Studying the Qurʾān in the Muslim Academy
MAJID DANESHGAR
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Daneshgar, Majid, author.
Title: Studying the Qur’ān in the Muslim Academy / Majid Daneshgar. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019012350| ISBN 9780190067540 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190067557 (updf) | ISBN 9780190067564 (epub) | ISBN 9780190067571 (online)
Subjects: LCSH: Islam—Study and teaching. | Islam—Apologetic works. Classification: LCC BP42 .D36 2019 | DDC 297.071—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019012350
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Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
Dedicated to Seyyed Hossein of Meybod College (Iran), who told 2005 entrants:
This Qurʾanic Sciences faculty is smaller than a high school, so you must always remember to expand your vision beyond its walls! &
Donald in Dunedin (New Zealand), who told me when I was very much worried about the reaction of readers to one of my works: Majid, the Earth doesn’t rotate around you, me, nor anybody else.
PART II
3.
2.1.ThetranslationoftheArabic Mawsuʿa al-mustashriqin (Encyclopediaof Orientalists)
2.2.BookcoverdisplayingthereceptionofWesternQurʾanicstudiesamong traditionalists
3.1.TheIndonesiantranslationofShariʿati’sonthethirdimamofShiʿis,Husayn 87 Tables
2.1.AMalay-Indonesianclassificationof“Orientalist”attackson hadith
2.2.CommonsubjectsinbothIslamictraditionalschoolsandthe Muslimacademy
2.3.AcademictheologysubjectsinNewZealand
Preface
I. Here Is New York and My Research Concerns
A few years ago, I read the book Here Is New York by E. B. White, which was first published in 1949. It caused me to reconsider the places where I grew up, studied, and worked.
For White, people in New York City are divided into three groups. The first group is made up of “involuntary,” native New Yorkers who “take the city for granted and accept its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable.”1 The second group is the commuters who only come to achieve a certain goal and then get out. The third group is those people, native and not, who view New York as a land ripe for discovery, one in which they can achieve their goals.2 For them, New York is neither a home nor a place only for specific activity or temporary residence. They love to explore the city and see it as a place whose buildings, shops, and people are full of history. For them, New York is its past and its future: Learning more about it means learning more about both.
Everyone is born and raised somewhere and most everyone both likes and dislikes wherever that place may be; most everyone has a degree of ambivalence toward what he or she calls home.
My own birthplace is Yazd, in Iran, a desert city of the Middle East, where the heritage of Zoroastrianism may still be felt, where the call to prayer (adhan) is still heard everywhere.
During Yazd’s summer, my brothers and I used to go swimming in the many swimming pools of this hot city. We did not study Yazd history and culture because there were no resources or facilities dedicated for it. Instead, we studied science and biology, for which there were resources and facilities. Along with many of our friends and relatives, we were told we had to be equipped with the empirical sciences in high school in order to be agha-yi khodiman (our own masters) in the future.
For us, the desert and Yazd the lovely desert-city were a lovely setting and an accommodating birthplace as well as a platform from which we could go
on to achieve great things. My brothers and I did not become aware of our hometown’s history and culture until we had left it and moved to bigger cities.
Upon returning to Yazd, just after turning twenty, I no longer saw the city as being simply part of the desert. For me, its buildings, people, cafés, food, and soil now all had meaning, reflecting the history that had shaped its identity . . . and mine.
Unlike my brothers, who all studied engineering, I chose to study “Qurʾanic sciences” at the Qurʾanic Studies colleges belonging to the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology and the Iranian Endowment Organization, which was in close connection with the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.
I continued to “return” to Yazd and to keep observing its features after deciding to study Qurʾanic sciences.
Sometimes I wonder whether it was my own decision to study Islam or a decision that my parents had imposed on me. These good citizens of the desert-city of Yazd believe that not only my existence, but also my name and career, were decreed by God.
