Category Archives: Scholars

Ode to Islamic Studies: Its Allure, Its Danger, Its Power

Islam and Christianity, Islam in America, Orientalism, Scholars

by Edward E. Curtis IV, Religion Bulletin, May 2, 2014

Editor’s note: This post is part of the Reflections on Islamic Studies series.

By any measure, Islamic studies is a vibrant field. In the last several decades, the number of tenure-track positions dedicated to the study of Islam as a religion and to Muslim politics and societies has expanded. New journals have appeared; book sales are good; and interest in Islamic studies has led to important public humanities projects such as the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Muslim Journeys Bookshelf.

What makes Islamic studies so dynamic? For one, its ever-expanding body of participants, who come from a number of disciplinary perspectives. The field is populated by intellectual networks rather than one identifiable set of intellectual authorities. Islamic studies finds institutional homes not only in religious studies and Near Eastern languages departments, but also in history, anthropology, sociology, political science, ethnomusicology, and art and architecture, among other academic units.

Islamic studies attracts some of the very best scholars in the world. There are now so many scholars producing so much scholarship that it is impossible for one person to know all of the literature in this vast field. Questions about where to do a graduate degree must be followed by the question of what the applicant wishes to study.

The multi-disciplinary study of Islam nurtures ever-expanding circles of conversation about the significance of Islam to both specialized disciplinary concerns and interdisciplinary inquiry. The origins of Islamic studies may be found in orientalism, that is, the scholarly, philological study of Islamic religion and Muslim cultures. But today, Islamic studies is a field defined by shared and intersecting questions, themes, and data, not any one methodology or set of texts. Its practitioners are not tied together by any one canon—one needn’t be an expert on the Qur’an to be in Islamic studies. Continue reading Ode to Islamic Studies: Its Allure, Its Danger, Its Power →

Bringing Muslims back to science

Development, Islamic Sciences, Scholars

Bringing Muslims back to science
Is Muslim religious discourse on scientific matters killing the scientific aspirations of the religious?

By Mohamed Ghilan, Al Jazeera, April 11, 2014

The most important rule in Islam is “judgment on anything is a branch of conceptualising it”. To determine whether a belief can be accepted by a Muslim or not, this is the first and most often repeated principle. However, when it comes to matters scientific, this indispensable rule for correct judgment is paradoxically the most disregarded one.

Ever since the decline of the Islamic civilisation and the end of its Golden Age, Muslims have ironically taken up superstitious and irrational thinking habits they had previously dropped when they originally accepted the Message of Prophet Muhammad. The ideas that the sun could eclipse for the death of someone, that certain numbers have magical powers, or that birds flying in a certain direction indicates an omen of some kind were among superstitious beliefs explicitly pointed out by Prophet Muhammad and in verses in the Quran for their irrationality. Unfortunately, it seems that Muslims have gone full circle. Out of the top 20 countries in overall science output, Turkey is the sole Muslim representative, barely sneaking in at number 19.

Overly simplistic explanations of this phenomenon have pointed to Al-Ghazali (c 1058-1111), one of the most influential Muslim theologians. His work, The Incoherence of Philosophers, is cited for its negative impact on Muslim thinking. This, however, is a grave misrepresentation of Al-Ghazali, his attack on contemporary philosophers, and the Islamic civilisation as a whole. Continue reading Bringing Muslims back to science →

Arabic Books Online

Books You Should Read, Folklore and Proverbs, Islam: Introduction, Islamic History, Islamic Law, Islamic Sciences, Islamic Texts, Languages, Literature, Scholars, Teaching Resources

In 1981, during a trip to Egypt, I bought the old multi-volume Cairo edition of the mother of all Arabic dictionaries: al-Zabidi’s Taj al-‘Arus. It took up an entire suitcase and was so heavy that I paid the porter extra. As I arrived home, the handle broke and the books spilled in the landing of my home. Those were the days when most Arabic books had to be physically bought in the Middle East and carried home in luggage. Books that used to be accessible only in major libraries are often available online today. If one is patient just about any classic Arabic text from the past is available online. Some are pdf scans, where there is a treasure trove at archive.org and 4.shared.com. It is usually best to search these sites in Arabic. But even a ouja-board Google search in Arabic can yield full texts.

Continue reading Arabic Books Online →

Tabsir Redux: Islamic Folk Astronomy, #2

Folklore and Proverbs, Islamic Sciences, Scholars

Time Reckoning

Era means a definite space of time, reckoned from the beginning of some past year, in which either a prophet, with signs and wonders, and with a proof of his divine mission, was sent, or a great and powerful king rose, or in which a nation perished by a universal destructive deluge, or by a violent earthquake and the sinking of the earth, or a sweeping pestilence, or by intense drought, or in which a change of dynasty or religion took place, or any grand event of the celestial and the famous tellurian miraculous occurrences, which do not happen save at long intervals and at times far distant from each other. Al-Bîrûnî (1879:16)

Time is relative. Given the modern world’s reliance on formalized calendars and machines that define time for us, it is easy to forget that the expansion of Islam occurred at a time when telling time was not dependent on a formal science of astronomy. How time is measured is not only a practical issue but also reflective of the desired interval of duration and the precision in defining it. Simple observation of the sun rising and setting, as well as its location, can easily yield calendars to determining hours, days, months and years. Similarly, the moon’s phases made it a useful measure for the Islamic lunar calendar. Observations of movements by the stars, as well as the planets, also provided practical ways of measuring units of time both short and long. Continue reading Tabsir Redux: Islamic Folk Astronomy, #2 →

