shodand (Hierarchies of self-inflated people, including the first people who
falsely claim to be prophets and also the messiah), by I‘tiªad al-SaltÇn¥
(1818–1880 CE) (Monnot 1985: 76–77). For our purposes, it is enough to say
that this work ensured a modicum of continuity, despite the empty eighteenth
century, between a vital formative generic system on religious others developed
over several centuries and what was to become a revival of yet unknown
magnitude in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries CE.
Some contemporary scholars point to these works in the proto-scientific
study of religions, especially those produced between the fourth and the early
sixth Islamic centuries, as the origins of the scientific or modern academic study
of religions or Religionswissenschaft. They served the needs of a particular
audience whose numbers must have remained small not only because of the
low levels of literacy but also because of the nature of the subject. Yet in
addition to serving the needs of certain political elites, they also provided a
collective Muslim identity insofar as a few of these books became classics,
thereby solidifying the boundaries of Muslim identity over and against a set
of distinguishable others that had clearly been subjected by then to political
domination. Those classics ratified the boundaries of Islamic normativity and
served to crystallize a normative Muslim religious identity. It is therefore not
surprising that as those boundaries solidified and Muslim power and prestige
remained effectively unchallenged in most of the Islamic world until the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the production of writings on religious
others decreased and a period of reproduction settled in for the next six
centuries. It was not until the advent of European colonialism (19th and 20th
centuries CE) and the subsequent post-colonial period (20th and 21st centuries
CE) that a new, modern academic study of religions developed in NAWA.
The emergence of the modern academic study of religions
In order to understand the emergence of the modern academic study of
religions, two analytical dimensions need to be distinguished: the discursive
lens through which this particular academic discipline was rationalized, and
the institutional structures within which it was put into practice. Let me
examine both in turn before turning to specific examples.
It is not appropriate to define the modern academic study of religions by
via negativaas simply a non-confessional or non-theological approach to the
study of religions. Nor is it satisfactory to use the term ‘academic’ for everything
this discipline has come to include in the last century and a half. This dichotomy
results in the simplistic image of a spectrum from theological or confessional
approaches to those ambiguously included in the word ‘academic’. For lack
of a better alternative, I continue to use the term ‘academic’ in the rest of this
chapter, but not without first problematizing it briefly.
1111
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1011
1
2
3111
4 5 6 7 8 9
20111
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
30111
1
2
3
4
35
6
7
8
9
40111
42222
3
411
NORTH AFRICA AND WEST ASIA
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