KRM is partnering with scholars around the world on the completion of a contemporary catalogue of Islamic analytic resources in electronic form, with over 2000 historical and contemporary works. The catalogue is edited by leading scholars at the universities of McGill, Canada, and Colgate, US.
The catalogue aims to offer a continuous and curated list of key texts which describes the role and importance of the key works, and helps construct a complete timeline from Classical to Contemporary. This part of the project is divided into three research periods—Classical, Post-Classical, and Modern—that will be published as a 3-volume series that details the 2000 most significant works from the classical period to the present day.
The first volume looks at the entry of Greek thought into the Muslim world during the Abbasid period, until the naturalization of Greek into kalam instigated by Al Ghazali. As such this volume highlights the main works that reflect the entry of Greek thought into the Islamic thought world, its reception, commentary, modification, and eventual formation into Sunni kalam.
The second volume, to be edited by Professor Robert Wisnovsky from the McGill and is team, seeks to explore the world of commentary and glosses of the madrasa, after the initial naturalization, and takes the reader from the Classical period to the advent of Modernism. McGill’s Institute of Islamic Studies, under the leadership of Professor Wisnovsky, is one of the leading centres in the world in the cataloguing of Islamic manuscripts.
The third volume, to be edited by Dr Aaron Spevack from Colgate University and with the assistance of Dr Nazif Muhtaroglu from Istanbul, looks at the period from the time of the French Revolution—whose ideas caught on early in Ottoman Turkey—and continues all the way to the present day. Looking at how Muslim scholars from around the world dealt with the presence of these ideas, this volume focuses on the treatises by the most outstanding mutakallimin that were not part of the traditional madrasa curriculum.
