Contemporary Approaches to the Qur’an and Sunnah

Abstract

This edited volume forms the first collection of proceedings from the Summer Institute for Scholars organized by the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), one of the publishers of this journal. This annual gathering, which was inaugurated in 2008, is “dedicated to the study of contemporary approaches to Qur’an and Sunnah,” hence the name of this volume. Given the capacious title, the work naturally offers essays – ten to be precise – from a wide range of disciplines, including Qur’anic and hadith studies as well Islamic law, theology, history, and comparative religion. Being the first iteration of this series, it is perhaps somewhat unsurprising that the work’s overall qual- ity is somewhat under par, with individual essays varying considerably in quality. It is therefore reassuring to see on IIIT’s website that subsequent Summer Institutes have been given a more focused theme. The work is divided into four parts: the first two focus in different ways on the Qur’an; the third part pertains more to the Sunnah and law (though, in my assessment, the ninth essay has more Qur’an in it than Sunnah); and part 4 consists of a single twelve-page essay on the history of Islamic studies in the West. Given constraints on space, I will not discuss every essay in this review ...