Cosmopolitans and Heretics

Dramatic political events involving Muslims across the world have put Islam under increased scrutiny. However, the focus of this attention is generally limited to the political realm and often even further confined by constrictive views of Islamism narrowed down to its most extremist exponents. Much less attention is paid to the parallel development of more liberal alternative Islamic discourses. The final decades of the twentieth-century has also seen the emergence of a Muslim intelligentsia exploring new and creative ways of engaging with the Islamic heritage. Drawing on advances made in the Western human sciences and understanding Islam in comprehensive terms as a civilisation rather than restricting it to religion in a conventional sense their ideas often cause controversy, even inviting accusations of heresy. Cosmopolitans and Heretics examines three of these new Muslim intellectuals who combine a solid grounding in the Islamic tradition with an equally intimate familiarity with the latest achievements of Western scholarship in religion. This cosmopolitan attitude challenges existing stereotypes and makes these thinkers difficult to categorise. Underscoring the global dimensions of new Muslim intellectualism, Kersten analyses contributions to contemporary Islamic thought of the late Nurcholish Madjid, Indonesia's most prominent public intellectual of recent decades, Hasan Hanafi, one of the leading philosophers in Egypt, and the influential French-Algerian historian of Islam Mohammed Arkoun. Emphasising their importance for the rethinking of the study of Islam as a field of academic inquiry, this is the first book of its kind and a welcome addition to the intellectual history of the modern Muslim world.

ISBN 1849041296   DEWEY edition DC22 ISBN13 9781849041294 (What's this?)   Pages 288 Publisher C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd   Published in London Imprint C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd   Height (mm) 216 Format Paperback   Width (mm) 138 Publication date 01 Jul 2011   Academic level Postgraduate DEWEY 909.09767

'Well located in the context of debates about concepts such as postcolonialism, translation, and hybridity, and the book is a powerful, and welcome, plea for the investigation of Islamic Thought on a global, as opposed to a regional, basis.' -Professor Hugh Goddard, University of Edinburgh 'Charts new territory for the robust study of Islam as a force in today's world. It traces the Asian arc of influence stemming from the cluster of new Muslim intellectuals whose work is little known but whose impact has begun to grow during the latest period of global history. The Indian Ocean network mapped here provides welcome attention to themes and issues, texts and contexts that will now be debated with fresh, sustained vigour.' - Bruce B. Lawrence, Professor of Islamic Studies, Duke University and author of The Qur'an-A Biography 'This is an important study of some of the leading Muslim intellectuals of the beginning of the 21st century: Hanafi, Arkoun, and Madjid. Kersten does an admirable job of situating them in both Islamic tradition and developments on Western thought. Highly recommended.'-Omid Safi, Professor of Islamic Studies, University of North Carolina 'Kersten's book demonstrates an imaginative grasp of these cosmopolitan intellectuals and their projects. His approach bears all the hallmarks of charting a new approach to modern Muslim intellectual history.' --Professor Abdulkader Tayob, University of Cape Town 'One of the reasons for the really abysmal knowledge of Americans - both the general public and many scholars - about the contemporary currents in Islam is language. As Carool Kersten's challenging but very important new study shows, much of the work of or on Islamic modernism is beyond the reach of potential readers who do not speak Arabic or Indonesian or French. This is what makes a summary like Kersten's so very valuable, as he is bringing some critical information to the English-speaking world that would be largely inaccessible otherwise.' - Anthropology Review Database

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