Brannon Wheeler

Islam is the only biblical religion that still practices animal sacrifice. Indeed, every year more than a million animals are shipped to Mecca from all over the world to be slaughtered during the Muslim Hajj. This multi-disciplinary volume is the first to examine the physical foundations of this practice and  the significance of the ritual. Brannon Wheeler uses both textual analysis and various types of material evidence to gain insight into the role of animal sacrifice in Islam. He provides a 'thick description' of the elaborate camel sacrifice performed by Muhammad, which serves as the model for future Hajj sacrifices. Wheeler integrates biblical and classical Arabic sources with evidence from zooarchaeology and the rock art of ancient Arabia to gain insight into an event that reportedly occurred 1400 years ago. His book encourages a more nuanced and expansive conception of “sacrifice” in the history of religion.

Recent scholarship focuses on the plasticity of the concept of “scripture” as it is defined by different religious traditions. Based on its contents, the Quran is most commonly compared to the Bible, yet such an approach misses the distinct way that the Quran is understood as an authoritative text by classical Muslim scholarship. Even “basic” information—knowing the number of words, the names of surahs, the structure of the text—is essential to understanding how Muslims see the Quran as scripture and the foundations upon which it is built. Muslims regard the Quran as the word of God, revealed to the prophet Muhammad, the primary source for determining the beliefs and practices of Islam. The text of the Quran is used in the teaching of Arabic and is the focus of Islamic learning. It is regarded as interceding on behalf of those who revere it, is recited as a part of regular rituals, and is treated as a sacred object in ritual and everyday settings. The exegetical and ritual use of th...

Is there an Islamic version of the UN doctrine of the "Responsibility to Protect"? Are Muslims obligated to defend their own community, and to save the rest of the world from tyranny andoppression? The UN doctrine commits member states to protect people from certain types of harm, and specifically includes protecting populations from their own governments. If a comparable Islamic doctrine exists, it is especially ironic that the UN doctrine is so frequently applied to Muslim majority countries in the Middle East. This irony allows for a new perspective on the continuing conceptual and physical conflicts between western powers and states in the Middle East.

RECENT scholarship in the history of religions has focused on how a given sacred text or canon is interpreted by the people who claim the authoritative status of that canon. It has been argued, in particular, that the appropriation and application of a canon consti-tute a ...

An examination of a number of unpublished commentaries on the Mukhtasar fī al-fiqh al-Hanafī of Ahmad b. Muhammad al-Qudūrī (d. 428/1037), shows that the Hanafī madhhab gains its authority and identity through a pedagogy focused on the conflict of opinions. Hanafī fiqh scholarship provides a case study of how commentary functions to define and perpetuate the institutional identity of individual scholars and the madhhab to which they are attached. Over time, the distinctions among the Hanafī authorities and between the Hanafī authorities and other non-Hanafī authorities were stressed and these distinctions multiplied rather than diminished. It is this conflict of opinions which seems to characterize Hanafī fiqh scholarship and serves as the primary means for the identification of individual scholarship and the authority of the madhhab as a whole. These unpublished commentaries show that being a Hanafī is not a matter of imitating earlier opinions, but rather suggest that Hanafī identity is linked to the authority of the members of the Hanafī madhhab who have learned to do fiqh through the medium of the ikhtilāf displayed in Hanafī textbooks.

Page 1. THE JEWISH ORIGINS OF QUR'AN 18:65-82? REEXAMINING ARENT JAN WENSINCK'S THEORY BRANNON M. WHEELER UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON The story of Moses and the anonymous servant of God mentioned in Q 18:65-82 has elicited much comment. ...