Islamic Studies In US Universities Charles Kurzman And .
From Middle East Studies for the New Millennium: Infrastructures of Knowledge (SocialScience Research Council), ed. Seteney Shami and Cynthia Miller-Idriss (New York: NewYork University Press, 2016)"Islamic Studies in US Universities"Charles Kurzman and Carl W. ErnstThe University of North Carolina at Chapel HillThe academic study of the Islamic religious tradition in US universities is an enterprise carriedout across a variety of institutional frameworks, each of which presents certain limitations. As inEurope, Islamic studies in the United States originated in the tradition of Orientalist scholarshipand Christian theology, with its strong textual emphasis, but it has gradually expanded to overlapwith Middle East area studies as well as a number of humanistic and social science disciplines,especially religious studies. This brief overview of the institutional locations and politicalcontext of Islamic studies in American universities is intended to clarify the different kinds ofresearch and teaching relevant to Islamic studies and how they relate to the contemporarypolitical and cultural situation. We conclude with a discussion of some of the organizationalchallenges facing Islamic studies in US higher education (for a comparative internationaloverview of the field, see Subject Centre for Languages et al. 2008).The Boom in Islamic StudiesOver the past several decades, and especially since 9/11, scholarly interest in Islamic studies hasmushroomed. “Everyone is interested in Islam now and in different topics related to Islam,” asone scholar put it in an on-campus interview with the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).1We can track this rise in a variety of ways. First, let’s look at the number of doctoral dissertationsproduced on Islam and Muslims over the past half-century. As a percentage of all dissertations inKurzman and Ernst 1
the Proquest Dissertations and Theses Database, Islamic studies themes grew from less than 1percent prior to the late 1970s, to 3 percent in the 1980s and 1990s, to over 4 percent since 2001(see Figure 1).2Figure 1. Percentage of dissertations with a focus on Islam and Muslims, 1960–2010Another indicator of scholarly interest in Islamic subjects is the percentage of articles inthe flagship journals of various academic disciplines. Figure 2 shows rolling five-year rates foreight such journals over the past half-century: the American Academy of Religion’s Journal ofthe American Academy of Religion, the American Anthropological Association’s AmericanAnthropologist, the American Economics Association’s American Economic Review, theAmerican Historical Association’s American Historical Review, the American Political ScienceAssociation’s American Political Science Review, the American Public Health Association’sKurzman and Ernst 2
American Journal of Public Health, the American Psychological Association’s AmericanPsychologist, and the American Sociological Association’s American Sociological Review. 3Figure 2. Percentage of articles with a focus on Islam and Muslims in eight flagshipjournals, 1960–2010. The thick line is the average for the eight journals; the thin lines representfive-year moving averages.Kurzman and Ernst 3
The numbers jump around considerably, and we do not know if these patterns hold forother journals but we can draw several preliminary conclusions:-The rates of scholarly attention to Islam and Muslims remain low—under 10 percentof articles for all but a handful of five-year periods. The eight journals published 252articles on these subjects, out of a total of 11,172 articles, or 2.3 percent.-The rates differ by discipline—psychology and public health are consistently amongthe lowest, anthropology and religious studies are generally among the highest.-These rates are affected significantly by special issues, such as the eight articles in thethematic supplement on the Qur’an and Qur’anic exegesis in the Journal of theAmerican Academy of Religion (JAAR) in 1979 and the five articles on thehistoriography of the Middle East American Historical Review (AHR) in December1991, each of which accounts for the jumps in the five-year rates for the JAAR in theearly 1980s and the AHR in the early 1990s (Welch 1979; “Modern Middle East”1991, iv).-The average rate rose throughout the past half-century but accelerated after 2001.This is particularly clear when the time periods are dichotomized, as in Table 1—seven of the eight journals devoted more coverage to Islam and Muslims since 2002than before and five of eight more than doubled their coverage.Kurzman and Ernst 4
