This article presents the findings of a national survey on Islam in Australia based on responses of 1034 Muslim Australian citizens and permanent residents. Knowing what Muslim Australians think about Islam in relation to Australian society is essential for a more informed understanding about Islam and Muslims needed to address misinformation, Islamophobia, and extremism. The findings presented in this article include typologies of Muslims; sources of influence concerning Islam; interpretations of the Qur’an; perspectives on ethical, social, and theological issues; issues of concern; social connections and sense of belonging; views on various Muslim-majority countries; and perspectives concerning political Islam, including jihad, caliphate, and shariah. While respondents’ understandings, interpretations, and expressions of Islam overall align with values and principles of equality, human rights, social cohesion, and social justice, a minority were found to understand and interpret Islam in ways that reflect the influence of late 20th and early 21st century ideas associated with Islamist political ideology, and a smaller sub-group were found to have views that could be considered extreme. This article discusses these findings in relation to the early 21st century time-period factors and the Australian social context.

Many of the contemporary political conflicts in Muslim-majority countries are said to pit modern secularists against the “backward” Islamists. However an important stream of contemporary Muslim thought—critical-progressive Muslim thought—refuses to accept either a hegemony of Western secularism or a hegemony of Islamist fundamentalism. Critical-progressive Muslim scholar-activists are reinterpreting the normative teachings of the Muslim worldview and developing a distinctive third-way approach. There are several key political and policy ramifications of this stream of thought, including a robust commitment to religious freedom, but within Islamic terms, not terms dictated by non-Muslim Westerners preoccupied with their own security interests.

This article critically examines certain custom (ʿurf) based assumptions and theories regarding gender roles and norms in Sunni Islamic tradition and law. First the article considers how scholarship should conceptualize Islamic tradition. Next, the processes through which the concept of ʿurf has entered into the Islamic tradition and Islamic law in particular are considered. The ʿurf based assumptions regarding the nature of gender roles and norms in (neo)-traditional Muslim thought are based on what I term a “gender oppositionality” thesis. I argue that the gender oppositionality thesis has strongly influenced the manner in which the Qurʾān and Sunna have been interpreted with respect to gender issues and on the basis of which patriarchal traditional Islamic law (and ethics) have been constructed. In particular, I highlight and problematize the conceptual link between women as “fitna” (sources of chaos), male honor (ʿird) and sexual jealousy (ghairāt) in discourses in (neo-)traditional interpretations of the Islamic tradition. Finally, the article articulates how traditional Qurʾān–Sunna hermeneutics failed to recognize the importance of “comprehensive contextualization” of the Qurʾān–Sunna on the basis of which we can question the validity of gender-oppositionality based interpretations of the Qurʾān and Sunna present in (neo-)traditional discourses that were incorporated into Islamic law through the concept of custom.

The aim of this article is to point to the hermeneutical limits of the critique of mainstream Sunnism vis-a-vis the Salafi-jihadist interpretations with particular reference to the literature produced by the proponents of the IS. The main argument the article makes is that by subscribing to what will be termed a “Salafi worldview,” mainstream Sunnism shares many interpretationally crucial epistemological and methodological mechanisms with those adopted by the proponents of the ideology behind the IS. As such mainstream Sunnism has strong hermeneutical limits that do not allow it to be in a position to mount an interpretationally effective rebuttal of many beliefs and practices Salafi-jihadists resort to including those pertaining to apostasy, enslavement, and gender-related issues.

This article aims to explain the ideas and the significance of Dr. Bilal Philips, a prominent ‘Salafi‘preacher, a major proponent of Neo-Traditional Salafism, and how his writings and activities can aid us in understanding the dynamics regarding the nature of Salafism in the West as a discursive tradition with deep roots in the Islamic intellectual history, as well as an element of global Salafi movements. As such, the article focuses primarily on identifying and analyzing Philips’ ideas on what constitutes a proper approach to interpreting the Qur’ān and Sunna in the light of the Islamic legal and exegetical tradition. After discussing the reasons why the ideas of Philips are significant for understanding Salafism in the West, the article focuses on his views on the conceptual relationship between sunna and hadīth, the broader hermeneutic characterization of the main four Sunni schools of thought (madhāhib), and issues pertaining to the correct methodology of Qur’ānic exegesis (tafsīr). The article also discusses the internal factionalism and the contentedness of the category of Salafism among western Salafis by examining one critique levelled at Philips by his fellow Salafis residing in the West, with the view of not only understanding and situating the views of Philips more accurately but also to provide an avenue to understand the internal Salafi dynamics in the West in particular.