We live in a time where ideas and principles are questioned, dissected, and contested at a dizzying rate. It can be difficult to decipher reason and proof from conjecture and avowal. Disjointed ideas and information are widely available without a necessary chain of transmission or reliable connection to sources of knowledge. In this confusing contemporary context, almost anyone can become a leader in thought, guiding naïve followers down unknown paths with unclear destinations. Yet, true thought leadership is that which is connected to the past and charts a clear, well-lit path forward toward an illumined future. Throughout time, there has been a legacy of truly brilliant thinkers whose genius is in communicating timeless wisdom in a powerful manner that speaks to the zeitgeist of their time. This ability allows them to make a significant impact on the hearts and minds of the people. The world lost one of these giants in thought leadership this past year.Professor Malik Babiker Badri was a man who not only innovated and developed novel ideas within his own area of expertise, but whose ideas had ripple effects well beyond the boundaries of his field of knowledge. Known to the academic and professional world as the “father of modern Islamic Psychology,” he also played a part in shaping massive cultural transformations that changed the world. These include the Black American experience, the epidemic of alcoholism, and the global AIDS crisis. Professor Badri brought to the world a cultural and spiritual revolution in the way many view their relationships to themselves, their societies, and their spirituality. Although several of his works have become seminal reads in the field of Islamic Psychology, and Islamic thought more generally, much of his great work remains unrecognized—perhaps because of his humility and lack of self-promotion. The time has come for the recognition of the significance of this man’s contributions which position him among the great thinkers of human history. This article charts the chronological and thematic development of Badri’s contributions over the course of his life and paints a picture of the significance of his work and its impact on the world.

In the fields of Muslim ethics and comparative religious ethics over the past two decades, embodiment and embodied practices have reigned as rich methodological loci yielding numerous illuminating studies on the nature and process of ethical formation, in large part because of the pioneering work of anthropologist of Islam, Talal Asad. But as is often the case with scholarly methodologies, the pendulum has begun to swing back, in this case towards an interest in theological and philosophical reasoning as crucial to understanding how religious and moral selves are formed—for example, in Thomas A. Lewis’s 2016 Why Philosophy Matters for the Study of Religion & Vice Versa. Presenting himself as standing firmly in the camp of this nascent trend, Faraz Masood Sheikh offers his Forging Ideal Muslim Subjects: Discursive Practices, Subject Formation, and Muslim Ethics as a study of both Muslim and comparative religious ethics that takes the power of ideas and reasoned reflection seriously in ethical formation. Sheikh seeks to demonstrate this primarily through an analysis of the thought of two important and understudied Muslim thinkers, the ninth-century moral pedagogue, al-Ḥārith ibn Asad al-Muḥāsibī (d. 243/857) and the twentieth-century Kurdish Qur’an scholar, Bediüzzaman Said Nursi (d. 1960).

Religion and spirituality have increasingly gained attention as resilience factors in mental health, and as common factors in psychotherapy.1 To this end, Muslim academics and clinicians across the globe have also begun to develop Islamically-integrated therapeutic interventions and services.2 Nevertheless, this area attracts controversies among Muslim experts from different disciplines such as psychology, psychotherapy, psychiatry, and Islamic theology. For instance, there is still no consensus concerning the definition and kinds of theoretical and practical permutations between the canon of Islamic disciplines and modern psychology. To address this fundamental question at the level of a conference for the first time in continental Europe, the Islamic Association of Social and Educational Professions (IASE) brought together a group of approximately 65 Muslim students, counselors, therapists, psychiatrists, and Islamic theologians from across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in Frankfurt am Main on April 6, 2019.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, modernist Islamic reformers have proposed more “objectives of Islamic law” or maqāṣid al-sharī‘ah and argued that the maqāṣid-oriented approach indicates that Islamic priorities include the modern principles of democracy, social justice, human rights, and government accountability. This paper considers the evolution of maqāṣid and its relationship with the traditional framework of uṣūl al-fiqh. Subsequently, it addresses how the new maqāṣid discourse has been politicized. It analyzes the use of maqāṣid by Shaykh ‘Abdullah Bin Bayyah in his recent declarations concerning the UAE’s policies against regional democracy. This paper argues that Bin Bayyah’s interpretation of maṣlaḥah (legal benefit) and his adoption of the idea of absolute obedience to the ruler (walī al-amr) are not based on the traditional interpretation of the sacred texts that have been adopted by Salafists and Traditionalists. Rather, it is deeply rooted in the maqāṣid discourse and rational reasoning related to Islamic modernism. The article includes a comprehensive examination of Bin Bayyah’s justifications, as based on two basic points: first, the priority of peace as a higher objective (maqṣid) of sharī‘ah than rights and justice; second, the verification of the ratio legis (taḥqīq al-manāṭ). This paper argues that this ideological interpretation could shift the purpose-0riented basis of maqāṣid al-sharī‘ah to result-oriented objectives, which focus on specific ideologies tosatisfy contradicting political ends.

This book examines Sufism in Ottoman Egypt in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Contrary to the traditional historiography that interpreted these two centuries as a period of stagnation and/or decline for Sufism and Sufi scholars, Rachida Chih argues that these centuries were fruitful, productive, and dynamic for Sufism in Ottoman Egypt. Chih builds her narrative around the mobilization and interaction of ideas, people, and institutions, focusing her thesis on the Khalwatiyya Sufi order.

Architecture of the Islamic West North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, 700-1800 (by Jonathan M. Bloom) Architecture in Global Socialism Eastern Europe, West Africa, and The Middle East in the Cold War (by Łukasz Stanek) Architecture of Coexistence Building Pluralism (by Azra Akšamija, ed.)

This article, which I intend to be one of a series, will provide analysisofmajor issues and problems arising out of attempts to implement Islamiceducational alternatives to American public schooling. The discussionbegins by offering a brief overview of the current dilemma-atriumvirate of historical, theoretical and practical enigmasconfrontingMuslim schoolmen. A primary question that is common toMuslim-American school planners is scrutinized through a sub-setanalysis focussing on some relevant and critical concerns to Muslimeducators. From this starting point, future installments in this serieswill look at practical cases that are representative of contemporaryefforts in alternative Muslim school planning, design and implementation.Where We areConservative estimates of the number of Muslims in North Americause one million as an approximate figure, two-thirds of whom reside in ornear the major urban areas of the United States. Within this multiethnicpopulation-800,000 being immigrants, the remainder a rapidlygrowing number of indigenous converts-there is a strong culturalcommonality and identity: It is Islam. Islam is a comprehensive code oflife that is expressed in the cultural, economic and social organization of

To scholars of the Nahda, that is, the Arab cultural renaissance which unfolded in Egypt and Ottoman Syria over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the journalist, teacher, and writer Buṭrus al-Bustānī is well familiar. However, few might be aware that al-Bustānī was also a committed Protestant Christian involved in building local church structures. Probably even fewer know that his daughter, Alice al-Bustānī, and other members of his extended family were at once important figures within the Syrian Protestant church and central protagonists of the Nahda. To read the full book review, download the PDF file on the right.

Since its 2013 release, Wael Hallaq’s The Impossible State has retained a central position in debates within the field of Islamic political thought. While Joseph Kaminski mostly agrees with Hallaq’s central thesis that an Islamic state is a contradiction in terms (as a modern state is in its very constitution immoral and ergo non-Islamic), he aims in his The Contemporary Islamic Governed State: A Reconceptualization to shift the discussion away from government to governance. To read the full book review, download the PDF file on the right.

Book Review