Islam and the Tyranny of Authenticity; An Inquiry into Disciplinary Apologetics and Self-Deception; Aaron Hughes

Aaron W. Hughes [+–]

University of Rochester

Aaron W. Hughes is the Dean’s Professor of the Humanities and the Philip S. Bernstein Professor in the Department of Religion and Classics at the University of Rochester. His research and publications focus on both Jewish philosophy and Islamic Studies. He has authored numerous books, including Situating Islam: The Past and Future of an Academic Discipline (Equinox, 2007); Theorizing Islam: Disciplinary Deconstruction and Reconstruction (Equinox, 2012); Muslim Identities: An Introduction to Islam (Columbia, 2012); and Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History (Oxford, 2012). He currently serves as the editor of the journal Method and Theory in the Study of Religion.

Many scholars of Islam are interested in creating a liberal, inclusive, pluralistic, feminist, and modern version of the religion that they believe to be explicit in the pages of the Qur’ān, but missed by earlier interpreters. In so doing, they create “good” Islam and, in the process, seek to define what does and does not get to count as authentic. As the purveyors of what they now believe to be veritable Islam, they subsequently claim that rival presentations are bastardizations based either on Orientalism and Islamophobia (if one is a non-Muslim) or misogyny and homophobia (if one is a Muslim that disagrees with them). Instead of engaging in critical scholarship, they engage in a constructive and theological project that they deceive themselves into thinking is both analytical and empirical. This book provides a hard-hitting examination of the spiritual motivations, rhetorical moves, and political implications associated with these apologetical discourses. It argues that what is at stake is relevance, and examines the consequences of engaging in mythopoesis as opposed to scholarship.

Preliminaries

Acknowledgements [+–] ix-x

Preface: Noble Lies xi-xviii

Introduction

Setting the Problem [+–] 1-13

The author situates this book in the context of his other publications. The point of departure here, is that Islamic religious studies represents an unhealthy commixture of apologetics for Islam with the dominant discourse of religious studies that privileges experience over praxis and the “religious” as if it somehow existed independently from more social or political (i.e., mundane) concerns. This confusion of critical scholarship with constructive theology has created numerous problems for the field. It means, for one thing, that historical and critical questions are largely ignored and are instead replaced with the quest to create a normative Islam that corresponds to that which are perceived to be universally recognized, as opposed to modern Western, values.

Chapter 1

Islamic Religious Studies and the Politics of Identity [+–] 15-36

Chapter 1 defines in detail the characteristics of “Islamic religious studies.” Here, we see the manifestation of the worst traits of identity politics wherein critical and historical scholarship can be simply dismissed as the stuff of “Orientalism,” an increasingly amorphous and meaningless term.

Chapter 2

Prisoners of Said [+–] 37-55

Chapter 2 begins with a debate between two scholars of Buddhism, Donald Lopez and Robert Thurman, on the proper representation of Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism. Whereas Lopez accuses Thurman of romanticizing Tibet, the latter suggests that no scholarship on the traditions of that country can ignore Chinese aggression and Tibetan suffering. This becomes my point of departure for thinking more generally about how many in Islamic religious studies believe ardently that the role of scholarship should be to defend a particular version of Islam that is of their own making rather than engage in anything that resembles critical scholarship as conceived in cognate disciplines.

Chapter 3

Insiders, Outsiders, and the Path Between [+–] 57-74

Chapter 3 charts a path to begin speaking about converts in the academic study of religion. Although it is a sensitive subject, we cannot overlook the fact that, through conversion, scholars are able to move from “outsiders” to “insiders” fairly rapidly. Rather than regard these two categories as hermetically sealed, conversion shows them to be porous and, ultimately, as artificial as any other category in the field.

Chapter 4

Business as Usual [+–] 75-93

Chapters 4 and 5 provide two competing models for Islamic studies. Chapter 4 takes as its point of departure a short essay in which Omid Safi, a scholar of religion and a leading player in the progressive Islam movement, offers his opinion on the current state of Islamic religious studies. Therein he is critical of non-Muslims in the field, and instead invokes a number of scholars—Sherman Jackson, Amina Wadud, Jonathan Brown, Kecia Ali, Ingrid Mattson, and others—whom he believes should function as models “to be emulated by the current and future generation of Islamic studies.” In this chapter I examine the writings of these scholars with an eye toward asking whether or not they should indeed function as “models.”

