Islamic Studies
On Difference and Understanding: The Use and Abuse of the Study of
Islam
Guarun Krämer
Why do we study Islam, and how should we do it? As usual, what
appears like a simple question poses the most intricate problems. Compared to the 'how',
the 'why' is relatively easy: culture is very much in fashion, and it has been so for a
while. The 'cultural turn' is widely debated, not only in the humanities, but also in the
social sciences. This includes the discipline I was first trained in and remain attached
to: history. The cultural turn has made an impact on sociology and political science, and
to a lesser extent on economics and law. Its strong appeal has certainly to do with
politics, for there can be little doubt that the demise of the Soviet Empire and the
intensification of ethnic conflict in many parts of the world have contributed towards
giving so high a profile to matters of culture and identity. The fact that there should be
a link to politics (and I hasten to emphasize that I do not subscribe to monocausal
explanations) need not render the interest in culture and identity, variously and often
ill-defined, suspect or illegitimate: I at least can see nothing intrinsically wrong with
an approach that looks at politics, society, law and the economy with a greater awareness
of, and sensitivity to, cultural norms and aspirations. But there are disturbing aspects
to this preoccupation with culture, if it is not an outright obsession; aggressive ethnic
assertiveness on one hand, and the talk about a potential if not inescapable 'clash of
civilizations' on the other, are among them. The latter in particular would not have found
such fertile ground and reached so wide an audience, had it not been for the cultural turn
in academic as well as in what is commonly considered to be 'real' life.
The attraction of the cultural turn for the scholar is obvious: if
culture is seen not as a separate compartment of life, let alone a system of its own,
where literature, music and the arts belong (at least good literature and what in German
is called serious music), but as a mobile configuration of patterns of perception,
representation and conduct that guide and inspire the way we live our lives both
individually and in communion with others, including society at large or any other
community real or imagined, then much can be gained from a close scrutiny of these
patterns and configurations: their making and unmaking, their complex interplay, their
meaning to different people in different contexts, their ambiguities and contradictions,
their variations over time and space, their adaptations and transformations. The risks
involved in focusing on culture rather than the social order, power or the international
system are equally obvious: there is a danger that economic reductionism as propagated not
so much by Marx himself but by some of his more simple-minded adherents (or were they just
single-minded?) could be replaced by cultural determinism. There is a risk that
intra-cultural choice, change and conflict be overlooked. This is difficult to avoid when
culture is understood to be uniform, timeless and totalizing, creating discrete units that
are fully integrated internally and sealed off by watertight boundaries against an outer
world of equally distinct entities. But we could aspire to more sophistication. If the
analogy of the personality that is sometimes used in this context was taken more seriously
(for we used to hear much about the German or the Egyptian personality), the reductionist
temptation could be resisted: no personality is fully integrated and free from
contradictions, nor does it develop in splendid isolation. For the personality to grow it
needs external stimuli. There is, to my mind, no way around taking culture seriously. It
is a must for both the scholar and the politician. Culturalism, by contrast, is a trap
studiously to be avoided.
The study of Islam serves to illustrate the point: dealing with Islam
cannot but involve dealing with culture or civilization, and with the role of religion in
defining the parameters of Islamic culture(s) or civilization(s), regardless of whether we
put them in the singular or in the plural. Unlike Chinese, Indian or African studies, it
does not really constitute an area study, for Islam is global and not restricted to any
particular territory. Though it may sound offensive to say so, Islam has centres and
peripheries, but the Middle East is no longer its only centre, at least not in
intellectual terms, not to mention demography. The closest parallel to Islamic studies, I
would argue, is Jewish studies. It is all the more regrettable that there should be so
little comparative work, if any, examining the evolution, methods and organization of the
two fields. One need not have to be of a deconstructivist bent to find particular interest
in the kind of questions they ask and those they eschew, or exclude as taboo. The
comparison would yield revealing insights into both disciplines.
Orientalism reconsidered
In Islamic studies, and here I use the term in the widest possible
sense to include various area studies such as Turkish, Iranian or Indonesian studies in as
far as they touch on Islam, the dangers of culturalism have been discussed at great
length, only in this case culturalism has become known as orientalism, and orientalism is
a very bad thing indeed. It is awkward enough to be addressed as an 'Islamist' rather than
an 'Islamicist', as it frequently happens among the uninitiate, for there is after all a
distinction between the practitioner of political Islam and the researcher studying the
phenomenon. But as a self-respecting scholar, one would not nowadays want to be called an
orientalist, much less so in Arabic where mustashriq (orientalist) comes perilously close
to mushrik (pagan, heretic) - although it must be said that the connection is seldom
explicitly made.
