I’ve been thinking about this a lot for the past few days. It all started with a discussion that took place on a discussion board on what is necessary to be a scholar, whether we should follow a scholar, and who is a scholar. I proposed that scholars (Muslims) taught in Western universities were scholars just as much as scholars who were taught in Muslim universities. The subjects they are taught are often similar (for instance philosophy of Islam, history of fiqh, methodologies of fiqh, history of hadeeth, etc). However, I met with some resistance on this issue. Basically, people said that although the people I referred to (Sherman Jackson, Ingrid Matteson) were highly education (both have PhD in Islamic studies and are experts on Islamic law) that they weren’t “scholars”, at least not in the same esteem as Hamza Yusuf or Yusuf Qaradawi. Other “Western” trained Muslim scholars include the late Fazlur Rahman and Khaled Abou El-Fadl among others. All are Muslims, all have the same knowledge of scholars taught in the Muslim world, all seem to have a love of Islam, yet they’re not scholars because they were trained in Western universities? I’ve noticed among a lot of Muslims that there is actually a reluctance to accept people like those mentioned above as Islamic scholars and I think there are a few reasons for this.
The first is that I think Muslims are scared to accept Western educated Islamic scholars as bona fide Islamic scholars because of the history of Orientalism in the academic study of Islam in the West. In the infancy of Islamic Studies in the West, there was, unfortunately, a tendency among a lot of Western academics to study Islam through an Orientalist lens that often served European imperialist interests. In fact, in my conversation, Orientalism was brought as one of the reasons why scholars trained in Western universities are not Islamic scholars.
In addition to the concern about Orientalism, there is also the concern among Muslims that giving legitimacy to Islamic scholars who hold degrees from Western universities will also give legitimacy to non-Muslim scholars in Islamic Studies and also Muslim scholars who hold non-mainstream views. Honestly, I wouldn’t go to John Esposito for a fatwa, despite my respect for his knowledge of Islam. However, I guess the bigger issue isn’t Muslims going to non-Muslims for religious knowledge (I don’t think this would ever realistically occur) but the fact that there are non-Muslims who may have just as much knowledge about Islam as a scholar trained in a Muslim country but who have no desire to convert to Islam and who see Islam from a purely academic POV. The academic study of Religion in Western universities makes this possible. I could study Jewish theology and get a PhD in with a focus on Jewish theology without ever wanting to be Jewish. I think that for many Muslims, this is an uncomfortable thought. However, I think it’s one we have to get over. Most Muslims have no issue with courses being taught on Islam in universities, especially with Islam and Muslims being so prominent in current. So we’ll have to get more comfortable with non-Muslims taking up scholarship in Islam.
While I think the concerns highlighted above are reasons why some Muslims are reluctant to fully accept Western educated Muslim scholars, I think the biggest reason is the different approach that Western universities and Muslim universities take towards Islam. Historically, Muslim scholarship was extremely rigorous with scholars constantly exchanging ideas, critiquing ideas, and defending ideas. In many ways, the scholarship of classical Muslim scholars was similar to the scholarship of Muslim scholars in Western universities today. I think the scholarship of both was definitely concerned with exchanging ideas and continuing research, not stiffling it. However, the recent trend in Muslim scholarship has been rote memorization of past scholarship instead of creating new scholarship. To illustrate my point, I take a passage from The Road of Mecca, the autobiography of Muhammad Asad:
‘Dost thou see those “scholars” over there?’ he (Shaykh Al-Maraghi) asked me. ‘They are like those sacred cows in India which, I am told eat up all the printed paper they can find in the streets…Yes, they gobble up all the printed pages from books that have been written centuries ago, but they do not digest them. They no longer think for themselves; they read and repeat, read and repeat-and the students who listen to them learn only to read and repeat, generation after generation.’
‘But, Shaykh Mustafa,’ I interposed, ‘Al-Azhar is, after all, the central seat of Islamic learning, and the oldest university in the world! One encounters its name on nearly every page of Muslim cultural history. What about all the great thinkers, the theologians, historians, philosophers, mathematicians it has produced over the last ten centuries?’
‘It stopped producing then several centuries ago,’ he replied ruefully. ‘Well, perhaps not quite; here and there an independent thinker has somehow managed to emerge from Al-Azhar even in recent times. But on the whole, Al-Azhar has lapsed into the sterility from which the whole Muslim world is suffering, and its old impetus is all but extinguished. Those ancient Islamic thinkser whom thou hast mentioned would never have dreamed that after so many centuries their thoughts, instead of being continued and developed, would only be repeated over and over again, as if they were ultimate and infallible truths. If there is to be any change for the better, thinking must be encouraged instead of the present thought-imitation…’ (189-190)
This exchange between Asad and Al-Maraghi gets to the heart of the matter. “Scholarship” in Muslim universities is vastly different from scholarship in Western universities because, for the most part, Muslim universities have failed to produce to real scholars for such a long time. I think that our (Muslim) idea of scholarship isn’t really scholarship at all. Learning Qur’an, hadeeth, fiqh, methodologies of Islamic law, kalam, aqeedah, etc. is necessarily in the study of Islam. However, this isn’t scholarship. Scholarship is building on those ideas and creating your own. People like Sherman Jackson, Khaled Abou El-Fadl, Ingrid Matteson do that. Even if we don’t agree with their ideas, they do that. Because of their ideas had to be defended while in academia, because they had people disagree with their ideas, they were and are able to frame their own ideas and to think independently. I honestly think that people like them carry on the intellectual tradition of Islam better than most of the scholars coming from Muslim universities.
There is almost a fear of new ideas and new thoughts among Muslims that I find scary. I think this is primary reason why scholars from Western universities are not perceived as being in the same light as scholars from Muslim universities. Scholars from Western universities are perceived as bringing in new ideas, perhaps even bid’ah into Islamic thought while scholars from Muslim universities are perceived by Muslims as carrying on the old tradition of Islamic scholarship. I would actually beg to differ and I think it’s time we take a serious look at what constitutes Islamic scholarship. I want Muslim universities to thrive once more but in order for that to occur, they have to start thinking outside the box.
