Jonathan A.C. Brown's Blog

I once found myself trapped on a phone call with an exercised adherent of the Ḥanafī school of Islamic law who made it clear that the conversation was not going to end until I acknowledged that Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 767), the school’s founder, was the greatest Hadith scholar in Islamic history. This is not unheard…

PDF Version Summery: There is near uniform agreement today that slavery is wrong. But that does not mean that everything we have labeled ‘slavery’ was always wrong in every time and every place. Confusion over this stems from two ambiguities: 1) use of the word ‘slavery’ to refer to a vast spectrum of dramatically different…

PDF Version I recently returned from teaching at the wonderful Ihsan Program in Istanbul (I highly recommend this for young Muslims), where, as usual, students peppered me with questions about how Muslims should deal with the ‘LGBTQ issue.’ I have presented my position several times before, once in Variety, once at ImanWire in the aftermath of the tragic Pulse Nightclub shooting, and again in…

Like I always say, never a boring moment for Muslims in America.  So there have been some controversies of late regarding women accusing high-profile Muslim scholars of sexual misconduct of various sorts.  All this has unfolded as the dam of public opprobrium finally broke before the accumulated weight of dozens of reports that Hollywood mogul…

This article is published in the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34, no. 3 (2017). Since the journal uses transliteration conventions that I do not prefer, and since the published version introduced some minor errors into the text, I’m providing this version of the manuscript, which is more correct. Download PDF

Often the only things people in the West associate with Islam are stoning and hand chopping. These images permeate our culture, from the trailer of hits like Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) to straight-to-cable pablum like Escape: Human Cargo (1998) (again, in the trailer… ‘If you can’t live by their rules, you might die by…

Is it just me, or is being a Muslim in the US a rollercoaster ride?  There’s so much to discuss! Top on the list is, of course, the imminent Trump administration. Like many in this country, since November 9th I’ve alternated between stupefaction, acute anxiety and invigoration for the… interactions (?) to come. This is an…

For many, politics is a dirty word. This is understandable. At its best, it often requires compromising principles. At its worst, it perverts them altogether. But politics has also always been inevitable. At its simplest, it is about coordinating cooperation on some basic task, like bringing down a woolly mammoth or building a waterwheel. At…

Not long ago one of my students approached me asking my opinion on a small text that had been circulating on social media, particularly amongst advocates of Progressive Islam.  The snippet of text was fascinating, since it touched on a major question of Islamic law and legal reform, namely the competing authority of the original…

A week ago I was in Sarajevo having a pleasant dinner with some academic colleagues from the university there. One scholar about my age asked my advice on how to be a productive scholar writing while raising young kids. I shared what I’d learned… kids need to sleep, and you need your time to work……