On the sad news of the passing of Saba Mahmood, the editorial board of the journal Sociology of Islam has decided to organize a special issue to honor the work and legacy of our distinguished colleague for the study of global politics and religion. Saba Mahmood’s anthropological work shifted debates on secularism and religion, gender and politics, the rights of religious minorities, and the impact of colonialism in the Middle East. Her conceptual engagement with these pertinent social and political issues, however, has opened up broader questions about the politics of religious difference in a secular age beyond the Middle East and Muslim majority countries. This special issue of Sociology of Islam intends to bring to the fore the scope of these contributions in order to assess the cross-disciplinary and trans-regional magnitude of her work.
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Sharia Compliant—An introduction
by
Rumee Ahmed
Observing and participating in Muslim conversations on Islamic law through a decolonial lens led me to see that debate as misplaced and reflective of a colonial obsession with ontology as the site of truth, whether in symbol or in social practice. That is, the debate assumes Islamic law “is” something that can be located either within cultural symbols or in a mode of cultural practice. But I did not find that same obsession with ontology in the conversations I was following. The driving concern in those discussions—rarely, if ever, expressed—is: how does one do Islamic law? And the answers to that question have very little to do with either textual records or observed practice. Rather, the virtue of Islamic law for a segment of believers I call fiqh-minded is found in making rhetorical arguments within an ancestral tradition that is both internally consistent and contextually relevant, whether or not that argument is found in either ancient texts or lived practice. In this framework, Islamic law functions through a salvific language that expresses the speaker’s ideas about ideal human activity, and speaking that language is itself the value. For fiqh-minded Muslims, the value of Islamic law and legal arguments is neither in the ontological referent of a legal proposition nor in the phenomenological, but in the rhetorical formation of an argument rooted in a historical tradition that provides meaning for contemporary believers.
Call for Applications | IRCPL Postdoctoral Research Scholar
by
The Editors
The Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University invites applications for postdoctoral research scholars for a period of three academic years beginning on September 1, 2018. The Institute plans to make two appointments (pending funding), with one position focused on Africa and the other on South Asia. The yearly renewal of the position(s) is contingent upon funding and performance. The postdoctoral research scholar(s) will actively participate in the intellectual development and program activities related to the project "Rethinking Public Religion in Africa and South Asia." The project envisions a partnership between IRCPL, the Institute for African Studies, and the South Asia Institute for research, programming, and coursework on the changing dynamics of interactions among religious communities in the modern world, considering the ways in which religion becomes public through diverse forms of encounter, with a focus on inter-regional differences and flows across South Asia and Africa.