CHRISTIAN LANGE

Religious Studies and the Study of Islam: Mutual Misperceptions, Shared Promises

ABSTRACT The relationship between scholars working in the field of Islamic Studies and those affiliating themselves with Religious Studies (in the Netherlands, but also beyond) is plagued by a number of mutual misperceptions. These misperceptions should, and in fact can, be overcome. To argue this point, I (1) sketch the institutional framework of Islamic and Religious Studies in the Netherlands; (2) discuss a current area of fruitful interaction, viz., the study of Islamic ritual; and (3) end by some methodological reflections on future possibilities for collaboration between the two disciplines.

In recent decades, the relationship between scholars working in the field of Islamic Studies and those affiliating themselves with Religious Studies (in the Netherlands, but also beyond) has been plagued by a number of mutual misperceptions.1 These misperceptions, as I argue in this essay, should, and in fact can, be overcome. After sketching the disciplinary and institutional framework in which the (at times uneasy) cohabitation of Religious Studies and Islamic Studies is embedded in the current Dutch context, I discuss the example of an area in Islamic Studies in which, to my mind, fertile cross-overs into the literature produced by scholars operating in Religious Studies are already happening and in fact commonplace: the area of Islamic ritual. The essay closes with a consideration of some of the methodological challenges to Islamic Studies recently raised by the late Shahab Ahmed, and with an analysis of how these challenges may stimulate a further rapprochement between the two disciplines. Mutual misperceptions The first misperception I want to address is that Islamic Studies is currently at the receiving end of a disproportional interest by Dutch politicians and ______1 This essay is a revised and enlarged version of a talk I gave at the symposium ‘Past Trajectories – New Directions: The Study of Religion Today’ (Utrecht University, 18 September 2013), organized by Birgit Meyer, Christoph Baumgartner, and myself. I thank the two guest editors of this special issue of the NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion, Birgit Meyer and Arie L. Molendijk, for allowing me to publish this piece in the conversational style in which it was originally presented. www.ntt-online.nl NTT 71/1, 2017, 31-43

Guest (guest) IP: 170.106.33.14 32 CHRISTIAN LANGE university administrators. This sentiment is not merely the stuff of whispers on university corridors. Rather, it is articulated openly. For example, the chair of the ministry-appointed committee charged in 2012 with evaluating the research of the Theology and Religious Studies departments in six Dutch universities told the Reformatorisch Dagblad that there is an ‘exaggerated interest’ (overdreven aandacht) in Islamic Studies in the Netherlands, at the cost of the study of the Christian tradition. ‘The number of degrees in Islamic Studies increases’, he mused, ‘but why? Is this to do with the Dutch situation, or do we study Islam because it somehow also matters? So, a separate department of Islamic Studies is created, because “that is also important”.’2 The difficulties involved in participating in, let alone chairing, an evaluation committee whose unenviable task it is to rank academic sister departments are easily fathomed, and my intention here is not to criticize the committee in question, which in my eyes acquitted itself rather admirably of its responsibility, or its chair, who, it should be noted, made the above-quoted comment on a personal basis. Nor do I mean to point a finger at scholars active in the study of the Christian tradition, of whom the interviewee happens to be a representative. Scholars rooted in the Study of Religion (understood, in this context, as a nomothetic and comparative enterprise) have issued similar statements. For example, the organizers of the symposium titled ‘Past trajectories - new directions: The Study of Religion today’ (Utrecht, 18 September 2013) announced in their call that the ‘new orientation toward Islam… occurs often at the expense of research expertise with regard to other religious traditions, including Christianity’. This is a formulation that strikes a more factual, sober tone (note that the notion that there is an ‘exaggerated’ interest in Islam is absent). In fact, arguably, this is not an altogether inaccurate description of the dynamics that shape the study of religion in Western universities in the early 21st century. However, as I hope the following comments will make clear, it is still a case of getting the emphasis wrong. Theology and Religious Studies programs in the Netherlands, like so many of their cognate disciplines in the humanities, are prey to political and financial strictures and pressures. What transpired at the University of Utrecht in 2011, when the department of theology was forced to close its gates—officially, because of an anticipated regression of numbers of students and in response to

______2 See Reformatorisch Dagblad, 10 July 2013, ‘Internationale commissie: Positie theologie Nederlandse universiteiten beter doordenken’, http://www.refdag.nl/kerkplein/kerknieuws/internationale_commissie- _positie_theologie_nederlandse_universiteiten_beter_doordenken_1_753263, accessed 23 May 2016.

