Volume 41 Issue 2 of the American Journal of Islam and Society comprises four main research articles, each of which engages themes of Muslim collectiv­ity, community, and umma from different vantage points. The first article is Rezart Beka’s contribution, “The Reconceptualization of the Umma and Ummatic Actions in Abdullah Bin Bayyah’s Discourse.” The second article is titled “An Egyptian Ethicist: Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh Drāz (1894-1958) and His Qurʾān-Based Moral Theory” by Ossama Abdelgawwad. The third research article for this issue is “The Other Legitimate Game in Town? Understanding Public Support for the Caliphate in the Islamic World”, a co-au­thored study by Mujtaba A. Isani, Daniel Silverman, and Joseph J. Kaminski. The fourth and final research article in this issue is Ashwak Hauter’s, “The Reparative Work of the Imagination: Yemen, ‘Afiya, and Politics of the Umma”. This issue of the American Journal of Islam and Society also includes four insightful book reviews, including editor Ovamir Anjum’s review essay engaging Joel Hayward’s recent work The Warrior Prophet: Muhammad and War and Celene Ibrahim’s author response to a review authored in a previous issue on her book, Women and Gender in the Qur’an.

For forty years, AJIS has been a trusted plat­form for researchers, scholars, and practitioners, serving as a conduit for the exchange of ideas, the dissemination of cutting-edge research, and the cultivation of intellectual dialogue. Many of us found this journal a space for ruminating, discussing, and developing our own narratives on our Islamic heritage and what it means in the contemporary world. Especially compared to anti-Islamic biases in other corners of academia, AJIS is a coming “home.” One constant throughout the past four decades is the journal’s commit­ment to scholarship that documents and explores Islam’s rich religious, intellectual, legal, philosophical, and social heritages. The assumption is that these various perspectives have meaningful things to say about the human condition and our place in the world. Debate, discussion, and disagreement all appear in these pages, but always grounded in an underlying steadfastness that Islam is a faith tradition that is not obso­lete; that Muslims can contribute positively to humanity’s betterment. That said, the journal is not a place of religious homilies. This is an academic journal, with a double-blind peer review process. Articles that are published thus pass muster in the discipline in which they conduct their research. Let us thank the authors who have entrusted us with their groundbreaking research, pushing the boundaries of knowledge and enriching our understanding of critical issues in our disciplines. Let us thank the journal’s editors, editorial boards, diligent reviewers, and committed staff members who have meticulously upheld the journal’s reputation for excellence, contributing to its sustained success.

Walking Qur'an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa

The authors of these rich ethnographic essays demonstrate that the Egyptian household plays a crucial, if largely overlooked, role into the dynamics of political, economic, and social change. While Western social scientists have assumed that employment outside the home improves women's autonomy and economic status, economic liberalization in Egypt is shown here to have worsened the economic situation of women and undermined their authority within the household. The collection explains why such everyday issues as unemployment, government subsidies, gender relations, housing, political participation, educational mobility, and the standard of living have become increasingly politicized at he household level, a development that has direct implications in the context of Islamist challenges to the state.

In this groundbreaking study, SherAli Tareen presents the most comprehensive and theoretically engaged work to date on what is arguably the most long-running, complex, and contentious dispute in modern Islam: the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic. The Barelvī and Deobandī groups are two normative orientations/reform movements with beginnings in colonial South Asia. Almost two hundred years separate the beginnings of this polemic from the present. Its specter, however, continues to haunt the religious sensibilities of postcolonial South Asian Muslims in profound ways, both in the region and in diaspora communities around the world. Defending Muḥammad in Modernity challenges the commonplace tendency to view such moments of intra-Muslim contest through the prism of problematic yet powerful liberal secular binaries like legal/mystical, moderate/extremist, and reformist/traditionalist. Tareen argues that the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic was instead animated by what he calls “competing political theologies” that articulated—during a moment in Indian Muslim history marked by the loss and crisis of political sovereignty—contrasting visions of the normative relationship between divine sovereignty, prophetic charisma, and the practice of everyday life. Based on the close reading of previously unexplored print and manuscript sources in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu spanning the late eighteenth and the entirety of the nineteenth century, this book intervenes in and integrates the often-disparate fields of religious studies, Islamic studies, South Asian studies, critical secularism studies, and political theology.

seeks to elucidate the concept of justice. It draws inspiration from two recent works of philosopher Nicolas Wolterstorff, but also from the groundbreaking Islamic initiative of 2007, the Common Word Letter addressed by 138 eminent Muslim scholars and clerics to the pope and all Christian leaders.

The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences (AJISS), established in 1984, is a quarterly, double blind peer-reviewed and interdisciplinary journal, published by the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), and distributed worldwide. The journal showcases a wide variety of scholarly research on all facets of Islam and the Muslim world including subjects such as anthropology, history, philosophy and metaphysics, politics, psychology, religious law, and traditional Islam.