Rethinking Islamic studies : from orientalism to cosmopolitanism / edited by Carl W. Ernst and Richard C. Martin.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Toward a post-orientalist approach to Islamic religious studies / Carl W. Ernst and Richard C. Martin -- Rethinking modernity: Islamic perspectives. Reasons public and divine: liberal democracy, shariʻa fundamentalism, and the epistemological crisis of Islam / Vincent J. Cornell -- The misrecognition of a modern Islamist organization: Germany faces "fundamentalism" / Katherine Pratt Ewing -- Between "ijtihad of the presupposition" and gender equality: cross-pollination between progressive Islam and Iranian reform / Omid Safi -- Fundamentalism and the transparency of the Arabic Qur'an / A. Kevin Reinhart -- Can we define "true" Islam? African American Muslim women respond to transnational Muslim identities / Jamillah Karim -- Rethinking religion: social scientific and humanistic perspectives. Who are the Islamists? / Charles Kurzman and Ijlal Naqvi -- Sufism, exemplary lives, and social science in Pakistan / David Gilmartin -- Formations of orthodoxy: authority, power, and networks in Muslim societies / Richard C. Martin and Abbas Barzegar -- Caught between enlightenment and romanticism: on the complex relation of religious, ethnic, and civic identity in a modern "museum culture" / Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr. -- Rethinking the subject: Asian perspectives. The subject and the ostensible subject: mapping the genre of hagiography among South Asian Chishtis / Tony K. Stewart -- Dancing with khusro: gender ambiguities and poetic performance in a Delhi dargah / Scott Kugle -- The perils of civilizational Islam in Malaysia / Carl W. Ernst -- History and normativity in traditional Indian Muslim thought: reading shariʻa in the hermeneutics of Qari Muhammad Tayyab (d. 1983) / Ebrahim Moosa -- Afterword: competing genealogies of Muslim cosmopolitanism / Bruce B. Lawrence.

Rethinking Islamic Studies upends scholarly roadblocks in post-Orientalist discourse within contemporary Islamic studies and carves fresh inroads toward a robust new understanding of the discipline, one that includes religious studies and other politically infused fields of inquiry. Editors Carl W. Ernst and Richard C. Martin, along with a distinguished group of scholars, map the trajectory of the study of Islam and offer innovative approaches to the theoretical and methodological frameworks that have traditionally dominated the field. In the volume's first section, the contributors reexamine the underlying notions of modernity in the East and West and allow for the possibility of multiple and incongruent modernities. This opens a discussion of fundamentalism as a manifestation of the tensions of modernity on Muslim cultures. The second section addresses the volatile character of Islamic religious identity as expressed in religious and political movements at national and local levels. In the third section, contributors focus on Muslim communities in Asia and examine the formation of religious models and concepts as they appear in this region. This study concludes with an afterword by accomplished Islamic studies scholar Bruce B. Lawrence reflecting on the evolution of this post-Orientalist approach to Islam and placing the volume within existing and emerging scholarship.