(Mis)diagnosing the Field of Islamic Studies:
Hughes, Aaron. Islam and the Tyranny of Authenticity: An Inquiry into Disciplinary
Apologetics and Self-Deception. London: Equinox Publishing, 2016. ISBN-10: 1781792178.
Hardcover, paperback. 256 pages.
Introduction:
It has never been exactly clear what apologetic scholarship achieves. Are apologetic scholars
reinforcing a certain status quo that lies outside of academe, one that is located in the particular
lived experience of the given religious community they study? What do we, and perhaps more
importantly, what do religious followers lose out on when apologetics is infused into scholarship?
Perhaps religious communities gain something from apologetic scholarship? But it is often
unclear what that might be. Should the academic community encourage more critical scholarship
that deconstructs and critically challenges apologetic scholarship of religion? Moreover, can
apologetic scholarship participate in meaningful reform of a given religion, or would that
compromise the disinterested and impartial basis of what it means to be a scholar in the western
academy?
These are the questions that Aaron Hughes’ short screed, Islam and the Tyranny of Authenticity:
An Inquiry into Disciplinary Apologetics and Self-Deception raises, but these questions are not
entirely answered.
Hughes has a much more specific, and perhaps idiosyncratic, axe to grind in this book. For
background, his criticisms of Islamic studies have been quietly celebrated by a number of nonMuslim scholars within Islamic studies (as evidenced by the testimonials on the back of the book).
According to Hughes, there exist too many taboos for non-Muslim scholars within Islamic studies
departments to be heard and responded to adequately by their Muslim peers who apparently
(Hughes maintains) do not hold social or academic power. This short text grew out of a series of
fairly intense, and very public, debates Hughes had with the prominent Muslim intellectual and
chair of Islamic Studies at Duke University, Omid Safi.
A Bold and Critical Appraisal:
Hughes makes a loud and resolute public declaration against the direction Islamic studies is
headed; in no uncertain terms he argues that Islamic studies has reached an “acritical” position
relative to the content of its inquiries and what it studies. It has devolved into a sour type of
identity politics, in his view, which has been caused, very predictably, by the response Muslim
scholars have had to make to pressures to combat prejudice and misunderstanding of Islam after
9/11.
Hughes, a scholar of Judaism and Islam respectively, as well as a scholar of the theory and
method of religious studies says this pressure is nothing new in the academic study of religion.
Jewish studies faced a similar tyranny of authenticity until Jacob Neusner—the most widely
published scholar of Judaism—revolutionized the field about mid twentieth century and began to
take the field into a new direction. The secret to his success was that he wrote like an outsider to
the field, even though he was an insider.
Hughes devotes an entire chapter to Neusner arguing that his excavation of the core sources of
Jewish texts shook the delicate normative fabric of Judaic studies and successfully enabled
Jewish studies to branch out to literature and other disciplines. Instead of asking where the Martin
Luther within Islam is today, as many neo-Orientalists often do, Hughes asks, where is the Jacob
Neusner? Neusner was not seeking normative community-level reform of Judaism, he was
seeking academic broadening of the tradition and he received it. Interestingly, his reputation has
been fraught with criticism by Jewish scholars for most of his life.
In the book, Hughes paints a picture of current day Islamic studies that is both dismal and
embarrassing. It goes like this: after 9/11, the study of Islam, specifically under Islamic studies,
went from being a serious scholarly affair to one filled with identity politics, insecurity,
defensiveness and a desire to correct misconceptions about Islam. If one is an outsider, i.e. not a
Muslim, they are encouraged to act as a friend or ally by supporting the positions of the Muslim
academics, but if they take a critical edge they are branded an Islamophobe. Hughes speaks
from personal experience here as Omid Safi branded him an ‘Islamophobe’ and others have
waged similar criticism for his views on contemporary Islamic studies.
Hughes argues that a wide swath of Islamic studies scholars (at times it is hard to tell if Hughes
means the entire field, or just some well known scholars) have adopted a reformist approach to
their field of study. But this reformist stance is internally constricted because they don’t publicly
admit that they are reformers of the religion, they rather present themselves as scholars of Islam
that are progressive. The scholars Hughes critiques include Kesha Ali, Jonathan Brown, Omid
Safi, and Amina Wadud, all highly esteemed scholars who Safi singled out as the future of Islamic
studies in America.
Each of these scholars invoke variations on what Hughes calls the “Muhammad and Me” genre in
Islamic studies – a personalized narrative of how the scholar relates to their faith which inflects
their scholarship based on a sacred individualized narrative. Hughes dismisses any academic
value to this and claims it is the worst sort of identity politics that consists of a demand for
universal inclusion into the all of humankind, but instead ends up asking for recognition of oneself
as different (22).
