Somewhere Between Islam and Judaism - Critical Reflections - Aaron W. Hughes
5. Modern Back-Projections and their Repercussions
Somewhere Between Islam and Judaism - Critical Reflections - Aaron W. 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.
Description
The fifth chapter, Modern Back-Projections and their Repercussions, is based on a lecture I gave at the University of Exeter. Building on the previous chapter, it argues that despite the secular context of the Western academy, the study of Islam retains many of the assumptions and tacit presuppositions examined in our early sources. We see this acutely in how Islamic studies deals with Jews and other minoritarian groups. Not only are all of these non-Sunnī traditions marginalized in our modern academic narratives, the language used to situate them has strayed little from the categories and structures encountered in the earlier theological tradition.