Failure and Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion

William E. Arnal, Willi Braun, Russell T. McCutcheon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781845538989
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317543954
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Religion

Failure and Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion presents a provocative critique of the unwillingness of modern scholars to publically distinguish research into comparative religion from confessional studies written within denominationally-affiliated institutions. The book offers the 19th Century founders of the study of religion as a bracing corrective to contemporary timidity. The issue was analysed and documented by Wiebe a quarter of a century ago. Here, marking Wiebe's work, a wide range of contributors reassess the methodology and ambition of contemporary religious research. The book argues that conceptualizing religion as part of the world of human action and experience is the first requirement of the study of religion.

SPECIAL FAILURES

FAILURES (OF NERVE?) IN THE STUDY OF ISLAMIC ORIGINS

Herbert Berg

I would like to ask a more specific question than the one asked by Don Wiebe (1984) at the beginning of his essay, “The Failure of Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion.” Does Islamic theology jeopardize the existence of the academic study of Islam, and even more specifically, the study of Islamic origins? At first glance, this question will strike almost all scholars of Islam as odd at best. Many scholars of Islam are neither Muslims nor former Muslims. Therefore, few of these scholars feel bound by Muslim confessional claims, nor are they subject to a hegemonic Muslim culture that might circumscribe their inquiries. Were one to ask, as Wiebe does for the study of religion in general, whether the scholar-scientist or the scholar-devotee controls the agenda for such a study, the scholar of Islam would again see the question as odd. Obviously the scholar-devotees of al-Azhar in Egypt or of Qom in Iran do not control the study of Islamic origins in the West.

There seems little doubt that such questions are more apropos in the study of Christian origins in which Christian theology and Christian scholars are so pervasive. Many scholars of the historical Jesus seem bound by theological constraints or have theological agendas, such as creating an image of Jesus that would still allow Christians to be followers of Jesus (Mack 2003: 38; Berg and Rollens 2008: 279). Despite the divergent confessional and cultural influences on these two groups of scholars, the outcomes of Islamic origins and Christian origins scholarship do parallel each other in one noteworthy way: many, or even most, of these scholars imagine a Muhammad or a Jesus who either bears a remarkable resemblance to the Muhammad or the Jesus of their respective confessional tradition, or who is made religiously significant in some other (fashionable) way. The study of Islamic origins is often just as, if not more so, “descriptivist” (Wiebe 1984: 409 [14]) as the study of Christian origins. Thus, despite the ostensible freedom from theological commitments or constraints, some failure permits theological concerns to imbue the study of Islamic origins. But is it a failure of nerve?

1. The Origins of Islamic Studies

One must be careful not to overemphasize the parallels between the studies of Christian origins and Islamic origins. Wiebe (1984: 401 [7]) pointed out that the study of religion achieved its political identity within the academy by distinguishing itself from theology. It is more precise to say that the study of the religion of Christianity had to distinguish itself from Christian theology. In a similar fashion, Christian origins continues to distinguish itself from its past, which began with people such as Hermann Samuel Reimarus, whose (Deist) theology certainly guided his quest for the historical Jesus. The academic study of religion’s concern for other religious traditions including Islam, by contrast, was one means of emphasizing the distinction between theology and what F. Max Müller (1899) called the Science of Religion or Comparative Religion. The study of Islam in the academy began well before the late nineteenth century, of course. Originally part of Oriental Studies (now more politically correctly named and divided into Middle East Studies and Asian Studies), it emerged out of the French and British colonial enterprise and the German philological tradition. In his book Orientalism, Edward Said (1978) argued that the study of Islam (both of the religion and of the civilization) implicitly justified and helped sustain European and later American imperial ambitions. Among the most obvious consequences of orientalism was to “other” the East; the West’s essential identity included the characteristics of strength and rationality, the East’s included weakness and inscrutability. One of many consequences of this dichotomization was that the so-called East and Muslims were not permitted to create their own narratives inasmuch as the West had constructed these identities.