During the Iran-Iraq war, my mother, Zari, dreamed that someone gave her a dusty book. In the dream, she cleaned the book’s cover and then, with her right hand, picked up a piece of chalk from the floor. Her hand wrote an Arabic-Persian noun phrase: Qurʾān-e Majid (The Glorious Qurʾān). The term “Majid,” one of the attributes of God in the Qurʾān, became golden. “Majid” was absorbed into the book’s cover.3 Zari then woke.
She called my father, Rahman.
She told him: “I am pregnant.”
“Again?” Rahman asked.
“Yes,” she replied. “I am pregnant with a boy whose name is Majid and who will dedicate his life to Islam and the Qurʾān.”
For a long time, this story was the motivation for my interest in religious studies. It certainly stopped me from considering studies in urban engineering, textile engineering, and geology, disciplines I was also accepted to study at university.
Unlike my brothers, who began their childhood social interactions in an ordinary kindergarten, at the age of five my parents sent me to a maktab, a small school where one learns to recite the Qurʾān and to perform namaz (Arabic: salat; saying prayers).
In the religious context of post-war Iranian society, a small child with the ability to recite the Qurʾān by heart was the center of every family session and gathering. I was always one of these children. As a result, I received both awards and rewards.
It was a nice feeling for me, at that time, to know that “divine” inspiration was behind my educational choices and future career. I thought that it guaranteed my life, job, and future.
The collectivistic nature of Persian culture, along with our household’s top-to-bottom hierarchical rule, always made me say to myself, “Do something, Majid, to meet your parent’s dreams! You should grow up to be the man that your parents want you to be!”
So, early in my academic career, I became involved with the media, doing domestic and a few international TV and radio programs and interviews with Iranian newspapers and magazines. This was meant to tell my parents: “This is ‘your Majid’ who is appearing in the media due to his research activities.”
I did all this public activity mainly on the basis of my mother’s dream, the reliability of which I constantly wanted to prove to my family. The more media appearances, the better the feeling, for both me and my parents.
The satisfaction I got as a child from good recitation remained with me even after I went to the Qurʾanic studies college in Tehran and then to its branch college in the city of Meybod in Yazd province, where I completed my bachelor’s degree.
Such colleges, so the dean of the Tehran college of Qurʾanic Studies told me in 2003, “aim at producing scholars who are not only obliged to spread the message of God, but also to save people’s lives and society from destruction.” Saving the world was one thing, certainly, but one of the main educational features of the curricula of both the colleges is an emphasis on Tajwid, the phonetic rules of Qurʾān recitation. Indeed, it is a common belief in the Muslim academy that a scholar of Islam and the Qurʾān should be able to beautifully and fluently recite it. I therefore took several courses to improve my recitation ability.
Our lecturer on the subject, Mehdi Seyf, a renowned referee of international Qurʾān recitation competitions, strongly recommended that I work with a tutor and listen to tahqiq (lit., “eloquent and gentle recitations”) audio tapes of the famous Egyptian reciter Abdul Basit Abdel Samad (d. 1988). I took private recitation classes almost every day for six months, which greatly improved my ability. In order to get my bachelor’s degree, I of course also had to pass some courses on Islamic theology, Shariʿa, Arabic language
and literature, as well as various courses on general psychology, sociology, the philosophy of education, and statistics.
After completing my studies at Meybod-Yazd, and again on the basis of my parents’ advice and to honor their opinion on the matter, I went to the city of Qum—renowned as the “Vatican of Iran”—for a masters at the male faculty for Qurʾān and Hadith (prophetic traditions).
I very soon realized that Qum is more complex than might be imagined: Previously part of the megalopolis of Tehran, today Qum is largely independent. Through the thousands of students from around the world who study Islam there, the city now has an extraordinarily significant impact on the wider world, too.
