Critical Islamic Reflections: About

The Critical Islamic Reflections group has successfully run three prior conferences: "Rooting Islam in America", "Muhammad the Prophet in the Academy", and "Islamic Law: Questions of Authority and Change". Past programs have featured leading and emerging scholars in the American Islamic context, many of whom possess backgrounds in both traditional Islamic learning and Anglo-American academia.

Mission:

The conference is designed to provide a broad framework to continually pursue a sophisticated understanding and discourse of issues pertinent to Muslims in America in light of prevailing realities. While focusing discussion around contemporary American discourses this year, we aim to examine this and related issues against a backdrop of broader, more fundamental questions confronting Islam and other religions. Those considerations include the following:

What is the relationship between religious conviction and academic inquiry? What is an effective and legitimate articulation of the compatibility of faith and academia?
What is the nature of the Islamic intellectual and scientific tradition - its scope, intellectual rigor, and comparison with contemporary Western academic methods?
What is the relationship between "intellectual Islam" and the wider Muslim community? Assuming there is access, how can access to academic/intellectual Islam empower or fail to serve this majority?