Therefore, although the study of religion is a product of the Enlightenment and developed in the nineteenth century out of the discipline of theology and in opposition to it (Wiebe 1984: 406 [11]), the study of Islam emerged as a product of colonialism—and in the last quarter century at least—in opposition to it. With regard to religious studies having eschewed theology in favor of scholarship, Jacob Neusner states, “We took that road to overcome an unwanted past. I think we had no choice” (Neusner 1977: 117). The study of Islam also sought, and continues to seek, to overcome an unwanted past, but a different one. Its fear is not theological atavism,¹ but orientalist atavism.

Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with Said’s critique, one cannot deny his impact on the study of Islam. Most scholars of Islam have gone to great lengths to avoid the greater sins of the now pejorative term, orientalism. In particular, they avoid both negative essentializations and appropriating the voice of Muslims. There is no doubt that Said’s critique has also had negative consequences for the study of Islam. Aaron Hughes points out, for example, that “the North American study of Islam has largely moved beyond the quest for origins and gravitated towards subjects such as Sufism (Islamic mysticism) or Islam in the modern world, especially the important need to counter and dismantle forms of Islamophobia” (Hughes 2008: 31). Despite describing myself as a “scholar of Islamic origins,” I have argued (Berg and Rollens 2008: 281) that to fixate on origins is to accept a theological perspective on the religion, so I welcome the diversification of the study of Islam. However, the emphasis on Sufism allows scholars to focus on the “nice face of Islam,” and fighting Islamophobia, while certainly valuable, can lead to the uncritical acceptance of Muslim points of view.

Ironically, some of these points of view encourage the positive essentialization of Muslims and the presumption of a continuous essence in Islam from its origins to the present. Thus Said’s critique has given impetus to scholars of Islam to accept the validity of the devotee’s position. This crypto-theological approach, however, has a long and respected pedigree in the study of religion and the study of Islam, which Said seems merely to have reinforced. Max Müller demanded, “If people regard their religion as revealed, it is to them a revealed religion and has to be treated as such by every impartial historian” (Müller 1899: 74). This sentiment pervaded the work of many prominent scholars of religion who focused on Islam, particularly Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Charles Adams. Both ultimately argued the scholar’s responsibility to be sensitive to the believers’ experience of Islam (Hughes 2008: 58–64, 74–79). In other words, the insider perspective seems to take precedence over any “reductionist” explanation. As Hughes (2008: 81–92) also points out, this trend is visible in the most popular textbooks on Islam, such as those by John Esposito and Frederick Denny, and even more so in the books of popular writers and apologists for “genuine” Islam (read: peaceful and spiritual Islam), such as Karen Armstrong.

No doubt Said’s critique and Müller’s dictum (via scholars such as Smith and Adams) have affected the contemporary study of Islam, but have they had an impact on the study of Islamic origins? None of them wrote much about Islamic origins, and scholars such as Esposito, Denny, and Armstrong fail to appear in the bibliographies of articles and books by scholars of Islamic origins. Therefore, one cannot simply assume that the crypto-theological methodologies of these scholars also explain the tendency of recent reconstructions of Islamic origins or of biographies of Muhammad by non-Muslims to closely resemble those by Muslims.

2. The Study of Islamic Origins

Some of the most prominent scholars of the Qur’an and its interpretation (for example, Theodor Nöldeke, Angelika Neuwirth, and John Wansbrough), of the Sïra (for example W. Montgomery Watt and Gregor Schoeler), of early Islamic history (for example, Hugh Kennedy, Patricia Crone, and Michael Cook), of the Sunna (for example, Ignaz Goldziher, G. H. A. Juynboll, and Harald Motzki), and of the formation of Islamic law (for example, Joseph Schacht and Norman Calder) are not Muslims. I suspect it would be impossible to construct a list of prominent scholars of Christian origins who are not Christians or who had not been Christians at one point in their life. I am thinking here of Dominic Crossan, James Robinson, Luke Timothy Johnson, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, and Bart Ehrman. Even more critical scholars such as John S. Kloppenborg, Burton Mack, Willi Braun, and William E. Arnal can hardly be said to be uninfluenced by Christianity in some significant way. As Wiebe points out about an earlier stage in religious studies, but which seems to apply now to the study of Christian origins, “the majority of those in the field hail from religious backgrounds and likely entered the discipline with theological baggage if not an agenda” (1999: 146). Baggage and agendas may also be present in the study of Islamic origins, but at first glance they must be of a very different variety.

