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This chapter analyzes the locations and contexts for the development of Islamic studies in US universities. It attributes the field's growth in part to exaggerated concerns about national security. It criticizes the field's location within institutions, pointing out that across time—from the first departments of Oriental and Near Eastern studies to more recent interdisciplinary programs and departments—Islamic studies programs have been constrained by the field's institutionalization within the academy. The chapter traces the development of Islamic studies within various departments, such as Near Eastern languages and civilizations or religious studies. It suggests that the area studies framework can also impose constraints on Islamic studies if it is not attentive to issues that cross geographic boundaries, such as centuries-old migration in and out of the region, the transregional character of religious movements, and the importance of global communication.

This chapter discusses how returnees from al Mustafa International University, including those from the International Centre for Islamic Studies, its preceding institution, have played a significant role in the development of the Shi'i community in Sunni dominated Indonesia. Pursuing Islamic education at Qom is a post-1979 phenomenon made popular by al Habsyi, an Indonesian scholar of Arab descent, who gained the trust of religious leaders in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Following a detailed account of the educational background of Indonesian students who went to Qom, the chapter illustrates the activities of the graduates in their home towns, such as their creation of the Association of al Mustafa International University Alumni, missionary activities through various Shi'i institutions, and educational activities in religious schools, including the Islamic College Jakarta, a branch of the university.

This chapter discusses the relationship between al Azhar and the government policy of ulama training in Malaysia. It traces how, during the twentieth century, a number of factors led to al Azhar becoming one of the most popular choices for Malaysian students wanting to major in Islamic Studies. Initially, ulama adopted al Azhar's reformed curriculum by choice, as the mixed curriculum introduced by al Azhar, starting with Muhammad Abduh's modernisation project, helped the religious schools in Malaysia to compete with the state run modern schools. However, to demonstrate its commitment to Islam, the Malaysian state eventually started to invest in al Azhar education. Under a series of policies intended to emphasise Islam, religious education and religious administration expanded rapidly, thus providing increased job opportunities for al Azhar graduates.

Islamic Studies is slowly moving beyond the long-established divide between neo/orientalist and confessional approaches. A more integrated, reflexive model is in progress at a few Islamic colleges now accredited by universities, but even then, the support flows asymmetrically from the university to the college. In addition, assumptions about the criticality of believers still pervade and divide the field, which is largely configured by gendered, epistemic, and institutional hierarchies. Yet, the growing number of Muslim students and staff, the expansion in private provision aspiring to accreditation, and even problematic political changes such as securitization, are some of the changing conditions allowing for the boundaries of the field to be negotiated and redefined more collaboratively. This is beckoning a promising though cautious move away from monological—and hierarchical—constructions of Islam and Muslims, whether as objects of enquiry or as confessional staff and students subjected to epistemic and institutional monitoring.

This chapter considers the ways in which Western Islamic studies in general, and Western Qurʾanic studies in particular written by different scholars, including John Burton, Joseph G. Schacht, Richard Bell, William Montgomery Watt, John Wansbrough, and Andrew Rippin, among others, are received in the Muslim academy. It compares the promotion of Islamic Apologetics and the approaches taken by Christian theology programs in the West. It considers also if and, if so, how, the Qurʾān is read in light of science, technology, and biblical literature. Finally, it tries to describe how the Muslim academy attempts to set apart and keep separate their institutions and publications from those of Westerners.

When teaching Islam to undergraduates, the question of pedagogy is crucial. Modules must be designed to capture the breadth of the religion, including ethics, spirituality, worldview, role of holy figures, history, scientific disciplines, cultural formations, and contemporary developments. Although Western universities should be commended for introducing Islamic Studies to undergraduates, they streamline Islam to the extent that it is reduced to Islamic history. This means Islam’s intellectual tradition is seen as a contribution of the past rather than a living contribution for current human problems. In this chapter, I will share the challenges I faced as a tutor in Islamic Studies at King’s College London within the context of two pedagogical issues: (1) how Islamic Studies modules could be designed more effectively and (2) how effective learning environments can be created for undergraduate students of Islamic Studies.

This chapter highlights the notion of “Islamic Apologetics” in the Muslim academy and Islamic studies in Western academia. The goal of the chapter is to prepare readers to see how topics discussed in the Western academy are understood differently in the Muslim academy. In it, the chapter tries to unpack the motives and intentions behind the development of Islamic Apologetics in the Muslim academy. This, as author hopes, will enable readers to understand what “Islamic Apologetics” both is and is not. This chapter also tries to outline the development of an academic approach to the pertinent issues in the Western academy.

The introduction sets the historiographical context for the book. It explains how the book’s arguments relate to the fields of Islamic legal studies and Ottoman history, and explores the concept of legal pluralism. It also provides an overview of the sources used in this study.

