On Islamic Studies in Western (and other) Academia: We are not dealing with oceans that never meet. But one cannot simply show up in a classroom of a public or private university and make normative statements that dismiss minority opinions in the Islamic traditions, or worse, dismisses certain self-identifying Muslims as in fact being beyond the pale of Islam. Religious Studies programs create the possibilities for scholars of Islam to be an integrated part of the humanities, and a vital part of almost every university in America. For us to do so, however, it will be vital particularly for the Muslim scholars of Islamic studies to avoid the kind of minefields of proselytism that would be seen as violations of religious studies approaches. We can and should situate our own persons, but to do so would mean that we would have to become fully conversant with the theoretical insights of anthropology, post-colonialism, feminism, African-American studies, and other disciplines. Many scholars of Islamic studies are very open to that, but there are far too many who have adopted a polemical attitude which sees these fields as foreign, secular, and Western impositions upon “authentic” Islamic values. The more we situate Islam as being oppositional to these fields, the more we run the risk of self-marginalizing—and ultimately becoming irrelevant.
Posted on: Sat, 01 Feb 2014 06:06:18 +0000
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