There are two immediate consequences of this identity politics in Islamic studies: it creates a
discursive barrier to those that are not Muslim and wish to study Islam – their scholarship all the
sudden lacks the same authenticity based on a personal relationship to the faith. Secondly, it
means that critical scholarship is posed as an imagined effort to reclaim a maligned identity of
‘Muslim’, even though that scholar may be a white convert to Islam.
The method of scholarship employed consists of a hybrid of academic methods of research with
traditional Islamic fuquha, or classical Islamic jurisprudential approaches that operate on what
Hughes calls “presentist arguments” (106). In other words, the scholarship refuses to assess a
set of critical interrogations into the very normative structure of the tradition and instead responds
to current day conflicts and struggles of Islamic identity and politics. He claims the premise of this
project is based in a “progressive Islam” approach to scholarship that seeks out re-interpretations
of the traditional sources to promote a more tolerant, open and modern version of Islam. He cites
work by these scholars in a fairly detailed manner, but one gets the impression that he is cherry
picking the parts of their scholarship that are agenda-driven and he often does not leave a full or
perhaps fair assessment of the entirety of their work.
More broadly, Hughes argues the progressive Islam project is flawed in that it accepts an origin
story of Islam that is pristine and ideal, and in so doing it refuses to interrogate the socially
constructed nature of the Real within the tradition. Rather, this scholarship accepts the Real of
Islam as Ideal, which is the very definition of apologetics that Hughes offers. One is left to wonder
whether these Muslim scholars would be even taken seriously if they did not accept the Real of
Islam.
Furthermore, does accepting the Real of Islam as Ideal always lead to an acritical position? One
could see the reverse occurring – that Islamic studies might return to a situation wherein every
scholar must renounce the normative basis of Islamic origins and remain silent about their own
piety. Surely a middle ground is possible.
One interesting symptom of this acritical position is that Islamic studies lacks inter-disciplinarity, in
that it denies its closest parent discipline of religious studies. While Islamic studies invoke
postcolonial theory to wage its political grievances, it only does so in a perfunctory and acritical
manner. For example, the theory of Talal Asad is wildly important and authoritative in current
Islamic studies, but Hughes argues, quite convincingly that Asad’s concept of religion denies the
notion of a pure interior space of religion as he shows that religion is an outgrowth of the modern
secular state.
In other words, the sanitized version of Asad that is invoked to further the project of Islamic
studies scholars is not supportive of the same apologetic approach to the study of religion.
More rigorous criticism is sidestepped as cynical or Eurocentric, and he goes so far as to claim
that critical theorists of religion such as Russell McCutcheon, a theorist on the method of religious
studies, goes ignored because he is a white male (19). Overall, Hughes makes the bold claim
that these scholars refuse to invoke more rigorous theoretical work because by doing so, they put
in question the timeless and ideal origins of Islam. The question this raises for people outside of
Islamic studies as well as within is whether a scholar of Islamic studies (or another religious
discipline) must in fact distance themselves from such an idealized association with the religion
they study,
Through the example of Buddhist convert Robert Thurman and his work on Tibet; Hughes
presents a similarly problematic use of scholarship by an insider of a religious tradition that ends
up missing empirically important insights and criticisms by his romantic association with the
tradition itself. Perhaps Hughes’ most helpful point in the book is that this scholarship might be
more useful, or at least more transparent, if it was re-named “constructive theology” instead.
This is a suggestion that I think should be seriously considered by Muslim scholars in western
academic settings who find themselves committed to a project that speaks equally to concerns
outside of the academe as inside. Indeed, there is nothing wrong with such an approach, and
such an approach can in fact be done in a critical manner, as we know from the work of Tariq
Ramadan who has influenced ways that Muslim communities in the west interpret traditional
sources and relate to authority.
(Mis)diagnosing the Field of Islamic Studies:
Hughes’ diagnosis of the field of Islamic studies is damning and incisive, if not at times unfair and
full of straw man arguments. However, where he falls short is in his prescriptive solutions and in
his core assessment of progressive Islam. I claim that Hughes over-estimates the influence of socalled progressive Islam within current day Islamic studies and that he advocates a mode of
textual critique that is Orientalist and if followed would bring the field back to many generations.
He offers two concrete suggestions to the field: the first is to return to the question of “origins” as
there exist a number of undone questions around the influence of Christianity and Judaism, and
the compilation of the Qur’an. This claim ignores the vibrant work being done within Qur’anic
Studies by many Muslim scholars including the work of Gabriel Said Reynolds and Behnam
Sadeghi. Admittedly, the field is not as “vibrant” as Biblical studies as these questions were the
main target of scholarship when Islamic studies was known as Oriental studies.
