Muslim Identities: An Introduction to Islam

RELIGIONS, INCLUDING Islam, mean a great deal to individuals across the globe: they are perceived to give solace to the weak and the oppressed, comfort to the sick and the dying, and memories to the dead. Any book that seeks to introduce readers to a religion must accordingly respect this feature of the religion. In addition, the line between “insider” and “outsider” to the religion, which I discuss more fully in the introduction, is often a very fine one that must be crossed with care.

It is precisely because of these issues that many are either unused to or uncomfortable with speaking about religions using terms and categories normally relegated to explicating more mundane phenomena. Although the latter approach is increasingly becoming normative in introducing aspects of religions such as Judaism and Christianity (e.g., Second Temple Judaism, the historical Jesus), it is only just beginning to enter the “introduction to Islam” classroom. This book attempts to be a part of this process, but in a way that remains sensitive to possible tensions that emerge from such a discourse. Chapters weave both outsider and insider accounts of Islam together so as to appreciate Islam more fully as a historical force.

This book’s goal is accordingly to reach some sort of middle ground between what Muslims believe and what certain trends in the academic study of religion tell us to attune ourselves to. The equilibrium required is a very delicate one.

Yet an introductory work that is perceived to be solely about including the traditionally occluded, although interesting, would not necessarily inform us about Islam’s staying power. As a result, I have included chapters that deal with beliefs and practices. However, I attempt to show how these beliefs and practices are both historically conditioned and emerge—like all belief and practices—from various contestations and struggles that can be documented historically.

I try not to bombard readers with notes. When I do use them, it is to show some of the debates in the secondary literature or to show the source of a particular interpretation. At the end of each chapter, I include a section entitled “Suggestions for Further Reading.” The books listed are the sources from which I derived most of my data and are the place to which the interested reader should go to inquire further into a particular topic. Unless otherwise noted, quotations from the Quran come from Alan Jones, trans., The Quran (Exeter, Eng.: Gibb Memorial Trust, 2007).

For better or worse, many scholarly books on religion tend to use diacritical marks to indicate how a word is pronounced in a particular language, especially if that language uses a different alphabet. This is how Islamicists or religionists tend to signal their scholarly bona fides to one another and to nonexperts. I debated whether to use such diacritics in this book and ultimately decided not to, for two reasons. First, I do not want to bombard the beginning reader with pages of unfamiliar diacritical marks on words that may already appear quite unfamiliar. Second, at this stage in technology, diacritics pose all sorts of problems for e-book formatting. For the sake of convenience and for the reader interested in diacritics, however, I have included them in the presentation of terms that appear in the glossary. Words that appear in bold in the text can be easily referenced in this glossary. I occasionally use the ayn (ʿ) and hamza (ʾ) in words. I do this not out of philological precision, but because this is the way that such names and words (e.g., Shiʿi, taʾwil) usually appear.

Dating can also pose a host of problems because Muslims use a different system that marks the passing of time, one that revolves around the importance of the hijra, or “exodus,” of Muhammad and his earliest followers to Medina (for details, see chapter 2). For the sake of convenience, I have used the Gregorian calendar but reduced it to the Common Era (B.C.E./ C.E.), which is familiar to Western audiences.