Book Review: Reimagining the Religion of Abraham

Review of Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (New York: Schocken Books, 2015)

The Azāriqa in Islamic heresiography

Since the publication in the West last century of a major Sunnī work on the Islamic sects, those interested in the early firaq have found themselves dependent on the heresiographical tradition. Islamicists have had little choice in the matter; most writing and thinking produced in circles later deemed heterodox has not been preserved, and to a large extent is available only through the mediation of the heresiographers. While material of other sorts has not gone unstudied, it has for the most part been the heresiographers who have shaped the way we look at early Islamic sectarianism.This marriage of modern scholarship and medieval heresiography is, however, a distinctly uncomfortable one. As indispensable as the firaq material may be, questions about its reliability persist. The difficulties which characterize this literature are well known, and hardly need to be rehearsed here: it is late, highly schematic, and frequently hostile to the doctrines and groups which it describes. To these might be added one other problem noted less frequently: most of the books in general academic circulation have passed through Ash'arite and/or Mu‘tazilite hands. If, as we shall see, the tradition is not entirely synoptic, there are at least powerful forces at work which militate against a diversity of perspectives.</jats:p

Oaths and Vows in Islamic Law

A study of treatment of oaths and vows in early Islamic legal texts. The project examines the way in which Muslim legal scholars deal with social and ritual practices widespread in the Near East at the time of the rise of Islam (7th-12th centuries). It will engage some of the major scholarly debates concerning the formation fo Islam in the context of Late Antiquity, and will assess the realtive importance of ealier pre-Islamic (expecially Jewish) discussions of oaths and vows in the Islamic legal system. Results to be disseminated in two encyclopedia articles (completed by the end of summer) and ultimately one or two major articles in referenced journals

The Middle East in Transition

The Middle East is undergoing the most dramatic transformation since the region emerged out of the Ottoman Empire after WWI. Radical Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism, the fixations of the Western media, are symptoms of this transformation. Over the past thirty years, however, significant social and economic developments have led to changing perceptions of the role of women, the growth of a vibrant middle class, civil society and free media, and rising demands for the political liberalization of increasingly unpopular authoritarian regimes across the region. The participants in the proposed interdisciplinary roundtable will draw on theory and research to examine three topics in order to clarify the nature, process and implications of these changes: (1) Women, Education and Work (Leuenberger); (2) Media (Al-Obaidi); and (3) Democratization (Mozaffar). Professor Lewinstein will comment on the presentations from the perspective of contemporary Islamic discourse. Each presentation will be about 15-minute long followed by Q&A