SCHOLARS SEEK NEW MODELS FOR ISLAM IN TODAY'S WORLD

Saturday, September 14, 2002

People study the Bible in different ways; believers, as an object of religious devotion; scholars, some of whom are also believers, as an object of academic interest.

Though the same is broadly true of study of the Quran, and more generally of Islam, in recent decades the scholarly study of Islam has been inhibited by political factors. In Arab Muslim states, it takes the form of government repression of free inquiry and the absence of academic freedom.

In Western academic circles, the inhibition has been self-imposed.

Edward Said's enormously influential book Orientalism, published in 1978, defined the study of the Orient (which to him mostly meant the Mideast) by Western scholars as a form of colonial oppression. Even terms such as ``Orient'' and ``West,'' rather than being merely useful shorthand, are subtle indicators of the oppressor's desire to place himself at the center of events and all others at the margins.

Well, there's certainly something to this -- except that it's something not only Westerners do. China, the Middle Kingdom, might be more properly rendered as ``Central Kingdom,'' about which all else revolved. And Japan, Land of the Rising Sun, is more nearly ``Land where the sun comes up,'' which, to the Chinese, it is.

Anyway, Said's model has dominated Middle East studies in the United States. Graduate students know that their chances of getting a degree, a job and tenure largely depend on their taking the official line, and dedicate their careers to demonstrating why everything that is amiss in the Arab world is the fault of American imperialism. This has left them markedly unprepared to anticipate or explain events such as Sept. 11.

Oh, I exaggerate. But not a lot.

A new generation of Islamic scholars, many of them Muslim but often trained in fields not so subject to the stultifying effect of Said's paradigm, is beginning to ask how Islamic societies can remake themselves in ways that are true to the Quran but compatible with the modern world.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has just published an article by Danny Postel surveying recent work in the field. Postel notes that disagreements between Said and Bernard Lewis, a professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies at Princeton, have set the terms of scholarship in this area.

In January, Lewis published What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. It was written before Sept. 11 but clearly bears on the events of that day. Said reviewed the book in the July issue of Harper's. As Postel summarizes the review, Said called Lewis' book an ``intellectual and moral disaster,'' an ideologically driven work subordinate to ``dominant pro-imperial and pro-Zionist strands in U.S. foreign policy.'' He takes offense at Lewis' description of the Islamic world as ``poor, weak and ignorant,'' ruled by a ``string of shabby tyrannies'' whose theocratic opponents are ``even more hostile to modernity than the despots who oppress them.''

But rather than siding with either Said or Lewis, the younger group of scholars wonder why only Lewis is asking ``What went wrong?'' Muslims, they say, should be asking that question.

Kahled Abou El Fadl, a professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles, is the author of Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law, 2001 and The Place of Tolerance in Islam, which will be published in November. Abou El Fadl agrees it would be disingenuous to deny that some verses from the Quran are easily interpreted as sanctioning intolerance, but there are others that ``readily support an ethic of diversity and tolerance.''

The Bible, too, lends itself to multiple interpretations.

In an online discussion with Chronicle readers, Abou El Fadl was asked whether Islam could experience something like the Protestant Reformation.

The Reformation happened not because of particular characteristics of the Old or New Testament, Abou El Fadl said, but ``because of social, economic and political conditions in which people were tired of suffering various forms of disempowerment.'' It couldn't happen exactly the same way in Islam.

Muslim reformers, he said, ``have no choice but to go beyond the Said paradigm'' and ``not to fall into the trap of seeing all of Muslim history through the Said lens.''

Muslims, he said, ``must become convinced that the failures they experience in the contemporary age are their own, to stop trying to find a scapegoat.'' That's the only way ``out of the dark ages of Islam that we are living through.''