NTT 71/1, 2017, 31-43 www.ntt-online.nl

Guest (guest) IP: 170.106.33.14 RELIGIOUS STUDIES AND THE STUDY OF ISLAM 33 the nationwide move towards bundling small areas of research and teaching in single universities (Dt. profilering) —, is a telling example.3 The worry that underlies statements such as the ones quoted above is therefore real. The fallacy, however, is to measure this perceived crisis against the trajectory of Islamic Studies in the Western academy. It is unnecessary here to dwell on the fact that Islam does deserve more rather than less scholarly interest, and that this can be shown to be true by considering the number of Muslims living among us in Western Europe, the conversion rate to Islam in Europe and on other continents, particularly Africa, or indeed the geopolitical and economic strategic interest of Europe in the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond. Nor will I labour the obvious point that it is not the intention of scholars of Islam to swamp out other religionists from the academy. Rather, what I would like to foreground here is that Islamic Studies is not a post-9/11 fad. It has not grown suddenly over night to replace other disciplines. Here I take a broad view of Islamic Studies as a field of academic research and teaching that includes area studies of the Islamic world (defined as those parts of the world in which Muslims are culturally dominant, or live in sizeable immigrant communities), including the affiliated linguistic, social scientific, historical, and art historical disciplines, next to the study of Islamic religion in the narrow sense (however one is to conceive of Islam-as-religion, a question on which I will have more to say in the following text). For convenience, I call those scholars whose primary academic affiliation is with this field ‘Islamicists’ (kindly note the difference with ‘Islamists’). Islamicists have a keen awareness and appreciation of the history of Islamic Studies as an autonomous discipline.4 The Chair of Arabic at Leiden University was established in 1613; four years ago, the Leiden University Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies section celebrated its 400th anniversary. In Europe, the emancipation of Islamic Studies from Theology, as whose handmaiden it came into being, occurred as early as the 18th century, when scholars like the German Johann Jakob Reiske (d. 1774) began to develop and defend an interest in Arabic literature for its own sake, divorced from the role such knowledge could play in theological disputes with, or polemics against, Islam. Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, who died in 1936, a professor in Leiden and a Dutch giant of Islamic Studies, famously defended ______3 See Reformatorisch Dagblad, 31 January 2012, ‘Opleiding theologie in Utrecht verdwijnt’, http://www.refdag.nl/kerkplein/kerknieuws/opleiding_theologie_in_utrecht_verdwijnt_1_619466, accessed 23 May 2016. 4 On the history of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Netherlands, see the beautifully produced volume by A. Vrolijk, R. van Leeuwen, Arabic Studies in the Netherlands: A Short History, Leiden 2014.