A visitor to Qum will immediately and automatically become a practitioner of Shiʿi Islamic teachings and culture, which are largely different from those one learns in Istanbul or Doha, where the Sunni approach to Islam prevails. Shiʿi tradition is reflected in Qum’s civic life, in restaurants, cafés, and libraries, in the streets around shrines and mosques, even in the few cinemas the city has (which usually do not show the kind of movies that play in Tehran).
As well as reflecting the strong cultural and historical traditions of the lands where the two main strands of Islam were eventually established as dominant, Shiʿi and Sunni Islam differ on how the power of Islam’s founder, Prophet Muhammad, was passed along. Shiʿi theology holds that, divinely inspired, Muhammad named ʿAli ibn Abi Talib as his successor at Ghadir Khumm; Sunni tradition considers that Muhammad named no successor and that the Prophet’s intimate circle of “Companions” elected Abu Bakr as successor and leader of the Muslim community by consensus.
In the streets of Qum, one can see students and visitors from every part of the world and hear conversations in the local languages of West Africa (e.g., Bambara), Eastern Europe (e.g., Bosnian), Western Europe (English, French, German), and the Malay-Indonesian world (e.g., Bahasa Indonesia). In Qum, by roadsides, in markets and alleyways, one often passes by the graves of important figures from Islamic history; the small district of Kahak was where the famous and influential Muslim philosopher Sadr al-Din Muhammad Shirazi, known as Mulla Sadra (d. ca. 1640), “spent fifteen years of ascetic devotion and self-purification until he achieved the ‘direct’ vision of the intelligible world.”4
In spite of its world renown, Qum as a city remains an untapped source of Islamic knowledge, a place whose archaeology, sociology, and history, especially, deserve better attention.
The Grand Ayatollahs (high-ranking clerics) of Qum have a role and power and influence equivalent to the Mufti of Mecca or Medina.
A Grand Ayatollah of Qum can grant research funds, permanent jobs, and various types of facilities and resources for someone in Islamic—or even plain-old secular academic institutions—in such places as, among many others across the globe, London, Washington, Sydney, Nairobi, Cape Town, Jakarta, and Wellington. A Grand Ayatollah of Qum has the power to issue a fatwa condemning to death someone living beyond the borders of Iran and promising a huge financial reward for the eventual killer. Just such fatwas (for apostasy) have been, for example, pronounced against the Iranian singer Shahin Najafi, now living in exile in Germany.
Studying the Qurʾān and working with several scientific and research centers attached to hawzas (Shiʿi seminaries) in Qum brought me up close with Shiʿi thinking, traditions, and clerics for some years.
The Qurʾān is not only viewed as a divine revelation but also as the key source for solving every possible national, political and cultural problem. For example, I worked with an institute dedicated to “Qurʾān and science” and “Qurʾān and Orientalism” whose goal is to prove the harmony between the Qurʾān and science and to “decolonize” European Qurʾanic studies—to “purify” the Western perspective.
Despite the efforts of my parents to keep me in my Shiʿi homeland, after completing my MA in Qum, I went to University of Malaya, at Kuala Lumpur, in Sunni-dominated Malaysia. I decided to experience the Sunni tradition of course but also a social and cultural context that would be, unlike that of Iran, truly pluralistic.
Malaysia consists of communities and ethnicities originally from places as different as Arabia, Yemen, China, India, and Thailand, among other places. Also, Malaysia had a more stable economy, currency, and educational system than those of Iran and some other Islamic societies in the Middle East I might have chosen.
At the time of my stay in the country, the last prime minister, Najib Razak, was still in power. During my time there, however, Malaysia’s Islamic context, like that of its institutes dedicated to the study of Islam, remained extremely conservative and orthodox.
Most Islamic institutions tended to be “Arabized.” Not only were they financially connected to Arab countries but they also promoted exchange programs such as Malaysian-Arabian/Egyptian (Azhari)/Jordanian intensive or long-term courses that tended to reinforce Arab connections—interest
in ties with Iranian Islamic institutions was almost nil. Every month, many, many people from Arab countries came to my institute to speak about (an Arab version of) Islam. I never heard from these guests and visitors any discussion of local—Malaysian—Islamic practice or the effects that the Malay society or culture might have on Islam.
