New Methods in the Study of Islam

Methods play a key role in how we access and subsequently organise data. There is a tendency, however, for scholars to focus primarily on their data at the expense of the methodological acts that bring such data into existence in the first place. The academic study of Islam is certainly no different in this regard. Indeed, many continue to employ established or classic methods that often echo (neo-)orientalist and other political inclinations. This collection, in contrast, offers an alternative, providing a set of multi-disciplinary approaches that focus on how we create, study and disseminate ＂Islamic data.＂

Abbas Aghdassi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Civilisation of Muslim Societies at the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (FUM), Iran. He is the author of Persian Academic Reading (2019, Routledge) and editor of Perspectives on Academic Persian (forthcoming, Springer Nature).

Aaron W. Hughes is the Dean’s Professor of the Humanities and the Philip S. Bernstein Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Rochester, USA. He is the author of many books, including most recently From Seminary to University: An Institutional History of the Study of Religion in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Muslim and Jew: Origins, Growth, Resentment (Routledge, 2019) and Shared Identities: Medieval and Modern Imaginings of Judeo-Islam (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Method & Theory in the Study of Religion (Journal of the North American Association for the Study of Religion).