Voices of Islam Read Free Page A

cooperation with the Jerusalem-based Elijah Interfaith Institute, he is presently co-convener of a group of Muslim scholars, of whom some are contributors to Voices of Islam, which is working toward a new theology of the religious other in Islam. Besides serving as general editor for Voices of Islam, Dr. Cornell is also the volume editor for Volume 1, Voices of Tradition; Volume 2, Voices of the Spirit; and Volume 4, Voices of Art, Beauty, and Science.
    The associate editors for Voices of Islam are Omid Safi and Virginia Gray Henry-Blakemore. Omid Safi is Associate Professor of Religion at the Uni- versity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Safi the grandson of a noted Iranian Ayatollah, was born in the United States but raised in Iran and has been recognized as an important Muslim voice for moderation and diversity. He gained widespread praise for his edited first book, Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism (2003), and was interviewed on CNN, National Public Radio, and other major media outlets. He recently published an important study of Sufi-state relations in premodern Iran, The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam (2006). Dr. Safi is the volume editor for Vol- ume 5, Voices of Change, which contains chapters by many of the authors rep- resented in his earlier work, Progressive Muslims.
    Virginia Gray Henry-Blakemore has been a practicing Sunni Muslim for almost 40 years. She is director of the interfaith publishing houses Fons Vitae and Quinta Essentia and cofounder and trustee of the Islamic Texts Society of Cambridge, England. Some of the most influential families in Saudi
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    Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan have supported her publishing projects. She is an accomplished lecturer in art history, world religions, and filmmaking and is a founding member of the Thomas Merton Center Foundation. Henry- Blakemore received her BA at Sarah Lawrence College, studied at the Ameri- can University in Cairo and Al-Azhar University, earned her MA in Educa- tion at the University of Michigan, and served as a research fellow at Cambridge University from 1983 to 1990. She is the volume editor for Vol- ume 3, Voices of Life: Family, Home, and Society.

    THE AUTHORS

    As stated earlier, Voices of Islam seeks to meet the need for Muslims to bear witness to their own traditions by bringing together a diverse collection of Muslim voices from different regions and from different scholarly and profes- sional backgrounds. The voices that speak to the readers about Islam in this set come from Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, and include men and women, academics, community and religious leaders, teachers, activists, and business leaders. Some authors were born Muslims and others embraced Islam at various points in their lives. A variety of doctrinal, legal, and cultural positions are also represented, including modernists, traditionalists, legalists, Sunnis, Shiites, Sufis, and ‘‘progressive Muslims.’’ The editors of the set took care to represent as many Muslim points of view as possible, including those that they may disagree with. Although each chapter in the set was designed to provide basic information for the general reader on a particular topic, the authors were encouraged to express their individual voices of opinion and experience whenever possible.
    In theoretical terms, Voices of Islam treads a fine line between what Paul Veyne has called ‘‘specificity’’ and ‘‘singularity.’’ As both an introduction to Islam and as an expression of Islamic diversity, this set combines historical and commentarial approaches, as well as poetic and narrative accounts of individual experiences. Because of the wide range of subjects that are covered, individualized accounts (the ‘‘singular’’) make up much of the nar- rative of Voices of Islam, but the intent of the work is not to express individu- ality per se. Rather, the goal is to help the reader understand the varieties of