Hello Friends!
OP - June 26, 2014, 05:08 PM
I was encouraged to write an intro after posting in some of the religion threads...
I'm a lawyer who became interested in early Islamic history due to my focus on comparative legal history in law school (Roman law, early European law, ancient Middle Eastern legal codes, etc.), naturally segueing into studies on Shariah and its development.
I have a great interest in modern critical scholarship on Islam's emergence, and have a small library of books in that area. I think it is one of the most fascinating areas of modern scholarship, full of incredible hypotheses and arguments, extremely complicated evidence, and lots of peculiar biases. I avidly follow a number of sources for new scholarship in this area, and in the course of researching various scholars on the Internet I came across a number of discussions on the subforums for this website. There are some good discussions here, so I thought I'd chime in with my thoughts, for what they are worth.
My interest is primarily historical; I am less interested in contemporary issues relating to Islam or religion generally. But I will say that I have read some of the intro threads in this forum from ex-Muslims, and found them riveting.
At any rate, happy to meet y'all!