What Is Islam? Bereitgestellt von | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 03.12.15 05:57 Bereitgestellt von | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 03.12.15 05:57 What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic Shahab Ahmed PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Princeton and Oxford Bereitgestellt von | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 03.12.15 05:57 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, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu Jacket image © Heritage Auctions. 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 Printed on acid- free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Bereitgestellt von | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 03.12.15 05:57 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.) Bereitgestellt von | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 03.12.15 05:57 Bereitgestellt von | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 03.12.15 05:57 For my parents, who raised me in the Islam of their cosmopolitanism and in the cosmopolitanism of their Islam Bereitgestellt von | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 03.12.15 05:57 Bereitgestellt von | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 03.12.15 05:57 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 Bereitgestellt von | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 03.12.15 05:57 x • Contents Chapter 6: Applications and Implications: Coherent Contradiction, Exploration, Diffusion, Form and Meaning, Modern 405 The Importance of Being Islamic 542 Works Cited 547 Index 593 Bereitgestellt von | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 03.12.15 05:57