The Shaping of an American Islamic Discourse: A Memorial to Fazlur Rahman.

• Author: Afsaruddin, Asma
• Position: Review

The Shaping of an American Islamic Discourse: A Memorial to Fazlur Rahman. Edited by EARLE H. WAUGH and FREDERICK M. DENNY. South Florida-Rochester-Saint Louis Studies on Religion and the Social Order. Atlanta: SCHOLARS PRESS, 1998. Pp. ix + 273. $39.95.

Professor Fazlur Rahman (d. 1988) was (and remains) one of the leading Islamicists of this century and, possibly, "[the University of] Chicago's greatest scholar of Islamic religion in the twentieth century," as maintained by Richard Martin in his essay in this memorial volume. The Shaping of an American Islamic Discourse is a collection of twelve essays in honor of Professor Rahman by his former students (Martin being the one exception). The essays do not all, however, have a direct bearing on the title of this work. The book is divided into five sections, reflecting the wide-ranging interests of the honoree, spanning the fields of philosophy, Sufism and mystical literature, Arabic poetry, Qur[contains]anic hermeneutics, and modern social issues. Part I is entitled "Islamic Priorities and the Contextuality of Discourse," and includes chapters by Earle H. Waugh and Donald L. Berry. Part H deals with "Islam and Philosophy," and contains chapters by Daniel Brown and Sheila McDonough. Part III is concerned with "Hermeneutics and Contemporary Issues," and is comprised of chapters by Valerie J. Hoffman, Tamara Sonn, and Donna Lee Brown. Part IV is called "Sufism and Poetry"; chapters in this section are by Michael A. Sells, Marcia K. Hermansen, and Th. Emil Homerin. Part V has the title "Community in Change" and includes chapters by Frederick Denny and Richard C. Martin. I will here restrict my remarks to those chapters that directly address the central theme of the book--namely, Fazlur Rahman's legacy in the field of Islamic studies, particularly concerning Muslim engagements with modernity and the role of Qur[contains]anic hermeneutics in defining these engagements.

Earle Waugh's introductory chapter, "Beyond Scylla and Kharybdis: Fazlur Rahman and Islamic Identity," assesses the lively debates among modern Muslims concerning their identities, especially in the face of Western critiques of the Islamic religious and intellectual tradition. When the world could be neatly divided into Muslim and non-Muslim camps, automatically implying an East-West division, this debate could be simplistically rendered in terms of a civilizational conflict, exacerbated in the last two centuries by Western...