ABSTRACT
The term ‘Islam’ in the context of social science research gathers meaning in two senses; as a socio-religious notion and as a theoretical framework as well. Islam as a socio-religious notion is understood or makes meaning in the academic domain mainly through its historical and contemporary social, cultural, and political interventions. As a theoretical framework, the term represents a methodological shift of a sort by problematizing the given methods or an unlearning of the conventional ones. This often results from the refusal to accept a given ontology legitimized through certain hegemonic practices, structures, and relations of power. This work explores some of the methodological and political directions that collectively lead to the repositioning of ‘Islam’ in social science research as both an epistemic/ontological category and as a method and the chapters that follow are nothing but an attempt to understand the research in the Islamic context vis-à-vis these two distinct yet somehow interrelated frames. The question being raised here is how Islam as socio-religious notion is related to Islam as a theoretical/methodological framework.
