Abstract
This chapter introduces the idea behind the book. It deals broadly with the issue that the inspirational narratives of any religious origins involve a mixture of historical and legendary accounts. In terms of belief, fervour and meaning, it matters little to the ordinary believer in time which is which. At the same time, it points to the liability of any religion becoming a seedbed of fundamentalism if fact and legend are overly blurred and the symbolic nature of a religion’s inspirational narrative is not understood. It is argued that this is, in part, what has happened in Islam and some of the reason that religious radicalization has been so easy to fuel by Islamist radicals and so difficult to counter by Islamic authorities. The book then seeks to address this issue by exploring the formative narratives of Islam to see where history and legend coincide or deviate.
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Lovat, T., Moghadam, A. (2018). The Conceptual Argument: Re-Defining Religious Narrative. In: The History of Islam . SpringerBriefs in Religious Studies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67717-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67717-0_1
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