Remapping Emergent Islam

by Carlos A. Segovia (Editor), Daniel Bêck (Contributor), José Costa (Contributor)

This multidisciplinary collective volume advances the scholarly discussion on the origins of Islam. It simultaneously focuses on three texts, social contexts, and ideological developments relevant for the study of Islam’s beginnings -- taking the latter expression in its broadest possible sense. The intersections of these domains need to be examined afresh in order to obtain a clear picture of the concurrent phenomena that collectively enabled both the gradual emergence of a new religious identity and the progressive delimitation of its initially fuzzy boundaries.

244 pages, Hardcover

Published December 1, 2025

About the author

My view is that, unlike art, which lends an event a new body, and unlike philosophy, which extracts only the event as such (I’m relying here on Peter Hallward’s reading of Deleuze), historical-critical scholarship is always about rethinking/remapping the articulation of past events, so as to extract from them a new tentative picture (necessarily more complex and surely more ambiguous than the one that results from the appropriation/representation of the past events themselves by any master-narrative) which, by subtly “brush[ing] history against the grain” (Walter Benjamin), may thus help us gain a better and radically different perspective of its events in order to draw from them new virtual possibilities susceptible of transforming both the present and the future – i.e. susceptible of helping us become different by means of re-imagining the very premises of our own identities, and hence these, otherwise.

Currently I am Lecturer in Quranic and Islamic Studies in the Humanities Division at Saint Louis University in Madrid, Spain, as well as Co-Director (with Guillaume Dye, Manfred Kropp, and Emilio González Ferrín) of the Early Islamic Studies Seminar: International Scholarship on the Qur'ān and Islamic Origins, Series Co-Editor (with Isaac W. Oliver and Anders Klostergaard Petersen) of Apocalypticism: Cross-disciplinary Explorations (Peter Lang International Academic Publishers), and Associate Editor of 4 Enoch: The Online Encyclopedia of Second Temple Judaism (Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Origins).