Almuslih’s first book publication Reforming Islam: Progressive voices from the Arab Muslim world has been available since December 2014.
The essays collected in this volume are taken from this Almuslih website and are in-depth analyses that are unambiguously reformist in purpose, courageous in tone and cut to the heart of the problems besetting the Arab Muslim world. They focus on freedom of expression and progressive thinking, religious pluralism and diversity, and they challenge static elaborations of law that rely upon an uncritical acceptance of foundational sources held to be immutable in form or interpretation. Reforming Islam complements the Almuslih website and will serve as a reference source to help the reader, Muslim and non-Muslim, understand the full intensity of the debate taking place within Islam.
Reforming Islam aims to establish and legitimise the discussion of Islamist political agitation and militant violence as manifestations of a religiously-defined problem with modernity. It seeks to allow bold and counter-intuitive opinion to be heard amid the gathering tide of anti-democratic and xenophobic currents that seek to devalue the commonality of human values. To do this it presents the viewpoint of Arab Muslim intellectuals who stand at the epicentre of the problem and who, with their cultural bi-lingualism, present the most nuanced and at the same time the most radical solutions.
Reforming Islam‘s launch coincided with the Progressive Arab Voices on Islamic Reform conference at the National Press Club, Washington D.C. on December 2, 2014.
This was an all-day event, lunch will be served at the conference.
528pp, hardback
ISBN: 978-0-9909709-0-3