The Reconquista left unprecedentedly large numbers of Muslims living under Christian rule. Since Islamic religious and legal institutions had been developed by scholars who lived under Muslim rule and who assumed this condition as a given, how Muslims should proceed in the absence of such rule became the subject of extensive intellectual investigation. In Islamic Law and the Crisis of the Reconquista, Alan Verskin examines the way in which the Iberian school of Mālikī law developed in response to the political, theological, and practical difficulties posed by the Reconquista. He shows how religious concepts, even those very central to the Islamic religious experience, could be rethought and reinterpreted in order to respond to the changing needs of Muslims.

Analyzes Muslim countries' contemporary problems, particularly violence, authoritarianism, and underdevelopment, comparing their historical levels of development with Western Europe.

In an editorial essay, Ovamir Anjum reflects on the current moment of (and literature on) de-globalization, considering in turn conservative and liberal arguments. He concludes by raising several questions which de-globalization opens, key among them the challenges posed by ongoing ecological degradation. In the first research article, Timothy Gutmann offers the term “propaedeutic” to refer to the critical pedagogy necessary for teaching unfamiliar material to audiences whose sensibilities and expectations are already structured by distinctive anxieties and concerns. Gutmann addresses common caricatures of Islamic law and suggests that Islamic traditions may themselves contain a propaedeutic potential for teaching Islamic studies in the North American context. In the second research article, Brannon Wheeler traces a possible Islamic “Responsibility To Protect.” By focusing on Islamist exegesis of Q 3:110 and on classical and contemporary understandings of migration, Wheeler ultimately notes the political and intellectual compromises involved in accepting certain instances of violence and rejecting others. In the third research article, Abbas Ahsan makes an analytic-philosophical case for radical epistemic relativism. Our inability to conceive of the logically impossible, he concludes, is itself a testimony that God transcends the laws of logic. Next, a review essay is followed by ten book reviews; in this issue’s Forum article, Scott Lucas introduces readers to the sophisticated work of four Muslim thinkers of the 5th/11th century: Miskawayh, al-Hakim al-Jishumi, Ibn Hazm, and al-Khatib al-Baghdadi. Lucas encourages Muslims to emulate these figures’ practices of reading widely, with intellectual generosity and commitment, and to insist on the relationship between knowledge and practice.

This volume assembles multidisciplinary research on the Judaeo-Islamic tradition in medieval and modern contexts. The introduction discusses the nature of this tradition and proposes the more fluid and inclusive designation of “Jewish-Muslim Relations.” Contributions highlight diverse aspects of Jewish-Muslim relations in medieval and modern contexts, including the academic study of Jewish history, the Qur’anic notion of the “upright community” referring to the “People of the Book,” Jews in medieval fatwas, use of Arabic and Hebrew script, Jewish prayer in Christian Europe and the Islamic world, the permissibility of Arabic music in modern Jewish thought, Jewish and Muslim feminist exegesis, modern Sephardic and Morisco identity, popular Tunisian song, Jewish-Muslim relations in cinema and A.S. Yehuda’s study of an 11th-century Jewish mystic.

In the Islamic tradition, fiqh (Islamic law) is generally regarded as the science of furū'al-dīn (matters complementary to the Islamic faith), as opposed to kalām (Islamic theology) which is known as the science of uṣūl al-dīn (matters primary to the Islamic faith). Over time, however, fiqh has significantly surpassed Kalām in terms of cognitive maturation and epistemic development. In The Higher Objectives of Islamic Theology, Mohammed Gamal Abdelnour argues that far too little attention has been paid to parallel developments in Islamic theology. Consequently, the theological project in the Islamic tradition has largely become limited to definitions and deliberations about the nature and qualities of the transcendent God, and has barely developed as a systematic discipline devoted to the higher objectives of Islamic theology, similar to those of Maqāṣid al-Sharī?a (higher objectives of Islamic law). Addressing this gap and drawing on the full-fledged genre of Maqāṣid al-Sharī?a, this study aims to develop a genre of Maqāṣid al-?Aqīda (higher objectives of Islamic theology) based on a scheme of core values (Truth, Justice, Beauty), instead of a scheme of .hudūd (penalties). Arguing that the tradition's current overemphasis on law (Justice) has relegated both theology (Truth) and Sufism (Beauty) to the periphery of the tradition, Abdelnour illustrates how this marginalisation of theology and Sufism leaves less room for an "ethical Islam" and instead prioritises "legal" and "political Islam." In shifting the focus from law to theology, the book thereby grapples with such questions as: why did Islamic theology fail to develop a systemic genre of Maqāṣid al-?Aqīda? How do we chart out a map to guide the process of founding such an area? In what ways can the emerging Maqāṣid al-?Aqīda benefit from the well-established Maqāṣid al-Sharī?a? What are the ramif underdeveloped theology?

Focusing on the Iberian Peninsula but examining related European and Mediterranean contexts as well, Forced Conversion in Christianity, Judaism and Islam traces how Christians, Jews, and Muslims grappled with the contradictory phenomenon of faith brought about by constraint and compulsion. Forced conversion brought into sharp relief the tensions among the accepted notion of faith as a voluntary act, the desire to maintain “pure” communities, and the universal truth claims of radical monotheism. Offering a comparative view of an important yet insufficiently studied phenomenon in the history of religions, this collection of essays explores the ways in which religion and violence reshaped these three religions and the ways we understand them today.

This book is a collaborative contribution that expands our understanding of how interfaith relations, both real and imagined, developed across medieval Iberia and the Mediterranean. The volume pays homage to the late Olivia Remie Constable’s scholarship and presents innovative, thought-provoking, interdisciplinary investigations of cross-cultural exchange, ranging widely across time and geography. Divided into two parts, “Perceptions of the ‘Other’” and “Interfaith relations,” this volume features scholars engaging with church art, literature, historiography, scientific treatises, and polemics, in order to study how the religious “Other” was depicted to serve different purposes and audiences. There are also microhistories that examine the experiences of individual families, classes, and communities as they interacted with one another in their own specific contexts. Several of these studies draw their source material from church and state archives as well as jurisprudential texts, and span the centuries from the late medieval to early modern periods.