I knew of course that a move from an extremely Shiʿi context to an Arabized Sunni institute for the study of Islam in Southeast Asia would be a significant change. Indeed, I found it quite challenging.
My hosts did not welcome Shiʿi teachings. The sources I had employed for years—Shiʿi-inspired commentaries on the Qurʾān and Hadith—were not considered reliable for the study of Islam. As well, the methodology I had used to study Islamic prophetic traditions (ahadith) in Qum was not the same as that used by my new colleagues.
Frankly, I was just astounded by all of it.
What I had heard about the Sunni tradition in my Shiʿi homeland was just not the same as what I was now learning in my new Sunni academic context and . . . vice versa: What I was hearing about Shiʿi tradition was not what I had learned or experienced.
I very soon realized that there is a dark veil hung between the Sunni and Shiʿi traditions. It is a veil of ignorance woven of the culture and political conflicts between the original Sunni and Shiʿi lands and peoples. Through this veil—and it hangs not only between Saudi Arabia and Iran but between every Islamic community attached to one of the traditions in respect to the other—one sees a blurred, rather vague, image of “otherness.”
For Muslim academia, the veil means that cultural, political and textual ignorance—partly intentional, partly unintentional—permeates Shiʿi and Sunni institutions alike. Both students and scholars ignore the other sects, fail to study their theology, literature, culture, and rituals, and are inattentive to any possible literary, ethnic, and cultural connections between the two grand traditions.
The “otherness” of my upbringing and education was a special and difficult challenge for me. When I began studying Islam in general, and the Qurʾān in particular, in Tehran and then in my hometown of Yazd, I had used sources that were not, and still are not, employed in the Sunni academic context.5
Indeed, in neither Shiʿi nor Sunni academia generally are the methods, syllabi, and styles of the other tradition recognized. For example, although I successfully defended my thesis, during the viva, the chair of the examining
committee, after admiring my thesis, reminded me that “here [Malaysia] is a Sunni context,” and that I needed to refer to Islamic exegetical works produced by Sunni scholars. Even such classic and modern Shiʿi luminaries as al-Tabrisi (d. ca. 1153) or Tabatabaʾi (d. 1981), respectively, would not do. I should note that the chair had studied at one of the great British universities. It was not just that Malaysia’s Sunni tradition was challenging.
From the very beginning of my time at university, I had been a big fan of European writings on Islam, in particular, those of the late Andrew Rippin (d. 2016), one of the foremost scholars of Islam and the Qurʾān of the last fifty years. In Malaysia, I struggled to find teachers who would take a serious interest in such Western Qurʾān scholars as Rippin and their work—in their eyes, Western analytical readings of the history of the Qurʾān and its commentaries just did not make the grade.
Although Rippin was approved as one of my doctoral supervisors—for which I am still grateful (it was Rippin who persuaded me to carry on when I wanted to drop out of the program)—some of my colleagues and other academic staff did not think highly of him. Recalling the way medieval Christian polemicists and some colonial officials talked about Islam, my colleagues felt that any work by such Westerners as Rippin, who are generalized as “Orientalists,” was just not trustworthy scholarship. Once, while passing through a corridor in the department’s classroom area, I noticed that a lecturer was presenting Rippin’s and other Westerners’ pictures on a PowerPoint slide, characterizing them as “Orientalists.”
In the most positive scenario, for example, Rippin was viewed as a very severe critic of Islamic history, if not as an actual (so-called) “enemy of Islam.” His works are read by Malaysian students of Islam but little-cited and his methodology even less often applied.
