Foundations of the Descriptive Study of Religions in Muslim History: A Conceptual Analysis.

Dr Muhammad Akram

doi:10.32350/jitc.102.05

Abstract

The classical Muslim scholarly tradition produced an assortment of literature on different religions including a considerable number of descriptive studies, a phenomenon that leaves imposing questions. Most importantly, how a pre-modern civilization was able to generate a tradition of descriptive scholarship on different religions in the absence of conditions such as the western modernity that supposedly factored the emergence of the modern academic study of religion needs to be explored. The current paper ventures to answer this question. It argues that certain features of the Qur’ānic worldview, such as the repeated invitation to observe the signs of God in time and space through travel in the land/across the world and to ponder upon the history of various nations coupled with the exhortation to use reason generated curiosity about different civilizations of the world as well as their religious heritage. Moreover, the Qur’ānic view of the universality of the religious phenomenon as a divine plan also encouraged a sober disposition towards religious others in cases under discussion. On the other hand, the meticulous historiographical techniques and methods for the interpretation of texts developed by Muslim historians, theologians, and jurists afforded the needed methodological apparatus for the said undertaking. The current paper further concludes that the same epistemology and methodological foundations can be appropriated according to/keeping in view the needs of the time to promote a credible study of religion/s in contemporary Muslim societies

Highlights

During its heydays, the Muslim civilization produced a wide range of literature on religions other than Islam.1 A significant part of this literature was polemical and disputative, written to demonstrate Islam's status as the only true religion and refute other religions.2 this corpus of literature contained many writings on differentJOURNAL OF ISLAMIC THOUGHT AND CIVILIZATIONVolume 10 Issue 2, Fall 2020 AkramFoundations of the Descriptive Study of Religions religions which were by and large descriptive
The question is, how in Muslim history, a kind of descriptive treatment of different religions could become possible in the absence of cultural experiences similar to the European societies and ensuing modernity? In other words, what prompted some classical Muslim scholars to produce descriptive writings on other religions? Was it a search for religious truth? Or, had some intrinsic features of the Muslim intellectual culture been at play behind this development? Did the interest in studying different religions appear at the center of the Muslim culture, or was it a peripheral phenomenon? The present paper digs into epistemological and methodological foundations of this premodern literary tradition to answer such questions
The above analysis concludes that various types of writings on religions that appeared in the classical Muslim civilization were a part of the broader world of knowledge

Summary

Introduction

The Muslim civilization produced a wide range of literature on religions other than Islam. A significant part of this literature was polemical and disputative, written to demonstrate Islam's status as the only true religion and refute other religions. this corpus of literature contained many writings on different. Around one-fourth of the Muslim writings on other religions that appeared from the eighth to the nineteenth centuries CE can be considered more or less descriptive.8 This tradition of descriptive writings on different religions in the premodern Muslim civilization leaves imposing questions. In the modern West, a series of cultural movements like Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, and Romanticism had played a vital role in shaping the scientific outlook towards religion, which is characterized by rational and critical inquiry. Such a perspective is generally supposed to have caused the rise of the contemporary scholarly study of religion.. Afshār Yazdī, 1957). 7‘Abd al-Karīm al-Shahrastānī, Al-Milal wa al-Niḥal (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, n.d). 8Patrice Claude Brodeur, “From an Islamic Heresiography to an Islamic History of Religions: Modern Arab Muslim Literature on 'Religious Others' with Special Reference to Three Egyptian Authors,” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1999), 128

The Question of Center and Periphery

The Qur’ānic View of Religious Others

The Methodological Foundations

Conclusion