History

In this paper, I argue that in his endeavor to reorient Muslim-American priorities and perceptions of authority in the name of a “Blackamerican Islam,” Sherman A. Jackson’s conception of “protest appropriation” and its concomitant blending of epistemological and social critique informed by the experience of black suffering stands in the tradition of African-American forms of pragmatism, especially that of Cornel West. Just as West’s “prophetic pragmatism” enabled him to develop a tradition of Christian thought and practice with an organic relationship to the experiences of African-Americans, so too does Jackson’s “Blackamerican Islam” evince certain pragmatic sensibilities in its quest to do the same for Sunni Islam in the face of white and immigrant Muslim ideologies. In the process of making this argument, I hope to make distinct the harmonies and dissonances between Jackson and West’s work, and thus better ascertain the possibility of a “Blackamerican Muslim” prophetic pragmatism.

In this paper, I argue that in his endeavor to reorient Muslim-American priorities and perceptions of authority in the name of a “Blackamerican Islam,” Sherman A. Jackson’s conception of “protest appropriation” and its concomitant blending of epistemological and social critique informed by the experience of black suffering stands in the tradition of African-American forms of pragmatism, especially that of Cornel West. Just as West’s “prophetic pragmatism” enabled him to develop a tradition of Christian thought and practice with an organic relationship to the experiences of African-Americans, so too does Jackson’s “Blackamerican Islam” evince certain pragmatic sensibilities in its quest to do the same for Sunni Islam in the face of white and immigrant Muslim ideologies. In the process of making this argument, I hope to make distinct the harmonies and dissonances between Jackson’s and West’s work, and thus better ascertain the possibility of a “Blackamerican Muslim” prophetic pragmatism.

By placing African American Muslim theologian Sherman A. Jackson’s work, especially his Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering, in conversation with the work of William James, I hope to explore Jackson’s conception of the category of “experience” and its role in the verification of belief. While his uses of classical Islamic thought to address the problems of black suffering assume a certain verificatory role for “experience,” a critical gaze is also cast upon the category of “experience” itself, especially the role it plays in William R. Jones’ arguments against theodicies of black suffering. Such critiques could be made of James’ own uncritical reliance upon “experience” in his discussions of verification; however, Jackson and James find common ground in their shared belief that the personal dimension of experiential knowledge holds a higher epistemic status than more scientific forms of knowledge which traffic only in realities of the most general kind.

has been busy not just killing Jordanian pilots and Coptic Christians but also destroying antiquities and burning rare books in Mosul. The almost uniform response has been one of disgust, at least among the online academic community. A friend who worked in the Yale Art Gallery as a graduate student and got to work with some of the antiquities that found their way to Yale from Mosul in the 1850s wrote about why we should care about archaeological destruction. As scholars of religion, we realize the already seemingly insurmountable limits to the work that we do. We are some of the first to "care" about this destruction. These artifacts are rare and priceless! They offer us a window into worlds before ours that we cannot replace! These thoughts and more come to the fore when watching videos like the one in question where artifacts deemed "idols" by ISIS are being destroyed systematically and deliberately. These responses seem appropriate, even natural. Yet, Russell McCutcheon, as he is wont to do, has pushed back against this response, and rightfully so. He asked on Facebook, for instance, Is the problem that they're destroying the past or, rather, that they're not respecting the choices we make concerning which of our pasts we enshrine? Many would respond-and many have-that the destruction of any past object is deplorable. But then, as McCutcheon laid out last year, we should be examining not just that such destruction has taken place but why we care so much about these particular objects? That is, why do we care about the destruction of statues from Nineveh and not about the destruction of a poem that a third grader wrote? Why is one endowed with the status of "art" while the other is so easily tossed aside? McCutcheon's point is that scholars are often just as "guilty" as our own objects of study of endowing certain things, certain texts, and certain groups with value, worth, and meaning. We then present as natural-"these stones merit our awe and respect"-that which is arbitrary. At the end of the day these are stylized stones and many stylized stones are not so lucky as to receive our awe and respect. Or, as Matt Day used to ask us, "why this rather than that?"

As for poets, the erring follow them. Hast thou not seen how they stray in every valley, And how they say that which they do not? Save those who believe and do good works, and remember God much, and vindicate themselves after they have been wronged.

Theories of virtue and its relation to ritual as a means of cultivating character have received much attention in the contemporary field of religious ethics. While there is increasingly more attention being paid to this subject in the Islamic tradition, there is much yet to be done.  This is perhaps especially the case with Ṣūfism (al-taṣawwuf). Consequently, I analyze the place of ritual in the theories of spiritual and character formation (al-tarbīya) of two recent and prominent Islamist activist intellectuals who were thoroughly shaped by Ṣūfī thought and practice: Syrian Muslim Brotherhood thinker Saʿīd Ḥawwa (1935-1989) and ʿAbd al-Salam Yassine (1928-2012), founder of the Moroccan Justice and Benevolence Association. By doing so, I not only challenge scholarship which reifies a Salafī-Ṣūfī divide, I also present a model of ethical formation which views ritual practice and socio-political exchange and interaction as interdependently necessary for the cultivation of virtue.

