Hughes/Tyranny, 4. Business as Usual

Chapters 4 and 5 provide two competing models for Islamic studies. Chapter 4 takes as its point of departure a short essay in which Omid Safi, a scholar of religion and a leading player in the progressive Islam movement, offers his opinion on the current state of Islamic religious studies. Therein he is critical of non-Muslims in the field, and instead invokes a number of scholars—Sherman Jackson, Amina Wadud, Jonathan Brown, Kecia Ali, Ingrid Mattson, and others—whom he believes should function as models “to be emulated by the current and future generation of Islamic studies.” In this chapter I examine the writings of these scholars with an eye toward asking whether or not they should indeed function as “models.”