Book Review of Studying Islam in the Arab World: The Rupture Between Religion and the Social Sciences, written by Sari Hanafi, trans. T. Parker (Routledge: London and New York, 2024).

This book, written by Sari Hanafi, professor of Sociology at the American University of Beirut, former president of the International Sociological Association (ISA) and former vice president of the Board of Trustees of the Arab Council for Social Sciences (ACSS), studies how some major classical and modern Arab and Islamic colleges and universities of religious studies integrate or ignore the social sciences from their curricula, research, and publications. The book is an updated and shorter version of the same work published originally in Arabic ʻUlūm al-sharʻ wa-al-ʻulūm al-ijtimāʻīya: naḥwa tajāwuz al-qaṭīʻa in 2021 by Nohoudh Center for Studies and Research in Kuwait. This work is the result of field research conducted between 2015 and 2020 to study shari‘a departments and their curricula in five Muslim majority societies of the Arab and Islamic world (Morocco in the Maghrib, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria in the Mashriq, Qatar and Kuwait in the Gulf, and Malaysia) (Chapters 2–9). Interviews with 263 teachers, deans, and students in Shari‘a and Islamic Studies colleges in the five countries are conducted, besides the study of Friday sermons, curricula of undergraduate and graduate levels in prominent colleges, Masters and PhD theses, and specialized Islamic studies journals.