Everlasting Doubt

Uncertainty in Islamic Representations of the Past

Bibliographic Data

ID19476226
AuthorsShahzad Bashir (0000-0001-7726-888X, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume20
Issue1
Pages25-44
Publication date2018-03-28
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueArchiv für Religionsgeschichte (BOOK_SERIES)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1436-3038 • E-ISSN: 1868-8888
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/arege-2018-0003
OpenAlexW2970516901
LanguageEN
Citations received6

Utilizing treatments of uncertainty regarding history in four major Arabic and Persian works (Ṭabarī, Bīrūnī, Badāʾūnī, and Abū l-Fażl), this article treats Islam as an ever-changing set of arguments rather than a panoply of beliefs and practices. ‘Islamic history’ is internally varied, without necessary universality or internal cohesion. The Islamic case underscores the methodological point that the interrelationship between religion and history is a multichannel and multidirectional affair whose valences differ in treatments of history of Islam versus that of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and so on. Each of these histories has its distinctive history as a subject, with attendant fields of possibility and impossibility. An overarching history of religions must then be a vast, ever-expanding matrix not reducible to generalizations except in thematic treatments conceptualized with self-conscious attention to categories of analysis

Arabic · Buddhism · Christianity · Epistemology · Group cohesiveness · Hinduism · History of Islam · Impossibility · Islam · Linguistics · Persian · Political science · Sociology · Theology · Universality (dynamical systems) · Education and Islamic Studies · Historical and Linguistic Studies · History · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Religious studies · Social Psychology

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