Introduction

The field of Islamic studies, in both western and non-western contexts, is certainly alive and well in both its methods and its output. We see Islamic data approached from various perspectives, from everything that includes – for lack of better terms – the ‘Orientalist’ and the ‘Indigenous’. Many of these methods should be familiar enough to the reader, and they have consisted of, among others, the historical, textual, theological, legal, anthropological, sociological, political and so on. Taken together, all of these methodological approaches have done a great deal to represent the myriad of historical and contemporary expressions of Muslim actors and the social worlds they have created and continue to create. What is worth pointing out, however, is that the overwhelming emphasis of these methodological focuses have gone into actual representations, as indeed should be the case. However, we must also be sensitive to the fact that when we focus solely on the data, the various acts that make such representations possible in the first place often recede into the background, if they are not ignored altogether. The present chapter focuses less on Islam, then, than it does on the various lenses that bring it into focus. These lenses are, of course, nothing more nor less than the various methods invoked to encounter and ultimately represent Islam to colleagues, to students and, more generally, to the public at large. What I wish to emphasise here is that none of these methodological acts are natural, let alone value-neutral, nor do they take place from some Archimedean ground. Nevertheless, they are more often than not presented precisely as such. Instead, they all take that gargantuan and unwieldy thing we all too neatly refer to as ‘Islam’ and then simplify and reduce it into something that can presumably be meaningfully studied. The simplification and reduction, however, is what I am most interested in here. What are the imaginative and other acts that permit us to frame some aspect of Islam by delimiting it and subsequently bringing it into conversation with something else? This is often done to such an extent that it is never some pure or essentialised ‘Islam’ that is refined and articulated – though it can often be presented in such a manner – so much as it is the understanding or definition of that tradition as understood and put forth by the interpreter.