Decolonizing the Study of Religions: Muslim Intellectuals and the Enlightenment Project of Religious Studies

Abstract

The term 'religion' as a discursive term occupies a dominant, but neglected feature of Muslim intellectual reflections since the 19 th century. Intellectuals from Muḥammad ʿAbduh (he died in 1905) to recent scholars like Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd (he died in 2010) have used religion as a critical term to develop a critique of tradition and modernity, and a strategy for renewal. This discourse may be compared with the study of religion since the 19 th century that has also used religion to develop a perspective on the religious history of humankind. In this contribution, I argue that the two intellectual traditions that have employed religion -Kantian and the modern Islamicpoint to very different ways of relating to the world, to the self and the 'other', and to the political condition of modernity. Rather than using the hegemonic Western tradition to make a judgment on the modern Islamic, I use the latter to point to the former's peculiar proclivities. Using the modern tradition among Muslim intellectuals, I invite an inquiry into both from each other's positions.

Intercultural Communication in the Perspective of Orientalism and Colonialism Against Islamophobia

“…This has changed Europe's views on Islam over time. While not denying that far-off events influence how people talk (Tayob, 2018).…”

Islam as a Challenge to The Ideology of Religious Studies

“…Even Abdulkader Tayob, who might not agree with Alles' assumption that "the object of study [i.e. religion] is global" (2008, 2), draws attention to a wide range of Arab Muslim intellectuals who for more than a century have been applying critical methods to locate religion in Arab/Islamic heritage (Tayob 2004;2009a;2009b). Of course, all these attempts to identify what counts as Religious Studies around the world are forced to wade into the muddy question of its distinction from Theology.…”

“…Fitzgerald's work to this end could be characterised as the autocritique of a scholar trained in Religious Studies, holding up a mirror to Western scholarship for others like himself to see its flaws. This mirror is not magic, however, and continues to be "acknowledged but then sidestepped" (136); 5 in this the field of Islamic Studies is no exception, despite the significant contributions of Asad (1993), Tayob (2009b) and Ahmed (2016). One reason for this appears to be a common scepticism that autocritique can be of much use in the real work of understanding others.…”

The Study of Religions in Premodern Muslim Civilization: Some Distinctions Concerning Its Disciplinary Status

“…However, concerns like a poor representation of different cultural perspectives and regional contexts (Pye 1989;Geertz 2000;Wiebe 2012) and male dominance of the field (Joy 2005;Reed 2015) could not be pacified. Similarly, the purported connection of religious studies to orientalism (Whaling 1995), colonialism (Hedges 2008;Tayob 2018), and Christian theology (Neville 1993;Milbank 2004) continued to haunt the field. Some scholars even challenged the conceptualization of "religion" itself as a valid analytical category for its inability to portray the cross-cultural aspects of human life accurately (Fitzgerald 2000, p. 10;Smith 1998, p. 269).…”