"For the Muslim, the relation of Islam to the other religions has been established by God in His revelation, the Qur'an. No Muslim therefore may deny it; since for him the Qur'an is the ultimate religious authority. Muslims regard the Qur'an as God's own word verbatim; the final and definitive revelation of His will for all space and time, for all mankind. The only kind of contention possible for the Muslim is that of exegetical variation."
Islam and Other Faiths,
Ismail Raji al Faruqi, pp. 72-73
Featured Scholar
Dr. Noah Salomon(B.A., ReedCollege; M.A., PhD University of Chicago) 2010--teaches courses in Islamic Studies and the anthropology of religion. His research examines the intersections between religion and state through ethnographic explorations of pious activities and political life among Muslim communities in the Middle East and Africa. His first book, For Love of the Prophet: An Ethnography of Sudan's Islamic State, was released by Princeton University Press in 2016. Other recent research has focused on the establishment of state secularism in South Sudan as a mode of unraveling the Islamic State, and the concomitant construction of a Muslim minority as part of a nascent project of nation-building. Salomon has begun preliminary work on a new project that introduces a series of micro-analyses of individuals and movements - from Sufi communists to Salafi faith healers to the place of jinn in political life - whose existence problematizes the taxonomic logic common to histories of the Islamic world. Salomon was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) in the School of Social Science for the 2013-4 academic year and has been part of recent collaborative grants from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (on Islamic epistemologies in Africa) and the Islam Research Programme, Netherlands (on religious minorities in the two Sudan's following partition).
A book talk by author Mustafa Akyol. Akyol traced the writing of his book to Reza Aslan's Zealot which was written by a Muslim but not written from an Islamic perspective.
The 5-day program consisted of a series of talks presented in Turkish to non-English speaking undergraduate students during their winter academic break.
