One Islam or Many? Making Sense of the Varieties of Islam

“Two facts confront someone studying Islam. One is the astounding variety of practices and beliefs that from place to place and time to time are considered to be Islam. The other is that Muslims, despite their manifest differences in practice and belief, tend to recognize one another as fellow Muslims”.  So writes Kevin Reinhart in explaining the problem that confronts anyone, Muslim or non-Muslim, in facing the visible facts of Islam in practice. In this episode, we explore ways to make sense of what is at once the plurality and unity of lived Islam. By using the analogy of language, we see how Islam can be interpreted as being ‘like’ a language that has ‘dialect’ features and ‘shared’ (or koiné) features, as well as a ‘standard’ version that, like the English of grammatical textbooks, isn’t necessarily followed by most speakers of English. Nile Green talks to A. Kevin Reinhart (Associate Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College), the author of Lived Islam: Colloquial Religion in a Cosmopolitan Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

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