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This chapter discusses Bint al-Shatiʾ's Omdurman lecture “The Arab Literary Woman Yesterday and Today,” where she reflects at length on women's literary and intellectual participation in public life. She also talks about (romantic) affect and an instinct for the divine—two concepts, wijdān and fiṭra, that she weaves together. She connects affect to the “law of instinct and the model (the sunna) of nature”—what has been fertile ground, she declares, for woman>'s “literary existence” in Arab and Islamic history. Fiṭra is profoundly gendered in the writings analyzed in this book.

Most 20th-century surveys of Qurʼānic exegesis, whether produced in Muslim or non-Muslim academic environments, remain remarkably uniform. Several widely available texts demonstrate this symmetry, circumscribing the subject field of tafsīr within well-defined parameters. A few volumes can serve as representative examples. Ignaz Goldziher's Die Richtungen der islamischen Koranauslegung, first published in 1920, has held its place as the standard Western survey of Islamic scriptural exegesis. In 1381/1961, Muhammad Husayn al-Dhahabī published his al-Tafsīr wa-l-mufassirūn (“Commentary and Commentators”), a work that quickly became the standard secondary source for contemporary tafsīr studies throughout the Muslim world. Does the exegetical activity to be found in other forms of Islamic literature simply echo that of the musalsal commentary traditionTafsīr as a genre and tafsīr as an intellectual exercise of the Muslim religious imagination are not necessarily coterminous categories? Despite the countless shelves of published commentaries and the many collections of tafsīr manuscripts that await editing, medieval exegesis of the Qurʼān cannot be caught and contained within these boundaries.

Commentary on the Qurʼān, as both activity and achievement, has been a remarkably stable enterprise over the long centuries of its production. The tradition of Qurʼānic exegesis continues to occupy a prominent place within contemporary Muslim intellectual life. In general, the extant commentaries on the Qurʼān represent a large and sustained range of literary output from at least the 9th to the 12th centuries with certain seminal works that predate even that span. The Qurʼān was so central to the intellectual life of medieval Islam that its verses and their interpretation appear in virtually all forms of Islamic literature. This chapter presents an overview of medieval interpretation of the Qurʼān, the chronology and classification of Qurʼānic commentary, varieties of exegetical material, questions posed by the commentators of the Qurʼān (for example, abrogation and applicability), and the continuity of Qurʼānic commentary.

The chapter shows the literature and folklore of the Middle East which revealed a normal range of traditional and stereotypical accusation against people who were perceived to be different and inferior. The following accusations were directed to slaves: stupid, vicious, untruthful, dishonest, dirty, having an evil smell. The black's physical appearance was described as ugly, distorted, and monstrous. If there were accusations, there were also praises such as brave, generous, and musical. There is one aspect that deserves deeper exploration: the emotional content attached to the concept of black and white — the idea that black is connected with sin, the devil, and damnation while white has the opposite association. Another stereotype of the black is as a monster or a bogeyman. Thus the portrayal of the black in Islamic literature and Islamic art falls into stereotyped categories.

This introductory chapter provides a brief overview of the transformation of the Arabo-Islamic intellectual tradition that accompanied the adoption of printing in the Middle East. It brings to light the stories of the hitherto mostly invisible individuals who effected this transformation. Their motivations, goals, and approaches were diverse. All had to contend with the formidable challenges posed by centuries of cultural neglect of the classical literature: locating and obtaining manuscripts in the absence of catalogs, piecing together complete works out of scattered fragments, deciphering texts in spite of errors and damage, and understanding their meaning without recourse to adequate reference material. Their painstaking, frequently solitary, and often innovative efforts opened up the narrow postclassical manuscript tradition into a broad literature of printed, primarily classical works—the literature that today can be considered the essential canon of Islamic texts.

This chapter analyzes the response of Tatar modernists to the success of Eastern Orthodox missionaries in the Kräshen milieu and their criticisms of popular Islamic literature. To reaffirm the supremacy of Christianity, Russian missionaries mocked the content of ancient religious texts to destroy their influence and turn Kräshens into martyrs and vectors of Christianity. Modernist Tatars, however, did not abolish this ancient literature but recalled its colorful images to create a national Tatar identity, which embraced the baptized apostates as Muslim martyrs of the faith. Reformist pedagogues subjected their popular tradition to an internal process of desacralization and historicization even as they defended it from missionary criticism. They adopted a common strategy: they popularized the teachings of Tatar theologians in textbooks by desacralizing the role of prophets, making Muhammad's sayings relevant to modern times, and attributing new meanings to popular Sufi metaphors.