www.ntt-online.nl NTT 71/1, 2017, 31-43

Guest (guest) IP: 170.106.33.14 34 CHRISTIAN LANGE the idea of Islamic Studies as a comprehensive discipline that has as its object the entirety of cultural expressions of Islamic civilization, much akin to what his German colleague, the Orientalist and Prussian minister of education, C.H. Becker (d. 1933), propounded as the kulturwissenschaftliche approach to the study of Islam.5 In sum, the suggestion that Islamic Studies in the Western academy, at the beginning of the 21st century, blossoms suddenly and somewhat coincidentally strikes me as a misrepresentation of the history of the discipline. It would be more accurate (though still not entirely true to facts, as will be explained below) to say that Islamic Studies is showing some signs of recovering from a period in the second half of the 20th century in which it was sidelined in Western humanities. In the 1990s, certainly in Germany, where I began to study Islam, Islamic Studies eked out a modest existence at the margin of humanities faculties, drawing no more than a handful first-year students every year. In Germany, Orientalistik, as it was then called in many places, was considered an Orchideenfach. In my recollection (though perhaps I am romanticizing an imagined past when universities were not yet neo-liberated), nobody seemed to think this was a cause of concern. In my student cohort, as far as I remember, not a single student had entered the field because of the wish to study the security threat posed by Islam. The average student profile was closer to that of a bookish dreamer and collector of ‘exotic’ languages, beliefs and customs than to that of an aspiring media ‘expert’ on Islam. How times have changed. Furthermore, while it is undoubtedly the case that Islam, since 9/11, or in the case of the Netherlands, since the murder of Theo van Gogh on 2 November 2004, has become a fulcrum of public debate and media attention, it would be incorrect to suggest that Islamic Studies in the Netherlands have grown over the course of the last fifteen years. To the contrary, departments and degree programs, especially those with a more linguistic emphasis, have folded left and right. In 2006, the teaching of Persian and Turkish was abandoned (partially in the case of Turkish) at Utrecht University, at the same time when the programme of Arabic Language and Culture, as it was then called, was merged into the subfaculty of Theology and Religious Studies. Also at Utrecht, in 2011, three full-time senior positions in Arabic Language and Culture were bundled into a single surviving one (while the section was rebranded as Arabic and Islamic Studies). At Radboud University in Nijmegen, the two professorships in Arabic language and literature and in Islamic Studies were not replaced after

______5 On Becker and Islam as cultural studies, see J. van Ess, ‘From Wellhausen to Becker: The Emergence of Kulturgeschichte in Islamic Studies’, in M.H. Kerr (ed.), Islamic Studies: A Tradition and Its Problems, Malibu, CA 1980, 27–51.

NTT 71/1, 2017, 31-43 www.ntt-online.nl

Guest (guest) IP: 170.106.33.14 RELIGIOUS STUDIES AND THE STUDY OF ISLAM 35 the retirement of Kees Versteegh and Harald Motzki in 2011 and 2012, though there continues to be a chair of Islamic Studies; the section Islamic and Arabic Studies was merged into Religious Studies, coinciding with a further draining of personnel; the BA Islamic Studies became a specialization (keuzetraject) within the BA Religious Studies. The Chair of Arabic at the Free University of Amsterdam likewise disappeared. In Groningen in recent years, the anthropological study of Islam has been strengthened; a junior (tenure-track) position has come to replace the professorship of Qur’anic Studies formerly held by Fred Lemhuis. Overall, the loss of philologically oriented professorial positions cannot be said to have been compensated by an equal number of more ‘Islamically’ oriented positions. In 2014, Leiden University announced the closure of the BA Islamic Studies, and its merger into the more broadly conceived Religious Studies programme. The impression that Islamic Studies claims a bigger piece of the cake than it used to arises, I suppose, because Islamic Studies units have increasingly been integrated into Religious Studies environments, as the examples of Utrecht, Nijmegen and Leiden show. It is relevant to note, however, that from the point of view of Islamic Studies, the merger into departments of Religious Studies and/or Theology has in most cases meant a reduction of activity. There is no point in victimizing Islamic Studies. Islamicists carry their own baggage, their own misconceptions, and the recent shifts in the institutional set- up of the humanities in the Netherlands and in much of Western academia forces them to rethink their position critically. Islamicists, in my view, have no reason to resent the ongoing rapprochement with Religious Studies. Traditionally minded, textually trained scholars in Islamic Studies may at times feel that they are in the midst of developments as the result of which Islamic Studies are not just reduced in quantitative terms but also in depth and quality. Why? Because scholars of Islam are trained (or used to be trained, anyway) in a specific set of skills in which the linguistic analysis, translation and edition of texts in the original languages was emphasized. Today, such scholars, a dying breed, cheek to jowl as they find themselves with Religious Studies, feel coerced, by a kind of institutional violence, to learn skills and deploy methods from the tool-box approach of Religious Studies, and to focus their research on previously unknown concepts and disciplines: not just history, but social history and sociology; not just the history of ideas, but the history of their uses in argument; not just ideas, in fact, but ideological speech-acts; not just belief or mental representations of religious truth claims, but embodied and material religion; and so forth. As a retired colleague likes to quip, ‘Islamic Studies has gone popsipedso’, that is, it has become dominated by political science, psychology, pedagogy, and sociology. And this, as the argument goes, would www.ntt-online.nl NTT 71/1, 2017, 31-43

