Certainly the most influential book about the study of Islam in Europe and North America over the past half-century must be Edward Said's Orientalism. A book that has actually shaped intellectual disciplines, it is important for its own arguments and also important for how it vectored into the Euro-American academy a certain reading of some post-colonial and Foucauldian (or perhaps Adornian) critical theory suspicions about the non-innocence of Euro-American modes of scholarly inquiry. It's one of those books that undergrads might read, but that every grad student in the humanities or social sciences ought to read in their first year--just to get a sense of what those criticisms are, and how Said's book, even if it goes unmentioned and is perhaps invisible in the fields into which the students are being educated, has undoubtedly shaped those fields.
This is not a post about Said, though he's definitely worth much more attention; if you only know his work on Orientalism, or his more direct political work on Palestine, I would urge you to read his other work--his several brilliant pieces on Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, not just the introduction he wrote to that book but his essay on "Secular Criticism", and also his (what I find) searching thoughts in the last book he was working on, On Late Style. Said rewards encountering in several directions, for several fields.
But again, this is not a post about Said. It's a post about an interesting thought (interesting to me, anyway) that I've begun to ponder. That thought is this: in some interesting ways, the figure of "Islam" in the Euro-American academy, and the puzzle of how to understand the diverse phenomena that that figure is meant to bring into view for scholars, has led to two of the most interesting changes in scholarship of the past half-century: the rise of the "World history" movement in history, and the emergence of analyses of the category of "religion" and "the secular" in anthropology and religious studies.
A good place to begin with "World History" is the H-net site on "world history". What is important here is that history has changed from a focus on, say, “Western Civ” or “the West and the Rest” to an account that embeds “the Rise of the West” in a larger and wider narrative of what is going on across Eurasia, sometimes including Africa, and sometimes going on to include the whole world. The larger narrative is that the Asian peninsula that we call “Europe” is not properly understood unless it is set in a much larger frame, where dynamics and structural changes that originate beyond itself are deeply influential for its own history. Thus the “fall of Rome” had a lot to do with movements of central Asian nomads; the “Black Death” was a trans-Eurasia pandemic; even the European global oceanic expansion was really an attempt by European traders to get unrestricted access to rich East Asian markets and products, by going around the Islamic world and thus evading their cost markups. All in all, this literature has really begun to alter our picture of the world and of Europe and “modernity” itself, as well. It has led, in the words of a famous book by Dipesh Chakrabarty, towards Provincializing Europe—towards seeing it as simply a small part of a larger story.
And it seems fair to say that one of the most important impulses driving this was the difficulties of a number of twentieth-century historians of trying to understand “the rest” in the light of “the West’s” self-congratulatory story. A big moment in that recovery has got to be the work of Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China, a vast encyclopedia that astonished many Western scholars about the extent of scientific and technological achievement in pre-modern China. He was still publishing in the 1980s, and while today he seems still a specialist's focus, the work rewards reading.
But this is not a post about Needham, either. Alongside Needham’s work, and the more general growing recognition of the significance of China across Eurasian history that Needham’s work has come to symbolize, is the recognition of the impact of what the historian Marshall Hodgson called “the Islamicate”—the world of Islam, which served as the central glue of Eurasia (and connected Eurasia with sub-Saharan Africa) for almost a thousand years.
Let me put it this way—there was a terrible book about twenty-five years ago that you bought for your uncle, How the Irish Saved Civilization. It was about the “Dark Ages” and, well, how the Irish saved Civilization. It was wrong in all the ways. While Western Europe was pretty bleak for a while there, the Byzantine Empire was doing fine. And beyond the Byzantines, it was Islam and the civilizational project centered around Baghdad that actually “saved” (“Western”) “civilization,” if by “civilization” you mean the archive of books from antiquity. Dimitri Gutas’s amazing book Greek Thought, Arabic Culture makes this clear—and while it’s a bit more painful to read than that book for your uncle, it’s difficulty is almost entirely in the service of giving you a rich and accurately complicated account of how Baghdad became the first place where one tradition directly appropriated the thought of another that was originally distinct from itself. (The Christians’ appropriation of Greco-Roman antiquity doesn’t count, on this view, as they emerged from that antiquity; but Classical Islam was linguistically and in other ways quite distinct.) What has emerged for the Western academy since Hodgson wrote in the 1960s is just that sort of
So much for historiography. But what about Religious Studies? Well, for the past few decades, one of the most important changes in religious studies has been what we can call the critique of the category of “religion” itself. Scholars such as JZSmith have challenged this in constructivist ways, though as for creative alternatives, Smith doesn’t offer us much. But the more commonly engaged, and seriously creative, stream of criticism is often associated with “the anthropology of Islam” and especially Talal Asad. Asad’s Genealogies of Religionand his follow-up Formations of the Secular really challenged the way scholars had unselfconsciously “leaned upon” categories of “religion” and “the secular” to make sense of the world. Other scholars like Asad’s student Saba Mahmood, who wrote The Politics of Piety, also challenged this narrative. There were other critics—Tomoko Masuzawa’s Invention of World Religions is important, and Anna Sun’s Confucianism as a World Religionis spot-on as well. But I think—I may be wrong on this—that Asad’s influence is more profound than Smith’s or Masuzawa’s.
What’s fascinating to me is that Asad’s work had a predecessor who is often today lamentably ignored. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, a Canadian prof at Harvard, wrote a fantastic and under-appreciated book The Meaning and End of Religion in the 1960s. It is by no means an entire anticipation of Asad’s work, but it is pretty interesting and astonishingly prescient. What made this possible? I don’t think it is a matter of genius or prophecy, though undoubtedly Smith was very talented. Rather, he was working on a similar problem—how to make legible, in a scholarly sense, the objects of his scholarly attention, which were Islamic thinkers, texts, and practices. These phenomena ill-fit the structural recepticles of the received categories into which “religion” was supposed to be organized. So he began to think about them more. And the resistance, and his reflection on it, led to The Meaning and End of Religion.
That is all very, very quick I know. But it is interesting to me that it seems fair to locate two of the largest “paradigm shifts” in humanistic scholarship—the rise of “World History” and the emergence of the critique of “religion”—to the problem of how, using western scholarly categories, to try to investigate, understand, and articulate, the multitudinous phenomena of inquiry gathered under the (already distortive) unitary category of “Islam.”
POSTSCRIPT: Much of what I’m saying here was prompted for me by reading Marshall Hodgson’s Rethinking World History, a collection of his essays from the 1950s and 60s. Hodgson was a profound thinker and very much a scholar untimely in his time; see Bruce Lawrence’s intelligent reflection on his work and how it is positioned relative to contemporary scholars.