His articles on classical and modern Arabic literature have appeared in Spanish, English, Arabic, and Ukrainian.ContentsIntroduction: Reclaiming Arabian MythThe Textual PuzzleThe Thamudic Backdrop to the PuzzleThe First Answer to the Puzzle: The Raid on TabukThe Totem and the TabooPoeticizing the ThamudDemythologizing the ThamudThe ScreamThe Arabian Golden Bough and Kindred Branches: Frazer, Vergil, Homer, and GilgameshConclusion

The book dissects the intriguing Arab-Islamic myth built around Muhammad's unearthing of a "golden bough" from the grave of the last survivor of an ancient Arab people, the Thamud, who, according to the myth, were destroyed by a divine scourge for their iniquity. In the myth the episode of the slaying of the she-camel of the prophet Salih, which precipitates the downfall of the Thamud, is symbolically linked with Muhammad, the discoverer of the golden bough.

The questioning of dogmatic constructs from within.

"Approaching the Qur'an captures the complexity, power, and poetry of the early suras, or chapters, of the Qur'an, the sacred scripture of Islam. Michael Sells presents brilliant translations of the short, hymnic suras associated with the first revelations to the Prophet Muhammad. In the second edition, Sells offers a new translation and commentary on the Sura of the Compassionate (al-Rahmān), which holds a special place within Islamic devotion and literature. Additionally, a new preface addresses the ongoing controversy over teaching about Islam and the Qur'an in Americna universities." --from Publisher.

The formation of any scholarly discourse is contingent upon the creation of a vocabulary and a set of categories responsible for manufacturing the data that it deems "significant" or not. The discovery of raw data, the manufacture of theoretical or interpretive frameworks that make sense of such data, and subsequent scholarly conventions responsible for its dissemination are always mediated by particular social, ideological, and political contexts. This book documents these contexts in the creation of the discipline known as Islamic Studies and demonstrates how they have been instrumental in shaping how we think about Islam in both the academy and, especially post 9/11, in the media. This volume argues that knowledge of Islam has never been innocent or about the simple collection of facts, but that the interpretive lenses used to study Islam have always been and continue to be caught up with larger forces (e.g., the reform of Judaism, Orientalism, identity politics of the 1960s, 9/11, the fight against terrorism, the creation of a liberal Islam). Whereas previous work is content to show the nefarious influence of Orientalism in the creation of Islamic data and the formation of an essentialized Islam, Situating Islam argues that the opposite approach - the construction of an authentic Islam that coincides effortlessly with Western values - is equally problematic. The work concludes by examining how Islamic data has the potential to help us better understand how we construct and contest "religion."