Introduction: In the Beginning

There are good reasons for recognising Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) as the founding father of sociology. The Muqaddimah (Prolegomenon) of 1377 is the famous introduction to the history of the known world. The work, which can be read as a theory of the state and religious change, was, among other things, a study of the contrasted forms of social cohesion (asabiyyah) in the city and the desert. The Muqaddimah is the Introduction, but it also means the first premise of an argument. In this respect it indicates the rational basis of his historical analysis and the continuity of his work with Aristotle (Dale 2015; Mahdi 1957). His work anticipated Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), the great French sociologist who, probably adopting Ibn Khaldun, developed a contrast between organic and mechanical solidarity to grasp, in particular, the transformation of France in the nineteenth century from a predominantly rural to an urban society (Durkheim 1984). Whereas solidarity in traditional societies rested on sameness, locality and common practices, the solidarity of an industrial urban society depended on the division of labour in which there is functional interdependence between members of the society. Ibn Khaldun’s study of urban and tribal solidarity was also adopted by Ernest Gellner (1969) in his study of the Atlas Mountains. He recognised the obvious parallel between Ibn Khaldun and Durkheim (Gellner 1975, 1981, 1985). Gellner is probably more famous for his publications on nationalism than his work on Islam, although the two issues are closely related. For Gellner, the social solidarity of modern societies will depend more on an integrated national system of education (and thereby a common language) and nationalism as the dominant political idea. The relationship between nationalism and Islam has played an important role in political sociology as a framework for understanding state formation.

While recognising Ibn Khaldun as a legitimate sociologist avant la lettre, I am more concerned with Western rather than Muslim attitudes and approaches to understanding Islam. More specifically in approaching this topic as a sociologist, I am concerned to understand how (primarily Western) sociologists have approached Islam in the recent history of sociology.

Introduction: The Origins of Islamophobia

One central topic in the growth of the sociology of Islam has been the ubiquitous critical research agenda on Islamophobia. The value and meaning of the concept has generated an extensive academic and public debate (Cesari 2006). Academic responses to this public fear have been defined as an ‘industry’ (Lean 2012). Apart from its domestic manifestations, it has also been seen as fundamental to American foreign policy (Jacobs 2006). Islam is viewed as a crucial component in the ‘clash of civilizations’ that was first announced by Samuel Huntington in Foreign Affairs in 1993. Violence against the Muslim world is also a global problem from the attack against a mosque in New Zealand to random attacks on Muslims in the United States and to constitutional attempts to change the legal status of Muslims in India (Kumar 2012). The attack on the Twin Towers and its aftermath were defining moments in the spread of Islamophobia (Cesari 2010). While not denying violence against Islam, much discussion in the media and the academy often exaggerates the extent and level of confrontation with Islam (Halliday 1996). Despite US military conflicts in the Middle East and Asia, Muslims are a long-standing and relatively successful community in the United Sates with a substantial and influential middle class in such cities as New York, Detroit and Newark (Alba and Nee 2003; Bilici 2012; Bleich 2011).

One cannot deny the widespread presence of Islamophobia in Europe and North American. In Why the West fears Islam, Jocelyne Cesari (2013) assembled an exhaustive list of reports from sociological surveys conducted between 1990 and 2012 showing, among other issues, that respondents believed that Islam was incompatible with Western societies. Respondents typically expressed fear of Muslims in their midst. Sociology can usefully undermine false and damaging claims about Islam such as the idea that radical Islam had infiltrated British schools (Holmwood and O’Toole 2017). For political movements in defence of Islam, the concept of Islamophobia functions legitimately and effectively, but it often obscures the complexity of the issues and the historical transformations of Muslim relationships with the West. Muslims do not constitute an ethnic group and their communities are diverse, geographically dispersed and often internally fragmented along religious lines.

Introduction: Imperalism and Edward Said’s Orientalism

Unlike the study of other ‘world religions’, the understanding of Islam has been controversial insofar as it has been continuosly and heavily influenced by political events in both the West and the Middle East, such as 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan and the enduring conflicts between Palestine and Israel. In 2021 attacks by ISIS, Al-Qaeda and their affiliates opened up a new front as they spread through the Sahel in Mali, Chad, Niger and Burkina Faso. The underlying causes include drought, poverty, unemployment and ineffectual governments. As with Afganistan, international military action often results in high civilian casualties through ‘collateral damage’, thereby widening the gap between Western forces and local populations.

