4 - The Troubled Orthodoxy in the Academic Study of Islam

Summary

This chapter examines scholarship in Islamic studies affirming Islam’s status as the symbolic “other” of Western modernity. The 1978 double upheaval of Edward Said’s Orientalism and the Islamic Revolution in Iran transfigured popular and academic representations of Islam in the West. But the transformation that Orientalism precipitated, as scholars like Richard C. Martin have argued, has gone politically and intellectually astray. Contemporary scholars’ romanticization of Islamist rejections of modernity confuses regressive ideas concerning culture, tradition, and family values with radicalism. The chapter traces this new orthodoxy to earlier thinkers like Henri Corbin, which Steven M. Wasserstrom described as “religion after religion.” We examine the work of Omid Safi, Talal Asad, Bruce Lawrence, Hossein Nasr, and Marshall Hodgson. We also discuss a second intellectual current emanating from the Left, whose popularity was made possible by the twentieth-century political eclipse of Marxism, which critiques modernity as a fusion of secularism and liberal democracy, exemplified in Ashis Nandy’s 1983 Intimate Enemy.