As I saw later in my budding career, this dismissive attitude toward Westerners and their work carried well beyond Malaysia. In both Shiʿi and Sunni academia, I found work produced in the West is just not valued. Scholars in the Muslim academy generally were neither familiar with, nor interested in studying, Western work on Islam. They nonetheless frequently produced essays criticizing bits and pieces of such work even when the bits and pieces themselves, let alone a complete work, were generally unavailable or just ignored. I am reminded of Marwa Elshakry’s noting how nineteenth-century religious thinkers, Egyptian scholars among them, rejected Darwinism despite never having read any of Darwin’s works.6
As challenging to my religious point of view and to my Western-oriented academic interests, the Malaysia-government-funded, Sunni-oriented educational institution eventually became my first long-term employer.
As everywhere else, student and colleague motivations at the University of Malaya varied.
Some students had to be there and some lecturers had to work: These both were a type of what E. B. White called “commuters,” “the queerest bird[s] of all . . . [their] entrances and exits more devious than those”7 of a desert city. Cheek-by-jowl with the commuters were those who had chosen to study and work at the university, those who, to paraphrase White, viewed the university as “a land ripe for discovery.” For them, education was a means by which they could learn about history, themselves, and their communities.
The next move, premeditated and deliberate, in my early academic career was to one of the most liberal societies in the world. New Zealand’s University of Otago, a government-funded, secular university with a highly diverse student body and scholars from many different religious traditions and cultures was almost as opposite as I could find to a government-funded, Arabized, Sunni-oriented Malaysian institution.
After a couple of years living and working in liberal academia, I found that there, as in Malaysia, people fit into E. B. White’s typology; I have now concluded that it applies to all communities and cultures.8 In effect, in each of the three social-academic contexts in which I have lived (Shiʿi, Sunni, and Western liberal),9 studied and worked on Islam’s history and traditions, there have been some scholars and students who approach them instrumentally, some who took them for granted, and some who approached them “as a land ripe for discovery.”
In New Zealand, it was possible for me to experience and feel concepts such as “individualism” and “liberalism,” notions I had heretofore only read about in books and magazines.
I found that New Zealand society often proved more open than New Zealand academia.
Indeed, I unexpectedly faced serious opposition from what were, in effect, Muslim fundamentalists there. Some of my Western colleagues, not really familiar with the issues involved, were reluctant to take a hard line against interference from those who wish to impose their particular views on the study of Islam. Although such self-appointed guardians of Islamic “orthodoxy” were often thousands of miles away from their homelands, places such
as Afghanistan or Pakistan, they felt fully secure to promote their illiberal values in liberal New Zealand.
As someone who feels himself a native of E. B. White’s “third type,” I was intrigued as well as troubled when I discovered that, in New Zealand of all places, a group of Muslim students and colleagues objected to my teaching. They said that undergraduates are too young to study such material about Islamic civilization as I was then teaching, especially the work of the scholars Abdelwahab Meddeb and Andrew Rippin. What my critics wanted, instead, they said, was for me to “Islamicize” my teaching by referring almost exclusively to influential traditionalist—Sunni—Muslim scholars.
Two big questions came to me: What was going on here (in liberal New Zealand) and there (in Islamic academia).
These two big questions resolved into a number of troubling, urgent, and interlocking questions:
• What is the nature of the Muslim academy in general and the study of religion departments in particular, given reigning sectarianism and rampant cultural ignorance (both of which have their root in politics)?
• How do students and researchers study Islam within the Muslim academy?
• Why do Muslim scholars of Islam and the Qurʾān in Iran, Arabia, and Malaysia, among other Muslim lands, not regularly use and reference each others’ works?
• Why do Muslim academics so often reject work on Islam done by Western scholars?
• Why do some Muslims want to change the Western approach Islamic studies?
• Why do some Muslims think that reading the works of a European scholar of Islam might hurt their beliefs or ʿaqida?
These questions prompted me to look into the little-explored cultural and educational features of how Islam is studied in the Muslim academy.
In very much the same way as the Bible has done for peoples who historically adopted Christianity, the Qurʾān situates as central to everything pertaining to Islam as well as to everything cultural and traditional in a society.
Among people who have adopted Islam, for example, it is a virtually universal belief that the Qurʾān is the key that enables true believers to attain
bliss and prosperity. My grandfather, for instance, told me many, many times how he restrained his anger by relying on Qurʾanic verses—as he was taught to do by his parents. Grandfather said that he was thereby able to lead a thoroughly “calm and friendly life.” What he meant, I believe, was that he felt that reading the Qurʾān had enabled him to attain a form of ethical perfection.
As well, as the central element of Islam, the Qurʾān is of course also a political instrument—it is and has been regularly employed by classical and modern politicians and religious thinkers.
The study of the Qurʾān as an academic subject in universities and colleges (not in religiously oriented seminaries and madrasas or in society as whole) is the subject of this work.
It is beyond dispute that, in the Muslim academy, the centrality of the Qurʾān in culture, tradition, and politics, has become an important tool to weed out the European-Christian scholarly approaches in the study of Islam. It is also systemically (and systematically) used deny the validity of Western critical historical approaches to the Qurʾān as well as to encourage Muslim students to use the Qurʾān as a way of highlighting and proving political and religious loyalties as well as religious points.
I recently came across an article that illustrates this latter use as a political tool.
Written up as a thesis and presented at the National Conference on New Approaches to the Humanities in the 21st Century in Iran in 2017, a paper titled “The Critical Analysis of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and Post-JCPOA from the Perspective of the Holy Qurʾān” “defends Islamic values” even as it demonstrates the legal right of the Islamic Republic of Iran to scientifically use nuclear energy in the light of “Qurʾān verses, the lifestyle of Shiʿi Imams and the Iranian Supreme Leader’s accounts.”10 The conference was organized by the Female Campus of the Imam Sadiq University of Iran.
Insofar as it sheds light on both my New Zealand critics’ demand that I “Islamicize” my teaching and the continuity of politicization in the Muslim academy, the originating institution of the conference is significant.
After the collapse of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran focused on “Islamic education” or the “Islamization of colleges” by means of a “cultural revolution” (inqilab-e farhangi). In order to unify educational policies, “Islamicize” syllabi, and reassign teaching and administrative staff, colleges and universities were closed from 1980 through to late 1982.11
In practice, once reforms were completed, university administrations were charged with eradicating Western social and political doctrines like Marxism while “Islamization” scrubbed out the secularism, “Americanization,”12 and Western culture that had developed under Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1925–1941) and his son Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1941–1979).
More than any other area or scholarly endeavor, “Islamization” impacted the humanities, “the essence of the university.”13
Imam Sadiq University, previously the Harvard-affiliated Iran Center for Management Studies,14 was one of the first post-revolutionary institutions of higher learning to open its doors in 1982. The new establishment sought to train and promote the humanities based on Shiʿi sources, a mission which, as we have seen above, it continues into the present in quite politicized form.15
Types of “Islamicizing” educational reforms also occurred in other Muslim societies throughout the period, from around the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s.
For example, the foundation of the International Islamic Universities of Pakistan and Malaysia (IIU and IIUM), in 1980 and 1983, respectively, was the result of a Muslim education reform conference held in Mecca in 1977. The main aim was to help Muslims rediscover and reinforce the dynamics of Islam in their present-day circumstances and, above all, to redefine the Islamic concept of education, thus leading to ways and means of achieving the harmony and unity of the body, mind, and soul for which Islam stands.16
Conference participants agreed to produce and unify academic syllabi for Islamic education that would be distributed throughout the Muslim world as well as, in particular, the United Kingdom.17
“Islamicization” aimed at enabling university graduates to be experts in their own, specific disciplines, but also in the Islamic faith, making of graduates, ideally, people who could solve human challenges as well as problems related to bring Muslim.
