Publication Opportunity: Islam and the Category of “Religion”


AAR-SW Friends,

Dr. Hussein Ahmad Kahn has announced that the Pakistan Journal of Historical Studies (Indiana University Press) is seeking articles for a guest edited issue of the journal to be published in the summer of 2019. The theme is ‘Islam and the Category of “Religion.”‘ Below is the full CFP.


We are seeking papers on the theme of ‘Islam and the category of “religion”‘ for the Summer 2019 issue of the semi-annual scholarly journal, Pakistan Journal of Historical Studies (PJHS), published by the Indiana University Press (Bloomington, USA).

Recent scholarship has historicised the concept of “religion” as it is used in contemporary popular, academic, and political discourse. Critics have called into question the usefulness and validity of a term developed in the context of post-Reformation Christianity and deeply entangled with the history of European colonialism, especially for the study of non-Western cultures. We seek papers that examine this question from the perspective of the study of Islam.

Potential topics:

  • Is Islam a “religion”, now or in the past?
  • Does the conception of Islam as a “religion” help or hinder our understanding of “Islamic art,” “Islamic science,” and “Islamic politics”?
  • How has Islam been constructed or governed as a “religion” in contemporary contexts?
  • How do indigenous concepts, such as dīn and īmān, compare to “religion”?
  • Did the diversity of peoples and communities within Islamic empires, or studied by Islamic scholars, require the development of concepts similar to “world religions”?

Amina Steinfels, Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, USA, will guest edit this issue.

Deadline for submitting articles will be 1st February 2019. Manuscripts should be submitted through the Indiana University Press website, via the following link:

https://scholarworks.iu.edu/iupjournals/index.php/pjhs/login

Length of an article should be between 8,000 and 12,000 words. For style-sheet, visit the following link:

http://hak3408.wixsite.com/khaldunia/guidelines-for-contributors

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