6 - From Islamic Religious Studies to the “New Islamic Studies”

Summary

So where do we go from here? How do we create or return to a critical and academic study of Islam from the theologizing and apologetics currently associated with Islamic Religious Studies? In this chapter I refer to this critical and academic study of Islam as the “New Islamic Studies,” one that positions itself in stark opposition to much of the work surveyed in the previous chapters. Moving beyond attempts to create a liberal version of Islam or the desire to defend Islam at all costs, this “New Islamic Studies” privileges the examination and analysis, not the mere description, of Islamic data, showing how they are implicated in the creation and maintenance of manifold Muslim identities on both synchronic and diachronic levels.

Despite calls to the contrary, as witnessed for example in Ernst and Martin's Rethinking Islamic Studies, there have been virtually no attempts to connect Islamic data to the critical methods and discourses supplied by certain subsections within the larger field of religious studies. Instead we are presented, time and again, with special pleading and attempts to convey the uniqueness of Islamic data. It is important to reorient the field from such special pleading to a critical study in tune with other discourses in the larger discipline in which Islamic Religious Studies finds itself. Reorienting an entire subdiscipline, especially one about which the majority of those associated with it see nothing problematic, is, however, a rather daunting task.