Never Wholly Other

Abstract

How does the Qurʾān depict the religious Other? Throughout Islamic history, this question has provoked extensive and intricate debate about the identity, nature, and status of the religious Other and the religious self. Contemporary Islamic scholars have also begun to engage this question, aiming to provide a theological and practical road map for a deeply interreligious world. This book critically engages this emergent contemporary discourse, highlighting a pervasive inability to account for both religious commonalities and religious differences without resorting to models that depict religions as isolated entities or models that arrange religions in a static, evaluative hierarchy. In response to these limitations of the contemporary discourse, the book constructs an alternative conceptual and hermeneutical approach—a Muslima theology of religious pluralism—that draws insights from the work of Muslim women interpreters of the Qurʾān, feminist theology, and semantic analysis. On the basis of this alternative approach, a novel reinterpretation is offered of the Qurʾanic discourse on religious Otherness that challenges notions of clear and static religious boundaries by distinguishing between and illuminating the complexity of multiple forms of religious difference. Through a close and detailed reading of the Qurʾānic text, the book identifies two genres of religious difference, explores the complex relationality that exists among Qurʾānic concepts of evaluated religious difference, and articulates a comprehensive model of religious pluralism that weaves together creation, revelations, divinely intended difference, and interreligious engagement.

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