Ahmed, A. S. & Sonn, T. (2010). The SAGE Handbook of Islamic Studies. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. doi: 10.4135/9781446200896
This timely and stimulating Handbook, edited by world-class experts in the field, provides a comprehensive guide to Islamic Studies today. It examines the main issues in the field and explores the key debates. It provides readers with an indispensable, balanced guide to the roots of Islam and the challenges it faces in the twenty-first century.
Part 1: Islam and Multiculturalism
Part 2: Foundations of Islam
Part 3: Culture of Islam
Part 4: Contemporary Issues in Islam
Part 5: Diversity within Islam
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The Contributors:
Asma Afsaruddin is Professor of Islamic Studies at the Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, and previously taught at the Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and Notre Dame universities. Her fields of specialization are the religious and political thought of Islam, Qur’an and hadith studies, Islamic intellectual history, and gender. Professor Afsaruddin is the author of The First Muslims History and Memory (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2008); Excellence and Precedence: Medieval Islamic Discourse on Legitimate Leadership (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002); the editor of Hermeneutics and Honor: Negotiation of Female ‘Public’ Space in Islamic/ate Societies(Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1999); and co-editor of Humanism, Culture, and Language in the Near East: Studies in Honor of Georg Krotkoff (Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 1997). Her articles and reviews have been published in numerous scholarly journals, and she has lectured widely around the world on various aspects of Islamic thought. Afsaruddin’s research has been funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation (2003–2004), among others, and she was named a Carnegie Scholar for 2005 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. She is currently the co-editor of the Islam section of Religion Compass, along with Yousef Meri.
Amineh Ahmed Hoti is the co-founder and was the first Director of the Centre for the Study of Muslim–Jewish Relations (CMJR) at Cambridge, UK. She outlined the Cambridge University Institute of Continuing Education course ‘Islam, Judaism and Muslim–Jewish Relations’, which she also taught for three years. She has organized several major conferences with the Archbishop of Canterbury Sir Rowan Williams, the Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks and Prince Hassan of Jordan as main speakers, and given media interviews on both international television and major national papers and journals. She is the consultant editor of ‘Valuing Diversity: Towards Mutual Respect and Understanding’, sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Jewish–Christian Relations (CJCR), the CMJR, and the Society for Dialogue and Action (D&A). ‘Valuing Diversity’ is an important learning resource for secondary school teachers, and has been distributed to about 500 UK schools. Her book Sorrow and Joy Among Muslim Women, published by Cambridge University Press (2006), was nominated for the 2007 Kiriyama Prize. She is a fellow-commoner at Lucy Cavendish College, executive director of the Society for Dialogue and Action, is an advisor to the Three Faiths Forum, and a patron of the UK Friends of the Bereaved Families Forum.
Charles E. Butterworth is emeritus professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park. He specializes in medieval Arabic and Islamic political philosophy. Pursuit of this academic interest has permitted him to live and study in most of the Arabic-speaking countries of the Middle East and North Africa, as well as in Europe. Professor Butterworth’s publications include critical editions of most of Averroes’s Middle Commentaries on Aristotle’s logic; translations of books and treatises by Averroes, Alfarabi, and Alrazi, as well as Maimonides; and studies of different aspects of the political teaching of these and other thinkers in the ancient, medieval, and modern philosophic traditions. His goal in these endeavors is to help recover the deep learning within the medieval Arabic and Islamic tradition, present it in its original terms as well as in modern Western ones, and analyze and interpret it as a means of assisting others to discern its great value.
Seyed Mostafa Mohaghegh Damad is a member of the High Council of the Research Institute of Humanities, as well as a member of the Board of Trustees of Iranian Universities. He has also served as chairman of the Commission of Compiling Judicial Acts, and as a judge in the Ministry of Justice. His English publications include Protection of Individuals in Times of Armed Conflict Under International and Islamic Laws and Religion, Philosophy and Law: A Collection of Articles and Papers. Dr. Damad received his BA and MA from the University of Tehran, and his PhD in Law from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. He taught jurisprudence of law at the Shahid Beheshti University in Iran, and has guest-lectured at several other universities within Iran. He has lectured and published widely on Islamic jurisprudence, theology, and philosophy.
