ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the interpretive repertoire of scholars, students, and other thinkers who are trained to be wary of generalizations about scripture, religion, and violence – readers who are trained to think in contextual and nuanced ways about religion and who understand it to be a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. It argues that the pernicious consequences of bad generalizations about religion — such as stereotyping, otherizing, and legitimation of oppressive power dynamics — are not automatically avoided by simply reducing the number of referents to which a claim applies and by choosing to make statements about some members of a group. The chapter shows that it is possible to talk about “only some Muslims” or to specify the number or particular group of Muslims to which one’s claim pertains, and yet to posit some sort of essence that makes Islam or the Qur’an violent.
