Rethinking Islamic Studies Studies in Comparative Religion Frederick M
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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 The University of South Carolina Press © 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 vii Preface and Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Toward a Post-Orientalist Approach to Islamic Religious Studies 1 Carl W. Ernst and Richard C. Martin Part 1 Rethinking Modernity Islamic Perspectives Reasons Public and Divine: Liberal Democracy, Shari a Fundamentalism, and the Epistemological Crisis of Islam 23 Vincent J. Cornell The Misrecognition of a Modern Islamist Organization: Germany Faces “Fundamentalism” 52 Katherine Pratt Ewing Between “Ijtihad of the Presupposition” and Gender Equality: Cross-Pollination between Progressive Islam and Iranian Reform 72 Omid Safi Fundamentalism and the Transparency of the Arabic Qur an 97 A. Kevin Reinhart Can We Define “True” Islam? African American Muslim Women Respond to Transnational Muslim Identities 114 Jamillah Karim Part 2 Rethinking Religion Social Scientific and Humanistic Perspectives Who Are the Islamists? 133 Charles Kurzman and Ijlal Naqvi vi Contents Sufism, Exemplary Lives, and Social Science in Pakistan 159 David Gilmartin Formations of Orthodoxy: Authority, Power, and Networks in Muslim Societies 179 Richard C. Martin and Abbas Barzegar Caught between Enlightenment and Romanticism: On the Complex Relation of Religious, Ethnic, and Civic Identity in a Modern “Museum Culture” 203 Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. Part 3 Rethinking the Subject Asian Perspectives The Subject and the Ostensible Subject: Mapping the Genre of Hagiography among South Asian Chishtis 227 Tony K. Stewart Dancing with Khusro: Gender Ambiguities and Poetic Performance in a Delhi Dargah 245 Scott Kugle The Perils of Civilizational Islam in Malaysia 266 Carl W. Ernst History and Normativity in Traditional Indian Muslim Thought: Reading Shari a in the Hermeneutics of Qari Muhammad Tayyab (d. 1983) 281 Ebrahim Moosa Afterword: Competing Genealogies of Muslim Cosmopolitanism 302 Bruce B. Lawrence Contributors 325 Index 329 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 per- spectives for rethinking modernity, on social scientific and humanistic perspec- tives for rethinking religion, and on Asian perspectives for rethinking the whole subject, as this book does. The collection ends with a stimulating and respon- sive essay by Bruce B. Lawrence, one of the most influential scholars in the rethinking of Islamic religious studies to date. Frederick M. Denny This page intentionally left blank Preface and Acknowledgments The papers in this volume are part of a long-ranging project in the field of reli- gious 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 creativ- ity 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 appre- ciate 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 Rich- ard C. Martin, Approaches to Islam in Religious Studies (Tucson: University of Ari- zona 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, tak- ing 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 Univer- sity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for their support of our efforts. In partic- ular 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 Univer- sity 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. x Preface and Acknowledgments 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 Carl W. Ernst and Richard C. Martin 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 pri- mary 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 reli- gions at its annual meetings as a subunit of the “History of Christianity” sec- tion. 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? 2 Carl W. Ernst and Richard C. Martin 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 perva- sive role in shaping, and sometimes ignoring, this area of inquiry, the trajectory of which we briefly sketch in this introduction. That trajectory over the past quarter century, we contend, has encouraged scholars to rethink how to theo- rize and problematize the textual and social data of Islam and how to adjust their investigations to methodologies that address the urgencies of Islamic studies in the twenty-first century. Islam in Religious Studies Revisited The short supply of expertise on Islam in religious studies has been observed and lamented for several decades. In an article titled “The History of Religions and the Study of Islam,” Charles J.