Papers by Abdulkader Tayob
Religion after Critique: Postcolonial Reflections on the construction and effects of religion
Religion & Theology, 2024
In the last few decades, religion and its terms have shown to be implicated in projects of coloni... more In the last few decades, religion and its terms have shown to be implicated in projects of colonial modernity. While this critique of religion is now generally accepted, the term continues to be used in the field with little regard to its history and its colonial construction. This essay aims to bring greater attention to the continuing relevance of religion in contemporary society as articulated in postcolonial scholarship. It pro- poses closer attention to the critique of religion in the work of David Chidester, Talal Asad and Charles Long. Two distinct dimensions of religion are identified in their work. The first is a construction of religion in colonial modernity, while the second suggests ways of studying religions in light of this construction. I show in this essay that their work points to multiple complementary ways of studying religions in the contempo- rary. Their work suggests that the field of religious studies cannot ignore its discursive history and construction.
In book: Islam and the drive to global justice: principles of justice beyond dominant ethnic and religious communitiesPublisher: Lexington Books, 2024
In the well-known understanding of Qur’anic aesthetics, truth may be apprehended through revelati... more In the well-known understanding of Qur’anic aesthetics, truth may be apprehended through revelation, nature, and history. This aesthetic is driven by signs and manifestations (āyāt) that point to the distinction between good and evil and between belief and disbelief. This aesthetic of clarity (bayān) is familiar to readers of the Qur’an. This essay points to a more complex aesthetic that occupies a place alongside it. It argues that this aesthetic is exemplified in verses that make a connection between beauty and disbelief and between beauty and belief. I offer an analysis of this ethic in a close reading of the root word z-y-n in the Qur’an. The words zīna (beauty, adornment), zayyana, and izzayyana (beautifying and adorning) intimate that belief and disbelief are mediated by beauty until the end of time. While most verses point to beauty obscuring belief, there are some that suggest that beauty is part of everyday experiences, including belief and truth. I show that this aesthetic mediation of belief and disbelief is a universal condition, one that generates an ethical empathy toward the belief of others. After presenting the semantic map of z-y-n in the Qur’an, I examine this complex aesthetic and its ethical implications in the intellectual history of Islam among theologians (mutakallims) and exegetes (mufassirīn).
Moral Exhortation in Islamic Discourse: Performance and Ethics in Islamic Sermons
Ritual and Social Dynamics in Christian and Islamic Preaching, edited by Ruth Conrad, Roland Hardenburg, Hanna Miethner, and Max Stille. London: Bloomsbury Academic., 2024
This chapter takes the khutbah and related moral exhortations beyond the global and Western publi... more This chapter takes the khutbah and related moral exhortations beyond the global and Western public spheres and media images. It argues that the khutbah and pre-khutbah addresses are part of the discourse of Islam, which is both local and global. As creative interventions in the discourse of Islam, they neither sacrifice their link with the past nor their engagement with the present. This chapter offers a close study of a pre-khutbah talk in a prominent mosque in Cape Town in February 2021, which discussed the closing and opening of mosques during the Covid-19 pandemic. Given after some restrictions were lifted, the pre-khutbah talk criticized the decision of some Muslims to evade government measures imposed on social gatherings. At the same time, it presented a vivid account of the significance of mosque practices. I argue that the pre-khutbah talk demonstrates Islamic discourse engaging with an ethical decision, weighing an established mosque performance against the demands of the pandemic. The ethical decision is not made by stepping outside the discourse, but by engaging with it.
Naqḍ wa tanwīr, 2023
Translation of English essay published in Journal for the Study of Religion, n°31, 2, 2018, pp7-3... more Translation of English essay published in Journal for the Study of Religion, n°31, 2, 2018, pp7-35, Online ISSN 2413-3027; DOI:
http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/v31n2a1
The term ‘religion’ as a discursive term occupies a dominant, but neglected feature of Muslim intellectual reflections since the 19th century. Intellectuals from Muḥammad ʿAbduh (he died in 1905) to recent scholars like Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd (died in 2010) have used religion as a critical term to develop a critique of tradition and modernity, and a strategy for renewal. This discourse may be compared with the study of religion since the 19th century that has also used religion to develop a perspective on the religious history of humankind. In this contribution, I argue that the two intellectual traditions that have employed religion–Kantian and the modern Islamic–point to very different ways of relating to the world, to the self and the ‘other’, and to the political condition of modernity. Rather than using the hegemonic Western tradition to make a judgment on the modern Islamic, I use the latter to point to the former’s peculiar proclivities. Using the modern tradition among Muslim intellectuals, I invite an inquiry into both from each other’s positions.
