Shahab Ahmed’s “What is Islam” Turns Modern Islamic Scholarship on Its Head
Ahmed’s book also offers us a new way of understanding the past and forces us to rethink and imagine our present and future.
by Usman Butt
As if out of a literary tragedy, the author and academic, Shahab Ahmed, did not live to see his many years of teaching and research culminate in the publication of his much-anticipated book, What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic.
Some might unfairly characterize his book as explaining rather than explaining away Islam’s contradictions, yet, in a post-Orientalist world, where Islam and Muslims are constantly in the news, the questions of what Islam is and what it means to be a ‘good Muslim’ are as vexing today as they were fourteen centuries ago.
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