How does the Qur'an depict the religious Other? Historically, this question
has provoked extensive debate among Islamic scholars about the identity,
nature, and status of such religious Others. Today, this debate assumes
great importance because of the widening experience of religious plurality,
which prompts inquiry into convergences and divergences in belief and
practice as well as controversy over the appropriate forms of interaction
among different religions. The persistence of religious violence also gives
rise to difficult questions about the relationship between the depiction of
religious Others, and intolerance and oppression. Scholars have
traditionally accounted for the coexistence of religious similarity and
difference by resorting either to models that depict religions as isolated
entities or models that arrange religions in a static, evaluative
hierarchy. In response to the limitations of this discourse, Jerusha Tanner
Lamptey constructs an alternative conceptual and hermeneutical approach
that draws insights from the work of Muslim women interpreters of the
Qur'an, feminist theology, and semantic analysis. She employs this approach
to reevaluate, reinterpret, and reenvision the Qur'anic discourse on
religious difference. Through a close reading of the Qur'anic text, she
distinguishes between two forms of religious difference: hierarchical and
lateral. She goes on to explore the complex relationality that exists among
Qur'anic concepts of hierarchical religious difference and to articulate a
new, integrated model of religious pluralism. Using an interdisciplinary
approach to confront existing Islamic scholarship, Lamptey's Never Wholly
Other offers a new genre of theology.
Author: Jerusha Tanner Lamptey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication Date: 2016
