Identity, Politics and the Study of Islam; Current Dilemmas in the Study of Religions; Matt k. Sheedy

Edited by

Matt Sheedy [+–]

University of Bonn

Matt Sheedy holds a Ph.D. in the study of religion and is a visiting professor of North American Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany. His research interests include critical social theory, theories of secularism and atheism, as well as representations of Christianity, Islam, and Native American traditions in popular and political culture. He is the author of Owning the Secular: Religious Symbols, Culture Wars, Western Fragility (Routledge, 2021).

Based partly on a series of posts coming out of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion blog, this volume includes greatly expanded essays by Ruth Mas, Sarah Imhoff and James Crossley as well as new pieces by Devin Stewart, Carlos Segovia, Alexandre Caeiro and Emmanuelle Stefanidis, Russell McCutcheon and Salman Sayyid. This volume, thus, brings together a variety of scholars both inside and outside of Islamic Studies in order to grapple with such questions as: what, if anything, is unique about Islamic Studies? How should Islamic studies as religious studies engage with postcolonial critique? What is the role of identity politics in such endeavors? What are the lines between descriptive (hermeneutic) work and theoretical explanations of Islamic texts? What can scholars in related areas, such as the study of Judaism and early Christianity, offer to this conversation by way of analogy? Can ethical, political, or theological concerns function critically to help theorize Islam?

The volume is divided into four sections: Theory and Identity Politics in the Study of Islam, which looks at the role of identity, knowledge production, and political commitments among scholars of Islam; Critique and Identity in Qur’anic Studies, which deals with challenges in applying critical-historical methods to the study of the Qur’an and how these methods relate to some of the issues raised Omid Safi and Aaron Hughes; Comparative Views from Outside Islamic Studies, which provides a comparative view of how scholars have dealt with similar concerns in the study of Judaism and Christianity; and A Critical Appraisal, which offers a direct challenge to Safi and Hughes.

Series: Culture on the Edge: Studies in Identity Formation

Introduction

Identity, Apologetics, and the Shapes of Critique in the Study of Islam 1-15

Matt Sheedy £17.50

University of Bonn

Part I: Theory and Identity Politics in the Study of Islam

1. The Modesty of Theory [+–] 19-42

Ruth Mas £17.50

Freie Universitaet Berlin

Ruth Mas is a Visiting Research Fellow in the Berlin Graduate School: Muslim Cultures and Societies at the Freie Universitaet Berlin.

In this contribution, I use the “dispute” between Omid Safi and Aaron Hughes to rethink the relationship between theory and politics. I argue that while scholars of religion cannot avoid being pushed into political discussions, there are crucial differences between “intervention, collaboration, and interpellation” that need to be recognized so that contemporary political issues don’t stand in the place of theory. Drawing on the likes of Stuart Hall, Weber, Foucault, and Asad, I urge for more rigorous attention to the lines between our political commitments and the theoretical goal of open-ended inquiry, which means paying attention to the ways in which we are all caught up in ideological state apparatuses, to borrow a line from Althusser, and how theory authorizes politics and vice versa. More concretely, I urge scholars to think about how critique is tied to normative assumptions about the relationship between Christianity, secularism, and Enlightenment, and how “Islam” and “Muslim modalities” are made to fit within this “modernist enterprise.”

2. I Want My Discipline Back [+–] 43-66

Salman Sayyid £17.50

University of Leeds

Salman Sayyid is Professor of Critical Muslim Studies in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds.

The appearance of Islam in the contemporary world is marked by its disruptive role. Mainly, this disruption is represented through international crisis or social and cultural problems of cohesion and integration; however, there is also an epistemological dimension. This epistemological dimension takes the form of a recurring series of disputes within the US academy over the status of Islamic Studies and related disciplines. If one steps back from the often personalized, and occasionally petty tones of these debates in which academic reputations and careers are ventured, it is possible to see the contours of this epistemological conflict: In one corner are those who believe that their venerable discipline has been invaded by ‘identity politics’ or ‘political correctness’ or anti-Americanism or whatever is the current designation of the latest threat to the civilizing mission as we know it. In the opposite corner are those who seem in the claims on behalf of the discipline to conduct business as usual the dead weight of privilege and power. The recent spat between Omid Safi and Aaron Hughes seems to be another instance of the epistemological dislocation marked by the way in which Islam seems to also disrupt the conventional wisdom of scholarship on Muslims, Islam and the Islamicate. Both sides of the debate may not share the same understanding of the ‘Western tradition of scholarly discourse’, they may not even agree with intrinsic and necessary relationship between Western values and universal values, but they share an intensely parochial take on what is at stake and thus miss the transformations in the conditions that make the discipline of Islamic Studies and its cognates possible. There is a need to recognize that current disciplines are reflections not timeless verities but contingent historical processes. Rather than trying to reform Islamic Studies or Religious Studies, there is need to decolonize these disciplines. This decolonial move is what I describe as Critical Muslim Studies.

