Author Meets Critics: Revisiting Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination after 20 Years

The publication of Ebrahim Moosa's Ghazālī and the Poetics of imagination (UNC Press 2005), winner of the 2006 AAR book award for Best First Book in the History of Religions, was a monumental moment in Islamic Studies and the study of religion more broadly. This monograph pioneered an approach to Islamic Studies that was simultaneously intensely philological, fiercely theoretical, and unabashedly normative in its proposals for reenergizing the Islamic intellectual tradition. This panel brings together four scholars at varied career stages, disciplinary persuasions, and foci of specialization to interrogate and reflect on the importance, implications, as well as the limits and tensions of Moosa's monograph twenty years later.