Religious Studies: A Global View

during the French mandate between World Wars I and II, and American secular

influences in the latter part of the twentieth century. As a result, this otherwise

first rate university never developed the academic study of religions nor any

form of confessional teaching (theology or shar¥‘ah), with the exception of two

courses on religion and society, one in the department of social and behavioral

sciences and one in the department of Arab culture and society. However, the

Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies does offer many closely related

courses.

In Egypt, the historical trajectory of the American University in Cairo,

founded in 1919, was similar to those of Robert College–Bog ̆Çziçi Üniversitesi

and the Syrian Protestant College–American University of Beirut in matters

pertaining to the teaching of religions—that is, until recently. In 2003, in the

aftermath of September 11, 2001, a program arose around the newly estab-

lished Abdulhadi H. Taher Chair in Comparative Religion. The following

description is worth quoting at some length because it reveals both a particular

academic approach to the study of religions and a preventive strategy to avoid

misunderstandings:

Courses in the comparative study of religion aim at fostering students’

cross-cultural understanding by increasing their knowledge about both their

own religious traditions, such as Islam and Christianity, and other ones

from around the world, such as Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism,

Confucianism, and more localized religions.... The academic study of

religion does not make value judgments; it is not interested in promoting

or demoting any particular religion or religions, but is interested rather in

understanding—in their own terms as much as possible—religions that

grow out of cultures different from one’s own.

The website also describes how courses on religion can be found in many other

departments, such as anthropology, Arabic studies, art, Egyptology, history,

Middle East studies, philosophy, political science, and sociology. The shift from

religious origins to the total lack of instruction in or about religion in two of

these three cases deserves further analysis, given the complexity of each local

history.

National universities within newly independent nation-states

The situation of the academic study of religions is better in the third kind of

institution of higher learning in NAWA, national universities. With political

independence following the first and second decades after World War II, the

development of national university systems went, for almost all NAWA

countries, hand-in-hand with the consolidation of the nation-state. How and

which religions were to be studied varied greatly with the ideology of each

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PATRICE BRODEUR