Decolonizing the Muslim Mind with Professor Joseph Lumbard: Blogging Theology - April 28, 2024

YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/u2g5dyxQtRQ?si=oX7wBHt8QiUBEWo1

Articles :

* Decolonizing Qurʾanic Studies : Joseph E.B.Lumbard, College of Islamic Studies, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha,Qatar - MDPI -2/17/2022
Abstract
The legacy of colonialism continues to influence the analysis of the Qurʾan in the Euro-American academy. While Muslim lands are no longer directly colonized, intellectual colonialism continues to prevail in the privileging of Eurocentric systems of knowledge production to the detriment and even exclusion of modes of analysis that developed in the Islamic world for over a thousand years. This form of intellectual hegemony often results in a multifaceted epistemological reductionism that denies efficacy to the analytical tools developed by the classical Islamic tradition. The presumed intellectual superiority of Euro-American analytical modes has become a constitutive and persistent feature of Qurʾanic Studies, influencing all aspects of the field. Its persistence prevents some scholars from encountering, let alone employing, the analytical tools of the classical Islamic tradition and presents obstacles to a broader discourse in the international community of Qurʾanic Studies scholars. Acknowledging the obstacles to which the coloniality of knowledge has given rise in Qurʾanic Studies can help us to develop more inclusive approaches in which multiple modes of analysis are incorporated and scholars from variegated intellectual backgrounds can engage in a more effective dialogue.
Full Article : https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/13/2/176

* Islam and the Challenge of Epistemic Sovereignty:Joseph E.B.Lumbard, College of Islamic Studies, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha,Qatar - MDPI - 3/13/2024
Abstract
The search for knowledge has been central to the Islamic tradition from its inception in the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (aḥādīth). The injunctions to obtain knowledge and contemplate the signs of God in all things undergird a culture of ultimate questions in which there was an underlying epistemic unity among all fields of knowledge, from the religious sciences to the intellectual sciences to the natural sciences. Having lost sight of the underlying metaphysic that provides this epistemic unity, many thinkers in the modern period read the classical Islamic texts independently of the cognitive cartography and hierarchy of which they are a part. This approach leads to further misunderstandings and thus to a sense of hermeneutical gloom and epistemic subordination characteristic of coloniality. Postcolonial theory provides effective tools for diagnosing the process by which this epistemic erosion produces ideologically and epistemically conscripted subjects. But as it, too, arises from within a secular frame, it is only by understanding the cognitive cartography of the sciences within Islam that epistemic confidence and sovereignty can be reinstated.
Full Article :https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/15/4/406#:~:text=51%20Being%20epistemically%20conscripted%20into,outside%20to%20even%20conceptualize%20their

Dr. Joseph Lumbard is Associate Professor of Quranic Studies at CIS. He has previously taught at the American University of Sharjah, Brandeis University, and the American University in Cairo. He also served as Advisor for Interfaith Affairs to the Jordanian Royal Court. He received his PhD in Islamic Studies from Yale University and has studied with scholars in Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, and Iran. His scholarship contributes to the fields of Islamic philosophical theology, Sufism, and Quranic studies. He served as author, translator, and general editor for The Study Quran (HarperOne 2015), which has been heralded as one of the most important contributions to Islamic studies in the English language. His current research incorporates aspects of Quranic studies, philosophy and theology to focus upon the development of epistemologies in Islam.Link:https://www.hbku.edu.qa/en/staff/dr-joseph-lumbard