Sherman Jackson

Ijtihād and taqlīd

2019-05-10 · 26 citations

This chapter aims to compare several competing perspectives on the Islamic legal institutions of ijtihad and taqlid. It argues that two of these extremely influential approaches carry into their analyses Western modernity’s positive valuation of reason, as an autonomous, self-authenticating episteme, coupled with a negative valuation of mimesis, as a heteronomous, historically bound means of authenticating claims to knowledge. The special issue of Islamic Law and Society was guest-edited by Prof…

The Islamic Secular

2024-03-21 · 24 citations

Abstract This book argues that the common notion of a fundamental conflict between the secular and the religious cannot be applied to Islam. This is not because Islam rejects the secular in favor of the religious; it is because Islam’s concept of the religious includes the secular. This is what is captured by the term “Islamic Secular.” Contrary both to the notion that “religion” in Islam equals “sharī‘ah,” and to the concomitant notion that sharī‘ah is the all-encompassing, exclusive metric of…

The Alchemy of Domination, 2.0?1 A Response to Professor Kecia Ali

American Journal of Islam and Society · 2018-10-29 · 20 citations

In her critical essay, “The Omnipresent Male Scholar,”2 Professor Kecia Alisets out to call attention to what she sees as the hegemonic privileging ofthe male scholarly perspective and the need to replace this with an academiclandscape more reflective and accommodating of the experiences andscholarly vantage points of women. To this end, she profiles the works ofseveral (Muslim) men in Islamic Studies (myself included) and highlightsthe various ways in which they omit, overlook, undervalue, or d…

The Islamic Secular

American Journal of Islam and Society · 2017-04-01 · 11 citations

It is common to assume an inherent conflict between the substance of the category “religion” and the category “secular.” Given its putative rejection of the separation between the sacred and the profane, this conflict is presumed to be all the more solid in Islam. But even assuming Islam’s rejection of the sacred/profane dichotomy, there may be other ways of defining the secular in Islam and of thinking about its relationship with the religion. This is what the present essay sets out to do. By t…

The Islamic Secular

American Journal of Islam and Society · 2018-04-01 · 8 citations

It is common to assume an inherent conflict between the substance of the category “religion” and the category “secular.” Given its putative rejection of the separation between the sacred and the profane, this conflict is presumed to be all the more solid in Islam. But even assuming Islam’s rejection of the sacred/profane dichotomy, there may be other ways of defining the secular in Islam and of thinking about its relationship with the religion. This is what the present essay sets out to do. By t…