For example, the work of the early German scholars of Islamic texts and manuscripts prior to the
First World War produced incredibly valuable work in this domain. As my colleague Joseph
Lumbard, a well-respected Qur’anic scholar notes; work on philology in Islam is alive and well in
the writings of Zamakhshari, Razi and others. But too often, scholars in the West tend to ignore
this work, looking instead to “alternative” origins for certain Arabic words in cognate languages
and attempting to highlight certain inconsistencies in the early Islamic period. For a good
rejoinder to some of this neo-Orentialist scholarship, see Walid Saleh’s article, “The Etymological
Fallacy and Quranic Studies.”
The other area where I think Hughes misses the mark is in his characterization of Islamic studies
as uniformly concerned with progressive readings of the tradition. Hughes is only partially correct
in this view, and he misdiagnoses the direction of the scholarship that is taking place. There is
plenty of interesting new work being done within Islamic studies that goes ignored by Hughes.
For example, there is a range of new work on Islamic philosophy on Islamist thinkers such as Ibn
Taymiyya that is groundbreaking, being conducted by younger Muslim scholars such as Ovamir
Anjum. This work may be accepting the Real as Ideal, but it is pushing the boundaries of
scholarship on Ibn Taymiyya and providing a wider understanding of the expansiveness of
Islamic philosophy itself.
While his argument that Islamic studies is post-criticism is understood based on the terms he sets
forth, I doubt that this label would hold when considering the path-breaking work of Shahab
Ahmed in his What is Islam: The Importance of Being Islamic. This text is a clear example of
original work that goes ignored by Hughes – perhaps it relies too much on the insider discourses
to present its critical arguments?
Moreover, perhaps Ahmed’s book shows that Islamic studies do not need to branch out to other
disciplines but rather need to establish a hermeneutical basis of their own system of analysis and
study? This is the general project of Shahab Ahmed and it is a noble one at that.
In this same context, Hughes also over-estimates the degree to which Islamic studies scholars
are uniformly committed to a liberal version of Islam. It is no surprise that Muslim scholars
maintain that religion must have an essence that is good, spiritual and sacred, yet this does not
necessarily foreclose criticality from being at work in scholarship by Muslim scholars. One would
assume that many Muslim scholars already maintain that religion is a study of how different social
actors operate and construct meaning in history – i.e. religion is not a timeless entity. But this
does not mean that a scholar cannot embrace both perspectives; such is the example of Jacob
Neusner after all.
Conclusion:
In the discourses of this hybrid ‘constructive theology’ that is being produced in Islamic studies
today, perhaps Islam is a presented as a timeless entity because the figures and scholars that
are being considered within the annals of Islamic history themselves never broke from this reality.
By characterizing the field as tied up with a progressive Islam project, Hughes misses out on a
substantial amount of scholars who are highly critical of progressive Islam.
These scholars I am referring to here are mostly younger scholars and they are interested in a
range of inquiries, from exegesis to theological analyses. They have a different form of nonapologetic allegiance to interrogating the tradition in ways that may not be compatible with
Hughes’ litmus test. But Hughes’ definition of apologetics includes anyone who does not critically
challenge the composition of the Real of Islam. Hughes suggests the field can only stay alive and
critical if it goes back to its Orientalist roots.
This is why, as an aside, I disagree with Hughes’ framing of Edward Said’s Orientalism as it
pertains to Islamic studies. While I agree that many contemporary scholars only invoke Said out
of fashion, that does not take away from the fact that his core model does in fact apply to the
study of Islam. But I don’t have the time and space to develop this point. Suffice it to say that, as
any good film critic knows, one can’t offer a critique of the movie one wanted to see made, one
has to offer a critique of the movie that was made. The movie being made within Islamic studies
is still in production and it must be completed.
Daniel Tutt, Ph.D. is a philosopher, filmmaker and adjunct professor at Marymount University.
His research and writing is concerned with Marxism and post-Marxist thought, contemporary
social and political movements, political Islam, Islamophobia, Islamic philosophy, the philosophy
of history and post-Lacanian thought. His forthcoming book is entitled Unstable Formations:
Political Community in Badiou, Nancy, Laclau and Zizek and his writing has been published in
Philosophy Now, the Washington Post, and Crisis and Critique, among other publications.
Published by "Religious Theory" a special feature of the Journal for Cultural and
Religious Theory (www.jcrt.org).