Books in the Lexington Studies in Classical and Modern Islamic Thought series

This volume challenges a long history of normalizing patriarchal approaches to the Qur'an and calls for a questioning of the interpretive credibility of many inherited Qur'anic commentaries. The author presents a fresh reading of the sacred text and Islamic teaching traditions as the rediscovery of a lost humanitarian and gender-egalitarian textual richness that has been poorly and loosely handled for centuries. The book stresses the importance of reviewing the interpretive linguistic choices that jurists and exegetes over the last fourteen centuries have adopted to semantically reshape the Qur'anic text. The vigilant reading the author provides of carefully chosen texts and commentaries suggests that many interpretive approaches to the Qur'an are dominated by sociopolitical factors alien to the intrinsic values of the text itself. More importantly, inconsistencies across putatively sound books of tafsir indicate that the Qur'anic text often suffers from historical and systematic drainage of its humanitarianism, gender-egalitarianism, and religious pluralism.

Driven by a detailed hermeneutical investigation of the Quranic story of creation, this book questions the hybrid Biblical/Quranic narrative that gradually erased the lines that define the authentic Quranic account. Abla Hasan argues that humanitys divine status is the bedrock from which to investigate the meaning of human religiosity and address the problem of pain and suffering. The detailed analysis in this book answers many linguistic and logical pending questions in the Quran and is a serious departure from popular Muslim narratives that seek to alleviate our pain and suffering.

This book describes and analyzes Muhasibi's and Nursi's accounts of what it means to live an authentically Muslim ethical life. It documents and examines the discursive practice, reflectivity, dynamism and complexity involved in living properly as a Muslim individual and social being.