Religious Studies: A Global View

because it helps explain what is happening in North American institutions of

higher learning as well as in the NAWA ones to which I will soon turn.

A final point remains to be made to complete the problematizing of this

dichotomous spectrum between confessional/theological and modern academic

study of religions. The emergence of the modern academic study of religions

in NAWA is linked to Europe and North America because of their colonial

and post-colonial history in the region. If we call this study of religions

‘academic’, then it assumes an ‘academic’ framework within which it operates.

This framework is that of university institutions or research centers. How this

particular form of academic institution came to develop in NAWA is not only

a question of relatively recent colonial history; it is also a question of how

post-colonial treatment of higher education took shape in newly independent

nation-states whose imagined pre-modern traditions were integrated differently

from institution to institution and from country to country. The result is a

coexistence, within sometimes the same university walls, of widely different

hermeneutical frameworks for interpreting religions, not to mention the degree

of openness or not to using other disciplines in the search to understand

religions better.

The development of the modern academic study of religions

The development of the modern academic study of religions in NAWA is linked

to two aspects within the broader transformations taking place within modern

education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: (a) the variety of insti-

tutions, and (b) the specific question of the relationship between theology (or

shar¥‘ahin Islam and halakhahin Judaism) and the academic study of religions

that grew mostly outside and in opposition to European and North American

Christian religious institutions of higher learning.

There are four different kinds of institutions in NAWA, each with its unique

historical genealogy: (1) transformed pre-modern educational institutions; (2)

universities that grew from missionary institutions; (3) national universities

within newly independent nation-states; and (4) private institutions of higher

learning that have multiplied tremendously in the last decade or so. In most

NAWA countries, a mix of these four kinds of institutions exists. I will provide

a few examples of each in order to reflect not only the complexity but also

the interdependence between these four kinds of genealogies in educational

institutions of higher learning.

Transformed pre-modern educational institutions

The most famous example of a transformed pre-modern educational institution

is Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt. Founded in 970 CE, this institution has

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PATRICE BRODEUR