Editorial

Abstract

This issue of AJISS provides a multidimensional perspective of today’s Islamic intellectual experience. What seems to contribute markedly to the shaping of this experience is the ongoing creative process of integrating the contemporary with the historical and the particular with the universal. The Muslims’ commitment to humanity’s persistent struggle for meaning and harmony is, in essence, deeply linked to their belonging to the social and discursive manifestations of the Islamic historical epoch. Similarly evident is that neither studying Islam nor seeking the construction of an Islamic view of our times can be conducted coherently without invoking human history and intellectual achievements located outside of the traditionally defined boundaries of the Islamic intellectual venture. Examples abound. Western epistemological tools and concepts are now used widely, with little hesitation, by an increasing number of Muslim social scientists. On another level, the emergence of world global systems has left its imprint on the Muslims’ perceptions of universal justice. The influences of non-Muslim suffering and struggle are becoming part of the Muslim consciousness. In a startling reflection of this development, the tragic history of Native Americans has recently been sought as an allegorical well-spring by Arab anti-imperialist poets. For Islam and the world, despite many pitfalls and dangers, this process of integration is ultimately bound to transfer the Muslims’ worldview to an era that is fundamentally disctinctive from the preceding “centuries of the Islamic experience.” Charles Hirschkind’s “Heresy or Hermeneutics: The Case of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd” provides a lucid example of how modem Islamic intellectualism and its image, the discipline of Islamic studies, are predicated on a wide variety of sources, whether historical or contingent, traditional or otherwise. The case of Abu Zayd and his prolonged conflict with Islamic circles in Egypt has been of particular interest to the western and Arab secular media alike. Emerging from the halls of the University of Cairo, the contentious debate surrounding his ideas has marched all the way to the Egyptian judiciary. But Hirschkind is not a judge, and AJISS is not a courtroom. The focus here is on “the contrastive notions of reason and history,” ...