The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present

The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present

Author: Youshaa Patel
Publisher: Yale University Press
Format: Hardback
ISBN: 9780300248968
Pages: 360p
Weight:
Year: 2022
Price: RM224

A sweeping history of Muslim identity from its origins in late antiquity to the present

How did Muslims across time and place define the line between themselves and their neighbors? Youshaa Patel explores why the Prophet Muhammad first advised his followers to emulate Christians and Jews, but then allegedly reversed course, urging them to “be different!” He details how subsequent generations of Muslim scholars canonized the Prophet’s admonition into an influential doctrine against imitation that enjoined ordinary believers to embody and display their religious difference in public life.

Tracing this Islamic discourse from its origins in Arabia to Mamluk and Ottoman Damascus, colonial Egypt, and beyond, this sweeping intellectual and social history offers a panoramic view of Muslim identity, revealing unexpected intersections between religion and other markers of difference across ethnicity, gender, and status. Patel illustrates that contemporary debates in the West over visible expressions of Islam, from headscarves and beards to minarets and mosques, are just the latest iterations in a long history of how small differences have defined Muslim interreligious encounters.