Bridging the Divide

Bridging the Divide: Beyond the Ethics of Disagreement is the title of two books with independent titles that have been subsumed by the author under the single title above, since both works cover the same theme and the later work covers some of the ground of the initial work. The first of the two works is The Ethics of Disagreement in Islam while the second is Preserving Unity and Avoiding Division: A New Approach to the Ethics of Disagreement in Islam. The first work was originally published in 1993 and having bought the 2011 reprint many years ago, I was initially somewhat confused by the author’s claim, in Bridging the Divide (published in 2024), that he had revised his ideas and wanted to maintain his original work, whether that meant the second of the two books in Bridging the Divide was the actual revision or whether that was a completely different work and that the Ethics of Disagreement, the first work in this duo, had in fact been revised. Clarifying this unequivocally at the outset would have been helpful even though there is some mention of this on the last page of the introduction (though it is still confusing since the introductions for both books are the same). The second work is a revision of the first with plenty of additional material: the first work remains unchanged. Thus, The Ethics of Disagreement reproduced here is identical to the 2011 reprint. It is prefaced by a long introduction (written mostly for the second work), however, this has somehow been duplicated in this single volume, before both books respectively; the same is the case for the two forewords. Since a new title was given for both books, it is only reasonable to have the expectation that both books should not appear together in their entirety without revision as if they have been glued together; trimming would have brought this work of over five-hundred pages down by at least twenty-five pages.