Modern Trends in Islam

Based on a series of lectures delivered at the University of Chicago 1945, Modern Trends in Islam analyzes the evolving religious beliefs of practicing Muslims during the author’s own time. It was one of the first texts in English to treat Islam not as an unchanging set of beliefs and practices but as a dynamic religion whose meaning is continually redefined by its adherents. In six chapters, this concise book covers Islam’s confrontation with Western Modernism in the first half of the twentieth century in realms of law, society, and religious thought. In doing so, these essays anticipate many of the tensions between progressivism and fundamentalism that have characterized Islamic life, thought, and politics over the last seventy years. Frontmatter (page N/A) I The Foundations of Islamic Thought (page 1) II The Religious Tension in Islam (page 17) III The Principles of Modernism (page 39) IV Modernist Religion (page 63) V Law and Society (page 85) VI Islam in the Workd (page 106) Notes and References (page 131) Index (page 137)