Islam as a Spectrum

The Western tendency to essentialize any entity or ideology as “the other” has functioned as the myopic apparatus through which it has viewed the outside world since the dawn of its global predominance. In the modern era, this inclination has focused on no other subject as fixedly as it has on the ‘Muslim’ world. “Otherizing” Islam has stripped the religion of its vast jurisprudential divergences and Muslims of their cultural and societal diversity. To even pursue a research question that deals with the entirety of Islam is presupposing that Islam can be boiled down to an essential element which can…