Editorial Note

Abstract

This issue of the American Journal of Islam and Society comprises four research articles, which engage themes of development and change within the Islamic tradition alongside questions of Muslim identity.

We begin with Abbas Jong’s work, “Reconfiguring Political Islam: A Discursive Tradition Approach.” In this article, Jong offers a thorough, deeply theoretical engagement with the concept of discursive tradition, which he restructures via the concept of social configuration.

We then turn to a study by Malik Mufti, “The Catholic Experience in America from Orestes Brownson to the Bozells: A Precedent for Muslims?” Malik’s point of departure is to consider the history of American Catholicism and its adaptation to the “American creed,” a part of an American liberal culture “that is both formally tolerant and ideologically compelling” to immigrants and their religious traditions.

As our third research article for this issue, we then have Hamdija Begovic’s “From Ummatic Muslims to State-centered Bosniacs: The Case of the Muslims of Bosnia.” Here, Begovic considers the evolution of the national identity of Bosnian Muslims throughout the 20th century from what he calls an “Ummatic-centric focus” that uses the label “Muslims,” toward a secularized identity demonstrated through their adoption of the ethnonym “Bosniacs.”

The fourth and final research article in this issue is Bilkis Bharucha’s article, “Islam, Science, and the Environment: An Application of Ibrahim Kalin’s “Three Views of Science in the Islamic World,” which offers a critical application of Kalin’s framework to contemporary debates on Islam and environmental ethics.