Contemporary Approaches to the Qur’an and Sunnah By Mahmoud Ayoub (ed.) Herndon, VA: IIIT, 2012. 230 pages.

Abstract

This edited volume forms the first collection of proceedings from the Summer

Institute for Scholars organized by the International Institute of Islamic

Thought (IIIT), one of the publishers of this journal. This annual gathering,

which was inaugurated in 2008, is “dedicated to the study of contemporary

approaches to Qur’an and Sunnah,” hence the name of this volume. Given

the capacious title, the work naturally offers essays – ten to be precise – from

a wide range of disciplines, including Qur’anic and hadith studies as well Islamic

law, theology, history, and comparative religion. Being the first iteration

of this series, it is perhaps somewhat unsurprising that the work’s overall qual-

ity is somewhat under par, with individual essays varying considerably in

quality. It is therefore reassuring to see on IIIT’s website that subsequent Summer

Institutes have been given a more focused theme.

The work is divided into four parts: the first two focus in different ways

on the Qur’an; the third part pertains more to the Sunnah and law (though, in

my assessment, the ninth essay has more Qur’an in it than Sunnah); and part 4

consists of a single twelve-page essay on the history of Islamic studies in the

West. Given constraints on space, I will not discuss every essay in this review ...