WHAT IS ISLAM AS A HISTORICAL FACT?

Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam?: The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2016) ("I am seeking to say the word 'Islam' in a manner that expresses the historical and human phenomenon that is Islam in its plenitude and complexity of meaning. In conceptualizing Islam as a human and historical phenomenon, I am precisely not seeking to tell the reader what Islam is as a matter of Divine Command, and thus am not seeking to prescribe how Islam should be followed as the means of existential salvation. Rather, I seek to tell the reader what Islam has actually been as a matter of human fact in history, and thus am suggesting how Islam should be conceptualized as a means to a more meaningful understanding both of Islam int he human experience and thus of the human experience at large.If I old out a salvific prospect, it is the altogether more modest but, perhaps, no less elusive one, of analytical clarity." Id. at 5-6. "[The] analytically unhelpful privileging of the very distant (Arabic) past as the necessary and default conceptual model of Islam is one of the things I am seeking here to undo." Id. at 81-82, fn. 205. "Implicit in my project is the conviction that it is important to have an accurate and meaningful conceptualization of Islam as a human and historical phenomenon because it matters how we us the word 'Islamic' to identify, designate, characterize and constitute given phenomena. How and when we us the word 'Islamic' is important because the act of naming is a meaningful act: the act of naming is an act of identification, designation, characterization, constitution, and valorization. In saying that something is Islamic we are necessary identifying, designating, constituting and valorizing that thing in terms of a norm that we believe we 'know' to be Islam, or as a value that we assay on the basis of what we regard as sound method and criteria to be Islam. To constitute something as 'Islamic' is thus necessarily an act of authorization, legitimation and inclusion: we are authorizing and legitimating that Islamic thing as being constituted by the normative value 'Islam,' and are including it with outer things that we are similarly authorizing and legitimating in the normative terms." Id. at 106-107. "In using the term 'Islamic' we modern Muslims and non-Muslims alike, are engaging in an act of ordering the world and making it meaningful for ourselves in terms of what we believe we know Islam to be." Id. at 108. "My goal in this book is to provide a new language for the conceptualization of Islam that serves as a means to a more accurate and meaningful understanding of Islam in the human experience--and, thus, of the human experience at age." Id.).