New Voices of Islam: American Muslim Intellectuals

• In Event: 3483 - Open Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 10. Religion and Religiosity: Culture, Context, and Impact on Life-choices

Abstract

My project examines the rise of new reform-minded American Muslim intellectuals (hereafter AMIs) and their reformist thinking in the last two decades. AMIs have brought increasing scrutiny and critique to traditional worldviews and discourses of Muslim. They have also provided alternative and multiple critical perspectives related to socio-religious thoughts of Muslims on key issues such as new epistemology, democracy, religious pluralism and gender equality. AMIs have embarked on important scholarly projects, which develop Islamic legal, political, and social thought in such a way that it combines what they view as a faithful representation of Islam with what they view as beneficial aspects of modern philosophy, epistemologies, liberal democracy, and universal human rights. In a sense, they are reconstructing Muslim worldviews, which take into account the complexity of today’s world. Thus, their intellectual projects simultaneously challenge (a) patriarchal, exclusivist, pre-modern socio-legalistic thoughts and epistemologies promoted by Muslims traditionalists, fundamentalists and Islamists; and (b) Western-centric, secularized, reductionist thoughts extensively found in parts of the Western academy. In this sense, the distinct discourses of AMIs are attempting to deconstruct hegemonic assumptions of modernity and dogmatic discourses of Muslims to reconstruct alternative socio-religious modernization for contemporary societies.
AMIs, hence, aim to reconstruct their new discourses based on global moral principles, contemporary epistemologies, and critical analysis of the Islamic tradition and modernity. They, therefore, are not merely picking and synthesizing random premises of modernity and Islamic worldviews. Rather, they appreciate the achievements of Western values and systems and examine their culture in light of these modern developments. They also take a critical approach to Western-centric modernity and its outcomes. In this regard, they have a dialectical engagement with modernity.
This qualitative project combines a textual and contextual analysis of the scholarly works of a sample of AMIs and includes in-depth interviews with them to learn more about the context and conditions of their new knowledge production enterprise and challenges.

Author

• Serhan Tanriverdi, Loyola University-Chicago