, it offers an innovative historiographical examination of the field of Islamic law and an ideal introduction to key personalities and concepts. While capturing the state of contemporary Islamic legal studies by chronicling how far the field has come, the Handbook also explains why certain debates recur and indicates fundamental gaps in our knowledge. Each chapter presents bold new avenues for research and will help readers appreciate the contested nature of key concepts and topics in Islamic law. This Handbook will be a major reference work for scholars and students of Islam and Islamic law for years to come.

This book is a translation of Aziz al-Azmeh's seminal work Al-'Ilmaniya min mandhur mukhtalif that was first published in Beirut in 1992. Both celebrated and criticised for its reflections on Arab secularisation and secularism in the modern history of the Arab World, it is the only study to date to approach its subject as a set of historical changes which affected the regulation of the social, political and cultural order, and which permeated the concrete workings of society, rather than as an ideological discussion framed from the outset by the assumed opposition between Islam and secularism. The author takes a comprehensive analytical perspective to show that an almost imperceptible yet real, multi-faceted and objective secularising process has been underway in the Arab world since the 1850s. The early onset was the result of adapting to systemic novelties introduced at the time and a reaction to the perceived European advance and local retardation. The need for meaningful reform, and the actions taken in order to put in place a new organisation of state and society based on modern organisational and educational criteria, rather than older, religious traditions, stemmed from the perceived weakness of Arab polities and from an internal drive to overcome this situation. The book follows these themes into the close of the 20th century, marked with the rise of Islamism. A preface to the English translation takes a retrospective look at the theme from the vantage point of social, political and intellectual issues of relevance today.