BOOK REVIEW

Rethinking Islamic Studies: From Orientalism to Cosmopolitanism. ByCarl W. Ernst and Richard C Martin. The University of South CarolinaPress, 2010. 333 pages. $29.95.

Scholars of religion tend to look at their departmental colleagues in Islamwith some degree of bewilderment. Their sparse numbers (often one Islamicistper department) and technical training in other fields (e.g., Near Eastern,Middle Eastern, or Islamic studies) have often generated a set of methodologi-cal and theoretical interests perceived to be far removed from the academicstudy of religion. This has unfortunately resulted in a tenuous relationshipbetween Islam and religious studies. One of the few scholars, however, whohas attempted to mediate between these disciplines has been Bruce Lawrence,and the book under review here is a celebration of his path-breaking work.Whether this amounts to a “rethinking” of the discipline, as the editors boldlyproclaim, is however a matter of some debate.

Carl Ernst and Richard Martin begin their volume highly critical of theOrientalism that they believe has largely been responsible for determining anddefining the traditional parameters of Islamic studies. As a corrective, theyhave assembled together a group of scholars, both senior and junior, to beginthe process of rethinking “how to theorize and problematize the textual andsocial data of Islam and how to adjust their investigations to methodologiesthat address the urgencies of Islamic studies in the twenty first century” (2).

To begin their project of rehabilitation, they divide the book into threeoverlapping sections with the aim of creating a “post-Orientalist IslamicStudies” (15). The first section seeks to provide various Islamic perspectives onmodernity; the second section deals with social scientific and humanistic per-spective on Islam; and the third and final section deals with Asian perspectiveson the Muslim subject. The choice of such rubrics, however, is not without aset of potential problems. They blur, for example, the boundaries between theacademic study of Islam and Islamic perspectives on a particular topic. Islamicperspectives on modernity, for example, are decidedly not the same thing as

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modern perspectives on Islam/s; and Asian perspectives on the Muslim subjectare not the same thing as perspectives on Asian-Muslim subjects.

The result is that many of the essays straddle the boundary between insiderand outsider accounts or, framed differently, between apologetic and criticalstudies. The danger of this is not that the academic study of Islam will becomemore familiar to those working in religious studies, but less so. If the desire isto create a rapprochement between contemporary theoretical modeling in reli-gious studies and the academic study of Islam, why do the editors/contributorsencourage an approach that stresses “Muslim” and “Asian” perspectives asopposed to critical ones? I suspect that they would argue that this is becausethe latter is implicated in numerous wills to power and the Orientalist heritagefrom which they desire to move.

Despite their intentions of “rethinking” the field, the editors fail in theirtask because they work with vague notions of what exactly needs to berethought. This categorical failure stems, in part, from the fact that nowhere dothey clearly define any of the key terms that sit together in the title of thebook: “Orientalism,” “cosmopolitanism,” and “religious studies.” The editorstell us, for example, that “Orientalism remains for most scholars the bête noirin the expanding family of Islamic studies today” (4). Why? Says who? Recentyears have seen many important monographs—ones that greatly extend ourunderstanding of the formative and other periods of Islam—that we or theirauthors might comfortably label as Orientalist. Using the term pejoratively,however, is a matter of ideology, a way of dismissing all those who take a crit-ical perspective when it comes to dealing with the historicity of early and otherMuslim sources. Even though the editors are calling for a “rethinking” of thediscipline, it is more the case that they are trying to set the parameters forwhat gets to count as authoritative Islamic studies in the future. Their easy dis-missal of those who disagree with them and their hermeneutical approaches,however, cannot take the place of a serious engagement with rival methodolo-gies. To lump their critics under the omnibus rubric “Orientalist” is ultimatelyto create a straw man.

Secondly, I assume that by invoking cosmopolitanism as a hermeneuticand having it replace the easily dismissed “Orientalism,” the editors mean apluralism of noncritical, nonskeptical, and insider approaches to deal withIslamic datasets. We have to wait until page 53, where Kwame AnthonyAppiah is invoked and there we read that this term “is the foundation of[Appiah’s] vision of a harmonious, globalized social order based on pluralismand tolerance.” Okay, but what does this mean? How is this a hermeneutic atall, let alone a critical one?

Finally, as we all know, religious studies provides an extremely broad set ofapproaches, theories, and methods that range from the phenomenological andecumenical to the extremely critical. To what religious studies do the editorsdesire to connect? Since there is no mention of individuals such as J. Z. Smith,Bruce Lincoln, Russell McCutcheon (to name but a few), the editors’ idea ofreligious studies seems to be the liberal protestant one that is not particularlyinterested in meta-questions or category analysis, does not question the basic

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narrative parameters of practitioners, and is overly descriptive. The editorsimply as much when they state that the future of Islamic studies has to “con-sider the impact of having Muslim students in the classroom” (5). Why? Whatare the repercussions of such a statement? That we have to teach Islam in sucha manner that Muslims do not disagree? To be fair, the editors mention TalalAsad, but reduce his complex work to the following utterance: “he arguedforcefully that Muslim societies must be understood on their own terms andnot a superimposed model” (9)!

Many of the essays bear this out. Space does not permit me to examine allof the essays in the volume; however, a description of some should suffice.Vincent J. Cornell’s essay is a theological and technical study of “epistemologi-cal crisis” among Muslim intellectuals who, he argues, have not yet analyzedthe principles of Islam and modernity. Omid Safi’s piece is another variation,written by a “participant-observer” (73), on the need to have a progressiveIslam, this time connected to something outside of the West (e.g., IranianReform Movements). Jamillah Karim attempts to show how African Americanwomen attempt to understand themselves, their experiences, and Islam inresponse to immigrant women experiences. Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle examinesthe homoerotic themes of a fourteenth-century poet that can “help engineer abalance between political effectiveness and cultural authenticity. The welfare ofmany depends upon the success of this delicate project” (262). There certainlyare some very good and more critical essays in the collection: the one byMartin and Barzegar on the complex web of social factors that contribute tothe formation of orthodoxy is probably the best of the lot precisely becausethey do try to engage broader themes in religious studies. The essay by LouisA. Ruprecht, Jr. (the only non-Islamicist in the collection) provides a good, ifimpressionistic, discussion of identity, comparative religion, and museumculture but its connection to the larger theme of the volume is not particularlyclear.

Bold claims to the contrary, this volume reads like a Festschrift to honorthe recently retired and aforementioned Bruce Lawrence. Many of the contrib-utors are his former students and/or colleagues and virtually every essay beginswith a laudatory invocation of Lawrence’s work, claiming to take his methodol-ogy in new or different directions. Indeed, Lawrence himself responds to eachessay at the end of the collection. The editors are perhaps not to be faulted fortheir desire to market their book with the grandiose title of “rethinking” thediscipline, and Lawrence certainly has done a lot to help define the field.However, to give this collected volume the title they use is highly problematicand far too exclusive.

doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfs044 Aaron W. HughesState University of New York, Buffalo

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