American Journal of Islam and Society Vol 40 No 1-2.indb 2 Editorial Note O V A M I R A N J U M In your hands is the 40th volume of the American Journal of Islam and Society, which began its publication as the American Journal of Islamic Studies, and was published for many years as the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences. The journal has, by God’s grace, played a pio- neering role over this period in bringing together Islamic and Western academic realms of scholarship. As part of the commemoration of the 40th anniversary, we are pleased to announce three initiatives. First, a special issue that will feature the most cited/read articles over the life of the journal under the editorship of our esteemed former editor, Dr. Katherine Bullock. In addition, we would also like to announce our new Call for Papers that you will find on the next page, with details on our website ajis.org. Finally, as an additional incentive, we are offering special honorarium for accepted articles by early career scholars, as announced on our website. We also have the pleasure to welcome Dr. David H. Warren as the new assistant editor and say farewell to Professor Basit Kareem Iqbal, whose contribution to improving the quality of our journal has been immeasurable. We pray for his success in what promises to be a bright and fruitful career. Dr. Warren’s appointment is a great win for the journal. He received his PhD from the University of Manchester in 2015 and is currently Lecturer of Middle East Studies & Arabic at Washington E d i t O R i A L N O t E  3 University in St. Louis. His research considers how the Muslim scholarly elite in the modern day have engaged with authoritarian regimes in the Arab World, and some of the different ways this has impacted their intellectual production. He has authored several influential articles, and his first book, Rivals in the Gulf: Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Abdullah Bin Bayyah, and the Qatar-UAE Contest Over the Middle East and the Gulf Crisis was published by Routledge in 2021. In this issue, you will find three peer-reviewed articles and two forum essays. Adrien A. P. Chauvet’s “Cosmographical readings of the Qurʾan” is a trained physicist’s probing, multidisciplinary inquiry about a topic of great interest to the recent generations of Muslims about the compatibility of Islam and science, and about the obvious exuberance Muslims feel when some modern discoveries point to the Qurʾanic truth. As a trained physicist, he wonders whether and how we can be sure that the scientific paradigms endorsed today will endure, and therefore, more pertinently, “how can the text stay scientifically relevant across the ages, while science itself is evolving?” It thus advances the scholarship on the scriptures’ relevance to past and present scientific paradigms, reviewing multiple ancient cosmographical paradigms (Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Hebraic, Greek, Christian, Zoroastrian and Manichean) as well as modern ones, while being grounded in Islamic theology and philosophy of sci- ence. It manages to advance a novel thesis in the growing field of Islam and science, advocating for a multiplicity of correspondences between both past and modern scientific paradigms, even if these paradigms con- flict with one another. Louay Fatoohi’s erudite contribution “The Non-Crucifixion Verse: A Historical, Contextual, and Linguistic Analysis” carefully examines the evidence supporting the consensus Muslim view that the Qurʾan denies the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and challenges the fringe view that calls this into question. In the process, our author, a trained scholar in applied historical astronomy and a widely published author in Islamic and biblical studies presents a range of classical and modern views to support the established view. In “Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s Jurisprudence of Priorities: A Critical Assessment,” Murie A. Hassan of the University of Melbourne, Australia, 4  A M E R i C A N J O U R N A L O F i S L A M A N d S O C i E t Y 4 0 : 1 - 2 assesses a key and widely employed, but scantily examined legal inno- vation by our era’s most influential Muslim legal authority, al-Qaradawi (d. 2022). The distinguished Egyptian jurist had proposed and for decades applied the idea of “the jurisprudence of priorities” (fiqh al-awlawiyyāt) to mitigate what he saw as excess and negligence in legal reasoning. This article examines this principle in light of the foundational sources of Islamic law and argues that the fundamental principles of the juris- prudence of priorities indeed find a strong echo in the sources of Islamic law and possess the potential to mitigate excess and negligence in legal reasoning. In our forum section (i.e., non-reviewed scholarly essays), we include two contributions, one timely and the other about time itself. Well- known Bosnian intellectual Enes Karić explores the notion of time in the Qurʾan, touching on the semantic richness of the vocabulary of the Qurʾan and inviting further philological, theological, and philosophical studies in this vein. In the second forum essay, Indonesian intellectual Muhammad Saekul Mujahidin warns that Sri Lanka has witnessed many examples of anti-Muslim sentiment and violence since the end of the civil war, especially in 2014 when ethnic unrest affected many, and Sinhalese monks and Buddhists appear to have played an important role in the unrest. The recent rise in Sri Lankan Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sen- timent is suggested by campaigns against halal products on food, Muslim women’s clothing, the slaughter of livestock in Muslim religious rituals, and attacks on mosques and Muslim-owned businesses, the push toward mandatory cremation for all Sri Lankans regardless of the religion during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the closure of Islamic schools. Ovamir Anjum Imam Khattab Endowed Chair of Islamic Studies Professor, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Toledo, Ohio Editor, American Journal of Islam and Society doi: 10.35632/ajis.v40i1-2.3255 5 Call for Papers Special Issue Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the American Journal of Islam and Society (est.1984) The Study of Islam and Society in the Modern Academy The American Journal of Islam and Society, previously the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, showcases a wide variety of scholarly research on all facets of Islam and the Muslim World (e.g., anthropology, economics, history, philosophy and metaphysics, politics, psychology, law etc.) and publishes scholarship that pertains to the myriad ways in which Islam and human societies interact. The Journal is delighted to be celebrating the 40th Anniversary of its founding in 1984. In recognition of this milestone, AJIS is pleased to announce a special call for papers critically examining the study of Islam and society in the modern academy. We invite submissions in a wide range of fields that reflect on the ways that the study of Islam and society has changed over the course of this period, be it within the North American academy, Europe, or the Muslim World writ large. Scholars working on these broad themes are warmly invited to submit abstracts for consideration. For details, please consult our website www.ajis.org.