Guest (guest) IP: 170.106.33.14 36 CHRISTIAN LANGE have undermined the philological and textual expertise in which Islamic Studies traditionally takes pride. To be clear, the languages whose mastery is required (or used to be required) in Islamic Studies are difficult to learn. The dropout rate in Arabic first-year courses is infamously high in most universities, and it matters little whether one looks at Harvard, Edinburgh or Utrecht, the three universities where I have had the privilege to teach over the last decade. At Tübingen University, where I learned the ropes in the 1990s, the Professor of Arabic, Manfred Ullmann, compiler of the magisterial Wörterbuch der klassischen arabischen Schriftsprache (WKAS), was fearsomely selective. Of the seventy or more first-year students, an average of three to five made it through the comprehensive Arabic exam at the end of the second year. The others were told rather bluntly that, well, Arabic was perhaps a little too difficult for them, often accompanied by the advice to study something that was ‘easier’, such as anthropology or political sciences. The elitism behind such statements is blatant, and not at all unintended. As the eminent scholar of Islam, Josef van Ess, writes in his recent biography of the outrageously talented German Orientalist, Hellmut Ritter (1892–1971), ‘those who decided to enroll in Oriental Languages in those days [the early 20the century], had to be exceptionally gifted’.6 Although today, this self-understanding of the discipline no longer exists, it survived until the late 20th century in isolated pockets such as Tübingen, where the Institut für Orientalistik saw itself as a Kaderschmiede, an elite training centre, for future generations of German Islamicists. A methodological shift has affected Islamic Studies, away from philology- based textual work to areas in which linguistic expertise plays a less prominent role, such as political science and anthropology. This shift is older than the recent tendencies towards institutional clustering of humanities departments, older, also, than the cultural (and more recently, the material) turn in the Study of Religion; its origins should be located in the aftermath of the events of 1968. Nothing indicates, however, that the process is slowing down. Primary texts have been buried under thick layers of secondary literature, and as much as this secondary literature has in turn come to be viewed as ideologically suspicious in our post-Orientalist times, few draw the conclusion that it is necessary to go back to the primary texts themselves.7 In the post-9/11 world, departments and degree programs of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies have increasingly been ‘profiled’ in the direction of the study of contemporary Islam, particularly in

______6 J. van Ess, Im Halbschatten: Der Orientalist Hellmut Ritter (1892–1971), Wiesbaden 2013, 2. 7 See Van Ess, Im Halbschatten, 234. There are, arguably, exceptions to this trend. The project Zukunftsphilologie at the Freie Universität in Berlin comes to mind.

