Muhammad: Forty Introductions

by Michael Muhammad Knight

American Muslims have increasingly leaned toward textualist, scholar-centered endeavors that promise to “revive” Islam and more clearly enforce a division between “religious” (i.e., universal, global, and authentic) and “cultural” (unique, local, and often illegitimate) practices. This in part is a result of the unique demographics of American Muslim communities after the 1965 immigration reform in the United States, which brought highly educated, scientifically oriented professionals to the country. As a worldwide trend, Islam’s intensified textualism and the popular imagination of scripturally sound “religion” as separate from ignorant “culture” mirror modern developments in other traditions. In the same era that Muslim reformers sought to purge Islam of local “shamanisms” and folk practices, Hindu reformers likewise sought to reconstruct Hinduism as a coherent “world religion,” and Japanese Buddhist intellectuals insisted that a return to the textually authenticated teachings of the Buddha would rescue true, original Buddhism from the distortions of folk practices and solve the “problem” of Buddhist cultural diversity.