Islam as a Discursive Tradition: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors

Negotiating Tradition and Contemporary Education: An Enrichment Center for Jewish Ultra‐Orthodox Children in Israel

“…In contrast to explicit and implicit statements of the Haredi teachers that religion is not compromised in the process of adopting Western theories in education, in other religious settings compromise and modernization of religion seem to be accepted as an inevitable part of such adaptation processes. Thus, Hellemans () describes the modernization of the Catholic church, Wagner () refers specifically to the compromises that Christian schools must make as they negotiate Western educational perceptions, and Asad (2009) argues that Islamic tradition is not a fixed unchangeable social system, but rather a discursive relationship of thinking subjects with foundational religious texts, allowing diversity, change and the mixing of tradition and modernity (Anjum ).…”

The limits of religion: liberalism and anti-liberalism in the Islamic Republic of Iran

“…The secularity of this approach may be read in multiple ways -as an answer to Islam's delayed modernisation and positive re-formation of Iranian subjectivity (Vahdat 2002), or as betrayal of 'traditionalist' Islam to the hegemony of Western ways of being (Anjum 2007;Mahmood 2006). Whatever the value scholars would like to attribute to these liberal readings, reformist Muslim discourses in Iran reflect the nature of the Islamic Republic and respond to its authoritarian model of governance (Foody 2015).…”

“…Contemporary responses to these liberal readings might be read as representing an alternative Islamic tradition; indeed, some analysts have suggested just such a reading of responses to liberal Muslims elsewhere (Anjum 2007). In the Iranian context, particularly regarding the question of human reason that theological debates evoke, conservative scholars do more than uphold long-standing Islamic systems of knowledge.…”

The ʿUlamāʾ and the Arab Uprisings 2011-13: Considering Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the ‘Global Mufti,’ between the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Legal Tradition, and Qatari Foreign Policy

“…Ovamir Anjum argues aptly then, "Rather than the 'thick descriptions' of theatrical subjects who simply 'behave' in accordance with the roles determined for them by either their material structure or culture, it is the arguments and discourses of the thinking subjects with their specific styles of reasoning couched in their historical and material context that become the focus." 140 Using that approach as the framework of analysis, the ʿulamāʾ have been seen to be playing an increasingly activist role in the region's emerging religious public sphere with the most prolific among them expanding the legal tradition's concepts of maṣlaḥa and iftāʾ to such an extent that any prevailing social or political issues of the day might come within their purview as ʿulamāʾ. With the boundaries between their fatwas and other discourses becoming blurred to a far greater extent than previously, this has increasingly involved a reliance on individual utilitarian reasoning, with Nakissa terming the creative moves by the ʿulamāʾ to conceptualise new subfields of jurisprudence to structure this reasoning as "secondary segmentation," seen most clearly with al-Qaradawi's fiqh al-thawra.…”