Understanding Islam has also to be concerned with ancient divisions and contemporary political struggles within the Islamic world itself. As with other world religions, Islam has significant theological and political divisions, primarily between Sunni and Shia traditions. However, so-called Islamic ‘sects’ include Ahmadiyya, Ibadiyya, Ismailis and Kharijites. Sufi mysticism is widespread across the Muslim world, but is not routinely regarded as a sect. The Sunni tradition has been historically dominant and shaped by the idea of Ash’arism – the conservative branch of Sunni Islam that has been promoted by Saudi Arabia. Its original doctrines were the work of al-Ash’ari (873–936).Over time this tradition became the basis of authoritarian rule in Sunni Islam in emphasising the importance of scriptural and clerical authority. While the unintended consequence of these uprisings, in which young people dominated opposition to ruling elites, was to re-inforce authoritarian rule especially in Egypt and Turkey, the protests and the sense of alienation with the legacy of powerful elites and their political dominance continue. Hence these regimes continue to be challenged by younger generations who want greater personal freedom and more democratic (or at least competent) rule. In Turkey, the new mood of reform is expressed by writers such as Mustafa Akyol who made the case for greater personal liberty in his Islam without Extremes (2011). Following a lecture he gave in Malaysia, the book was banned on the grounds that it would result in civil unrest.

Introduction: Unsettled Controversies

Despite decades of research and debate regarding the status of women in Islam generally and the specific position of Muslim women in Western liberal democracies, there is no settled or commanding interpretation about these issues. Given the development of feminism in the West over the last century or more, there is a clear feminist view that Islam is patriarchal and that Muslim women are subordinated and imprisoned in religious traditions. Then there is a liberal argument that the practice of compulsory veiling offends Western notions of freedom of choice. There is yet another argument regarding the behaviour of citizens who must not have their faces covered in the public domain. The face of the citizen should be visible to all citizens in public places. Furthermore, there are religious and constitutional arguments that the state and religion should remain separate, and hence there must be no legislation to control religious buildings, attire or practices. In this argument, we can include state interference in such matters as circumcision where many liberals are critical of both Jewish and Islamic practice. The return of the hijab with the return of the Taliban to Kabul may only confirm the worst fears of liberal feminists in the West. But Afghanistan is not Indonesia, where Sufism has been a dominant factor in the spread of Islam. Indonesia is the largest Muslim community in the world and its diverse character is perhaps best represented by the progressive Nahdlatu Ulama with a membership of between 60 and 90 million followers, providing religious services, health care, poverty relief and education. Founded in 1926, it preaches inclusion and recognises the religious and cultural diversity of Indonesia. The Indonesian educational system from the 1920s has promoted the inclusion and promotion of girls who often outnumber boys in schools (Hefner 2009). However, there is evidence that modern-day Indonesia is becoming more conservative.

Despite decades of research, the actual relationships between gender, patriarchy, religion and level of economic development remain under-researched and theoretically unclear (Lussier and Fish 2016). Many of these dilemmas have been perfectly captured in Martha Nussbaum’s ‘capabilities approach’.

Introduction: Globalisation and Knowledge

In this chapter I treat both pragmatism and postmodernism as movements that challenge the authority of traditional religious institutions and their claims to knowledge. They are intellectual movements that are therefore intimately connected to questions about ‘positions of knowledge’. Indeed, they raise fundamental issues about science and objectivity. While these intellectual movements were often constructed to question the secular idea of rationality as the legacy of the Enlightenment and the development of positivism in the social sciences, they inevitably challenge the universal knowledge claims of all authorities, including religious authorities. These movements had their origin in the West, but they have global implications for religious life in general. We need therefore to situate these cultural developments within the broader context of globalisation.

While I have described these movements as intellectual developments, postmodernism can also be regarded as a social and cultural movement that had widespread effects on architecture, film, literature, fashion and design. In cultural terms, post-modernism was expressed in conceptual art, pop art, happenings, and Theatre of the Absurd. However, the impact of postmodernism was most amply seen in architecture with the publication of Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi and Brown 1972). This publication was an attack on modernism in architecture in which Las Vegas was seen to be a ‘non-city’ that had been created out of a ‘strip’. Postmodernism has influenced all forms of communication. Television, film and popular music have transformed youth cultures including Muslim youth cultures (Rakmani 2016).

