Rethinking Islamic Studies

Carl W. Ernst

Description

A groundbreaking response to the challenges of interpreting Islamic religion in the post-9/11 and post-Orientalist era

Rethinking Islamic Studies upends scholarly roadblocks in post-Orientalist discourse within contemporary Islamic studies and carves fresh inroads toward a robust new understanding of the discipline, one that includes religious studies and other politically infused fields of inquiry.

Editors Carl W. Ernst and Richard C. Martin, along with a distinguished group of scholars, map the trajectory of the study of Islam and offer innovative approaches to the theoretical and methodological frameworks that have traditionally dominated the field. In the volume's first section the contributors reexamine the underlying notions of modernity in the East and West and allow for the possibility of multiple and incongruent modernities. This opens a discussion of fundamentalism as a manifestation of the tensions of modernity in Muslim cultures. The second section addresses the volatile character of Islamic religious identity as expressed in religious and political movements at national and local levels. In the third section, contributors focus on Muslim communities in Asia and examine the formation of religious models and concepts as they appear in this region. This study concludes with an afterword by accomplished Islamic studies scholar Bruce B. Lawrence reflecting on the evolution of this post-Orientalist approach to Islam and placing the volume within existing and emerging scholarship.

Rethinking Islamic Studies offers original perspectives for the discipline, each utilizing the tools of modern academic inquiry, to help illuminate contemporary incarnations of Islam for a growing audience of those invested in a sharper understanding of the Muslim world.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Islamic university
• The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror
• Islamic Protestantism
• Islam and secularism
• Islamic extremism
• Islamic schools and branches
• Islamic culture
• Islam and clothing
• Pan-Islamism
• Islamic terrorism
• Islamic party
• Political aspects of Islam
• Islamic studies
• Islamic fundamentalism
• Islamization of knowledge
• Islamic philosophy
• The Clash of Civilizations
• Islamism
• Religion
• Islam
• History

