These two volumes are among the first works to be published as part of a five-year project, Changing Structures of Islamic Authority and Consequences for Social Change: A Transnational Review, which I initiated in 2014 with the support of a European Research Council (ERC) Start-up Grant: European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement no. [337108]. These ERC investigator grants, as they are more commonly known, invest in a compelling research idea by allowing the Principal Investigator the time (five years) and resources (close to 1.5 million Euros) to build a team. These volumes are a product of one such team effort.

Since September 11, 2001, Islamic legal and political thought, as well as the socio-economic and political attitudes of Muslims, have been intensively researched. However, the debate on whether it is the text or the context that drives some Muslims to espouse radical ideals remains unsettled. This project stems from a desire to explicitly address this question and map the plurality of Islamic intellectual thought; to see how scholars from within the dominant Islamic traditions engage with modernity; and, equally importantly, to present some decisive findings on what, if any, is the relationship between the socioeconomic and political conditions in which the Muslims in question find themselves and their interpretation of the text. Why is it, after all, that intellectual and rationalist inquiry seemed to have flourished best within Muslim societies when they were politically and economically flourishing, and conservative and inward-looking Islamic movements developed strong roots in many Muslim countries under colonial rule, when Muslims were politically and economically marginalized? Historical analysis suggests that context plays a role in how the text is interpreted. As a social scientist interested in the study of societal conditions and Islamic knowledge transmission, mapping the influence of context in both the creation and transmission of Islamic knowledge remains core to my research. My focus in developing this project was thus two-fold: one, to examine how globally influential Islamic scholarly platforms are engaging with change, with a view to mapping the plurality within the tradition; and, two, to situate each tradition within the socio-economic and political conditions in which it evolved, in order to better understand its historical evolution, and consequently to better predict how its current relationship with the state and society may influence its future trajectory.