What is Islam? Conventional Views and Contemporary Perspectives

Abstract

What is Islam?Conventional Views and Contemporary Perspectives Ahmet Selim Tekelioglu (bio) On 11 April 2018, the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University held a conference titled, "What is Islam? Conventional Views and Contemporary Perspectives." The one-day conference was held at George Mason University's main campus in Fairfax, Virginia and brought together ten scholars. The conference was organized across two panel sessions: the Morning Panel Session, and the Afternoon Panel Session, with each panel hosting five presenters. The conference sought to highlight implications of the question, "What is Islam," in conjunction with the late scholar Shahab Ahmed's book bearing the same title. Each speaker was allocated thirty minutes to present his/her paper which was followed immediately by a Q&A session. Huseyin Yilmaz, associate professor of history and director of the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University, opened the conference with reference to his friend, late Shahab Ahmed's 2017 book, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. He emphasized that the conference sought to explore not the work itself but the questions that it generated. He said the conference steering committee sought to intentionally bring together a team of scholars who specialize in medieval and modern times at once. Yilmaz emphasized that the goal behind the conference was to have these scholars, many of them focusing on contexts outside Shahab Ahmed' Balkans-to-Bengal conceptualization such as Africa, Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia, reflect on multiple regional and topical contexts. The [End Page 120] organizers, Yilmaz emphasized, sought essentially to generate a broad discussion on popular, academic and modern manifestations of conventional Islam in conversation with Shahab Ahmed. Yilmaz also highlighted that the Center was organizing another conference the next day focusing on Islam in the Americas, with the title, "Racism, Racialization and African American Islam in the Americas" to explore similar questions in another context. The Morning Panel Session of the conference was chaired by Maria Dakake, professor of religion at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA. Dakake explained the format and then invited the first speaker of the panel, Asma Afsaruddin, professor of Near Eastern languages and cultures in the School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. Afsaruddin delivered a paper titled, "Reconceptualizing the Military Jihad on the Basis of Non-Legal Literature." In her talk, Afsaruddin argued that it was not enough to focus merely on "official Islam" that emerges primarily from legal texts while engaging Islamic intellectual tradition. She encouraged scholars to broaden their focus in order to do justice to the full range of contestations and multiplicity of interpretations that characterize this tradition. To highlight this point she provided a discussion of the military jihad in Islam in the context of Qur'an 2:190. Afsaruddin argued that this verse unambiguously and categorically affirms the principle of non-aggression in military matters. Drawing upon an array of Qur'an commentary works, she discussed how early and late Qur'an commentators interpreted this verse and emphasized that Shahab Ahmed significantly cautioned that "(T)he primacy that is given to the constitutive determinacy of legal discourse over other discourses serves to distort our perspective . . ." The second speaker on the panel was Robert W. Hefner, professor of anthropology and global affairs at the Pardee School for Global Affairs at Boston University, MA, with a paper titled, "The Plurality of Being Islamic: Indonesian Perspectives on the Balkans-to-Bengal Legacy." In his talk, Hefner examined the implication of Ahmed's arguments for the historical and hermeneutic realities of Islam in Indonesia. Delivering high praises for Shahab Ahmed's work, he mentioned that it was viewed less in terms of specific practices or textual legacies, than in terms of broader hermeneutics. Ahmed's appeal for an expansive understanding of the "Islamic" resonates in a most remarkable way with Indonesian realities. Hefner emphasized however that "there were and still today remain significant differences between Islamic hermeneutics and practices in the archipelago and Islam in the Balkans-to-Bengal region." Hefner argued that developments such as the nation-state did not produce monolithic results, and that he disagreed with Ahmed's Talalian...