Emerging issues
The most important emerging issues are similar to those in Europe and
North America. The tensions between secular versus religiously based
approaches to the modern academic study of religions reflects a variety of
commitments among scholars of religion. These are in turn found in the variety
of academic programs and in the production of writings on religions. If by
‘academic’ one means ‘non-confessional’ or ‘non-theological’, than the per-
centage of academic production versus non-academic production on topics
related to religions is small indeed. What remains more important, though, is
how the various genres in writings on religions in NAWA interrelate with each
other today, as they certainly did in the first few centuries of Islamic history.
To what extent is there a symbiosis between these various perspectives that
sometimes seem so contradictory? Are they more complementary than can be
discovered at first glance? This inter-relationship between the variety of
hermeneutical approaches in the current study of religions, whether academic
or not, modern or not, is one of the emerging issues that needs further
examination.
Another emerging issue is the need to study how the Western modern
academic study of religions is linked to the emergence of Western secular and
democratic states. The development of the modern academic study of religions
in NAWA clearly tends in this direction. Wherever there is a higher degree of
democracy and important pockets of secular discourses within a country, there
is a possibility of encountering there a modern academic study of religions. Is
this also the case in other parts of the world?
A third emerging issue is the institutionalization of the modern academic
study of religions, which represents a central marker of how this particular
academic field of study has developed over the last century in this region of
the world. It is the best indicator by which the growth of the modern academic
study of religions can be measured, albeit still imprecisely.
Finally, I would maintain that the modern academic study of religions, in
the balance, benefits from a plurality of institutional genealogies and current
programmatic practices. Yet for most countries in NAWA the link between
institutions of higher learning and new investment in education during the
colonial period as well as intellectual training outside the region at the present
time, points toward a dependence, especially on Europe and North America,
which has not yet turned into inter-dependence. This is particularly the case
for the modern academic study of religions. Just what happened in the initial
encounter with colonialism and modernity that the vitality of the medieval
proto-scientific study of religions could not be sustained? Why did this study
not lead to an internal revival similar to what happened in the field of Arabic
literature? The answer may not lie simply with the anti-religious or a-religious
stance of Western modernity, found within the normative positivist scientific
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