Table 1.Percentage of articles in each journal with a focus on Islamor Muslims, before and after 3.210.4This jump in attention to Islamic studies has spurred an “avalanche” of books and articlesintended “to give us a crash course in, as the phrase goes, ‘understanding Islam’” (Geertz 2003,27). Those of us who chose to study Islamic subjects prior to 2001 suffer from mixed feelingstoward the sudden surge of interest. Naturally, we are gratified to be taken seriously and wewelcome the improved career prospects. At the same time, it is disconcerting that this attentionderives in large part from overblown fears of security threats. “It’s not just that the field benefitsfrom Muslims committing atrocities, but that it benefits also from non-Muslims’ ignorance andparanoia. As a result, Islamic studies scholars spend much of their time in the limelight trying todispel the very stereotypes that helped bring them to prominence” (Kurzman 2007b, 519-20).The rise in attention to Islamic studies also raises the question of how to organize this sortof work in the context of American academia. Over the past century, universities haveexperimented with several institutional formats for this field, and none of them has provedentirely satisfactory.The Organization of Islamic Studies in the United StatesThe first professor of Islamic studies in the United States may have been Duncan BlackKurzman and Ernst 5
Macdonald, a professor of Semitic languages at the Hartford Theological Seminary, who wasappointed director of the “Mohammedan department” at the Kennedy School of Missions whenthe seminary established the school in 1911. However, interest in Islam was noticeable amongintellectuals in America as early as the eighteenth century. Thomas Jefferson owned a translationof the Qur’an, and there were a number of American subscribers to the publications of theAsiatic Society of Bengal in the 1790s (Asiatick Researches, etc.). This interest began to beinstitutionalized with the formation of the American Oriental Society in New Haven in 1843.Arabic language was taught first at Yale University in 1841, though it was only available at halfa dozen universities by 1900 (Starkey 1965).In the early twentieth century, several departments of Oriental studies were established atthe older American universities, typically including within their purview everything from Chinaand Japan to India and the Near East. By the 1960s, “Oriental Studies” was typically split intodifferent sections, with departments of Near Eastern languages and civilizations emerging as thehome for research on Islam and Muslim societies, alongside study of the ancient Near East (for abrief overview, see Mahdi 1997). Near Eastern studies departments were found primarily in theolder universities of the Ivy League (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia) along withChicago and Michigan, eventually joined by a dozen or so other leading universities, both publicand private. In a 1976 review of the field, Charles Adams distinguished four main approaches tothe study of the Islamic religious tradition: 1) normative or religious approaches, whether byChristian missionaries, Muslim apologists, or advocates of interfaith dialogue; 2) philologicaland historical approaches; 3) social scientific approaches; 4) the phenomenological approachassociated with the history of religions. Nevertheless, he concluded that “the study of Islam as aKurzman and Ernst 6
religion is grossly underdeveloped in the centers of higher learning in North America” (Adams1976, 53, see also pp. 34-54).The discipline of Islamic studies, as a rubric for a field of study, emerged in the midtwentieth century (Hitti 1941, 292-4). The first entity in North America to take on this title wasthe Institute of Islamic Studies founded at McGill in 1952. In the United States, the field ofIslamic studies was popularized by the writings of Gustave E. von Grunebaum, who had joinedUCLA in 1949, although the center he founded there in 1957 was called the Center for NearEastern Studies (von Grunebaum 1954; Laroui 1973; Banani 1975). The first Islamic studiescenter in the United States was the Duncan Black Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam andChristian-Muslim Relations at the Hartford Theological Seminary in 1973—and this was asomewhat specialized center at a seminary rather than a university (see Bijlefeld 1993).4Villanova established its Center for Arab and Islamic Studies in 1983 but a listing of Islamicstudies centers in the United States in 1992 identified only two more centers based at collegesand universities: the American Institute for Islamic Affairs at American University and theInstitute for Islamic-Judaic Studies at the University of Denver (Koszegi and Melton 1992, 3035). Both are now defunct, as are the Institutes for Muslim Studies at two Christian schools—Wheaton College and William Tyndale College. Since then, at least a dozen more centers haveemerged, most since 9/11: Georgetown’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-ChristianUnderstanding (1993), Youngstown State University’s Center for Islamic Studies (1995), theCaroline-Duke-Emory Institute for the Study of Islam (1997), the University of Arkansas’ KingFahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies (2000), Columbia International University’sZwemer Center for Muslim Studies (2000), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’sKurzman and Ernst 7
Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations (2003), the UnitedStates Naval Academy’s Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies (2005), the Duke IslamicStudies Center (2006), the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago’s Center of ChristianMuslim Engagement for Peace and Justice (2006), the Graduate Theological Union’s Center forIslamic Studies (2007), Merrimack College’s Center for Jewish-Christian-Muslim Relations(2008), the University of Southern California and the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute ofReligion’s Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement (2008), and Lehigh University’s Center forGlobal Islamic Studies (2009). It is worth noting that few of these centers focus exclusively onIslamic studies; the others combine Islamic studies with an area studies or interfaith focus.A similar pattern emerges with interdisciplinary programs and departments in Islamicstudies. This is difficult to pin down with accuracy but it appears that the first such program inthe United States was established in the 1960s by von Grunebaum’s Center for Near EasternStudies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Ohio State University founded an IslamicStudies program in the mid-1980s, separate from the campus’ Center for Middle East Studies.Texas’ Department of Middle Eastern Studies and Berkeley’s Center for Middle Eastern Studiesstarted Islamic studies programs in the 1990s, and at least nine schools—in addition to several ofthe centers already mentioned—have established interdisciplinary Islamic studies programs since2001, most of them offering undergraduate majors or minors. These new programs includeGeorge Mason (2003), Stanford (2003), the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (2004),Harvard (2005), Michigan State (Muslim Studies, 2005), the University of Washington (added totheir Arabic program in 2006), San Francisco State (2007), and Lake Forest College (2008). Atleast two area studies departments have added Islamic studies to their titles: Georgetown’sKurzman and Ernst 8
Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies and New York University’s Department of MiddleEast and Islamic Studies, both of which changed their names in 2004.The institutional arrangements for Islamic studies programs vary tremendously. Some arehosted within a Middle East studies department (such as Texas and Washington) or a MiddleEast center (such as Berkeley). Some are hosted by on-campus international centers (such asMichigan State and UCLA). At Columbia University, the School of General Studies has offereda Liberal Studies MA Program in Islamic Studies since 1987, administratively separate fromColumbia’s Middle East Institute and its Department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languagesand Cultures. At schools without Middle East departments or centers, the programs are housed ina particular department (such as religious studies at University of North Carolina-Charlotte) or inthe college of arts and sciences (such as George Mason, Ohio State, and San Francisco State).Similarly, universities and donors have begun to establish endowed chairs in Islamicstudies, most of them open to a variety of disciplines, not just religious studies. The first ones inthe United States appears to have been the Ibn Khaldun Chair in Islamic Studies at AmericanUniversity (1981), the King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud Chair in Islamic Studies at the University ofCalifornia-Santa Barbara (1990), the King Fahd Chair for Islamic Shariah Studies at HarvardLaw School (1993), and the Avalon Foundation Distinguished Service Professor of IslamicStudies at Chicago (1997). At least a half-dozen chairs have been founded since 9/11: theHumphrey Distinguished Visiting Chair in Islamic World Studies at Macalester College (2003),the Nursi Chair in Islamic Studies at John Carroll (2003), the Imam Khattab Endowed Chair ofIslamic Studies at Toledo (2006), the Gorter Chair in Islamic Studies at Duke (2007), the GorterChair of Islamic World Studies at Lake Forest College (2007), and the IIIT Chair at GeorgeKurzman and Ernst 9
Mason (2008).These developments suggest a variety of avenues for the institutionalization of Islamicstudies in US universities. In the following pages, we discuss several of these in turn, andaddress some of the uncomfortable limitations that they present.Near Eastern Languages and CivilizationsThe first academic units to house Islamic studies in the United States were departments of NearEastern Languages and Civilizations, sometimes known by the abbreviation NELC. Since therange of these departments extended from the cuneiform civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia tomedieval Islam and Judaism, and eventually to the contemporary literatures of the Middle East,they were really to be seen as loose collections of linguistic and textual expertise, housedtogether for convenience because of their geographic association. If Near Eastern studiesdepartments shared any intellectual perspective, it was the Orientalism that was fostered by areliance on philological methods and a nearly exclusive focus on texts. Much has been written onthis