Transformations of Tradition

Talal Asad’s “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam” is one of the more influential articles in the study of Islam, generating vociferous critique as well as favorable elaborations. Asad argues that to write an anthropology of Islam requires that we formulate the right concepts and, he continues, “discursive tradition” is such a concept. An Islamic discursive tradition is, Asad writes, “simply a tradition of Muslim discourse that addresses itself to conceptions of the Islamic past and future, with reference to a particular Islamic practice in the present” (Occasional Papers Series [Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, 1986], 14). The concept of “discursive tradition” requires that scholars attune themselves to the correct processes of teaching and what is to be learned, which are necessarily processes of argumentation and reasoning that demarcate what is and is not Islam. For Asad, then, argument and contestation, crucially, do not signify a tradition in crisis but a sign of persuasion as well as power. SherAli Tareen’s Defending Muhammad in Modernity and Junaid Quadri’s Transformations of Tradition: Islamic Law in Colonial Modernity expand upon as well as challenge Asad’s intervention in their compelling histories of Islamic reasoning and polemics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They offer divergent methodological approaches to the idea of a history of Islam—approaches intended to adequately conceptualize the effects of colonialism on Islam.

Argumentation theory · Colonialism · Epistemology · Islam · Islamic studies · Modernity · Political science · Sharia · Sociology · Theology · Education and Islamic Studies · Islamic Finance and Banking Studies · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies