Religion as Critique

“[Irfan] Ahmad has written an important, sophisticated, and provocative book. This book stands in the best tradition of contemporary Islamic studies.”—Marginalia: Los Angeles Review of Books

“Religion as Critique is literally a tour de force that combines different objectives around the central axis of showing how believers in Islam act as 'dynamic agents . . . of critique'.”—South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

“Original and compelling. . . . This important text will be of interest to a wide range of scholars from the social sciences to the humanities committed to better understanding what a postcolonial ethic toward scholarship on Muslims and Islam in the context of rising Islamophobia might look like.”—Nova Religio

“The book is written in a passionate and engaging style and can easily persuade the reader to finish it at a sitting as its vocabulary is rich and varied and its rhetoric well-crafted, illustrated with poetry, proverbs and personal anecdotes. . . . This book is at once a challenging and exciting work.”—Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations

“Thoughtful, nuanced, questioning, exploratory, Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace is a brave book and a timely one.” — The Hindu

“Ahmad writes as both a philosopher and an anthropologist. . . . What Ahmad does in assessing Abdul Ghaffar Khan is nothing short of revisionism at its most extreme, and daring, pinnacle. . . . Irfan Ahmad deserves the acclaim that . . . Khan has been denied, but may now regain, in part thanks to this lucid, imaginative analysis of his life, his movement, and his legacy.”—Critical Research on Religion

“Scholars of religion and philosophy will find plenty of challenges to assumptions about what counts as critique and who can deploy it.” — Publishers Weekly

“Offers an interesting opposition to the West-and-the-rest narratives of an European Enlightenment radiating outwards from Greece and Germany into the backward corners of a darker world.” — Al Jazeera

“Expands the idea of critique itself. [Ahmad] offers new theoretical considerations of modernity and change, taking on such salient issues as nationhood, women’s equality, the state, culture, democracy and secularism.”—Islamic Horizons

“A bold academic contribution that presents an alternative narrative of India and Islam that is seldom discussed in mainstream academic discourse and . . . is recommended not only to readers of anthropology and religion, but also to those interested in philosophy and discursive practices.”—Open