Postmodernism has been a disruptive movement with respect to religion. It has been analysed by Akbar Ahmed (1992) in Postmodernism and Islam and by Ernest Gellner (1992) in Postmodernism, Reason and Religion. Gellner claimed that we face three ideological options – religion, postmodernism and reason. He regarded postmodernism as simply a repeat of relativism. In contemporary anthropology, postmodernism was a conflation of subjectivism and liberal guilt over the legacy of imperialism. In criticising white Western anthropologists as outsiders, as either direct or indirect representatives of Western colonialism, these critiques overlooked the experience of many anthropologists who defended aboriginal cultures and rights against predatory colonial settlement. Gellner feared that the obsession with the position of the ethnographer would make fieldwork impossible, leaving anthropology as the study of texts.

Introduction: Afghanistan

Understanding Islam today inevitably takes place in a politically charged and fragile world environment. This volume was written as the Taliban swept through Afghanistan with disastrous consequences for its citizens who were caught in the fighting. The Afghan government collapsed, and President Ashraf Ghani fled to a safe haven in the United Arab Emirates. There was a terrible bomb attack by ISIS-K militants on Kabul airport in August 2021 with a significant loss of life. The new government contained men who were identified by the UN and the United States as terrorists. However, unlike Al Qaeda, the Taliban are basically an Islamist nationalist movement who are at odds with the radical Islamic State Khorasan group.

To understand these events, we need, as a minimum condition, to pay attention to history. Alexander the Great (356–323 bc), in his struggle to free the Greeks from Persian control, invaded Asia and fought various disastrous battles in Bactria, now Afghanistan, in 330–327 along the Khyber Pass. The British invaded Afghanistan twice in the nineteenth century with their own version of ‘regime change’. In the first Anglo-Afghan War in 1839–42, designed to block Russian influence, the British lost over 16,000 troops in a retreat from Kabul. The second campaign in 1878–80 was equally problematic (Dupree 1980: 377–413).

Russian involvement in Central Asia has a long history especially after the October Revolution in 1917. The Soviet period had devastating consequences for Islam as ‘patterns of the transmission of Islamic knowledge were damaged, if not destroyed; Islam was driven from the public realm; the physical markings of Islam, such as mosques and seminaries, disappeared’(Khalid 2007: 2). Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to support a communist state following a coup in 1978 (Roy 1986: 84–109), to stabilise the internal political situation, and to counter American influence. In response the United States supplied arms to the Mujahideen to undermine the Russian presence. The Russian army prepared to withdraw in 1988 having suffered around 18,000 casualties in ‘a long goodbye’ (Kalinovsky 2011). The United States became involved after 9/11 and twenty years later President Biden decided to withdraw American troops to coincide with the anniversary of 9/11 as the Taliban took over many regional cities with mounting civilian casualties.

Introduction: Dilemmas of Diversity

The underlying theme of this discussion of positions of knowledge and the capacity to understand other cultures and other religions is that conflicts of positions can only emerge in a world that is in a context of what we might called ‘contested diversity’. The question of a person’s position would not hypothetically emerge in a stale monocultural environment. If issues of position did emerge, they could in all probability be easily resolved. That modern societies are diverse is a pointless truism, but the consequences are real. The position of classical sociology, from Comte to Simmel, is now challenged from the perspective of post-colonialism (Bhambra and Holmwood 2021) and post-modernism (Susen 2015). Because of an expanding social and cultural diversity that is related to globalisation, positionality has become a political issue, and not just in the academy but among the wider public. We are also living in an environment of ‘fake news’ and cyber attacks. Liberal secular societies in the West officially celebrate diversity and multiculturalism, including religious difference, but typically encounter a limit when confronted by the veil, female genital mutilation or underage brides. How can we resolve these conflicts in the public domain? In the absence of shared values, finding agreement over basic ethical issues is deeply problematic (MacIntyre 2007). The liberal quest for ‘an overlapping consensus’ (Rawls 1987) in the civil sphere appears to be remote. Ironically, the overlapping beliefs between Muslims and Christians – their family resemblances – may render achieving a broad basis for a productive harmony more, rather than less, difficult.