Chapter 5

Jacob Neusner Meets Islamic Studies [+–] 95-114

If the goal of chapter two was to show how the issues in Islamic religious are not unique, but indicative of larger debates within the academic study of religion, chapter 5 offers another exemplum, this time from the field of Jewish studies, and focuses on the work, motivations, and relevance of the work of Jacob Neusner. Neusner, a scholar of Jewish studies, did more than anyone to bring the academic study of Jewish data into sync with the conversations happening within the larger context of the humanities.

Chapter 6

Turf Wars [+–] 115-127

The sixth and final chapter provides an attempt to deal with many of the aforementioned issues, albeit from the perspective of greater theoretic distance. For ultimately many of the problems that I have broached and discussed in the previous chapters are but a set of examples, derived from my own chosen field, that are representative of what I consider to be some of the larger issues endemic to the academic study of religion. The questions that I have asked in the previous chapters, if I have done my job properly, ought to be relevant to those dealing with similar issues, but working in other religious traditions.

End Matter

References 129-138

Author Index [+–] 139-140

Subject Index [+–] 141-143

Reviews

In this fascinating and impeccably argued book, Aaron W. Hughes engages a theme relevant to the contemporary study of religion. At stake, for him, are the fundamental theoretical and methodological dimensions that reside at the heart of the field.
Daniel Dubuisson, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris

The project of understanding something on its own terms has rightly received much critical attention over the past twenty years—inasmuch as it erases observers and the criteria by which they chose which participant interests to represent and thereby authorize—but there are still pockets within the field that resist a full historicization. Aaron Hughes’s Islam and the Tyranny of Authenticity is but the most recent of his ongoing efforts to invite scholars of Islam to see their object of study as no more or less human than any other, suggesting that their methods should not only be comparable to those found in other sub-specialties but also that their field can be the beneficiary of advances that have taken place elsewhere.
Russell T. McCutcheon, University of Alabama, Co-author of The Sacred is the Profane: The Political Nature of ‘Religion’ (Oxford University Press)

From his example of 'Islamic religious studies,' Aaron Hughes argues that the study of religion in secular universities is characterized more by political correctness, crypto-theologizing, and normative pronouncements than it is by a theorized, critical, and historical scholarship that is of relevance to - or even recognizable by - colleagues from other university disciplines. A must read for all religious studies scholars.
Luther H. Martin, Professor Emeritus of Religion, The University of Vermont

Offers an eye-opening account of how the study of Islam in North American departments of religious studies is becoming more and more an exercise in liberal Muslim apologetics. Hughes responds by laying out a compelling alternative vision, in which practitioners of the academic study of Islam act as critical analysts of "religious" discourses rather than simply as advocates for their own preferred version of Islam. This timely intervention cuts to the heart of the question of the legitimacy and relevance of the study of religion in the modern academy, and Hughes's forceful statement should begin a vigorous and useful conversation.
Brent Nongbri, Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Fellow, Department of Ancient History, Macquarie University

Aaron Hughes' Islam and the Tyranny of Authenticity is a beautifully crafted and concise critique of Said's Orientalism thesis and its effects upon contemporary study of Islam. Hughes takes a number of prominent scholars of Islam, analyzes their work and demonstrates the biases that have been created in attempts to pander to identity politics through scholarship. Unexpectedly, he beards Said in his den by proposing Jacob Neusner's methodologies in the study of Judaism as a way forward for Islamic studies--a delightfully creative solution bringing back the importance the shared heritage of Jewish and Islamic studies once had.
David Cook, Department of Religion, Rice University

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Islam and the Tyranny of Authenticity

An Inquiry into Disciplinary Apologetics and Self-Deception

Aaron W. Hughes [+–]

University of Rochester

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