Overview

What would it mean to imagine Islam as an immanent critique of the West? Sayyid Ahmad Khan lived in a time of great tribulation for Muslim India under British rule. By examining Khan’s work as a critical expression of modernity rooted in the Muslim experience of it, Islam as Critique argues that Khan is essential to understanding the problematics of modern Islam and its relationship to the West. The book re-imagines Islam as an interpretive strategy for investigating the modern condition, and as an engaged alternative to mainstream Western thought. Using the life and work of nineteenth-century Indian Muslim polymath Khan (1817-1898), it identifies Muslims as a viable resource for both critical intervention in important ethical debates of our times and as legitimate participants in humanistic discourses that underpin a just global order. Islam as Critique locates Khan within a broader strain in modern Islamic thought that is neither a rejection of the West, nor a wholesale acceptance of it. The author calls this “Critical Islam”. By bringing Khan’s critical engagement with modernity into conversation with similar critical analyses of the modern by Reinhold Niebuhr, Hannah Arendt, and Alasdair MacIntyre, the author shows how Islam can be read as critique.

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9781350006331

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Reviews

This book is a welcome foray into uncharted territory.Hussain's ambition is to parallel and create a modern version of Sayyid Ahmad Khan's mediated voice, the quintessentially Muslim voice, finding harmony in discord, and incorporating difference as an essential feature of a verdant, vigorous Islam . The message is at once compelling and productive,making this a volume of intense interest to multiple audiences, withinand beyond the academy. * Bruce B. Lawrence, Marcus Family Humanities Professor of Religion Emeritus, Duke University, USA * In a world where ponderous and pretentious prose is an occupational hazard, Khurram Hussain is witty, even electric, writer, and a nimble and adventurous thinker. He is one of the few thinkers who could address both the absurdities and maddening realities of our long post-9/11 moment by treating the Islamic response to Western modernity not as an external but as an internal critique. Hussain shows that Sayyid Ahmad Khan, far from the figure of longstanding sympathetic and hostile caricatures, provides fertile resources for an Islamic, yet cosmopolitan, critique and reconstruction of modernity. * Andrew F. March, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA *

Author Information

Khurram Hussain is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion Studies at Lehigh University, USA.

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