This chapter shows that Jewish scholars tested the boundaries between religious, political, and cultural modes of public expression by immersing themselves in the study of Islam—some to the point of conversion. This engagement with Muslim literature and culture, which persisted until the Second World War, enabled some Jewish scholars to cast themselves as intermediaries between Eastern and Western aesthetics and theology. By forging a middle ground, they helped to relieve the social and political pressures Jews experienced in late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Europe. The positive view of Islam that prevailed among Jewish theologians allowed it to function as a template for presenting central Jewish ideas, such as monotheism, rejection of anthropomorphism, and religious law as divine revelation.

This chapter focuses on Johann Heinrich Hottinger's Arabic and Islamic studies in Zurich and Heidelberg. It first considers Hottinger's appointment as professor of catechesis at the Collegium Humanitatis in 1643 before turning to his method of instruction concerning Islam and the Koran as well as the religious, cultural, political, and social history of the Near East. It then examines the impact of oriental printing presses in the two centres of Reformed orthodoxy on the manner of teaching future Reformed ministers. It also discussses Hottinger's publications, including a student manual that details the history of the Islamic world, his Thesaurus Philologicus, his Hebrew grammar entitled Erotematum Linguae Sanctae conscripti in usum scholae Tigurinae, Lexicon Harmonicum, and Smegma Orientale. The chapter concludes with an assessment of Hottinger's teaching of oriental philology and the history of comparative semitic philology, as well as his meeting with Hiob Ludolf for the first time in July 1658.

Chapter 5 looks specifically at formal learning about Islam. Most of this material relates to religious organizations; mosques and Islamic Studies schools. However, many children have formal lessons in teachers’ homes, or teachers come to them, so the chapter also includes discussion of home-based formal religious education. Chapters 4 and 5 form a pair of chapters focused on how children are taught explicitly about Islam. The remaining empirical chapters are less explicit about the teaching of religion, but are concerned with how the social context of young Muslim children has an impact on religious nurture. Chapter 5 first introduces the terrain of formal education in Muslim communities. There follows material on religious socialization with other children, approaches to learning in supplementary schools, and parents’ and children’s views of mosque facilities. The chapter concludes with a section on formal teaching and learning in family homes.

Conventional treatments of religion stress official ritual, doctrine, and law. What they overlook is living practice, which often has little to do with religion as revealed in the philological study of texts. Historians have long known about the deficiencies of this overly bookish interpretation of religion and sought out what they have called ‘popular religion’. Yet this concept is, for various reasons, flawed or incomplete. This book argues that the proper category for a true social history of religion is “agrarian religion,” which transcended all the official religious traditions—Islam, Christianity, and Judaism—of the premodern Middle East.

Having zoomed-in on a number of examples of the interaction between Esther and Islamic cultures throughout the book, in this chapter we defocus our gaze, zoom out and consider the wider ramifications of the study, as a whole, to “Islamic studies”, “biblical studies”, and “Jewish studies”, respectively. In doing this, the main points made in the book are summarized and reviewed according to contributions made to each of these scholarly fields. Moreover, it is argued that there is merit in adopting a comparative approach to certain topics in the fields of Near and Middle Eastern studies, despite the recent trend towards specializing within these fields. In particular, it is suggested that future study of the “Persian” books of the Bible might benefit from recourse to Islamic-era Persian materials.

This Response provides a response to Chapter 1 which is about Judaism and natural law. The response addresses the common presumption of natural law as associated with the Latin West, and explores the relevance, let alone possibility, of positing a natural law theory within a tradition from traditions that have a different genealogy. In particular, it takes issue with those who would reject a Jewish or Islamic natural law as anachronistic to the respective traditions. Moreover, it reflects on the common presumption of natural law as espousing universal values, while also addressing whether, how and to what extent a community of tradition, with its own conceptual vocabulary, can contribute to a natural law discourse.

This chapter looks at the history of Islam in America. The history of the Muslim faith in America exemplifies many of the principles associated with immigration, the globalization of American religious communities, and ethnic insularity and self-definitions. The first significant entry of Muslims onto the American continent took place with the African slave trade from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. The earliest Muslim immigrants arrived between 1875 and 1912 from the rural areas of Greater Syria in the Ottoman Empire, what today is Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel. This chapter also examines the African Americans' embrace of Islam in their effort to find an identity and a place in American society, with particular emphasis on the rise of the Nation of Islam. It also considers white converts to Islam, Muslim ideologies and institutions in America, and issues and concerns for the American Muslim community. Finally, it assesses the current state of Islamic studies in the United States.

The final chapter of the book is divided into two sections: conclusions, and “Islamic Apologetics” everywhere. It informs readers about the future of Islamic studies in the West and the way it gets gradually changed to Islamic Apologetics. In so doing, some of the true stories that have happened in both Muslim and Western academic contexts are discussed. The final remarks aim to show that, in fact, the stronger the connection with politics and traditionalism, the more diminished is the academic approach toward religion and the greater the conservative presentation of religious studies, in both Western and Muslim academic contexts.