Mohammad Salama offers a way to re-engage with the Qur’ān's indigenous and Arabic contexts as a means to decolonize the field of Qur’ānic studies. Salama puts emphasis on the Qur’ān as an indigenous code of knowledge, rather than as a text derived from a Late Antique milieu.

The eight essays that appear in the Theories and Methodologies section of the January 2024 issue of PMLA examine core concepts derived from the premodern compendium of Arabic thought—associated with the disciplines of aesthetics, jurisprudence, philosophy, rhetoric, theology, and more—and activate them as nodes of theoretical contemplation.