subject, particularly since the 1978 publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, which may besaid to have overstated the case by painting all Orientalist scholars with the same brush,suggesting active collusion with colonialism or, at best, bad faith as a standard characteristic ofthe profession. Nevertheless, it may be observed that many Orientalist scholars shared basicpresuppositions of European (and by implication American) superiority to the African and Asianpeoples whom they colonized. The scientific West was opposed to the superstitious mystic East,and scientific racial theory and the consequent widely accepted racism supported thesegeneralizations. But the philological method encouraged the notion that, armed with a dictionaryKurzman and Ernst 10
and a grammar, the armchair scholar of Oriental languages could decipher all that was importantabout the culture and character of Orientals. For many European and American intellectuals,nineteenth-century ideas of culture and religion included the widespread notion that religioncould be defined in terms of an unchanging essence determined by scriptural texts (the Protestantunderpinnings of this presupposition often went unchallenged). Religion could thus in principlebe detached from history and understood from texts alone (Ernst and Martin, 2010).In a lengthy review article written in 1978, Marilyn Robinson Waldman remarked that“[i]n Islamic studies, interdisciplinary research is still in its prehistory, as full of hazards as it isof potential. . .[because] linguistic, not theoretical, expertise has continued to be the sine qua nonfor writing Islamic history” (545-6). This legacy of Orientalist scholarship is very much alive indepartments of Near Eastern languages and civilizations today, in terms of the persistence of thephilological approach and a disinterest in applying other disciplinary approaches, although to besure there have been notable contributions in these areas of textual study and in the study ofmodern history. Many dissertations in Islamic studies coming out of these departments focusnearly exclusively on primary texts from the eighth to twelfth centuries, with emphasis onnormative disciplines like Islamic law. These studies are often unrelieved by anything more thana modicum of reference to theoretical studies of modern authors in fields like literary theory ormoral philosophy; in other words, they focus on replicating medieval texts rather thaninterpreting them in terms of contemporary disciplinary and interdisciplinary issues. Such anapproach has very little to do with the kind of teaching and research that goes on in the vastmajority of jobs available in liberal arts colleges, since few graduates of NELC departments willfind placement in the kind of department in which they were trained. The occasional studentsKurzman and Ernst 11
who attempt to go outside the narrow framework of Near Eastern texts—and there are a few—have to overcome significant institutional obstacles in order to include, for example, anexamination field in Buddhism as a comparative tonic to alleviate the monotony of the standarddiet.The traditional NELC approach to Islamic studies has faced increasing challenges frompost-Orientalist Islamic studies, which has sought to address not only the canon of classical textsbut also the recent history of Muslims and non-Muslims in the traditional homelands of Islam aswell as in Europe and America. Increasing attention has been paid to stereotypes and negativeimages of Muslims, from medieval times to the colonial and postcolonial contexts. Media andpopular culture representations of Islam, which for many Americans are the only source ofinformation about Muslims, themselves have become the subject of analysis. Feminism andgender studies brought valuable new perspectives, particularly concerning the roles of women,but also in terms of reconsidering all aspects of gender. Ethnography and anthropology focusedon small-scale societies with intensive study of the actual practices found in particular locations,providing an important corrective to the often idealized pictures to be found in classical texts.The new ideologies of the late twentieth century, including fundamentalism, Salafism, andWahhabi movements, claimed attention as legitimate subjects of inquiry. And while there wasmuch superficial instant analysis of terrorism by journalistic “experts,” the nature of jihadistmovements also became a subject of serious academic research.Also spurring these changes was the changing demographics of North America, whichbrought increasing numbers of Muslims—and Hindus, Buddhists, and others—into collegeclassrooms, and eventually into the professoriate as well. The presence of Muslims in EuropeKurzman and Ernst 12
and North Am
Islamic studies; the others combine Islamic studies with an area studies or interfaith focus. A similar pattern emerges with interdisciplinary programs and departments in Islamic studies. This is difficult to pin down with accuracy but it appears that the first such program in
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