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 27 novembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611172317
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Rethinking Islamic Studies
Studies in Comparative Religion Frederick M. Denny, Series Editor
Rethinking Islamic Studies
From Orientalism to Cosmopolitanism
Edited by
Carl W. Ernst and Richard C.Martin
© 2010 University of South Carolina
Cloth and paperback editions published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2010 Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2013
www.sc.edu/uscpress
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print editions as follows:
Rethinking Islamic studies : from orientalism to cosmopolitanism / edited by Carl W. Ernst and Richard C. Martin.
p. cm. (Studies in comparative religion)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-57003-892-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-57003-893-8 (pbk : alk. paper)
1. Islam Study and teaching. 2. Orientalism. I. Ernst, Carl W., 1950– II. Martin, Richard C.
BP42.R48 2010
297.09 dc22
2009051152
ISBN 978-1-61117-231-7 (ebook)
Contents
Series Editor’s Preface
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: Toward a Post-Orientalist Approach to Islamic Religious Studies
C ARL W. E RNST AND R ICHARD C. M ARTIN
PART 1
Rethinking Modernity
Islamic Perspectives
Reasons Public and Divine: Liberal Democracy, Shari a Fundamentalism, and the Epistemological Crisis of Islam
V INCENT J. C ORNELL
The Misrecognition of a Modern Islamist Organization: Germany Faces “Fundamentalism”
K ATHERINE P RATT E WING
Between “ Ijtihad of the Presupposition” and Gender Equality: Cross-Pollination between Progressive Islam and Iranian Reform
O MID S AFI
Fundamentalism and the Transparency of the Arabic Qur an
A. K EVIN R EINHART
Can We Define “True” Islam? African American Muslim Women Respond to Transnational Muslim Identities
J AMILLAH K ARIM
PART 2
Rethinking Religion
Social Scientific and Humanistic Perspectives
Who Are the Islamists?
C HARLES K URZMAN AND I JLAL N AQVI
Sufism, Exemplary Lives, and Social Science in Pakistan
D AVID G ILMARTIN
Formations of Orthodoxy: Authority, Power, and Networks in Muslim Societies
R ICHARD C. M ARTIN AND A BBAS B ARZEGAR
Caught between Enlightenment and Romanticism: On the Complex Relation of Religious, Ethnic, and Civic Identity in a Modern “Museum Culture”
L OUIS A. R UPRECHT J R .
PART 3
Rethinking the Subject
Asian Perspectives
The Subject and the Ostensible Subject: Mapping the Genre of Hagiography among South Asian Chishtis
T ONY K. S TEWART
Dancing with Khusro: Gender Ambiguities and Poetic Performance in a Delhi Dargah
S COTT K UGLE
The Perils of Civilizational Islam in Malaysia
C ARL W. E RNST
History and Normativity in Traditional Indian Muslim Thought: Reading Shari a in the Hermeneutics of Qari Muhammad Tayyab (d. 1983)
E BRAHIM M OOSA
Afterword: Competing Genealogies of Muslim Cosmopolitanism
B RUCE B. L AWRENCE
Contributors
Index
Series Editor’s Preface
Over the past four decades the rethinking of Islamic studies has encouraged the energetic cooperation and the engaged collaborative attention of scholars of Islam and religious studies in exciting and productive new ways. During that period the study of Islam and of Muslim peoples has increasingly merged with theory and method in religious studies, which itself has increasingly developed its discourses in interdisciplinary relation with the humanities and social sciences. Rethinking Islamic Studies is indeed, as editors Carl W. Ernst and Richard C. Martin assert, a collection of essays “envisaged as a generational sequel and advance upon” 1985’s innovative and influential Approaches to Islam in Religious Studies , which was also edited by Martin.
The Studies in Comparative Religion series also published its first work in 1985. Nothing could be finer for the twenty-fifth anniversary of this scholarly series than a fresh array of essays on Islam and Muslims focusing on Islamic perspectives for rethinking modernity, on social scientific and humanistic perspectives for rethinking religion, and on Asian perspectives for rethinking the whole subject, as this book does. The collection ends with a stimulating and responsive essay by Bruce B. Lawrence, one of the most influential scholars in the rethinking of Islamic religious studies to date.
F REDERICK M. D ENNY
Preface and Acknowledgments
The papers in this volume are part of a long-ranging project in the field of religious studies, with special reference to the study of Islam. We as editors look back on the last three decades as a period of extraordinary growth and creativity in this area. This period has been a liberating experience for us as scholars initially trained in narrowly textual “Orientalist” approaches, as we have been forced by circumstance to address many issues of contemporary political and social relevance, not to mention the numerous theoretical developments that have taken place in the humanities in recent years. While we still deeply appreciate the discipline of the philological study of medieval Islamic texts, we have also welcomed the opportunity to engage with interdisciplinary research, new social-scientific methodologies, and transregional approaches to Islamic studies in the contemporary world. This volume harks back to previous benchmarks in Islamic studies, going back to essays by Charles Adams from the late 1960s and early 1970s, and at the same time it charts new courses for future research.
In particular we recall the pathbreaking collection of papers edited by Richard C. Martin, Approaches to Islam in Religious Studies (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985). That volume, based on a 1980 conference, signaled a major transition from unself-conscious forms of Oriental studies to a more reflexive application of religious studies approaches. The essays in the current volume are envisaged as a generational sequel and advance upon that earlier effort, taking full account of the critical developments in the understanding of Islam in recent years.
Earlier versions of these papers were presented in a symposium, “Islam in Theory and Practice,” held at Duke University in January 2006. We would like to express our thanks to Emory University, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for their support of our efforts. In particular it is a pleasure to thank Emory graduate students Abbas Barzegar and Anthony R. Byrd for their many valuable contributions to editing the papers in this volume in 2009. We are also grateful for the support of series editor Frederick Denny, acquisitions editor Jim Denton, and other staff at the University of South Carolina Press for their visionary support of this project. Finally we commend the efforts of all the contributors to this volume, which we hope will serve as a benchmark for the future development of Islamic studies.
The editors would like to dedicate their work on this volume to Bruce Lawrence and miriam cooke, for their continuing collegial inspiration, and to Charles Adams and Edward Said, for opening our eyes to the possibility of new directions in the study of Islam.
Carl W. Ernst and Richard C. Martin
Introduction
Toward a Post–Orientalist Approach to Islamic Religious Studies
C ARL W. E RNST AND R ICHARD C. M ARTIN
The Immediate Context
Public interest in Islam has increased dramatically in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The evidence for this includes a new abundance in colleges and universities of faculty openings and curriculums that deal with the Islamic religious tradition. As a consequence Islamic studies as a field in departments of religion in North America has recently become more apparent than in the past in the classroom, bookstores, professional societies, and conferences worldwide on Islamic topics. The reasons for this sudden surge of interest in Islam since September 11, 2001 by liberal arts deans, religious studies departments, and scholars worldwide require little explanation. As recently as the last decades of the twentieth century, however, interest in, and room for, curriculum on Islam and Muslims could be found in barely one-tenth of the approximately 1,200 academic departments of religious studies in North America. With the rapidly increasing demand for Islamic studies in the first decade of this century, when at least fifty academic positions for specialists in Islam in religious studies had been advertised annually until the collapse of the economy in 2008, there were not enough qualified candidates trained in religious studies who are also trained in Islamic studies. 1 Yet it was not so long ago that Islam did not even have a primary presence in the major professional society for faculty of religion, the American Academy of Religion (AAR). Indeed as recently as the middle of the twentieth century, Islam was included within the AAR’s coverage of world religions at its annual meetings as a subunit of the “History of Christianity” section. Now “The Study of Islam” is a major program unit within the AAR, with many subsections and sessions cosponsored with other religious traditions. Was 9/11 the cause of all that?
Not entirely. While Islamic studies as a field has been powerfully affected by political events, debates within the academy have had a longer and more pervasive role in shaping, and sometimes ignoring, this area of inquiry, the trajectory of wh