This presentation focuses on the theory of virtue and character formation in the thought of scholarly giant and "Proof of Islam" (Ḥujjat al-Islām), Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111). Many scholars have addressed the ways in which al-Ghazālī synthesized elements of the law, Ṣūfism, and philosophy into an integrated paradigm of devotional life and the religious sciences in order to foster individual piety and virtue; however, less attention has been paid to the public and social dimensions of this project. I therefore elucidate the place of al-Ghazālī's account of the duty to "command right and forbid wrong" within the broader ethical framework found in his seminal work, The Revival of the Religious Sciences (Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn).

With its focus on " narrative " and theology as an ethnographic enterprise, the " postliberalism " of Hans W. Frei and George A. Lindbeck sought to incorporate insights from the linguistic turn in modern thought; however, it has faced criticisms ranging from sectarianism to concern with its overly static and homogeneous conceptions of " narrative " and " Christian community " that fail to recognize the church's participation in many overlapping communities of discourse. In this essay, I explore such criticisms and their recognition of the varied narratives and discursive practices by which Christian communities are formed, in ways both recognized and unrecognized. I then examine the work of Ugandan Catholic theologian Emmanuel Katongole which gives due attention to " narrative " and ideology, and in doing so, demonstrates " postliberal " theology's insights while also compensating for its weaknesses.

In this essay, I contribute to ongoing debates regarding proper conceptions of “political Islam” or “Islamism” by bringing greater attention to the roles that Islamic mysticism, or Sufism, have played in some traditions of Islamist thought and practice. I do so by situating the ‘commanding right and forbidding wrong’ discourse in the wider thought of ʿAbd al-Salam Yassine (d. 2012), founder of the Moroccan Justice and Benevolence Association (Jamaʿat al-ʿAdl wal-Ihsan). This discourse has been interpreted and deployed in various ways by Islamist movements to conceptualize their activist visions, and in the hands of Yassine, we find an understanding which has been thoroughly shaped by Sufism, especially in the role played by spiritual and ethical formation (tarbiya) in cultivating a successful socio-political vanguard. This perspective challenges analytical frameworks which describe Islamist groups primarily as products of modernity or as political ideologies. Additionally, attention to the Sufi-centric aspects of some traditions of Islamism offers a contrast to previous scholarship which has focused almost exclusively on its exoteric scripturalism and fixation on the law. Such insights are crucial when attempting to understand and engage Islamist actors for purposes ranging from cross-cultural understanding to policy formulation.

In this article, I trace and analyze the manifold ways in which Ḥasan al-Bannāʾ (d. 1949), founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, appropriated Ṣūfī thought and practice in the creation of Brotherhood doctrine and institutional structures, with a particular focus on his model of ethico-spiritual formation (tarbīya). For al-Bannāʾ, Ṣūfī discursive and embodied practices and the virtues they produced were required not only for individual flourishing, but as the necessary precondition for socio-political activism. Such a recognition of the embodied nature of ethical formation stands in contrast to Salafī epistemologies predicated on a scriptural positivism and an exoteric focus on law, and sheds further light on the early Muslim Brotherhood's Ṣūfī origins. Moreover, this ethical paradigm, which entails a " sharīʿa-minded " Ṣūfism placed in an activist framework, creates avenues for exploring the relationship between practical reasoning, virtue formation, and public engagement, thus further contributing to an " engaged Ṣūfism " advocated by some today.

In the fields of Muslim ethics and comparative religious ethics over the past two decades, embodiment and embodied practices have reigned as rich methodological loci yielding numerous illuminating studies on the nature and process of ethical formation, in large part because of the pioneering work of anthropologist of Islam, Talal Asad. But as is often the case with scholarly methodologies, the pendulum has begun to swing back, in this case towards an interest in theological and philosophical reasoning as crucial to understanding how religious and moral selves are formed—for example, in Thomas A. Lewis’s 2016 Why Philosophy Matters for the Study of Religion & Vice Versa. Presenting himself as standing firmly in the camp of this nascent trend, Faraz Masood Sheikh offers his Forging Ideal Muslim Subjects: Discursive Practices, Subject Formation, and Muslim Ethics as a study of both Muslim and comparative religious ethics that takes the power of ideas and reasoned reflection seriously i...

The antebellum era is often portrayed a time of religious flourishing, when the state got along with the church, when revivalism gave a voice to the voiceless, and when churches grew faster than the population. While these aspects are significant, one must also ...