Part II: Critique and Identity in Qur’an Studies

3. Religion, History, Ethics: Rethinking the Crisis of Western Qur’anic Studies [+–] 69-97

Alexandre Caeiro,Emmanuelle Stefanidis £17.50

Qatar Faculty of Islamic Studies

Alexandre Caeiro is Assistant Professor at the Qatar Faculty of Islamic Studies.

Universite Paris-Sorbonne

Emmanuelle Stefanidis is a PhD candidate in Islamic Studies at the Universite Paris-Sorbonne.

What reading practices and literary sensibilities are appropriate for understanding scripture? How are different modes of historical inquiry linked to various socio-political projects? What is the proper function of critique in a (post)secular world? These timely questions constitute, we argue here, the stakes underlying contemporary debates in the field of Qur’anic studies. In this article we trace the emergence of a mode of practical history concerned with the relation between historical inquiry and ethical commitment. This historiographic mode, prompted by the reconfiguration of Qur’anic studies in the aftermath of 9/11, contrasts with the resilient ideal of disinterested scholarship that has dominated the field for most of its modern history. The onset of practical history coincides with broader institutional transformations that have unsettled the field’s regime of truth, expressed in a set of oppositions between secular Reason and religious commitment, Science and politics, the West and Islam. Rather than the widely invoked methodological challenge posed by revisionist approaches to the history of the Qur’an, it is perhaps the blurring of these constitutive binaries that best explains why the diagnosis of “crisis” and “disarray” has proliferated in spite of the field’s obvious vitality.

4. Identity Politics and the Study of Islamic Origins: The Inscriptions of the Dome of the Rock as a Test Case [+–] 98-118

Carlos A. Segovia £17.50

St Louis University, Madrid and Camilo Jose Cela University, Madrid

Carlos A. Segovia is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Camilo Jose Cela University in Madrid and Lecturer at St Louis University, Madrid Campus.

The process that led to the gradual emergence and establishment of the Islamic religion is anything but clear. The view that Islam was fully formed in Muḥammad’s lifetime and subsequently spread by the rāšidūn caliphs and the Umayyads has been challenged on different grounds. There is no material evidence that Islam was the main reason behind the Arab overtake of the Near East. Nor is there evidence that the latter followed a linear development. In fact, it is difficult to speak of a unified Arab state, and of Islam as a new religion for that matter, until the late 7th century. My purpose in this paper is to analyse the inscriptions of the Dome of the Rock and explore how their rhetoric bears witness to a transition period in the process of Muslim identity making as a means to examine the tacit connection between scholarship and identity politics in the study of Islam’s origins.

Part III: Comparative Views from Outside Islamic Studies

5. Jews, Jewish Studies, and the Study of Islam [+–] 121-137

Sarah Imhoff £17.50

Indiana University

View Website

Sarah Imhoff is Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Chair in Jewish Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University. She is author of Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism (Indiana University Press, 2017) and The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist (Duke University Press, 2022). She is the founding co-editor of the journal American Religion.

In the Americas, Jews have dominated Jewish Studies, but Muslims have made up a far smaller portion of Islamic Studies scholars. These seemingly opposite trends are deeply rooted in the histories of the fields. While Islamic Studies in America traces much of its history through Orientalism—non-Muslims studying Muslims and Islamic civilizations—the dominant narrative of Jewish Studies begins with Jews studying Judaism. Despite these different narratives, each field has confronted similar questions about scholars’ own identifications, epistemological debates about insiders and outsiders, political questions about minority identity and pluralism, and questions about the relationship between funding and scholarly research. This chapter explores the origin stories of Jewish Studies and the meanings for its’ past, and asks what these stories might suggest about Islamic Studies and its future.

6. The Quest for the Historical: Can Biblical Studies Lead Qur’anic Studies away from Theology? [+–] 138-154

James Crossley £17.50

St Mary’s University, London

James Crossley is Research Professor in Bible, Society, and Politics at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society, Academic Director of the Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements (CenSAMM), and Professor of Bible and Society at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, London. He is author of numerous books and articles on Christian Origins, reception history of the Bible, and English politics and religion, reception history of the Bible, including Cults, Martyrs and Good Samaritans: Religion in Contemporary English Political Discourse (Pluto, 2018). The website John Ball, English Legend provides images and resources discussed in Spectres of John Ball.