Islamic Medicine at Yale

Animals, Food and Drink, Gender and Sexuality, Islamic Sciences, Islamic Texts, Miniatures, Orientalism, Scholars


Ibn Sina’s (d. 1037 CE) Qanun, copied in Shiraz in 1645 CE

For anyone interested in the history of Islamic medicine, there are some rare editions of texts by famous Muslim scholars like Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Masawayh, al-Antaki, al-Damiri, and others, including a few 19th century French translations published in North Africa. These are available to view or as pdfs at Yale University’s library. Below is the press release about the collection:

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS RELEASE

This digitized collection of selected volumes of medical books and manuscripts, dating from 1300 to 1921, is drawn from the Medical Historical Library, Cushing/Whitney Medical Library. This collection reflects the Arabic and Persian intellectual efforts that translated, augmented, and transmitted Greek and Roman medical knowledge to Western societies during the Renaissance. It includes iconic works by authors such as Avicenna and al-Razi.

The Medical Historical Library, originally formed by the joining of three collections by bibliophiles Harvey Cushing, John Fulton, and Arnold Klebs, has over 120,000 volumes dating from the 12th to the 21st centuries. While primarily composed of works in Western medicine and science, a smaller selection of Arabic and Persian books and manuscripts are a “hidden collection” in the Library. Through the support of the Arcadia Fund, the Medical Historical Library was able to digitize Arabic and Persian books and manuscripts, as well as early translations in Latin, French, and English. Continue reading Islamic Medicine at Yale →

Reflections on the State of Islamic Studies

Islam: Introduction, Scholars

The prominent scholar Omid Safi has written a commentary on Jadaliyya entitled “Reflections on the State of Islamic Studies”. It is well worth reading. I attach the beginning paragraphs below.

I have been asked to share my impressions about the state of Islamic studies in the North American academy. Given that the pioneers of this field include many of my mentors, and many of my own peers have struggled for years to help advance the field to its current state, my observations will not be dispassionate. And since I have been fortunate to have a front-row seat along the development of the field over the last twenty years, I hope I’ll be able to do justice to the current state of the field.

I became a graduate student in the field of Islamic studies in the early 1990s. In those days, almost all of us were “converts”: no one went to undergraduate studies planning to become a professor of Islamic studies. For many, particularly Muslims of transnational background, the usual academic caste options were the familiar: doctor, lawyer, engineer, maybe the always dubious “business.” Almost all of us who entered the field did so by following the siren call of one mentor or another: Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Hamid Algar, Roy Mottahedeh, Bruce Lawrence, Vincent Cornell, Carl Ernst, Michael Sells, Annemarie Schimmel, and a few others.

My own path was similarly convoluted: I had been accepted to medical school, and turned that down to embark on a PhD. It was three or four years before it occurred to me to ask anyone what the likelihood of getting a job in this field was, or what kind of salary one could expect. Imagine my shock towards the end of finishing my PhD to find out that in 1999, there were four jobs in Islamic studies in all of North America That actually represented a remarkable improvement over the 1980s, when typically there was one tenure track job in Islamic studies in the whole country.

The game changer, of course, was 9/11. In the aftermath of those events, the overwhelming majority of American universities and colleges suddenly found themselves without the necessary faculty to “explain” the event to their students, to serve as a spokesperson in engagement with local communities, and to interact with the media. Those are not identical roles, and the list of desiderata was long and imposing. But quickly, the demand for Islamic studies positions went up dramatically: the next few years (until the market crash of 2008) saw between 40-50 tenure track positions per year…

For the rest of Omid’s article, click here.

Free Reads from U. California Press

Anthropology/Sociology, Arab-Israeli Conflict, Books You Should Read, Scholars, Teaching Resources


Brinkley Messick’s 1992 book on Yemeni legal reasoning, one of the many books available to read online at the U. of California Press website

The University of California Press is offering online viewers the opportunity to read online 770 of the books it published between 1982 and 2004.

Some 36 selections on the Middle East published between 1982-2004 are available to read online by clicking here.

An American Tabari, #1

Lithographs, Orientalism, Scholars

There was a time when it was possible to write universal histories. In geological time scale the writing of history is a mere second in the millions of years life has been evolving on this planet. In the ancient Near East empires were being formed as fodder for later historians. The classical age saw an expansion of Greeks and Romans far afield from Europe. Muslim historians chronicled life from Adam to the caliphs who patronized their work. Medieval European histories had no space for the Americas, which would not be discovered until the end of the 15th century. By the end of the 19th century there were still valiant attempts to condense world history into a series of tomes. One of the last multi-volumed histories of the world was by an American, John Clark Ridpath, whose universal history stretched to 16 volumes and whose biographical dictionary reached 25. Ridpath seems an unlikely candidate for such a task. He was born in 1840 in rural Indiana and educated in “frontier” schools not long after Abe Lincoln’s experience in the same pedagogical setting. His career trajectory led to college, teaching and eventually an administrator at the beginning of De Pauw University. He was a prolific writer, digesting history and literature for the public and his books sold well.


John Clark Ridpath

Continue reading An American Tabari, #1 →