Al‐Madina Document in Contemporary Arab‐Muslim and Western Scholarship: Surveying and Assessing some Intellectual Orientations and Reading Strategies1

Abstract

AbstractThis short essay attempts at displaying briefly some examples of scholarly and intellectual interests in al‐Madina Document, which one can find in Arab and Western literature today. It endeavors to highlight the primary, focal conceptual orientations and the contextual concerns and motifs that make the Arab and the Western intellectual scenes approach this document from the distinguished perspectives they follow and to interpret its content from the specific dimensions of interest and focus they prioritize. After exposing in a survey‐like and short analytical manner these different approaches, the paper will end with some assessments of each scholarly modus operandi and then suggest some aspects of reading that should not be ignored or sidelined if one wants to relate to the Madina Document in its own terms and from‐within its own world and possible context, without ending up either eisegeting the document, or anachronizing its content or injecting its words with what they do not not essentially state.