Abstract
Contrary to the earlier forecasts of secularization theory, religious practices and ethical imaginaries are flourishing across the Muslim world. But Muslim scholars and intellectuals disagree on the question of how to deal with the pluralization in mind and society that marks our age. This paper examines the ways in which contemporary Muslim engagements with religious plurality are discursively path dependent. The engagements are shaped by, on one hand, discourses long associated with Islamic ethics and law, and, on the other hand, circumstances extrinsic to this normative tradition that inform the way in which those internal discourses are selectively reconstructed in the face of modern plurality. The article suggests that, notwithstanding certain anti-pluralist currents, there is a growing community of Muslim intellectuals intent on engaging diversity in society by devising a “plurality in mind” that is still recognizably Islamic in method and message but accommodating of a higher degree of social diversity than was typical of classical Islamic discourses on religious “others.”
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Hefner, R.W. Modern Muslims and the Challenge of Plurality. Soc 51, 131–139 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-014-9752-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-014-9752-7