How to evaluate narrative-historical sources is the subject of intense controversies in Islamic Studies and beyond. Arguably, no student of Islamic history can escape the conundrum of debates surrounding these sources. Chase Robinson aptly observed, “it is a measure of just how conservative the professional study of Islamic history remains that the noisiest controversy of the last 25 years concerns the reliability of our written sources, rather than the models according to which we are to understand and use them.” When a scholar makes a claim about the supposed “unreliability” of late antique Islamic sources, she often operates under the positivist assumption of the existence of an “original Truth” that can be discovered through a specific methodology...

The little-known and undated manuscript that will be the focus of the second part of this essay, the Buku Doa dan Jampi, was apparently written in the nineteenth century. It uses different short and long phrases in dealing with supplications (doa-doa), incantations or spells (jampi dan petua), and rituals. One supplication begins “in the name of the Restorer of Health, in the name of the All-Sufficing, in the name of the Forgiver…” According to Islamic teachings, these Arabic terms are among the beautiful names of Allah, extensively used in talismans and amulets to protect a child, heal a patient, increase property, and so on...

Perhaps the main takeaway students and scholars of Islam should derive from Shahab Ahmed's What Is Islam? is that instead of avoiding definitions of Islam, blithely insisting that the sheer diversity of Muslim thought, practice, and experience makes such an enterprise impossible, we should tackle the question head-on and consider what that diversity really means for the problem of definition. But how to move forward? How best to explore the implications of such an argument, operationalizing the consequences of his observations in practical terms?