NTT 71/1, 2017, 31-43 www.ntt-online.nl

Guest (guest) IP: 170.106.33.14 RELIGIOUS STUDIES AND THE STUDY OF ISLAM 37

Western contexts, resulting in what one might describe both as the anthropologization and the securitization of Islamic Studies. This goes hand in hand with a rather pronounced penchant for presentism. While some see this as the liberation of Islamic Studies from its old-school disciplinary shackles, others mourn the loss of a long history of accumulated expertise in the study of the Islamic textual tradition, of Islam’s vast poetic, ethical, legal, theological, and piety-related literary heritage. Philology, in my view, has much to recommend itself. The detailed attention to texts and linguistic conventions teaches us the crucial skill of listening to others. I believe that in-depth command of the primary languages must remain the bedrock of how Islam is taught at universities if Islamic Studies wants to survive. The gradual disappearance of Islamic languages from the curricula of Dutch universities is therefore alarming. As the recent KNAW report on the state of Religious Studies and Theology in the Netherlands highlights, Arabic, next to a number of other languages, is ‘at the risk of being marginalised’.8 However (and though some may say that one cannot eat the cake and keep it intact), I do not agree that a philology-based study of Islam cannot coexist with, or that it cannot benefit from, the methodological and theoretical richness that one encounters in Religious Studies. It is not only on account of external forces that Islamicists have landed in a ‘ghettoized’ position within the broader field of the study of religion.9 What might be identified as over-textualism and a certain defensive posturing have played a part, too. Religionists steeped in the social sciences, in turn, should move beyond the clichéd criticisms of textual scholarship, such as it continues to be entertained in a number of areas of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, as not being of this time and age. Nor does it seem helpful to paint the picture of the Study of Islam as a goût du jour, propelled to prominence by the vagaries of contemporary politics and migration, taking over territory that formerly belonged (and supposedly, still belongs) to Theology and Religious Studies. Areas of interaction In order to illustrate how the disciplinary gap between Religious Studies and Islamic Studies can be bridged, I would like to discuss a number of recent developments in the study of Islamic ritual. It is a commonplace observation in Islamic Studies that 20th-century scholars of comparative religion do not draw much on Islamic examples. For example, Mircea Eliade, in Patterns in ______8 KNAW, Klaar om te wenden… De academische bestudering van religie in Nederland: Een verkenning, Amsterdam 2015, 13. 9 J.J. Elias, ‘Introduction’, in J.J. Elias (ed.), Key Themes for the Study of Islam, Oxford 2010, 1–5, 2. www.ntt-online.nl NTT 71/1, 2017, 31-43

Guest (guest) IP: 170.106.33.14 38 CHRISTIAN LANGE

Comparative Religion (1949), barely mentions Islam at all. It is true that, at first sight, certain basic Muslim rituals, that is, prayer, fasting and pilgrimage, provide little in terms of mythical underpinnings, symbolic meaning, or ideological suprastructures.10 The normative rituals of Islam, such as the pilgrimage to Mecca, when looked at in the light of the legal and scholastic literature, seem profoundly aniconic, anti-mythological, and anti-sacramental. A common way of putting this is to say that Muslims perform these rituals because they must, not because they think about their meaning. A hadith in one of the canonical collections is frequently invoked to drive the point home. According to this hadith, the second caliph, Umar b. al-Khattab (d. 634 CE), when kissing the Black Stone of the Kaaba, exclaimed: ‘By God, I know that you are only a stone, and had I not seen the Messenger of God kiss you, I would not kiss you!’11 Scholars have drawn the conclusion, as stated in a seminal article by William Graham from the 1980s, that there is a ‘Muslim avoidance of magicoreligious interpretations of the Hajj rites’.12 That is, precisely the stuff that gets scholars of religion excited is missing in Islamic ritual.13 Scholars of Islam in the second half of the 20th century often reacted by turning away from the universal, ‘normative’ rituals of Islam (prayer, pilgrimage, fasting) and focusing instead on studying local ritual practices, the veneration of saints in shrines, Sufi spiritual concerts (sama’), and so on. This has led to a situation where the study of Islamic ritual, as Kevin Reinhart has recently put it, suffers from ‘either too much contact with reality or not enough’.14 What Reinhart means by this is that scholars of Islamic ritual tend to fall into two camps, each with a blind spot. On the one hand, there are the scholars who study local ritual practices and who emphasize how little these practices have to do with the ‘normative’ Islam of the Muslim jurists, how unique the local ritual is in comparison with the hegemonic universal. On the other hand, there are the scholars who study the Muslim ‘normative’ universal literature on ritual law as if in a vacuum, often proceeding in their reading of the tradition as if they were themselves Muslim jurists, that is: by testing the logical consistency of arguments and comparing the teachings of the legal ______10 See W.A. Graham, ‘Islam in the Mirror of Ritual’, in R.G. Hovannisian, S. Vryonis (ed.), Islam’s Understanding of Itself, Malibu, CA 1983, 53–71, 56. 11 The hadith is reported, inter alia, in Muslim’s (d. 875 CE) canonical collection of hadith, the Sahih. See G.H.A. Juynboll, Encyclopaedia of Canonical Hadith, Leiden etc. 2007, 138. 12 Graham, ‘Islam in the Mirror of Ritual’, 67–8. 13 On the genealogy of the perception of Islam as a ‘dry monotheism’ that is inimicable to the Study of Religion, see the detailed study of R. Schulze, ‘Islamwissenschaft und Religionswissenschaft’, in F.W. Graf, F. Voigt (ed.), Religion(en) deuten: Transformationen der Religionsforschung, Berlin etc. 2010, 82–202, 134ff. 14 K. Reinhart, ‘What to Do with Ritual Texts: Islamic Fiqh Texts and the Study of Islamic Ritual’, in L. Buskens, A. van Sandwijk (ed.), Islamic Studies in the 21st Century: Transformations and Continuities, Amsterdam 2016, 67–86, 67.