Walter Denny is professor of Art History at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he has taught courses on Islamic art and architecture, museum studies, orientalism, and art–historical methodology since 1970. The major focus of his research in the past four decades has been the arts of the Ottoman Empire, especially architecture, ceramics, silk textiles, carpets, and the arts of the book. He has curated numerous exhibitions at various museums, and lectures widely in the United States and abroad. Since 2007, he has served as a Senior Consultant in the Islamic Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
S.M. Ghazanfar received his BA, MS, and PhD from Washington State University. He was a faculty member (emeritus, 2002) of the University of Idaho from 1968 to 2002, serving in various capacities, including Department Chair (1993–2002), Founding Director, International Studies Program (1987–1993), part-time faculty (2003–2008), and Consultant to the Idaho Legislature (1974–1998). He has received numerous academic and civic awards, including the 2007 Distinguished Alumnus Award, Washington State University. He has published in the areas of public finance and economic development, but his recent publications have focused on the links between early Islam and the West, with special focus on the evolution and transmission of socioeconomic thought. He has written four books, the two most recent being Medieval Islamic Economic Thought: Filling the ‘Gap’ in European Economics (Routledge-Curzon, 2003), and Islamic Civilization: History, Contributions, and Influence–A Compendium of Literature (Scarecrow Press, Rowman-Littlefield Publishers, 2006). He also contributed to the 2001 PBS-TV documentary Islam: Empire of Faith.
Camilo Gomez-Rivas is Lausanne Graduate Fellow, Religious Studies, in the College of Liberal Arts, Willamette University. He received his PhD in medieval studies from Yale University, United States, and has studied contemporary Lebanese and Palestinian literature at the American University of Beirut. Camilo has also worked as a translator and journalist in Syria and Lebanon. He translates medieval and contemporary Arabic poetry into English. He is a regular contributor to Banipal.
Haldun Gülalp, a sociologist by training, is currently professor of political science and director of the Center for Global Studies at Yildiz Technical University in Istanbul, Turkey. He has been a visiting professor at George Washington University, Northwestern University, UCLA, and others, and was awarded research fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and St. Antony’s College, Oxford University. Widely published in the fields of political sociology, sociology of religion, and secularism, he has recently edited Citizenship and Ethnic Conflict: Challenging the Nation-State (Routledge, 2006).
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, currently University Professor of Islamic Studies at the George Washington University, Washington, DC, is one of the most important and foremost scholars of Islamic, religious and comparative studies in the world today. Author of over 50 books and 500 articles which have been translated into several major Islamic, European and Asian languages, Professor Nasr is a well-known and highly respected intellectual figure, both in the West and in the Islamic world. His key books include Man and Nature: the Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man (Kazi Publications, 1998), Religion and the Order of Nature (Oxford, 1996), and Knowledge and the Sacred (SUNY, 1989). His writings have also been brought together in a number of edited works such as The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr (2001) and Essential Seyyed Hossein Nasr (2007).
Dietrich Reetz is senior research fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, with a focus on the non-Arabic Muslim world, and South Asia, in particular. He has extensively worked on global Muslim networks emanating from South Asia, such as the Tablighis, the Deobandis and others. Recently, he directed a collaborative research project on Muslims in Europe in cooperation with the University of Frankfurt/Oder, University of Hamburg, and University of Halle. He is also a senior lecturer of political science at the Free University Berlin (Privatdozent) since 1991, and a Principal Supervisor for Political Science/South Asia at the Graduate School of Muslim Cultures and Societies at Free University Berlin from 2008. Dietrich Reetz has written many articles, contributed to several edited collections, and, in 2006, authored Islam in the Public Sphere: Religious Groups in India, 1900–1947.
