Critical-Progressive Muslims: On Islamic hermeneutics, Gender and Interreligious Dialogue

  CAVEAT - This preliminary reflection is written for non academic audiences and is not meant to be a fully systematic ,academic treatment on the subject but primarily as a piece that I can share on social media. I hope to develop these ideas more fully in the future. To understand the nature of progressive Muslim thought it is essential to understand how it approaches the nature of the Qur’an and the nature of the idea of Revelation itself . In my previous writings on progressive Islam ( here and here , ) drawing upon the work of A. Al-Khuli and Nasr Abu Zayd, I emphasised the idea that progressive Islam considers the Qur’an as a socio- culturally produced and literary discourse or set of discourses ( for summary of parts of this work click here ) . In other words , according to progressive Muslim thought there is an organic and symbiotic link between the specific religious environment  o ut of which the Qur’ an emer ged and the nature of the Qur’an itself . Imp

  Book Review Contemporary thought in the Muslim world: trends, themes, and issues by Carool Kersten, London and New York, Routledge, 2019, 218 pp., £96 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-415-85507-5  Reviewed by Dr. Adis Duderija, Griffith University Kersten’s highly informative book comes closest to truly qualifying as providing a global overview of contemporary Muslim thought in both Muslim minority and majority contexts which is what it purports to do. This book leaves just about no stone left unturned when it comes to providing an overview of the intellectual landscape of contemporary Muslim thought. Of particular importance is the rare acknowledgment of the progressive Muslim thought as an independent and coherent intellectual category in its own right that this book review author has theorized on and discussed at length elsewhere for over a decade (Duderija 2011; Duderija 2017).  Also, unlike other studies on contemporary Muslim thought that usually are dominated by studies on schol