NTT 71/1, 2017, 31-43 www.ntt-online.nl

Guest (guest) IP: 170.106.33.14 RELIGIOUS STUDIES AND THE STUDY OF ISLAM 39 schools, without asking what these texts actually do, what they mean in, and for, practice. However, in recent years a recalibration has taken place. Scholars of Muslim local cultures are increasingly attuned to the relevance, also in local contexts, of the normative Islamic textual tradition, and textual scholars are less likely to confuse normative legal texts with actual ritual practice. Crucially, textual scholars have also begun to take a broader view of what constitutes the normative body of texts in Islam. They have moved away from the idea that the essence of Islam lies in Sharia and that, therefore, the essence of Islamic ritual lies in Islamic ritual law. Other textual sources, such as the vast and internally diverse body of hadith, but also Islamic geographical writings, historiography, and Sufi literature, are increasingly made part of the analysis. This opens up vast horizons of interpretive possibilities, and pushes the field into exciting new directions. Nowadays, the text-based study of Islamic ritual is characterized by three analytical moves that realign it, I think, with the theoretical and methodological concerns current in Religious Studies. First, there is a re-evaluation of the claim that normative Islamic ritual is nonmythological, or even antimythological. Brannon Wheeler’s 2006 study of symbolic representations of Mecca is a case in point. Basing himself on Qur’an commentaries, Prophetic tales, and on hadith literature, Wheeler shows that the sanctuary in Mecca and the rites performed in it have rich connotations of the lost utopia of the garden of Eden, and he submits these mythological underpinnings of the Hajj rituals to a rigorous reading along the lines of J.Z. Smith’s writings on ritual.15 In a similar vein, I have highlighted in a recent monograph that premodern Hajj texts (often of the Sufi kind) interpret the journey to Mecca as a journey toward the hereafter, establishing all kinds of suggestive analogies between the realities encountered during the Hajj and in the postmortem realm.16 Secondly, there is a re-evaluation of the claim that Islamic ‘orthoprax’ ritual is non-sacramental. For example, the scholar of Islamic ritual law, Marion Katz, has emphasized that classical, non-legal Arabic texts written to celebrate the merits (fada’il) of the Hajj are full with promises about the salvific efficacy of performing the rites. ‘Touching the Black Stone removes sin’, such texts proclaim, or they promise that ‘the sins of those who circumambulate the Kaaba seven times, pray two prayer cycles behind Abraham’s Station, and drink the ______15 B. Wheeler, Mecca and Eden, Chicago 2006. 16 Ch. Lange, Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions, Cambridge 2016, 267–74.

www.ntt-online.nl NTT 71/1, 2017, 31-43

Guest (guest) IP: 170.106.33.14 40 CHRISTIAN LANGE water of Zamzam, will be forgiven, however numerous they may be’.17 As others have noted, the hadith literature is full of statements that confirm the expiatory power of common Islamic rituals, such as praying in the mosque, fasting, or carrying the funeral bier.18 Thirdly and finally, scholars of Islamic ritual have developed a more critical view of the ideological factors at work in the writing of ritual texts, and in particular, of the role of the Muslim scholars (‘ulama’) in the formation of the Islamic ritual system. Again Katz can serve as an example. She points out that Muslim jurists usually denied the salvific efficacy of ritual because the idea undermined ‘the entire system of religious obligation whose elaboration was the central concern of the ‘ulama’’.19 That is, the uncontrolled and rampant growth of hadiths promising forgiveness of sins for the performance of sundry rituals threatened the power of the scholars of Islam, who thereby lost their unassailable privilege of determining what kind of religious praxis must be followed. In sum, what appears to be happening is a certain decentering of Islamic ritual law in the writings of classically trained, textual Islamic Studies scholars, who have become more open-minded towards looking beyond the narrow confines of legal literature alone. It has become a bit of a rarity to find scholarly contributions to the textual study of Islamic ritual law that fail to include at least a nod to Catherine Bell’s many publications on ritual theory. A significant number of textual scholars of Islam have moved away from seeking to define the essence of Islamic ritual in jurisprudential terms to studying the variety of its cultural uses and of the hegemonic discourses that attach to how Islamic ritual is organized both locally and transregionally. It is no coincidence, perhaps, that the likes of Reinhart, Wheeler and Katz are all members of the American academy. In the United States, scholars of Islam have been more organically integrated into Departments of Religious Studies than in many European countries, and this may have facilitated engagement between the sister disciplines. Perhaps the institutional shifts affecting Religious and Islamic Studies in the Netherlands (with the possible exception of Leiden) will provide inspiration along the same lines. Recent years have witnessed a renewed interest in the Hajj in the Netherlands. For example, from 10 September 2013 to 9 March 2014, the National Museum of Ethnology ______17 See M. Katz, ‘The Hajj and the Study of Islamic Ritual’, Studia Islamica 89/99 (2004), 95–129. 18 See Ch. Lange, ‘Expiation’, in Gudrun Krämer et al., Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, Leiden 2007-, online publication (entry first published in 2011). 19 Katz, ‘The Hajj’, 129.

NTT 71/1, 2017, 31-43 www.ntt-online.nl

Guest (guest) IP: 170.106.33.14 RELIGIOUS STUDIES AND THE STUDY OF ISLAM 41 organized the exhibition ‘Longing for Mecca: The Pilgrim’s Journey’, which resulted in an edited scholarly volume in which the attempt to espouse a multidisciplinary approach to the topic is palpable.20 There is hope, therefore, that the gap between anthropological and textual studies of the Hajj, and of other Islamic rituals, will further shrink in the future. Conclusion Such an assessment resonates, I suggest, with larger developments in the theoretical and methodological orientation of contemporary Islamic Studies. Shahab Ahmed’s recent What is Islam?, a sprawling, erudite essay of over 600 pages, provides a certain amount of ammunition for this view.21 The book constitutes no less than a full-blown attack on the established patterns of studying Islam in the Western academy. Ahmed occupied a central position in Islamic Studies, certainly in the U.S., where he served as professor of Islamic Studies at Harvard University from 2005 to 2014. Since its posthumous publication in 2016, What is Islam? has garnered much critical attention, leading many scholars of Islam to predict a lasting impact on the field. By way of conclusion, it seems worthwhile, therefore, to reflect on how the criticisms and views expressed by Ahmed connect to the kind of questions I have raised in the preceding pages, and how, in particular, Ahmed’s argument can be read as pushing Islamic Studies towards a closer alliance with Religious Studies. I believe that this applies in two crucial respects. First, Ahmed eloquently underscores that religion is an indelible element in studying the Islamic world, whether in respect to historical, political, social, or intellectual aspects. Islamic Studies by definition finds itself in close proximity to Religious Studies. Second, Ahmed challenges Islamicists to rethink reified notions of Islamic religion, which are common stock in Islamic Studies, suggesting that this requires Islamicists to examine the very concept of religion itself. Again, Islamic Studies have much to learn in this respect from Religious Studies. Both points deserve a bit of elaboration. Regarding, first, the question how central religion is, or ought to be, in Islamic Studies (in the broad definition outlined above), Ahmed boldly states that the religious/secular dichotomy has no heuristic value in scholarly attempts to understand the Islamic world. As he avers, it is a common mistake to insist on ‘differences between the religious and the cultural (or religious and secular) spheres of something called Islam, with integral Islam obtaining in a somehow self-evidently “religious” space…’, the latter being demarcated, primarily, by

______20 L. Mols, M. Buitelaar (eds.), Hajj: Global Interactions Through Pilgrimage, Leiden 2015. 21 Sh. Ahmed, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic, Princeton etc. 2016. www.ntt-online.nl NTT 71/1, 2017, 31-43

Guest (guest) IP: 170.106.33.14 42 CHRISTIAN LANGE

Sharia law. Instead, Ahmed writes, what is needed is ‘a suspension of these received categories of distinction’; this will enable scholars ‘to reconceptualize Islam as a human and historical phenomenon in new terms which map meaningfully onto the import of the prolific scale and nature of the contradictory normative claims made in history by Muslims about what is Islam.’22 The reconceptualization of Islam that Ahmed envisions is a complex undertaking; it involves, as the above quote suggests, an appreciation of the notions of ambiguity and contradictoriness as being constitutive of Islam. What is more important for the present purpose is Ahmed’s insistence that the religious factor must under no circumstances be eliminated from scholarly analyses of the Islamic world. Scholars of the Islamic world cannot set aside certain areas of life, such as law, as religious (and therefore Islamic), while studying others, such as politics or art, without reference to Islamically buttressed claims to (ultimate) meaning. This proposal is likely to irritate scholars of Muslim societies who have grown accustomed to defending the well-meaning position that we must not, as scholars of the Islamic world, reduce Muslims to being practitioners of Islamic religion, and nothing else besides. Note, however, that the outlook that Ahmed embraces resonates with the notion of postsecularism, a concept that is central to recent theorizing in the Study of Religion. In my view, in the years to come, postsecular thought is likely to make increasing inroads in the study of, for example, the art and literature, or the political and social history, of the Islamic world. Secondly, as stated above, Ahmed challenges Islamicists to rethink the very concept of Islamic religion itself. Islamicists, in his view, are all too often hostage to a reified, essentialist notion of what constitutes ‘real’ Islam. As Ahmed asserts, the search for a ‘universal essence, the “real Islam” is a quest for an analytical chimera.’ At the same time, he speaks out against the idea that there is no Islam, only a plurality of local islams. In his project of reconceptualization the tradition, Islam as an analytical category does not dissolve, far from it.23 To what extent Ahmed succeeds, in the later parts of his book, in salvaging the coherence of the concept ‘Islam’ as a unifying signifier is open to debate. What is relevant here is that Ahmed calls on scholars to critically interrogate common understandings of the ‘core’ of Islamic religion (think of the five pillars), and thereby, the very concept of religion itself. Needless to say, this is the kind of intellectual exercise in which scholars of Religious Studies are fluent and can therefore be expected to fruitfully interact

______22 Ahmed, What is Islam, 73. 23 Ahmed, What is Islam, 135.

NTT 71/1, 2017, 31-43 www.ntt-online.nl

Guest (guest) IP: 170.106.33.14 RELIGIOUS STUDIES AND THE STUDY OF ISLAM 43 with scholars of Islam in the future. In sum, in my view, Ahmed points out valuable opportunities to overcome mutual misperceptions, or at least to mitigate the persistent feeling that Islamic Studies and Religious Studies are strange bedfellows. In this perspective, the recent push towards wedding the two disciplines in the institutional framework of Dutch universities, a development that may well be irreversible, may still produce synergetic effects, rather than merely enforce unwanted cohabitation.

Christian Lange is Professor and Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Utrecht, Janskerkhof 13, 3512 BL Utrecht, The Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected].

www.ntt-online.nl NTT 71/1, 2017, 31-43

Guest (guest) IP: 170.106.33.14