Islam and Modernity, 2009
Journal for the Study of Religion, 2022
The idea of a moral economy has gained salience in the 21 st century. It has been used by economi... more The idea of a moral economy has gained salience in the 21 st century. It has been used by economists, political scientists, and to a lesser extent, scholars of religion, for alternative values of money, exchange, debt, poverty, and prosperity. As an actual moral economy seems elusive in the presence of a dominant capitalist market, this essay reflects on the work of Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun, the 14 th-century historian and philosopher. Ibn Khaldun's reflections on the different ways in which individuals seek a livelihood (maʿāsh) reveal systematic and also ethical considerations. The essay examines some key terms which he uses to understand human sustenance and ethical reflections on various crafts. His 'moral economy' combines economic considerations with divine beneficence, rational thought, and ethical purpose.
ISIM Review, 2005
The Rights at Home Project (R@ H) held an Advanced Training Programme (ATP) in Zahle, Lebanon in ... more The Rights at Home Project (R@ H) held an Advanced Training Programme (ATP) in Zahle, Lebanon in June and July of 2004. The training focused on challenges and opportunities facing human rights activists in Muslim societies and communities. Trainers and trainees rose to the challenge in an inspiring way.
Journal for Islamic Studies, 2021
This essay offers a perspective on studying Islam as a complex discourse constituted by unexpecte... more This essay offers a perspective on studying Islam as a complex discourse constituted by unexpected events (, pl. of faltah). The concept of faltah is developed from a close reading of statements attributed to the companions of the Prophet after his death. It is shown that the experience of faltah introduces fundamental features of Islamic unresolvable contradictions. While faltah may be disruptive, these features have proven to be productive in the history of Islamic discourse. This essay, then, turns to religion as a discourse of colonial modernity that has impacted societies and traditions across the globe. It argues that religion in this form may be treated as a faltah, like other disruptions that Islamic discourse has encountered in the past. The discussion offers a perspective of Islam in its encounter performance, debate and unresolvable contradictions.
Social Sciences and Missions, 2015
Religion & Theology, 2016
Professors David Chidester and Cornelia Roux support the new policy on religion education promulg... more Professors David Chidester and Cornelia Roux support the new policy on religion education promulgated in 2003 that emphasises the value of exposing learners to the diversity of religious traditions in the country. In this essay, I identify the frameworks they adopt for the study of religions, and argue that they be further developed for the religion education classroom. I propose that both dynamic discursive traditions (Chidester) and texts (content) (Roux) provide key frameworks for religion education. Discursive traditions open the door to a critical and contextual appreciation of religions that is open to change, renewal and innovation. I do not support the hermeneutical preoccupation of Roux, but find her emphasis on the texts and content of religions useful for thinking about the semiotics of religious traditions on self, society and the world. I provide the justification for these frameworks from reflections in the study of religions.
Reform in the discourse of Islam and the making of Muslim subjects, 2022
The discourse of reform in Africa is recognizable as a dialectic of religious practices, norms, ... more The discourse of reform in Africa is recognizable as a dialectic of religious practices, norms, and values between the past and present, the local and global. It has been spurred by flows of pilgrimage, migration, political formations, and knowledge exchanges. This chapter focuses on colonial and postcolonial manifestations of reform in African Muslim societies. While it recognizes the value of identifying various movements from Islamic modernism to radicalism, it stresses the fluid boundaries in performances and ever-present debate and deliberation. Tajdid is a focusing lens for reflecting on reform in the discourse of Islam. Through recognizing its appropriation in history, the chapter proposes that religious reform may be examined as part of a complex and dynamic discourse constituted by crisis, performance, and deliberation.
