---

In What Is Islam?, Shahab Ahmed presents a bold new conceptualization of Islam that challenges dominant understandings grounded in the categories of "religion" and "culture" or those that privilege law and scripture. He argues that these modes of thinking obstruct us from understanding Islam, distorting it, diminishing it, and rendering it incoherent. What Is Islam? formulates a new conceptual language for analyzing Islam. It presents a new paradigm of how Muslims have historically understood divine revelation - one that enables us to understand how and why Muslims through history have embraced values such as exploration, ambiguity, aestheticization, polyvalence, and relativism, as well as practices such as figural art, music, and even wine drinking as Islamic

---

"Anyone interested in exploring the intricacies and complexities of Islam as a religion, philosophical system and social text should study the new bookWhat Is Islam? [A] perfect antidote to our present discourse."--Hussein Ibish, New York Times

---

Shahab Ahmed (1966-2015) was postdoctoral associate in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University.

---