Author Meets Critics Roundtable on Tehseen Thaver's Beyond Sectarianism + Business Meeting

This author-meets-critics roundtable focuses on Professor Tehseen Thaver of Princeton University’s new book Beyond Sectarianism: Ambiguity, Hermeneutics, and the Formations of Religious Identity in Early Islam (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023). It argues that a narrow sectarian driven approach to the study of Shi‘i Qur’an commentary traditions, one that assumes perfect correspondence between sectarian identity and hermeneutics, conceals more than it reveals. Although marked as a Shi‘i scholar and exegete, the interpretive and political horizons that informed al-Radi’s scholarly endeavors were irreducible to predetermined templates of sectarian identity corresponding to often presumed signature features of Shi‘i theology and identity such as privileging interiority and the religious authority of the Imams. Rather, Thaver argues, al-Radi was an active participant and beneficiary of critical intellectual currents and debates that animated the wider Muslim humanities during his life, especially on questions of language, poetry, and theology.