Reclaiming Islamic Tradition

Elisabeth Kendall is Senior Research Fellow in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Pembroke College, Oxford University. Previously, she held positions at the Universities of Edinburgh and Harvard, as well as serving as Director of a UK government sponsored Center focused on building Arabic-based research expertise. Her current research examines how militant jihad groups exploit traditional local Arab cultures. She has lectured at government and academic institutions all around the world. Ahmad Khan is postdoctoral researcher at Universität Hamburg, Asien-Afrika-Institut. In 2014-15, he was Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford, Faculty of Oriental Studies. His D.Phil (Oxon) examined discourses of heresy and the formation of medieval Sunni orthodoxy. His current research focuses on the history of medieval Iran. His second research specialism concerns modern Islamic history/thought, particularly the emergence of publishing houses and editors in the Islamic world.

Ranging from law to exegesis and poetry, this volume presents prodigious evidence that tradition is not fragile and static, as many assume, but malleable and often re-interpreted. The contributors skilfully show that the past is not ‘a foreign country’, but an intimate part of the contestation over authority and meaning in modern Muslim societies.

• Acknowledgements;About the Contributors viiiIntroduction 1Elisabeth Kendall and Ahmad Khan1 Modern Shiʿite Legal Theory and the Classical Tradition 12Robert Gleave2 Muaammad Nā‚īr al-Dīn al-Albānī and Traditional HadithCriticism 33Christopher Melchert3 Islamic Tradition in an Age of Print: Editing, Printing andPublishing the Classical Tradition 52Ahmad Khan4 Reaching into the Obscure Past: The Islamic Legal Heritage andReform in the Modern Period 100Jonathan A. C. Brown5 Reading Sūrat al-Anʿām with Muaammad Rashīd Ri∂ā andSayyid Qu†b 136Nicolai Sinai6 Contemporary Iranian Interpretations of the Qurʾan andTradition on Women’s Testimony 160Karen BauerKENDALL 9781474403115 PRINT (11/13).indd 5 04/03/2016 13:06vi | reclaiming islamic tradition7 Ibn Taymiyya between Moderation and Radicalism 177Jon Hoover8 The Impact of a Sixteenth-Century Jihad Treatise on Colonialand Modern India 204Carole Hillenbrand9 Jihadist Propaganda and Its Exploitation of the Arab PoeticTradition 223Elisabeth Kendall10 Contemporary Salafi Literature on Paradise and Hell: The Case ofʿUmar Sulaymān al-Ashqar 247Christian LangeIndex