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Sohaira Siddiqui

Sohaira Siddiqui is an Associate Professor of Theology at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar. Her work focuses on the relationship between law, theology and political thought in classical Islam; Islamic law during British colonization; and Islamic law in contemporary Muslim societies. Most recently, she is the author of Law and Politics Under the ‘Abbasids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-Juwayni (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Locating the Shari’a: Legal Fluidity in Theory, History and Practice (Brill, 2019).

Essays

Genealogy and Tradition as Methods in Islamic Studies

As Talal Asad’s notion of a discursive tradition has become a mainstay in Islamic Studies, how has it contributed to the larger debate on continuity versus rupture? And how does Asad’s anthropologically-informed definition of Islam shed light on the tension between genealogy on tradition?