| Summary: | <p>This thesis argues for the significance of ‘the ordinary’ within Islam, closely examining and building upon the work of Pakistani Islamic thinker Javēd Aḥmad Ghāmidī (b. 1952). It makes the case that moral life, according to Islam, primarily consists of our everyday thoughts, feelings, and actions, in comparison to Islamic traditions in contemporary South Asia, which often resist the prominence of the ordinary. Instead, most Islamic traditions assert that ‘the extraordinary’, an event beyond our everyday actions and causes, shapes our moral lives.</p>
<p>This thesis explores the intellectual tension over the ordinariness of moral life in Islam within the context of prophethood. It is argued that for many Islamic traditions, prophethood represents the extraordinary par excellence, viewing post-prophetic moral life as characterised by a genre of prophetic events, namely transcendence, shock, and apocalypse. Ghāmidī instead maintains that the event of prophethood cannot be experienced again but remains morally significant to everyday life.</p>
<p>The thesis examines these contrasting views of prophethood through two analytical endeavours. Firstly, it utilises recent scholarship in everyday life studies to formally identify and evaluate various forms of the ordinary and extraordinary in contemporary Islamic discourses on prophethood. Secondly, it builds upon Ghāmidī’s unique literary exegesis of the Qur’ān as the narrative representation of prophethood to classify different representations of prophethood in Islamic traditions.</p>
<p>Focusing on Ghāmidī’s intellectual context of contemporary South Asia, this thesis closely examines his body of work, which exists entirely in Urdu, alongside relevant Sufi, Islamist, and Sunnī texts from South Asia. This examination is supported by relevant secondary literature, including everyday life scholarship on twentieth-century European and American literary modernism. The thesis comprises six chapters: an introduction, four core chapters, and a conclusion. The core chapters trace conflicting representations of prophethood across four selected topics: prophethood, politics, eschatology, and moral life.</p>
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