The articles brought together in this volume deal with Muslim perceptions and uses of the Bible in its wider sense, including the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament as well as the New Testament, albeit with an emphasis on the former scripture. While Muslims consider the earlier revelations to the People of the Book to have been altered to some extent by the Jews and the Christians and abrogated by the Quran, God's final dispensation to humankind, the Bible is at the same time venerated in view of its divine origin, and questioning this divine origin is tantamount to unbelief. Muslim scholars approached and used the Bible for a variety of purposes and in different ways. Thus Muslim historians regularly relied on biblical materials as their primary source for the pre-Islamic period when discussing the creation as well as the history of the Israelites and the prophets preceding Muhammad. Authors seeking to polemicize against Jews and Christians were primarily interested in the presumed biblical annunciations of Muhammad and his religion and / or in perceived contradictions and cases of internal abrogation in the Bible. These various concerns resulted from and had an impact on the ways in which Muslim authors accessed the scriptures. -- From publisher's description

New Methods in the Study of Islam offers an international perspective on the field of Islamic studies. It seeks to push the study of Islam to the forefront of methodological considerations by revisiting classical topics for example the Qur'an, hadith and kalam using new lenses, as well as new subjects, such as lived Islam and Islamic critiques of the West. Taken as a whole, the collection provides new perspectives on the role and place of the academic study of Islam in contemporary scholarship --

Islam and the west have been neighbours for 1400 years. The West grew up under the shadow of Islam, and then after the Renaissance, in a dramatic reversal of roles, the West became world conquerors and subdued all other cultures and civilisations, including Islam. This transformation ushered in the modern world, a world unlike any that had existed before.

The author argues against the belief that religion is universal to all human cultures and eras, discussing how Western cultures distinguish a difference between what is secular and what is religion, and examining how the West uses the idea of religious violence as a justification for peacekeeping, whereas religious violence from other social orders is often considered fanatical.