Issue: Publication Date: 2011 Pages: 2-3
Abstract: This issue of the Journal for Islamic Studies consists of a diverse set of articles, bo... more Abstract: This issue of the Journal for Islamic Studies consists of a diverse set of articles, book reviews and a report. They cover issues dealt with in previous volumes of the Journal for Islamic Studies, with an important and nuanced caveat. The articles begin with Loimeier's study of Islamic political discourse in Zanzibar, and conclude with Mraja's review of al-Amin Mazrui's popular legal text. Cobbett's essay on Islamic finance examines the workings of an increasingly popular field, while Mathee searches Timbuktu Muftis' fatwas for women's ...
Impulse fuer die Migrationsgesellschaft: Bildung, Politik und Religion, 2015
Muslim schools founded in South Africa since the 1980s face two imperatives of integration – into... more Muslim schools founded in South Africa since the 1980s face two imperatives of integration – into the broader society, and into a framework of new Islamic schooling. This paper discusses these two imperatives, showing that national integration and Islamization take on very distinctive forms. It also argues that demands for integration are seldom focussed on one path. There are more than one imperatives placed upon schools, and they have to balance between these. Christian, Jewish, Islamic and other culturally based schools are constantly changing and evolving. At the same, they have to integrate in nations and societies that are constantly being re-imagined.
Claiming and making Muslim worlds: religion and society in the context of the global, 2021
I use Edward Said's metaphor of exile to identify an archive that offers an alternative discourse... more I use Edward Said's metaphor of exile to identify an archive that offers an alternative discourse in the study of Islam. By drawing on Western and Muslim traditions, this archive occupies a place of exile that does more than constructing a representation of the Muslim world. Like Said's work, it continues the critique of Orientalism. In addition, it includes a deliberation on ethics that has generally eluded the dominant discourse on the making and unmaking of the Islamic World. I contrast this archive with a post-Orientalist discourse that sometimes takes a deconstructivist approach to Islam, and sometimes one that emphasizes agency. The use of agency draws attention to Muslim imbrication in the social, political, and religious fields, but fails to account for political and economic hegemonies. Such strategies side-step the continuing dominance of Western political power games in Muslim societies and states. I therefore turn to scholars in exile and propose that their interest in critique and ethics offers a different way of imagining the Islamic world. Their questions and concern offer a different perspective to 'post-Saidian' Islamic Studies.
Becoming Better Muslims: Religious Authority and Ethical Improvement in Aceh, Indonesia
Journal of Contemporary Religion
The Muslim Youth Movement of South Africa: Challenging the 'ulama' hegemony
Journal For Islamic Studies, 1992
Politics and Islamization in African public spheres
Islamic Africa, 2012
Abstract: Public Islam and Muslim publics provide a useful framework for understanding how techno... more Abstract: Public Islam and Muslim publics provide a useful framework for understanding how technology and new social and political contexts have impacted discourses of religion in the public sphere. This article proposes that scholarly attention on Muslim publics has been guided by the different impacts of Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Jürgen Habermas. Smith's theory of reification has focused attention on the production of Islam (s), while Habermas's work has focused attention on the production of new values for democratic politics. Muslim ...
Abstract: The concept of Muslim publics has been helpful in delineating at least two distinct asp... more Abstract: The concept of Muslim publics has been helpful in delineating at least two distinct aspects of modern Islamic developments. The first, and the most successful of such applications, has been the idea that Muslim publics provided the spaces for the construction of new and modern identities. These have been the conceptual and physical sites for the flourishing trends of Sufis, feminists, Wahhabis, traditionalists, Islamists and progressives.
Tabarī on the companions of the Prophet : Moral and political contours in Islamic historical writing
Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1999
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Papers by Abdulkader Tayob
http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/v31n2a1
The term ‘religion’ as a discursive term occupies a dominant, but neglected feature of Muslim intellectual reflections since the 19th century. Intellectuals from Muḥammad ʿAbduh (he died in 1905) to recent scholars like Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd (died in 2010) have used religion as a critical term to develop a critique of tradition and modernity, and a strategy for renewal. This discourse may be compared with the study of religion since the 19th century that has also used religion to develop a perspective on the religious history of humankind. In this contribution, I argue that the two intellectual traditions that have employed religion–Kantian and the modern Islamic–point to very different ways of relating to the world, to the self and the ‘other’, and to the political condition of modernity. Rather than using the hegemonic Western tradition to make a judgment on the modern Islamic, I use the latter to point to the former’s peculiar proclivities. Using the modern tradition among Muslim intellectuals, I invite an inquiry into both from each other’s positions.