This introductory chapter argues that despite the numerous accounts of the political history of Umayyad al-Andalus, its relationship to the Jewish and Christian communities under its rule can be viewed only from scattered evidence in the Arabic–Islamic literary sources. Given the limitations of literary sources, the book turns to early Andalusi and Maghribi Maliki legal texts for evidence that could contribute to a deeper understanding of life in al-Andalus. It presents an examination of Islamic legal texts as sources for understanding intercommunal relations in a legal and historical context. The chapter discusses the conceptualization, expression, and imposition of boundaries by rulers, judges, and jurists, and looks at boundary testing as a mechanism for the transmutation and the continuity of regular social practices.

This concluding chapter tracks the developments in Arabo-Islamic print culture beginning in the mid-twentieth century. It remarks on some features of postclassical thought which were common enough to mark the era's scholarship in distinct and recognizable ways. It is likely that they contributed, together with the decline of educational institutions and libraries, to the decreasing availability of classical works in the Arabic-speaking world, which further constrained intellectual production by reducing the resources at scholars' disposal. In their righteous zeal, the reformists may well have exaggerated the intellectual weaknesses of their age, but the sincerity of the feeling of liberation and optimism with which they reached into the classical tradition for tonics for present maladies should not be doubted. From there, the chapter turns to more contemporary times and the major technological strides which herald a new renaissance for classical literature.

This chapter scripts an alternative genealogy of critique—tanqīd/naqd—in the Islamicate traditions of South Asia in Urdu. Building on the works of Martin Bernal, Michael Herzfeld, and John Keane, it interrogates the prevalent views of Greece as the birthplace of anthropology, democracy, critique, and so on. Subjecting canonical works on Urdu literary criticism and taking, inter alia, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s writings as illustration, it documents the secularist and secularizing premise of Urdu literature and how it was designed as distinct from religion but aligned to territorial nationalism. In contrast, central to the alternative genealogy is the premise that God Himself is the source of critique. God sent prophets for reform (iṣlāḥ). To reform was to critique and to critique was to reform. In the "religious" texts and social practices of "traditional" ʿulema thus a different notion of critique emerges—a notion that doesn't reject the Greek, pre-Muhammad, or Western traditions but which simultaneously can't be subsumed within them. The chapter traces elements of this genealogy through the Qurʾān, prophetic lives, and the early community constituted around Muhammad and his companions. Maududi and his interlocutors read, craft, elaborate, configure, update, and modify that tradition of critique.

Chapter 4 focuses on the Hadith and Islamic historical literatures that expound upon Jesus's eschatological descent. To do this, the author first explains the importance of the Hadith in Islamic theology, defining the methodology used in the Islamic sciences to verify their reliability, and, second, he discusses Islam's understanding of the Prophet Muhammad. Throughout the Hadith literature, there is no single unified story regarding Jesus's descent. The author uses this fact, plus the general understanding that Muhammad spoke metaphorically, to argue that the sayings of the Prophet must be understood through interpretation. The chapter then gives examples of both weak and strong Hadith and examines the history and theological implications of these Hadith.

This chapter explores feminist engagements with religion in works by Nawal Sa’dawi and Salwa Bakr. It reads Sa’dawi’s Suqut al-Imam (1987) and Jannat wa Iblis (1992) as feminist dystopias which employ unconventional narrative techniques to augment the dystopic effect and take issue with the founding texts of monotheism as historic vehicles for female oppression. It discusses Salwa Bakr’s rehabilitation of Zulaykha in Wasf al-Bulbul (1993) and explores Al-ʿAraba al-Dhahibiyya la Tasʿad ila al-Samaʾ (1991) by the same author as a critique of religion via the trope of madness, paying attention to how religion, as belief, custom, institution and law, is implicated in the plight of women in the text. The discussion also takes in the Alifa Rifʿat’s stories as a rare example of Islamic literature admitted to the canon. Each of these four chapters begins with a contextual introduction.