Susan Buck-Morss (2006), whose politics are no doubt very different from Hans-Georg Gadamer’s political outlook, writing soon after 9/11 in Thinking Past Terror, pleaded with the American public to go beyond the futile conflict of terror and counter-terror. She believed that a conversation could take place in a public sphere in what she called the ‘cosmopolitanism of the world of letters’. In the preface to the paperback edition, she argued that her central proposal is that we consider Islamism as a political discourse along with critical theory as critiques of modernity. Her work contains the hope for a productive conversation and presupposes a cosmopolitan context, namely a cosmopolitan world of letters.

Introduction: Who Has Authority to Speak?

Many of the issues about positionality were explored in Chapter 2 through Robert Merton’s discussion of the insider– outsider problem in American sociology with special reference to research on black American communities. However, the arguments in this volume about the history of Western responses to Islam are now rehearsed in contemporary debates, not under the insider–outsider distinction, but under the notion of ‘positionality’. The driving issues behind this notion include gender and race, namely that scientific knowledge has been dominated historically by privileged white males. It is argued that sociologists have overlooked the consequences of colonialism on social theory (Bhambra and Holmwood 2021). This idea about positions of knowledge has gained currency especially in ethnographic and qualitative research, where the researcher’s own position is seen to be crucial in his response to the world in which he is positioned. For now, I shall continue to refer to ‘he’ rather than ‘she’, because most of the criticism has been focused on male researchers and to some extent more so for anthropologists than for sociologists for reasons that will become obvious shortly. The whole issue of positionality, and indeed the various arguments presented in this volume, ask the ultimate question: who has authority to speak? Has this obvious fact ever been seriously disputed in the social sciences? The unfinished debate about verstehen can be seen as the entrée into questions about positionality. However, we might date the contemporary approaches to the subject with the emergence of subaltern studies that was specifically connected with the article by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) titled ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ in which she examined the subordination of voices at the periphery. The whole issue of positionality, and indeed the various arguments presented in this volume, hinges on power and authority. While accepting the challenges presented by positionality, I argue that sociology has to defend the search for objectivity in its research, and ‘objectivity’ implies also ‘universality’.

The notion of positionality in anthropology first emerged as a critique of research on aboriginal cultures, where the ‘subjects’ were either objects of research without a voice of their own or they were research assistants to anthropologists whose role was to translate and explain.

Often, when we are puzzled by a person or situation, we say we do not understand. Our puzzlement eventually brings us to the conclusion that as an outsider, we cannot somehow come to terms with the world of the insider. Perhaps our understanding might be improved metaphorically by trying to stand in the insider’s shoes. Of course, reaching an understanding becomes even more difficult if there is tension or conflict between these two worlds of the inside and the outside. In modern times, understanding is rendered increasingly difficult by the unsettled conditions in which we live. The great German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) worked on the problem of understanding through much of his life. In a 1970 article titled ‘Language and understanding’ he wrote that the problem of understanding had received increasing attention in modern times. This was ‘not unrelated to our very uneasy social and world-political situation and the sharp increase in tensions at the present time’ and efforts to reach understanding between nations and generations were failing (Gadamer 2006: 13). Because for Gadamer all understanding must succeed or fail through the medium of language, we must attend carefully to the conversations and texts between insiders and outsiders. These basic notions also direct us to the obvious point that translations between the meanings present in different cultures or contexts are always and only approximations. Although Gadamer did not discuss Islam in this context, his hermeneutics are valuable to understanding Islam or any religion. Gadamer can be criticised for failing to pay attention to power relationships in the process of understanding and his focus was more on understanding language and text than a people or a religion. He would respond that paying attention to language is a critical step towards good relationships.

Forms of Understanding

At the outset, I need to distinguish between two types of understanding. First there is the understanding that might emerge through a conversation or dialogue between two different agents or parties whose views do not entirely converge. I may call this Dialogue 1. This form of dialogue is the one I imagine taking place between Christians and Muslims with the intention of arriving at some mutual understanding.