Orientalism, as we have learned, is a project that presents, or as many
would say 'constructs' or 'represents', Islam as a distinct, homogeneous and timeless
entity that is essentially defined by its normative texts, i.e. the Qur'an as divine word
and the Sunna, or tradition of the Prophet Muhammad. For the unreformed orientalist,
Muslims are sufficiently defined by their being Muslim. Little does it matter whether they
live in Kuala Lumpur, Cairo or Karachi. They are over-determined by Islam. This is, of
course, vintage culturalism. But orientalism, its critics continue, does not stop here: it
'constructs' Islam as the ultimate Other, using it as a negative foil against which the
achievements of Western civilization, resting on the triple foundation of ancient Judaism,
ancient Greece and the Christian faith, appear all the more glorious. Islam, by contrast,
lacks the notion of liberty, a sense of responsibility both individual and civic, a spirit
of scientific inquiry, an independent middle class, any kind of recognized community
except the umma, etc., etc. If one adopts this logic, Islam is little but a 'cluster of
absences' (Bryan S. Turner, who, to avoid any misunderstanding, does not share this view).
There is little point in going into this list of 'what we have and Islam has not', though
it would not be difficult to paint a much more nuanced picture. Our subject here is
orientalism and its critique. To judge by their 'cluster of deficiencies', die-hard
orientalists reveal not only an appalling lack of sense and sensibility. They pursue a
political project that is intimately linked to colonialism past and present, and all the
more powerful for its stark simplicity. Simplicity does not always equal innocence after
all.
But the same is true for the critique of orientalism, or for that
matter, the study of Islam if done by 'outsiders' more generally. It would come as a
relief and a great encouragement to all those interested in Islam if orientalist-bashing
were slowly to go out of fashion inside the Muslim world as well as outside of it.
Rather than pointing accusing fingers at certain scholars dead or alive, some of them
eminent and others less so, it could prove useful and refreshing to take more notice of
what is currently being done in the field, and not only in the English language. Much of
it is based on rigorous self-examination that would do a puritan proud, or a strictly
observant Sufi. The way out of the dilemma of taking culture seriously without making it
the prime mover of history is, I think, not so much to join in the ritual denunciations of
orientalism. Nor does it solve the problem to put the difficult terms in quotations marks,
and therefore write 'Islam' rather than Islam, 'Islamic culture' rather than Islamic
culture, and 'difference' rather than difference, or always to use the plural and so to
consistently write Islams or, to be entirely on the safe side, 'Islams'. That still leaves
the possibility that there is something that could legitimately be referred to as Islam,
or culture, or difference. And how can you have something in the plural anyway that does
not exist in the singular, at least not for the scholar?
Unity / diversity
A more promising way to distance ourselves from primitive orientalism,
as indeed we must, is to pay yet more attention to the dynamic and plural nature of Islam,
and here it does not seem to matter much whether we use the singular or the plural. This
corresponds to a marked tendency in the humanities and the social sciences to focus on
actors rather than on systems, and therefore to concentrate on agency, practice and
processes mediating between structures, or systems, on one hand and actors on the other.
'Negotiation' is the catchword here, taking us straight to the market-place. I will come
back to that. Scholars now insist on the openness of historical processes that are neither
linear nor homogeneous ('contingency' is the word to be known here), focusing on
countervailing forces to megatrends such as industrialization, modernization or
globalization. They highlight intra-cultural variation rather than uniformity,
intra-societal conflict rather than harmony, fragmentation rather than coherence. Gender
studies have contributed much to this shift of emphasis and perspective. Historians have
learned from anthropologists, and vice versa. Deconstructivists have spoken about the
'cacophony' of discourse(s) that characterizes any given situation. In our context, we
should perhaps rather refer to a 'polyphony' of Muslim voices, for even though they are
numerous the sound need not grate on the ear, as a cacophony does.
Yet even when we focus on plurality, polyphony and variation, major
challenges remain, and they do so on several levels. Islamicists may insist on the
plurality of Islam(s), they may use inverted commas to express their discomfort with
essentializing terms, they may even deny that there is such a thing as Islam, or Islamic
law, art or architecture. They may choose to talk about discourses on Islamic history
rather than Islamic history proper, suggesting that history proper does not exist, no
matter whether Islamic or other: there still remains the fact that for ever so many
Muslims, Islam is precisely the timeless, homogeneous and unique whole, the sum total of
divinely ordained norms, values and aspirations Islamicists spend so much time and energy
on 'deconstructing'. That they often do so in order to defend Islam (no inverted commas
here) and the Muslims against those critics who seem unable to distinguish between the
Taliban in Afghanistan, the Islamic Republic of Iran, a mullah in Cologne and the
teachings of the Prophet as understood by Muslim communities in the Netherlands, adds to
the irony of the situation. How then should the student of Islam deal with the firm
convictions of the Muslim believer (that is to say: not just any Muslim regardless of his
or her personal views)? For it will hardly do to summarily dismiss them as evidence of
false consciousness.