This essay takes as its starting point the dispute between Aaron Hughes and Omid Safi on the state of Islamic Studies in North America, and the quests for historical “founding figures”, through a comparison with biblical studies. It will cover issues relating to “critics” and “caretakers”, Orientalism and metacritical approaches to scholarship, and the ongoing dominance of theology. It will provide arguments for the ways in which “critics” can promote their agendas in a way that creates some distance from “confessional” or “caretaker” approaches, including the significance of certain uses of social history. The essay will end with theses (or perhaps suggestions) for the critical historian of Jesus or Muhammad.

Part IV: A Critical Appraisal

7. A Modest Proposal for Islamic Studies [+–] 157-200

Devin Stewart £17.50

Emory University

Devin Stewart is Professor of Islamic Studies at Emory University.

Aaron Hughes’ Theorizing Islam, which identifies the Study of Islam Section of the AAR as an institutional cause of bad scholarship, critiques a small corner of Islamic studies writ large. Many of his assessments of the shortcomings of particular works are justified, but the type of writing he condemns is highly promoted by university presses, and found in scholarship on most other religious traditions and in many other fields throughout academia. Hughes then incorrectly maps the current divide in Islamic studies between less skeptical empiricists and radically skeptical revisionists onto a divide between naïve, apologetic work and serious, critical investigations. Instead, the main conclusion that one ought to draw from this debate is that most scholars in Islamic studies are trained in rather narrow sub-fields and tend to falter when they write on general topics, but the demand for such general works is high, so it is unlikely that there will be much quality control in the future. Rejecting the idea that improved scholarship on Islam will come from more thorough engagement with recent theories in religious studies, I propose my own set of theses to guide research and writing on Islamic studies in the future.

Afterword

The Meaning and End of Scholarship on Religion 201-223

Russell T. McCutcheon £17.50

University of Alabama

Russell T. McCutcheon is University Research Professor and, for 18 years, was the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. He has written on problems in the academic labor market throughout his 30-year career and helped to design and run Alabama’s skills-based M.A. in religion in culture. Among his recent work is the edited resource for instructors, Teaching in Religious Studies and Beyond (Bloomsbury 2024).

End Matter

Index [+–] 224-226

Matt Sheedy FREE

University of Bonn

Based partly on a series of posts coming out of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion blog, this volume includes greatly expanded essays by Ruth Mas, Sarah Imhoff and James Crossley as well as new pieces by Devin Stewart, Carlos Segovia, Alexandre Caeiro and Emmanuelle Stefanidis, Russell McCutcheon and Salman Sayyid. This volume, thus, brings together a variety of scholars both inside and outside of Islamic Studies in order to grapple with such questions as: what, if anything, is unique about Islamic Studies? How should Islamic studies as religious studies engage with postcolonial critique? What is the role of identity politics in such endeavors? What are the lines between descriptive (hermeneutic) work and theoretical explanations of Islamic texts? What can scholars in related areas, such as the study of Judaism and early Christianity, offer to this conversation by way of analogy? Can ethical, political, or theological concerns function critically to help theorize Islam? The volume is divided into four sections: Theory and Identity Politics in the Study of Islam, which looks at the role of identity, knowledge production, and political commitments among scholars of Islam; Critique and Identity in Qur’anic Studies, which deals with challenges in applying critical-historical methods to the study of the Qur’an and how these methods relate to some of the issues raised Omid Safi and Aaron Hughes; Comparative Views from Outside Islamic Studies, which provides a comparative view of how scholars have dealt with similar concerns in the study of Judaism and Christianity; and A Critical Appraisal, which offers a direct challenge to Safi and Hughes.

Reviews

The volume by Sheedy is an important, intriguing and welcome analysis of what is at stake in the Western study of Islam. I only hope that such approaches will be echoed and analyzed (and not marginalized) in other Muslim societies where the study of Islam still largely takes place in a vacuum.
Reading Religion

I recommend the book for all students and researchers on Islam, as it is an excellent work on how relations of power, knowledge, the self, the academy and the study of Islam are entangled.
Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations

Many readers may find a path forward in situating themselves in the field by appreciating that boundaries are based on human choices, not essential truths. For all the binaries offered in the provocations that led up to this volume, readers will find nuanced approaches that introduce practical strategies for how they might approach their own work in Islamic studies. This book would be useful to graduate students (especially in North America) and early career scholars seeking a balanced introduction to questions of identity and politics in Islamic studies.
Religious Studies Review

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Identity, Politics and the Study of Islam

Current Dilemmas in the Study of Religions

Matt Sheedy [+–]

University of Bonn

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