Introduction: Knowledge in a Divided World

The topic of this chapter is to raise, yet again, the question of insider and outsider knowledge that has occupied much of the conventional debate in sociology and anthropology about understanding other cultures. Quite simply it concerns the issue as to whether people who are practising members of a religious community (or indeed any community) are more reliable witnesses to the nature of that religion or its communal culture than social scientists who are not members. Insiders are more likely to be knowledgeable about that community and very likely to be more sympathetic witnesses than outsiders. On the other hand, it is reasonable to believe that outsiders might be more objective and conceivably notice aspects of a religion or culture that are ignored or neglected by insiders. This debate also takes us into the status of science itself. In this chapter I start therefore with some elementary ideas about inside and outside witness. In Chapter 4, I raise some postmodern and pragmatist objections to conventional notions of science and objectivity as a neutral mirror held up to the world. In Chapter 8, I explore the far more complex issue of ‘positionality’ in contemporary humanities and social science. In Chapter 9, I attempt to bring together some final considerations on a debate that has raged in sociology since its foundation as a separate and distinctive discipline in the social sciences. The debate ultimately centres on the problem of objective knowledge and how that might be secured, for example by outside independent inquiry or by inside familiarity. At each stage of this discussion, the idea of understanding gains in increasing breadth and complexity. In this chapter, I raise issues that have emerged primarily in sociology. However, in many respects, anthropology has stood at the centre of these issues concerning the position of ethnographers in their engagement with aboriginal communities.

Let me begin to develop this chapter with a lengthy discussion of a famous article by Robert Merton (1972), ‘Insiders and outsiders: a chapter in the sociology of knowledge’. Merton observed that in societies, where there is extensive social conflict and fragmentation of the social structure, these social and political conflicts are often reflected in basic distrust of objective knowledge.

For sociologists of my generation, our introduction to undergraduate sociology was typically through Peter L. Berger’s Invitation to Sociology (1963). I still possess my Penguin paperback copy, which I bought while at the University of Leeds in 1968. The Invitation is well written and packed with illustrations that an average student could understand and remember. The basic theory behind the book is somewhat hidden, and few students would have taken much notice of the limited references in the footnotes to the German sociologist Arnold Gehlen (1904–1976), who in many ways is the theoretical backbone of the book. Gehlen’s sociology is complex and challenging, but the basic idea is that animals are driven and determined by their instincts, while humans also have instincts, their lives are determined and guided by social institutions. To quote Berger (1963, 104) “Gehlen conceives of an institution as a regulatory agency, channeling human actions in much the same way as instincts channel animal behavior.” He then gives a typical Berger example. When a young man meets a young woman and falls in love, the institutional imperative declares “Marry! Marry! Marry!” What we might want to say now is that, while animal instincts are permanent, institutions are not. Since the 1960s, the institution of marriage has been radically transformed to include same-sex marriage or no marriage at all. Institutions address the problem of social order, but that order is changing and fragile.

For my “disobedient generation” (Sica and Turner, 2005) in the 1960s, Berger’s sociology carried a radical, if somewhat hidden, doctrine that institutions are socially constructed and can be, with some political effort, de-constructed and re-shaped to meet new needs and ideas. The underlying radical view of knowledge in the Invitation was not explicit. With Thomas Luckman, a more complete and sophisticated view of knowledge was to appear three years later as The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). The book contributed to the emergence of an influential movement in modern sociology called “social constructionism,” which has radical implications for how we understand social institutions and their legitimacy.

