Islamic Studies within Islam: definition, approaches and challenges of modernity

Abstract

Programmes of Islamic Studies have a longstanding status in a number of Western universities, yet the boundaries of the discipline, its institutional locale and its methodologies are still being questioned. This paper is an attempt to go beyond the discipline’s ‘Eurocentric’ settings and reflect on the provision of the subject within its origins in Islam itself during its long history. It defines the nature of the subject and its status in the Islamic framework of classification of knowledge. A brief discussion is given of the different approaches applied in the three main activities of the scholarly study of Islam: the collection of data from oral narrative to written texts, the analysis of their meanings and the evaluation of their validity. The paper concludes with examining the effects of modernity on the discipline and the efforts to reconstruct it.