Overview
Can we understand a religion without believing and practicing it? Can we have knowledge about faith? Can people understand those different from themselves? Can outsiders ever understand the world of insiders? Examining insider and outsider positions of knowledge Bryan S. Turner explores what understanding Islam entails. He argues that understanding Islam has in recent years been dominated by political events the Iran Hostage crisis, the fall of the Iranian Shah, 9/11, Afghanistan and the foreign policy of Donald Trump leading to western intellectuals and public figures, many of whom know nothing about Islam, suddenly becoming experts. Turner asks how they, or how anyone, can have the authority to speak on this subject. He brilliantly elucidates the questions and problems involved in the challenge of understanding religion.
Full Product Details
Author: Bryan S. Turner
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Imprint: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 9781474498739
ISBN 10: 1474498736
Pages: 176
Publication Date: 10 January 2023
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Not yet available
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.
Reviews
"""This book unpacks with classic sociological discernment key binaries in unfinished debates on knowledge production within the humanities and social sciences, like insiders vs. outsiders and understanding vs. explanation. Supported by an astutely jargon-free thematic bricolage, Turner's tour de force combs one of the thorniest scholarly battlefields of our times. It helps carve out treasured clearings for helping the sociology of Islam out of the murky epistemic swamplands of proliferating positionalities."" -Armando Salvatore, Professor of Global Religious Studies, McGill University"
Author Information
Bryan Turner is Professor of Sociology, Australian Catholic University; Emeritus Professor the Graduate Center, CUNY; Honorary Professor, Potsdam University; and Fellow Edward Cadbury Center, University of Birmingham. He is one of the world's leading sociologists of religion and has also devoted significant attention to sociological theory, the study of human rights and the sociology of the body. Turner has written, co-authored or edited more than 70 books and more than 200 articles and chapters, including most recently The Religious and the Political: A Comparative Sociology of Religion (2013) and Religion and Modern Society: Citizenship, Secularisation and the State (2011), both published by Cambridge University Press. He is a founding editor of the journals Body & Society, Citizenship Studies and Journal of Classical Sociology.
