New Books In Islamic Studies

In his much anticipated and equally brilliant book Transformations of Tradition: Islamic Law in Colonial Modernity (Oxford UP, 2021), Junaid Quadri explores the productive tensions, fissures, and creative interpretive projects enabled by the drive to defend Muslim traditionalism under the looming shadows of colonial modernity. By focusing on the thought and career of the towering 20th century Egyptian scholar Bakhit al-Mutiʿi, Quadri interrogates ways in which new technologies like the telescope and telegraph interacted with traditional norms like moonsighting (for announcing beginning of Ramadan and ‘Id) to generate vexing yet fascinating conundrums of normative knowledge and practice for traditionalist scholars like Bakhit. Much of this book interrogates the hermeneutical strategies, tussles of religious authority, and new conceptions of religion that went into attempted resolutions of such novel conundrums. While maintaining normative fidelity to the tradition, Bakhit also transformed the tradition in inde