Moreover, most scholars of Islamic origins are historians or philologists teaching in Departments of History, Middle East Studies, or Near Eastern Studies in the West. This academic geography matters, for they do not generally need to bracket out their personal beliefs to be critical nor do they feel the need to conform to or to reject a hegemonic Muslim belief system. And, being outside Departments of Religious Studies, they are also much less likely to have inherited from the study of religion the legacy of Müller, Smith, and Adams so evident in Esposito, Denny, and Armstrong.

The argument could be made, however, that since so many prominent scholars of early Islam are not Muslims, they need to bracket out their disbelief in Islam or at least their belief in traditions such as Christianity or Judaism. This criticism is an old one that has been made of early Western works on Islamic origins such as Abraham Geiger’s Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen? (1833), Hartwig Hirschfeld’s Jüdische Elemente im Koran (1878), and Richard Bell’s The Origin of Islam in Its Christian Environment (1926). Although it is hard to deny that some forms Judaism and Christianity played a role in the origin of Islam as these three scholars argued, it would be naïve to assume that Geiger, Hirschfeld, and Bell were not influenced by their respective confessional theological commitments.

It was in part to counteract such accusations that W. Montgomery Watt (1953) felt that “a historian of the mid-twentieth century, while not neglecting or belittling the religious and ideological aspects of the movement initiated by Muhammad, wants to ask many questions about the economic, social and political background” (1953: xi). Watt, however, was not simply advocating reductionist, material explanations in favor of the confessional ones of Geiger, Hirschfeld, and Bell, for he elaborated: “I do not, however, regard the adoption of a materialist outlook as implicit in historical impartiality, but write as a professing monotheist” (1953: xi). The use of the term “monotheist” (as opposed to “Christian”) was obviously meant to appease Muslim readers. Later, in his forward for his revision of Richard Bell’s Introduction to the Qur’an, Watt again deferred to Muslim sensibilities:

It has become imperative for a Christian scholar not to offend Muslim readers gratuitously, but as far as possible to present his arguments in a form acceptable to them. Courtesy and an eirenic outlook certainly now demand that we should not speak of the Qur’ān as the product of Muhammad’s conscious mind; but I hold that the same demand is also made by sound scholarship. (Watt and Bell 1970: vi)

Speaking of influences and development was permitted, though not on Muhammad, just influences on the Arabian environment and development of his community’s outlook. “Muhammad [must be] regarded as a man who sincerely and in good faith proclaimed messages which he believed came to him from God” (Watt 1953: 18). Watt mirrored Müller’s demand to accept at face value the claims made by adherents of a religion. The result of this attitude was a biography of Muhammad that took into account Meccan and Medinan economic, political, sociological, and religious settings. It also produced a biography that was almost identical to that of the Muslim tradition. Much the same was true for his account of the collection and canonization of the Qur’an. Watt was aware that Ignaz Goldziher’s and Joseph Schacht’s negative conclusions about the authenticity of the hadiths of the Sunna (which are critical to Islamic law) had implications for the hadiths of the historical tradition. Watt justified his wholesale acceptance of the latter: “In the legal sphere there may be some sheer invention of traditions…but in the historical sphere, in so far as the two may be separated, and apart from some exceptional cases, the nearest to such invention in the best early historians appears to be ‘tendential shaping’ of material” (Watt 1953: xiii). The distortions may have been introduced by later transmitters (such as ascribing motives to the participants), but the underlying events could be discerned by the critical scholar. In other words, he accepted as fact the basic claims of Islamic origins as presented b...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• The Nerve of Donald Wiebe
• The Failure of Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion
• General Failures
• Special Failures
• In Lieu of Conclusion
• Index of Authors