Contemporary Issues in Islam

Asma Afsaruddin is Professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author and/or editor of seven books, including Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought (2013) and The First Muslims: History and Memory (2008). She was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2005.

• Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Negotiating the Shoals of Modernity; 2. Engaging the Sharia: Re-reading the Qur’an and Hadith; 3. Islam and Politics; 4. Islam, Gender, and Feminist Hermeneutics; 5. War and Peacemaking in the Islamic Tradition; 6. American Muslims and the Expansion of the Umma; 7. Religious Dialogue and Inter-Faith Relations; Epilogue: Looking to the Future; Bibliography.

This long after 9/11, Western public discourse about Islam appears to be getting (if possible) even less subtle and nuanced than ever before. Complex questions about context, power and history are increasingly shunned in favour of simpler and simpler questions about Islam’s timeless essence. Asma Afsaruddin reminds us in this learned and timely book that only a longer historical view allows us to better understand the complexities of the public expression of Islam in modern conditions that have been both imposed on Muslims from without and developed by them from within.