Table of Contents

Prologue Introduction 1. The Language of Reform 2. Modernism and Humanism 3. The Meaning and End of Time 4. The Viva Activa 5. Knowledge and Wisdom Epilogue: Can the Muslims Speak? Notes Bibliography Index

Promotional Information

Offers a new way of considering Islam as a means of understanding modernity and the modern condition, in contrast to Western thought.

About the Author

Khurram Hussain is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion Studies at Lehigh University, USA.

Reviews

This provocative and thoughtful book will animate the interest of a range of scholars in Islamic Studies, South Asian Studies, Politics, Philosophy, and Postcolonial thought; it will also work as a great text to teach in courses on these and other topics.
*New Books Network*

Khurram Hussain’s Islam as Critique: Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Challenge of Modernity is an important and highly original book … The book’s offerings are daring and original, and the style is engaging.
*Journal of Islamic Ethics*

“This book is a welcome foray into uncharted territory. Hussain's ambition is to parallel and create a modern version of Sayyid Ahmad Khan's “mediated voice, the quintessentially Muslim voice, finding harmony in discord, and incorporating difference as an essential feature of a verdant, vigorous Islam”. The message is at once compelling and productive, making this a volume of intense interest to multiple audiences, within and beyond the academy.”
*Bruce B. Lawrence, Marcus Family Humanities Professor of Religion Emeritus, Duke University, USA*

“In a world where ponderous and pretentious prose is an occupational hazard, Khurram Hussain is witty, even electric, writer, and a nimble and adventurous thinker. He is one of the few thinkers who could address both the absurdities and maddening realities of our long post-9/11 moment by treating the Islamic response to Western modernity not as an external but as an internal critique. Hussain shows that Sayyid Ahmad Khan, far from the figure of longstanding sympathetic and hostile caricatures, provides fertile resources for an Islamic, yet cosmopolitan, critique and reconstruction of modernity.”
*Andrew F. March, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA*