Sitaram made a comment yesterday asking me what I thought of my time as a graduate student in religion. It's something I've been meaning to write about for over 10 years now, but never got around to. But here goes.
Back in 1993, there was very little on offer on Islamic studies at Harvard Divinity School. It was still very much centered on the Judeo-Christian tradition. Even the World Religion offerings seemed to be predominantly full of courses on Hinduism and Buddhism. While I was a student I often wondered how these had become entwined with the Western consciousness in a way that Islam never has, and how much we needed a Muslim equivalent of the Beatles.
However, the seeming lack of Islamic studies wasn't a disaster; I chose the Divinity School rather than a conventional Islamic Studies program as I wanted to learn more about a whole bunch of things, not all Islamic. In hindsight I would say that the Biblical studies courses were incredibly valuable to me; the most frequent comment I get about my writing is that it seems to be more about the Bible than about the Qur'an. Plus, as important as the content of the Biblical courses on offer was the historical and critical approach to the texts. Modern Biblical criticism is all about dissecting texts into different sources and trying to fit each one into its own historical context; not a bad training for someone interested in Muslim liberalism.
The Islamic studies stuff that I really got into was study of Qur'an and sirah. Hadith and Islamic legal studies always tended to put me to sleep. In particular, the Islamic Legal Studies program at the Law School seemed particularly stifling; it was all about classical madhhabs, with nary a trace in sight about the last two centuries. This was my most negative experience with academia; it was too prone to see Islam and Muslims as museum pieces, frozen in the forms of classical texts. This was Orientalism in another shape, effectively denying Muslims the right to redefine and dissent from tradition. All it took to fall into its trap was a choice of tense between "Islamic law was..." and "Islamic law is..."
Of course, with every passing year, my experience is increasingly out of date. In the last few post-9/11 years, the situation has changed completely: the Divinity School, recognizing its shortcomings in Islamic studies, appointed William Graham, one of the most interesting modern scholars of Hadith literature, as its dean. It also recruited Leila Ahmed, whose book Women And Gender In Islam is still my favourite amongst the growing field of Muslim feminist writing.
I'd be curious to hear about other folks' experience with Islamic studies in Western academia. Laury?
I, too, find Islamic Law to be mind-deadening as I do most juristic hair-splitting from any tradition (surely, we had our own version of ambulance chasers in the Classical period!). However, I see a big shift in that more Muslims are becoming professors in this field which is a very good thing in my opinion. I think it will allow Western academic rigor into the field which will help us see things from the valuable historical and social aspects and not just continuing to delude ourselves into thinking that we approach the texts with a clean slate. Its almost as if we are refashioning the old madrasa system on Western lines; I've seen a good number of Muslims taking the Islamic studies classes at my uni...
Personally, I would have much misgivings about studying Islam from someone who has studied it so much yet does not believe. I feel much more that I can become a scholar by studying under Muslim faculty.
- A Salafi in worship, a Sufi in society, a Secularist in government.
Lately, my thoughts are with Zeeshan and these questions of Islam, academia and Western philosophical tradition.
If I remember correctly, the first time I visited Zeeshan's page, I saw a photo of him juggling. This morning, it occured to me that, metaphorically, juggling is a very Western thing.
Oh, not the physical act of the entertainer, but the similitude of tossing various conflicting concepts about, turning first to one, then to another, and then back, keeping everything "up in the air", and gaining a bit of amusement, and perhaps even self-esteem, from one's skill in the act.
This mornining, as I prepared breakfast, I wondered whatever in the world Mohammed might say to Kant's antinomies.
I will tell you an amusing and instructive story. I had to install and test skype for a friend. Naturally, I set it up using their last name, which sounds very Muslim, except that they are Jewish, with ancestry from a traditionally Islamic region.
I needed someone on-line in skype to test it out. I saw a Saudi engineer on line, so I said hello. He was I would venture to guess a man in his 50s. He was a very religious Muslim, and also, an engineer in computer communications. He was very enthusiastic about meeting me, since the last name made him think I might be Muslim. The first thing he asked me is whether the surname is Muslim, and I simply said no.
He then proceeded to talk about the importance of Islam. One his first comments was : "But of course, we must NEVER QUESTION, what is said in the Qur'an or practiced in Islam."
I simply agreed with him, and let it slide.
But to me, this notion of NEVER QUESTIONING, is very much a part of the fabric of devout Islam, and is very much NOT an aspect of Western philosophical or theological thought.
Think of Kierkegaard, the father of modern existentialism, who questions Abraham's encounter with God, and the command to slay Isaac. Kierkegaard wisely observes that it is Abraham's free will which CHOOSES to recognize the voice and command as God's, rather than a tempting demon, or a bit of indigestion.
Well, I must post this for now, and prepare for work, but I shall think more on these matters.
I remember, ten years ago, asking a college student in Bangladesh to tell me his favorite verse in the Qur'an. He did not cite the Surah and verse number, but he paraphrased it as "Many of you do as I (Allah) say, but few of you truly believe in me."
I wondered if there could be a Hans Kung of Islam. Hans Kung was a rising star of Catholic scholarship, side by side with Ratzinger (now Pope), at the time of Vatican II. But, Kung's very existential tome, "On Being Christian" caused the Papacy to revoke his teaching license. Kung arrived at his position through the diligent exercise of Western scholastic questioning (or juggling if you please).
These thoughts made me google just now for "belief in the Qur'an" and let me to this link which seems to say it all, from the side of a devout Muslim, confronting such Western scholasticism.
http://www.islamanswers.net/Quran/authorship.htm
Personally, I would have much misgivings about studying Islam from someone who has studied it so much yet does not believe. I feel much more that I can become a scholar by studying under Muslim faculty. OmarG
Two points: 1- you assume honesty and intellectual rigor to be belief bound. Extremists found their 'calling' in what you implicitly assume: exclusion and distrust of the "other" or what is sometimes referred to as Satanic doubts and traps.
2-Knowledge of the context of a text does not seem to fair at all in your statement above. Knowledge of Arabic (take a deep breath, yes, Arabic ) is a must tool a scholar has to know irrespective of whether an educator is Muslim or not.
Being truthful and honest is a dimension shared by human beings, including but not limited to Muslims.
A Muslim faculty has no monopoly on truth.
Sitaram,
thanks for the site re authorship of the Quran.
very typical of how doubt is dissed or Satan-ized.
During the day, my thoughts have returned several times to this thread.
Just now, 7:30pm, it occurs to me that any successful religion is like a ripened fruit which ultimately withers away, and falls away, to reveal an individual whose life and actions and desires and values embody and express the ethical system of that religion. Such a notion resembles the Marxist notion of the state which ultimately withers away.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch05.htm
Marx and Engels envisioned capitalism withering away. In the context of a religion, it is the quid-quo-pro motivation of seeking the rewards of heaven and fleeing the torment of hell which withers away, to leave an individual whose life and actions embody righteousness for its own sake, apart from the materialism of reward and punishment.
One sees a hint of this in the life of someone like Gandhi, who admires the beatitudes of the sermon on the mount but does not choose the practice or confession of Christianity.
Perhaps Rumi is a good example to take from the Islamic-Sufi context.
Rumi said "Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase 'each other' doesn't make any sense."
This notion of religion which I describe is certainly not a Muslim notion of religion.
In Islam, it is Mohammed alone who embodies as an individual such ethical perfection, and the believer who takes shahada attempts to emulate, and perhaps approach asymptotically to Mohammed's example, much like an integral in calculus approaches "as close as one pleases" to some incommensurable value, such as pi, but never equals.
Jesus for Christians, and Moses for Jews, represent this same kind of limiting value; approachable but unreachable.
But I can envision a form of progressive Islam, or Christianity, or Judaism, which reforms or reinterprets the notion to be an achievable life which many may reach in fullness.
But, getting back to the pros and cons of studying Islam in a Western, Judaeo-Christian academic setting, in a secular democracy; I am reminded of Abraham Maslow, who said that "when the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem tends to become a nail."
The only tool which Western academia has, or chooses to use and value, is a form of Socratic dialectical inquiry combined with an Aristotelian/Baconian/Cartesian syllogistics.
So, when, armed with such a Western tool, one attempts to comprehend an ideology which traditionally demonizes such methods of analysis and reinterpretation, then, is not one in some sense doomed from the outset to a certain kind of failure, or frustration? The notion of analytical comprehension is synonymous with "mastery", in the sense of one who masters a subject, and as such, is antithetical to "submission" where one surrenders that aspect of the mind which questions, and challenges and masters.
Salams Zeeshan,
Well, since I didn't know anything about Islam prior to studying it in a university I was in for a shock when I started experiencing Muslim life outside the universities. I was arrogant as all hell, I thought I knew things the "unwashed masses" did not. Only took about one month in Morocco for me to get my commuppance. After that I was learning from everyone.
But look, secular universities teach critical thought in a way you cannot get in a solely religious environment. All human thought is a resource for thinking. All questions should be tracked down. All ideas should be weighed. Weighed against what? Well that is open to criticism as well. How do we decide? How have our scholars decided in other times and places? How should we decide now? What is at the core of sorting out these issues? What matters to us? In the end, when I chose certain interpretive boundaries (the enternality of the Qur'an and the binding of the Sunna, for instance), I was not afraid of having my faith challenged by outside scholarship. I am not afraid to ask questions of our own scholars. I am not afraid to ask questions of the greatest scholars of the western tradition. I am not afraid of what I will find. I will always maintain that if God is true, if the Qur'an is eternal, and Muhammad is our messenger (s), then we should never be afraid of what we might find or discover by means of any mode of thought or investigation. God and His wisdom must encompass this all. I do not always get my questions answered right away. Trust, for me, means I keep asking until God answers. Trust means that I trust God to give me the means to understand. Trust means knowing that I will never have to settle for an intellectually cheap answer, a fix, or a dodge. Trust means if I do not understand yet, I will someday even if that means after I have died. I do not doubt, because I trust that God and the Qur'an and Muhammad are only revealed in a deeper and truer light through any means of analysis.
Laury's above comment should become our manifesto.
- A Salafi in worship, a Sufi in society, a Secularist in government.
Thank you Omar. God willing if we ever get our tradition site off the ground, you are free to take it and rework it to your needs. God is generous with knowledge, alhamdolelah.
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