The Jakarta Post | Thu, 07/08/2010 5:09 PM | Opinion
Ahmad Najib Burhani
Luthfi Assyaukanie wrote a provoking article in this paper titled “Where should we go to study Indonesian Islam?” (June 25).
He begins making a common differentiation between studying Islam (with a religious orientation) and studying about Islam (studying Islam for the sake of knowledge/science).
If someone wants to study about Islam, he concludes, it is not to Mecca or Cairo he should go to, but Leiden, Boston, Chicago or Oxford.
The argument for the above conclusion revolves around two reasons.
First, he explicitly mentions that at Western universities (Europe, Australia, and America) the collections of resources on Islam outnumber those at universities in Muslim countries.
Second, he implicitly mentions that in terms of methodology Western universities are far better than Islamic institutions in Indonesia or the Middle East.
Assyaukanie’s article has been successful in provoking responses. We can see this from the number of comments in the online edition of The Jakarta Post.
However, in terms of content I am sure he would revise and elaborate further on some of his statements if he had the chance to write a longer and more comprehensive article.
At least two of the issues he needs to elaborate on are: scholarship paradigms in Islamic studies and an accurate comparison of the collection of Islamic resources among universities, particularly between Western and Muslim countries.
Assyaukanie mentions that Western universities treat Islamic studies in a “highly professional manner” and are purely “designed to produce scholars and experts”.
At a glance this statement is true, but we need to look into it in detail. Historically, Western universities have come to the current stage after passing several generations.
In this paper, I will classify these stages into three categories: imperialist-missionary, orientalist and islamicist.
The first group studied Islam to subjugate Islam or Muslim society. Koranic studies in this generation, for instance, tried to trace Jewish or Christian influences on the Koran.
Studying Islamic theology at that time was intended to prevent Christians from converting to Islam or, the other way around, Muslims converting to Christianity.
Other scholars in this generation served as colonial officials and dedicated their work mainly to helping the colonial administration. An example of this is Snouck Hurgronje.
The second group is represented, for instance, by Bernard Lewis. This group perceived Islam as a binary opposite to the West. If secularism is inherent in Christianity, then separation between religion and state is something foreign to Islam.
In the discourse on martyrdom, Christianity builds a culture that is “committed to life”, while Islamic culture promotes “a love of death”. Although there are some shortcomings, we should note that this
generation made a substantial contribution to Islamic studies, parti-cularly when they applied philological and historical approaches to Islam.
The third group is considered the most sympathetic in studying Islam. However, some critics say they are less critical compared to previous generations because of their reluctance to critique Islam out of fear of offending Muslims. Among this group are Annemarie Schimmel, Albert Hourani and Stephen Humpheys. In the US, this group is currently dominated by Muslim scholars.
The pressing question is whether the first two categories still exist in Western universities. I would say yes. The persistence of a Clash of Civilizations paradigm and the difference between divinity school
and religious studies are two examples.
For the former, it is easy to find scholars such as Daniel Pipes who accuse Islam of being an inferior religion, at Western universities. For the latter, divinity school is normally run or supported by certain religious denomination and intended to create priests or clerics, while religious studies is intended to educate religious scientist.
Therefore, Western universities are not only designed “to inculcate science and knowledge to their students,” but also to create imams. It depends on what university and what department a student enrolls in.
It is said that Al-Azhar University has 99,062 books and 595,668 volumes of Islamic manuscripts some of which date back to the 8th century. Indonesia’s National Library perhaps has a larger collection on Indonesian Islam than Leiden University, but this is not the point I want to make.
With the current systems in place in libraries such as ILL (Inter-Library Loans), a collection of books is not the first requirement for becoming scholar of Islam. A student of Indonesian Islam at Yale University, for instance, can check out a book from Melbourne University with just one click on his computer, and the book will arrive within days. A student at Sorbonne University can also ask a university librarian to borrow an Islamic manuscript from Istanbul University in Turkey.
It is true that in terms of modern management, Western universities are better than universities in Muslim countries. It is also true that by Western standards, universities in the West are more objective in teaching Islam. But students of Islam should also be aware that Islamic studies in the West are not “purely scientific” or without any biases. Subjectivity in humanities and social sciences are sometimes difficult to avoid. What we can achieve is limited objectivity and what we need to do is to recognize our subjectivity.
Scholars need to be critical not only of their own culture, but also foreign cultures. They should be careful not to eagerly abandon their traditional heritage, willingly enslaving themselves to Western ideology.
My professor at Al-Azhar University always reminds me, “Even if you study in Europe or the US, you still need to be critical of the ideology behind Western sciences. What Western people do is no more than move from enslaving themselves to God to enslaving themselves to a certain ideology, which has little difference.”
I do not agree completely with this admonition, but I take it as a good nasihat (advice).
The writer is a researcher at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI).
— JP
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