As I have frequently observed, heard, and read over the years, praising and respecting Islamic sanctities is a key aspect of Islamization and is to be practiced in Muslim academic careers as well as applied to published work. For instance, Qurʾanic studies (Arabic: al-dirasat al-Qurʾaniyya; Persian: Qurʾān pazhuhi) graduates from reputed universities in Muslim countries are very frequently called Khadim al-Qurʾān al-Karim (“The Servants of the Holy Qurʾān”), and both academic and nonacademic journals are obliged to print standard blessings (doxologies) after the use of Muhammad’s, or his Companions’, names.18
In light of Islamization, one may legitimately wonder if Muslim universities and other academic institutions are meant as places for students to learn to defend their established beliefs or to learn to think critically about the past, present reality, and future possibilities.
That is the big question.
In the words of Akeel Bilgrami, are academic institutions “sites for students for intellectual inquiry and research, and where one of their chief goals is the pursuit of truth and pedagogical projects for conveying the truth as one discovers it and conceives it in one’s research, and to set students on the path of discovering further truths in the future on their own” or . . . not?19
While previous scholars have examined how Islam is studied, this volume goes one step further to shed light on the role of politics and of religious and cultural conflicts in the study of Islam and to go deeper by studying an underexamined venue: the Muslim academy.
The reception of Islam in Western universities has already been researched by various Muslim and non-Muslim scholars. These works have mostly revolved around the twenty-first-century understanding of Islam in wider secular contexts. For example, The Teaching and Study of Islam in Western Universities, edited by four scholars from New Zealand and Australia, was published in 2013. The editors argued that people have become more interested in learning about Islam since the September 11, 2001, attack of the Twin Towers in New York and that, if it is rudderless, a university response has nonetheless been forthcoming:
Although some of the fear and hostility that followed the events of September 11, 2001 has subsided, there continues to be great deal of public interest in the religion of Islam and the activities of Muslim communities. Universities throughout the West have taken advantage of this interest to establish institutes and programs in the study of Islam. But there has been surprisingly little reflection on the appropriate shape of such programs and the assumptions that ought to underlie such study.20
Apart from recent fieldwork dealing with the reception of Qurʾanic exegetical and intellectual traditions in Muslim educational institutions, two works have been produced that address the study of religion by Muslims in different countries.
The first, Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education, edited by Robert W. Hefner and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, which takes a variety of anthropological approaches, gives a general view of “the culture and politics of modern Muslim education.” Schooling Islam, which is a response to the Western political commentators and media who see Islamic madrasas, mainly those in Pakistan, as the birthplace of radicals, pays particular attention to the situation, confrontation or interaction of a madrasa-based educational system with the policies of both Muslim and non-Muslim countries.21
The second work is a recent special issue of Hartford Seminary’s journal The Muslim World, titled “The Challenges and Opportunities of Teaching Islam in Theological Seminaries” which covers the teaching of Islam in theological seminaries but which also tries to shed more light on the study of Islam in Christian and secular institutions.22
Both works definitely fill some gaps for those who wish to assess the difference between radical and ordinary Muslims, the so-called “conspiracy” of the Western media and the real image of Islam, interreligious dialogues, and other current issues.
However, neither Schooling Islam nor “Challenges and Opportunities” explores how the Qurʾān is studied in universities, the politics behind the study of Islam in Muslim academic institutions, or the differences in what is produced in the West and in the Muslim world. Neither work concerns itself with the methods and theories produced and practiced in Muslim academia for studying Islam and the Qurʾān. It remains for my book to try to offer some explanation as to why, for example, a William Montgomery Watt (d. 2006) is more popular than a John Wansbrough (d. 2002) in Muslim academia or why Iranian-inspired Persian Shiʿi works are widely read in Indonesian universities and colleges but not in Malaysian ones, or why such new forms of Qurʾanic studies in the West as Jane Dammen McAuliffe’s Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān have not been warmly received by some Muslim academics.
