Nonspecialists (“laypeople”—as if academics were some kind of sanctified clergy?) often misunderstand Religious Studies as the simple cataloguing of religious ideas and behaviors, or worse, as the attempt to compare and evaluate which tradition is better, more compatible with modern values, or truer. This, of course, is not what Religious Studies is about at all, or at least, this is what scholars should strive to make sure it does not become.
I would characterize critical Islamic Studies as the attempt to bring new data about Islamic communities to light, or reevaluate well-known phenomena, with a particular eye to asking second-order (that is “meta-”) questions through studying that data or phenomena—not just describing what a thing is and trying to understand its significance in context, but also attempting to figure out what we learn about method and the questions we ask, or how we should be asking, by doing so.
Critical Islamic Studies as a practice reflects the need to carefully clarify terms; to examine the underlying political, social, and economic commitments embedded in the questions we ask as scholars; to weigh the accuracy of the categories used to characterize Muslim societies and their cultural productions; and reevaluate the labels applied to communities, groups, behavior, and traditions. In a number of publications I have tried to raise methodological issues of import for Islamic Studies, in articles ranging from a comparison of the ideology of ISIS with that of the American right wing coalition that elevated Donald Trump to power in 2016 to an extended consideration of the possibility of recovering early traditions of qur’anic exegesis through comparison of extant early texts on the basis of both attribution and content.
ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS
Review Essay: “I Hear Islam Singing: Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic”
Harvard Theological Review 110.1 (2017): 149–165
DOI: 10.1017/S0017816016000420
“ISIS, Eschatology, and Exegesis: The Propaganda of Dabiq and the Sectarian Rhetoric of Militant Shi’ism”
Mizan: Journal for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations 1.1 (Fall 2016)
DOI: 10.17613/y5mz-9v54
“Editor’s Introduction: Context and Comparison in the Age of ISIS”
Mizan: Journal for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations 1.1 (Fall 2016)
DOI: 10.17613/qdyh-pc18
“Methodologies for the Dating of Exegetical Works and Traditions: Can the Lost Tafsīr of Kalbī be Recovered from Tafsīr Ibn cAbbās (also known as al-Wāḍiḥ)?”
Aims, Methods and Contexts of Qur’anic Exegesis (2nd/8th–9th/15th c.)
Karen Bauer, ed.
Oxford: Oxford University Press in Association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2013, 393–453