Islamic Studies: Sunni

"Investigating a wide range of sources and viewpoints, this pioneering study profiles Ibn Hanbal's life, work, theology, and extensive collection of hadith, yet presupposes little specialist knowledge. Examining the fact that even during his lifetime, his followers were revising his doctrines in favour of a more commodious Islam, it questions whether Ibn Hanbal has been misrepresented, and offers an insightful introduction to one of the founders of Sunni Islam." -Jacket.

Turkey's contemporary struggles with Islam are often interpreted as a conflict between religion and secularism played out most obviously in the split between rural and urban populations. The reality, of course, is more complicated than the assumptions. Exploring religious expression in two villages, this book considers rural spiritual practices and describes a living, evolving Sunni Islam, influenced and transformed by local and national sources of religious orthodoxy. Drawing on a decade of research, Kimberly Hart shows how religion is not an abstract set of principles, but a complex set of practices. Sunni Islam structures individual lives through rituals—birth, circumcision, marriage, military service, death—and the expression of these traditions varies between villages. Hart delves into the question of why some choose to keep alive the past, while others want to face a future unburdened by local cultural practices. Her answer speaks to global transformations in Islam, to the push and pull between those who maintain a link to the past, even when these practices challenge orthodoxy, and those who want a purified global religion.

"The famed reform debates at al-Azhar Madrasa in nineteenth-century Cairo, one of the most influential centres of religious study in Sunni Islam, were enormously influential for twentieth-century Islamic thought. Here Indira Gesink offers a revisionist history of these debates over curricular and administrative reforms, and challenges our understanding of the struggle between Islamic reform and conservatism. It has been assumed that famous Islamic modernists such as Muhammad ‘Abduh instigated the reform movement and the ideas of modern religious life that emanated from al-Azhar and permeated Islamic society, a development that religious conservatives opposed. Gesink draws on obscure, but important, archival sources, legal manuals and ephemeral journals to tell the other side of the story, and to illustrate the important contributions of conservative scholars to the evolution of twentieth-century Sunni Islam." - I.B. Tauris Publisher