Editorial

Abstract

This issue of AJISS provides a multidimensional perspective of today’s
Islamic intellectual experience. What seems to contribute markedly to the
shaping of this experience is the ongoing creative process of integrating the
contemporary with the historical and the particular with the universal. The
Muslims’ commitment to humanity’s persistent struggle for meaning and
harmony is, in essence, deeply linked to their belonging to the social and
discursive manifestations of the Islamic historical epoch.
Similarly evident is that neither studying Islam nor seeking the construction
of an Islamic view of our times can be conducted coherently without
invoking human history and intellectual achievements located outside
of the traditionally defined boundaries of the Islamic intellectual venture.
Examples abound. Western epistemological tools and concepts are now
used widely, with little hesitation, by an increasing number of Muslim
social scientists. On another level, the emergence of world global systems
has left its imprint on the Muslims’ perceptions of universal justice. The
influences of non-Muslim suffering and struggle are becoming part of the
Muslim consciousness. In a startling reflection of this development, the
tragic history of Native Americans has recently been sought as an allegorical
well-spring by Arab anti-imperialist poets. For Islam and the world,
despite many pitfalls and dangers, this process of integration is ultimately
bound to transfer the Muslims’ worldview to an era that is fundamentally
disctinctive from the preceding “centuries of the Islamic experience.”
Charles Hirschkind’s “Heresy or Hermeneutics: The Case of Nasr
Hamid Abu Zayd” provides a lucid example of how modem Islamic intellectualism
and its image, the discipline of Islamic studies, are predicated on
a wide variety of sources, whether historical or contingent, traditional or
otherwise. The case of Abu Zayd and his prolonged conflict with Islamic
circles in Egypt has been of particular interest to the western and Arab secular
media alike. Emerging from the halls of the University of Cairo, the
contentious debate surrounding his ideas has marched all the way to the
Egyptian judiciary. But Hirschkind is not a judge, and AJISS is not a courtroom.
The focus here is on “the contrastive notions of reason and history,” ...