Culture in the market-place
One way to reconcile the demands of intellectual integrity with the
recognition of strong beliefs among those who are after all the principal partners of the
students of Islam, and not just the object of their research, is to look at Islam as a
repertory of references, textual, visual and other, that can be variously transmitted, but
which under all circumstances require interpretation if they are to acquire force, and
have done so from the very beginning of Islamic history (I do not hesitate to use the
term). Interpretation is done by active minds, or to put it in current scientific jargon:
it is premised on agency. To speak of a repertory of references that are continually
re-interpreted, and re-defined, and frequently contested, without losing their status of
normativity for those involved, has a liberating effect. Among other things it frees
students of Islam from the necessity to declare themselves on the highly sensitive issue
of whether the Qur'an is actually God's word, and whether Muhammad was truly God's
prophet, or indeed the last and final one in a long line of messengers that had been sent
to humankind for God's will to be known. What matters is that Muslim believers view and
revere them as such. Considering the explosive nature of the issue particularly in our
times, this is an advantage not to be underestimated.
To put it bluntly then, it is not the task of those who study Islam to
define Islam for the Muslim believer, to delimit its boundaries and to measure
transgression. I would maintain that in spite of the current fascination with negotiated
space, shifting boundaries and imagined communities, boundaries exist that cannot all be
negotiated. The very notion of a repertory suggests that it is limited (or should I say
'bounded'?), and that it can be exhausted. To speak of negotiated space does not mean that
'anything goes'. Islam, Sayyid Qutb is said to have remarked, is flexible but not fluid.
But it is not for the scholar to fix those boundaries. It is our task to unravel how in a
given context the available (normative) references are selected, used and combined, and by
whom, to what purpose and to what effect. In doing so we should perhaps be more careful
when employing the market metaphor: shopping around for suitable references to uphold
specific views and to further particular interests has not always been an option and may
not always be one today. It is precisely more interesting to find out what references are
available to specific people in specific situations. In many cases, the choice could turn
out to be more restricted than it might appear to the scholar with full access to all
kinds of ideas, sources and resources. At the same time I would be more cautious when
speaking about inside and outside views, for in many situations the divide is by no means
as clear as some seem to think. I see, at any rate, no reason why the 'understanding' of
an urban middle-class academic of Muslim faith should by definition be more authoritative,
and insightful, than the 'interpretation' of an urban middle-class academic of Hindu,
Christian or uncertain leanings; otherwise European medievalists would not face the
methodological problems that they do in trying to understand medieval history.
On difference and modesty
If the concept of 'understanding' culture(s), no matter whether it is
done from the inside or the outside, is so problematic and Islam so elusive, why should we
make the effort in the first place? There are, of course, practical reasons: the presence
of growing numbers of Muslims in Western societies, not as migrants and visitors, but as
integral parts of these societies; the rise of political Islam; the call for an
application of the Sharia, for an Islamization of knowledge, etc. As is well known, these
practical concerns are all too often tied to some sense of threat coming from Islam, or at
least of a challenge to be faced. But there is another dimension that has little if
anything to do with fear or confrontation: it involves curiosity, be it intellectual or of
a seemingly less elevated nature. Curiosity presupposes difference, which in anthropology
and oriental studies more specifically has fallen into such disrepute that many dare not
use the word without visible signs of distaste. My initial motivation to study Islam was
precisely the assumption that it was somehow different from the life I was familiar with.
I wanted to know to what extent that was true and in which way if it was true at all.
There was incidentally little romanticism involved: orientalist painting held no
attraction for me, nor did I feel any desire to go native in the desert. My interest had
to do with the possibility that there might be alternative ways of living and of thinking
and of organizing society, and I assume that many of our students feel the same (unless,
of course, they are looking for their roots...).
We are constantly faced with questions which are not predicated on a
sense of distance or superiority that is so often associated with the notion of
difference, or not necessarily so. If Muslims believe that there is such a thing as
Islamic values, what are they? If Islamists advocate an 'Islamic order', what is so
specific or possibly unique about it? Unlike many Islamists, I do not think that it has to
be unique in order to merit attention. If the critics of modernization theory (simplified,
unilinear modernization theory) consider the possibility that there might be several paths
towards modernity, or that we should think in terms of plural modernities that transcend
the Western model (of which, again, there are several), what exactly does this plurality
exist of? Is it possible to distinguish a stable core of Islam, constituting its essence
and foundation, from its more malleable elements that can adapt to the most diverse
circumstances in order to make Islam, as the well-known formula has it, relevant to all
times and places? And how does this correspond to the familiar claim that whereas
techniques can be freely adopted from non-Islamic sources, Islamic values must by all
means be preserved intact? It is certainly important to analyse the function of these
claims and convictions. However, I do not think we should stop there, but look at content
as well. Human rights, good governance or social justice provide excellent examples of
what is at stake.
These are big questions, and they must be approached with modesty. But
then, if I may be allowed a moral note at the end of my remarks, modesty may be a crucial
prerequisite if we are to continue the study of Islam in all its rich diversity without
falling into the trap of culturalism. This particular modesty code does not apply to women
only, nor is it restricted to non-Muslims. The study of Islam is a joint venture. We all
share the risks and the benefits and the doubts.
ISIM Newsletter 5/2000
http://isim.leidenuniv.nl/newsletter/5/index.html
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