Understanding Islam

Bryan Turner is Professor of Sociology, Australian Catholic University; Emeritus Professor the Graduate Center, CUNY; Honorary Professor, Potsdam University; and Fellow Edward Cadbury Center, University of Birmingham. He is one of the world’s leading sociologists of religion and has also devoted significant attention to sociological theory, the study of human rights and the sociology of the body. Turner has written, co-authored or edited more than 70 books and more than 200 articles and chapters, including most recently The Religious and the Political: A Comparative Sociology of Religion (2013) and Religion and Modern Society: Citizenship, Secularisation and the State (2011), both published by Cambridge University Press. He is a founding editor of the journals Body & Society, Citizenship Studies and Journal of Classical Sociology.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: What is Understandinng?1. The Changing World of Islam2. Insiders and Outsiders3. The Rise of the Sociology of Islam4. Postmodernism, Globalisation and Religion5. Orientalism and Islam6. Islamophobia7. Feminism, Fertility and Piety8. The Problems of Positionality9. The Possibility of DialogueIndex

This book unpacks with classic sociological discernment key binaries in unfinished debates on knowledge production within the humanities and social sciences, like insiders vs. outsiders and understanding vs. explanation. Supported by an astutely jargon-free thematic bricolage, Turner’s tour de force combs one of the thorniest scholarly battlefields of our times. It helps carve out treasured clearings for helping the sociology of Islam out of the murky epistemic swamplands of proliferating positionalities.