The Work of Constructive Muslim Thought and Engaged Scholarship

his special issue of the Muslim World gathers seven essays developed from the proceedings of the 2023 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion.In specific, they are critical pieces that have emerged from a seminar dedicated to scholarship connected to the work of constructive Muslim thought.To better situate these essays, a brief history of the seminar in question is in order.In 2019 Najeeba Syeed and I submitted a proposal for a five-year seminar at the American Academy of Religion (AAR) under the title "Constructive Muslim Thought and Engaged Scholarship."By design, seminars at the AAR are intended to be exploratory and collaborative spaces where participants worked collectively towards eventual publication.We believed that this setting and framework was well suited for what we envisioned, namely a forum that would 1) allow committed scholars working in constructive and/or ethics-informed modes to gather and develop their work while also 2) delineating the parameters of an area of critical inquiry distinct from the already capacious umbrella of Islamic Studies.In other words, we were seeking a space where we might explore critically with others the nature of constructive Muslim scholarship and what it might become.The application process allowed us to refine our aspirations and resulted in a mission statement:This seminar is aimed at exploring the developing academic discourse of constructive Muslim thought as a disciplinary field.Constructive Muslim thought is a broad and rich field of critical inquiry that involves both knowledge production and praxis.The constructive Muslim discourse is the cumulative result of the pioneering work of Muslim feminist scholars, postcolonial thinkers, decolonial thinkers, ethicists, scholars of Islam and critical race theory, among many others.Structural critique, ethical discernment, and community engagement are integral aspects of this broad body of scholarship.The organizers of this seminar argue that this expansive array of work can be construed as constituting an emergent new field within the academy, namely "constructive Muslim thought," which runs parallels with, but is distinct from the study of Islam and Muslims.The seminar is envisioned as a space for scholars of the study of Islam and Muslims and academic practitioners of engaged scholarship from out of the Islamic tradition (broadly conceived) to share and develop their research in conversation with one another.Specifically, over the course of five years, the seminar will critically examine two