The problem is particularly acute because this dichotomy blinds most
scholars, whether self-defined as ‘theologians’, ‘scientists of religions’, or a
combination of both, to the subjective discourse of a modern rationality that
often underpins most theological and academic discourses in regard to religions.
Indeed, most production of knowledge related to religion today is conceived
within very specific institutional practices that would rather not question the
a prioriof the modern, such as the major influence of reductive positivist
analyses of religions, whether they come from modern or post-modern academic
theories applied to religious phenomena or from modern theological approaches
often popularized as ‘fundamentalist’. The boundary between what is
theological and what is non-theological in the study of religion is highly
dependent on a person’s definition of these terms. The same goes for any other
approach. The place of belief systems in the subjectivity of every human being
is central to any rational process, however sophisticated it may be.
When these key terms in the study of religions are compared to other
terminologies from different cultural and religious worldviews, certain
dimensions are highlighted in a way that questions the definitional bound-
aries as well as the premises of the enterprise of both Christian theology and
the academic study of religions as developed mostly in Europe and North
America. This point was demonstrated in the above analysis of the proto-
modern scientific study of religions in NAWA prior to the rise of the modern
West. It will only be reinforced in the following analysis which raises the
question as to why so few NAWA countries have any program in the modern
academic study of religions and, when they do, why they often developed into
hybrid forms somewhere between pre-modern and modern confessional
approaches and modern and post-modern scientific approaches.
It will become apparent in the next paragraphs that the particular discipline
under examination worldwide in this book is therefore linked to a definition
that privileges its own historical emergence out of the conditions of a modern
secular outlook that provides certain kinds of intellectual freedoms that are
possible because of democratic practices. These conditions for a particular way
of rationalizing what has been broadly defined as ‘religion’ have been often
hidden behind the objectivist discourse of analysis found at the heart of how
the modern academic study of religions came to develop, although many of
the postmodern theoretical currents now question those assumptions as I do.
Indeed, under the impact of the linguistic turn in all of the humanities and the
social sciences, this particular approach to making sense of reality is not
objective as such, but simply a different configuration of subjectivities with
equal amounts of faith in the hidden system that has provided its logical
structural framework. That particular kind of subjectivity is being challenged
by all kinds of contemporary modernist and postmodernist forms of religious
subjectivities. It is important to see the interdependence between all of them,
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
89
