Thursday 15 September 2011

Refashioning the Study of Islam: Muslim contributions


Kristian Petersen, the new host of the Islamic Studies and Religion section of New Books Network (NBN) interviewed this blogger about the contributions of three Muslim intellectuals to finding new approaches to the study of Islam. The talk is based on the book Cosmopolitans and Heretics examinations of the writings of Indonesian Islamicist and public intellectual Nurcholish Madjid, the Egyptian philosopher Hasan Hanafi, and the French-Algerian historian of Islam Mohammed Arkoun.
Often when we read about new Muslim intellectuals we are offered a presentation of their politicized Islamic teachings and radical interpretations of theology, or Western readings that nominally reflect the Islamic tradition. We are rarely introduced to critical Muslim thinkers who neither abandon their Islamic civilizational heritage nor adopt, wholesale, a Western intellectual perspective.
Click here to listen to the whole interview. And the the image below to buy the book.