Religious Studies: A Global View

in civil society and private enterprise, both of which often meet around new

initiatives for higher educational institutions, most often called universities.

This chapter makes no claim to survey exhaustively all of these new develop-

ments, some of which may not yet have reached the stage of literary

accessibility, whether through database electronic research tools or cyberspace

web search engines, by the time of writing. Its principal aim is not to describe

comprehensively but rather to identify trends and raise important theoretical

questions about the historical growth of the modern academic study of religions

in this region of the world, within a broader contemporary globalizing frame-

work. I carry on this task from the limited lens of my North American scholarly

training as well as past and on-going research on North African and Western

Asian developments in the academic study of religions.

Pre-modern history of the study of religions

In this region of the world, ‘prehistory’ often implies the period of human

existence that precedes the invention of writing. Therefore, in presenting and

analyzing the early growth of the study of religions in this region, I use the

heading ‘Pre-modern history of the study of religions’. ‘Pre-modern’ refers to

the period prior to the European colonial presence, which started with

Napoleon’s brief military occupation of parts of Egypt between 1798 and 1801.

The pre-modern history of the study of religions in NAWA would require

us, first, to translate the word ‘religion’ into the many languages found

in this broad geographical area, and second, to delimit the scope of the

historical research on phenomena related to these various linguistic equivalents

of our modern Western concept of ‘religion’, with its own myriad of definitions.

On the first point, there are several language groups related to this area, from

Tamazight and Semitic to Persian and Turkic, to mention but the principal

ones. Each of these groups includes several languages, with cognate words for

concepts that approximate ‘religion’ as broadly understood in modern Western

languages. For example, in Semitic languages, the concept of d¥nis often

translated as ‘religion’, with meanings related to ‘debt, conformity, piety’. It

is closely related to datin Hebrew. In Turkic and Persian languages, the

influence of Arabic has left its mark: din(plural, dinler) in Turkish and d¥nor

madhab(adyÇnin the plural) in Persian. A thorough study of the pre-modern

history of the study of religions in NAWA would also need to look at these

language groups prior to their various degrees of Arabization as well as at

other languages now extinct.

On the second point, a pre-modern history of the study of religions in the

sense of what approximates today’s broad Western understanding of religion

requires a historical study of how these cognate terms within their respective

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PATRICE BRODEUR