January 2026 may be remembered for its snow and cold, yet at New Research in Islamic Humanities Studies we began this month with the warmth of a new question:
Does the humanities of this land still have the courage to speak about the good life?
Issue Eight is a direct response to that courage not as a slogan, but as an academic concern emerging from a course titled Islam and the Questions of Our Time. Here, there are no formulaic translations or borrowed clichés. Instead, the contributors write in the voice of their own intellectual and cultural milieu, drawing on Qur’anic verses, hadith, and Iranian lived experience to reflect on identity, religious knowledge, women and family, justice, and the educational system.
Perhaps the most important feature of this issue is that it is unafraid unafraid of critiquing tradition and unafraid of encountering modernity. For it recognizes that Islamic humanities, once freed from hesitation, may offer an answer to the fatigue of a generation.