Constructive Muslim Thought and Engaged Scholarship Seminar
Prof. Najeeba Syeed and I have organized a five year seminar to run at the Annual Meetings of the American Academy of Religion from 2021-2025. This seminar is aimed at exploring the developing academic discourse of constructive Muslim thought as a disciplinary field. The seminar was designed to be a space for scholars of the study of Islam and Muslims and academic practitioners of engaged scholarship from out of the Islamic tradition (broadly conceived) to share and develop their research in conversation with one another. Each year a different critical theme will be addressed:
- 2021 Assessing the State of the Field
- 2022 Approaches, Methodologies, Interventions, Intersections
- 2023 Structural Challenges and Institutional Dynamics
- 2024 The Politics of Engaged Scholarship
- 2025 The Future of Constructive Muslim Thought and Engaged Scholarship
Ultimately, the seminar hopes to foster intellectually this critical and reflective Muslim discourse and to grow a network of professional support for the engaged scholars of this field, whatever their approach or trajectory may be.
Participants in the proceedings of 2023 were invited to contribute pieces for a special issue of The Muslim World that I guest edited. This resulted in “The Work of Constructive Muslim Theology,” an issue that featured the following contributions:
Martin Nguyen, “The Work of Constructive Muslim Theology and Engaged Scholarship” (Introduction) – Download
Aysha Hidayatullah, “Structural Challenges in Constructive Muslim Thought on Gender and Sexuality“
Martin Nguyen, “Constructive Muslim Theology as Disruption, Invitation, and Ethical Intervention” – Download
Jawad Anwar Qureshi, “Thinking About Constructive Muslim Theology“
Mahjabeen Dahla, “Constructive Feminist Theology and Islamic Studies“
Oludamini Ogunnaike, “Intellectual Hijra: Thinking In and Out of the Burning House of the Western Academy“
Anna M. Gade, “Environment, Sustainability, and the Work of Constructive Muslim Theology” (Open Access)
Ebrahim Moosa, “The Prophetic in Constructive Muslim Theology: Creativity, Epistemic Virtues, and Vices” (Open Access)
Islamic Moral Theology in Conversation with the Future
With the support of a John Templeton Foundation grant, Prof. Maria Dakake (George Mason University) and I led a project on “Islamic Moral Theology and the Future” (IMTF) in partnership with the AbuSulayman Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University. Over the course of 28-months, IMTF brought together Muslim scholars and thinkers from around the world to explore the relevance of Islamic moral theology to issues facing the Muslim community and humankind globally. It explored how Muslim conceptions of virtue can contribute to a broader, cross-cultural conversation about human ethical challenges in the 21st century — from income inequality and unsustainable consumerism; to virtual platforms that enhance, but sometimes also distort, our human connections; to the need to create spaces that better connect us with our local communities.
All the published pieces from the IMTF participants can be found here.
The first of two conferences was convened from 20-22 October 2022 at George Mason University.
The second conference was convened from 7-9 October 2023 at the University of Sarajevo.
My framing contributions to the online roundtable on Islamic virtues of the self and economic inequalities are as follows:
“Virtue Ethics and the Cultivation of the Moral Self,” TheMaydan, (3 November 2021)
“Figuring Ethics and Economic Inequalities in Their Contemporary Contexts,” TheMaydan, (7 June 2022)
“Envisioning the Work of Economic Justice in Islam,” TheMaydan, (23 March 2023)
Martin Nguyen 