Lawrence Rosen, Princeton University, is both an anthropologist and a lawyer. His main interests are in the relation between cultural concepts and their implementation in social and legal relationships. His main fieldwork has been in North Africa; he has also worked as an attorney on a number of American Indian legal cases. His publications include Law as Culture: An Invitation, Varieties of Muslim Experience, Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society (co-author), Bargaining for Reality: The Construction of Social Relations in a Muslim Community, The Anthropology of Justice: Law as Culture in Muslim Society, and Other Intentions: Cultural Contexts and the Attribution of Inner States (editor). He teaches courses on law and anthropology, comparative religious systems, the American Indian and the law, and the theory of cultural systems. He received the Princeton Presidential Distinguished Teaching Award from Princeton University in 1997, and was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar for 1997–98.
Robert Sampson, a former teacher at Edwardes College, is a doctoral student at the University of Birmingham who has worked as a secondary school teacher in Peshawar, Pakistan, since 1989. A linguist and translator of Pukhto poetry, his publications include A Dictionary of Spoken Pukhto and The Poetry of Rahman Baba. He is currently completing a language-learning book on the Pukhto language. His research interests include popular Islamic preaching, poetry, and Sufism, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and worldwide.
Qaiser Shahzad, based in Rawalpindi, is a research associate at the Islamic Research institute, and teaches philosophy at the faculty of Usuluddin, International Islamic University, in Islamabad. He has published monographs such as Ibn ‘Arabi’s Contribution to the Ethics of Divine Names, Human Body in the Sufi Metaphysics of Ibn ‘Arabi, and Biomedical Ethics: Philosophical and Islamic Perspectives (all published by the Islamic Research Institute).
Laura Thomas is an independent scholar at San Diego, California.
Bryan S. Turner was professor of sociology at the University of Cambridge (1998–2005) and later professor of sociology in the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore (2005–9). He is concurrently the Alona Evans Distinguished Visiting Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College, United States, and Director of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies at the University of Western Sydney Australia. He edited the Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology (2006), with Craig Calhoun and Chris Rojek, The Sage Handbook of Sociology (2005), and the New Blackwell Companion to SocialTheory (2009). With Kamaludeen bin Mohamad Nasir and Alexius Pereira, he published Muslims in Singapore (2009). With John O’Neill, he is the founding editor of the Sage Journal of Classical Sociology. He is a research associate of GEMAS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris). His work Vulnerability and Human Rights was published in 2006 by Penn State University Press.
John Obert Voll is professor of Islamic history and associate director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim–Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. He taught Middle Eastern, Islamic, and world history at the University of New Hampshire for 30 years before moving to Georgetown in 1995. The second edition of his book Islam: Continuity and Change in the Modern World appeared in 1994. He is co-author, with John L. Esposito, of Islam and Democracy and Makers of Contemporary Islam, and is editor, author, or co-author of six additional books. He is a past president of the Middle East Studies Association and also of the New England Historical Association. He has served on the Board of Directors of the American Council of Learned Societies, the New Hampshire Humanities Council, the New Hampshire Council on World Affairs and the Sudan Studies Association. He was the chair of the program committee for the 1999 annual meeting of the American Historical Association. In 1991, he received a Presidential Medal in recognition for scholarship on Islam from President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. He has published numerous articles and book chapters on modern Islamic and Sudanese history.
Earle H. Waugh is professor emeritus in the Department of Religious Studies and currently director of the Centre for the Cross-Cultural Study of Health and Healing in Family Medicine at the University of Alberta. Trained as a historian of religion, Waugh brings a comparative perspective to his studies. One of the world’s leading scholars of Muslim religious chanting, particularly within Sufi mystical traditions, Waugh is the author or editor of more than ten books, including The Munshidin of Egypt: Their World and Their Song, published by the University of South Carolina Press in 1989. His most recent book is Visionaires of Silence: al-Demirdashiya of Cairo, American University in Cairo Press, 2008. Waugh continues to lecture widely since his retirement from teaching in 2002, and is often sought out by commentators and journalists for his views on Islam. He lives in Edmonton.
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