Introduction: From Political Economy to Sociology

There is general agreement that Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) and David Ricardo (1772–1823) are founders of political economy (Roll 1973: 173). Their status depends to a large extent on two, but profoundly influential, publications: An Essay on Population in 1798 and Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in 1817. Nevertheless, they produced a voluminous collection of publications. Pietro Sraffa's edition of Ricardo ran to eleven volumes. Malthus is also recognised in his own right as a founding figure of political economy, but his development of social science has in the past often been overshadowed by moral criticism that is blind to his real scientific contributions. In this chapter, I promote the idea that Malthus and Ricardo were also founders of sociology without whom there would be, for example, no Marxist sociology of social class. When Ricardo introduced the growth of manufacturing into the third edition of Principles, then wages cannot rise and the conflict between capitalists and landlords over rent evaporated to be replaced by a conflict between capitalists and workers as machines replaced labour (Davis 1993). Thus, the foundation of Marx's class theory was already well developed in classical political economy. Sociology in the case of Max Weber's generation emerged out of economics conceived as a ‘science of man’ that examined the ‘conditions of existence’ of people. Thus, sociology was already embedded in the Historical School of German ‘political economy’ (Hennis 1988: 105–45). German economists rejected Adam Smith's ‘cosmopolitanism’ in which nations freely traded with each other to their mutual benefit. For Weber, economics was a political science based on national struggle for domination. Weber was only too aware of issues around population growth and immigration from a national perspective (Tribe 1989). Prussian Junkers were hiring Polish workers to lower their costs of production, thereby displacing the German population. In his 1895 Inaugural Address to the University of Freiberg, he criticised the policies that resulted in the displacement of German by Polish workers in the East Elbian provinces of Prussia with disastrous effects on German character and culture. Weber concluded: ‘As usual, a large number of children follows hard on the heels of a low standard of living, since this tends to obliterate any calculation of future welfare.

Introduction: Democratic Ideals and Institutional Failure

While I was writing my doctoral thesis at the University of Leeds in the 1960s on the decline of the Methodist Church, I used Philip Selznick's account of grassroots organizations to understand political conflicts within the church. I have in more recent years become interested in the idea of successful societies primarily through my longstanding interest in what I call “social citizenship” as the real foundation of a political democracy. Perhaps this idea is too simple to provide an explanation why whole societies fail, and so it may be more appropriate to look at specific institutions such as churches, trade unions, or football clubs as the focus of research. Alongside this idea of successful societies, I also became interested in the idea of happiness. Perhaps like “social success,” the notion of happiness is either too grand or too complex to act as a useful idea in mainstream sociology. Happiness has in modern times been downgraded often to mean little more than personal “satisfaction.” In any case, happiness as a concept has a long history that we can start with the Greek notion of eudaimonia that, for Aristotle, was based on the virtuous life. In contemporary politics and political theory, it is inevitably connected to utilitarianism and consequentialism. Insofar as Selznick was a pragmatist, we could also regard him as a consequentialist. I treat early utilitarianism as a version of consequentialism. Of course, Jeremy Bentham's “felicific calculus,” or the pain–pleasure principle, has been heavily criticized, and therefore a more usable idea may be “well-being” as a concept for capturing the welfare of individuals and as the basic goal of social policy. By combining “democratic citizenship” and happiness or well-being, we may start to get somewhere toward giving the sociology of successful societies more adequate foundations (Stones and Turner 2020). While to my knowledge Selznick did not write explicitly about happiness, he certainly addressed the question of the success or failure of democratic ideals, and he regularly talked about human “flourishing,” which underpinned his commitments to communitarianism, for example.

It is an honor and a privilege to have been involved in the publication of this volume - a study of the past and from a different world, where Abū Ḥāmid Al-Ghazālī, a man of faith and knowledge, thought hard about the intricacies between ethics and the mundane realities of economic life. His faith forced him to confront the inequities of human societies, and his religious quest urged him to find wisdom from the philosophers of the past. He explored Greek philosophy which laid the groundwork for a new synthesis between the moral imperatives of Islam, the force of logical thinking, and the precarious conditions of human life and our common vulnerability. Al-Ghazālī's thought became a bridge between religion and philosophy, and a source of knowledge for those who are thinking hard about the essential contours and conditions of a more just world.

Al-Ghazālī is famous for many achievements, not least his research into what constitutes human happiness. To achieve insight into human wellbeing, he concluded that rationalism was not in itself sufficient to guide humans to self-knowledge and at the same time that religious piety was more than a collection of rules to guide the faithful. As a Sufi philosopher, he acknowledged the force of everyday experience, and the inspiration of music and dance. We moderns can benefit from his teaching, because in our world happiness is often degraded to mean merely selfish satisfaction.

The 2020 pandemic has highlighted the iniquities of the contemporary world and the depth of human suffering. His philosophy has forced us think deeply about the intersections between morality and economics. This publication is the first volume in the series Religion and Society with Anthem Press. Sami Al-Daghistani has established a level of intellectual excellence which will inspire future authors and develop a deeper understanding of the complex relations between the secular and the religious.