From Nuṣayrīs to ʿAlawīs: The Religiography of Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī

Jonathan Kearney

doi:10.3390/rel13020131

Abstract

A disproportionate emphasis on the work of Western European and North American scholars has been a feature of investigations into the development of the academic study of religion. This article seeks to examine how a non-European intellectual, the Syrian Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī (1876–1953), produced and transmitted knowledge about religions in his encyclopedic historical topography of ‘Greater Syria’—the Khiṭaṭ al-Shām (1925–1928). Kurd ʿAlī was a leading figure in the Nahḍa, an intellectual movement that sought to revivify Arab (and for some, Islamic) culture through a rediscovery of its classical heritage and was a proponent of a reformist tendency within Sunnī Islam known as Salafism—often associated with the thought of Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī and Muḥammad ʿAbduh. Kurd ʿAlī’s religiography in the Khiṭaṭ, though grounded in traditional Islamic discourse on the religious other, moves beyond that discourse to privilege the experiences and accounts of insiders. This move from heresiography to religiography is best seen through a close reading of Kurd ʿAlī’s writing on the ʿAlawīs (formerly known as Nuṣayrīs). Kurd ʿAlī’s writing on the ʿAlawīs is also an important witness to a vital phase in the development of that group’s articulation of its own identity in an environment that had been at best indifferent and at worst hostile to its existence.

Highlights

Kurd Alıalso departs from commissioning insider descriptions by himself, a Sunnı Muslim, writing the essays on four religious groups the nature of whose relationship to Sunnıand Ithna asharı (Twelver) Shıı Islam is contested: the Ismā ılıs, the Alawıs, the Druze, and the Bābıs
The marked contrast between the tone of the introductory essay on the Bāt.iniyya and that on the Alawıs shows an important development in Islamic writing about religious others: namely, a move from heresiography to religiography
As the leading figure of the Nahd.a in Syria, Kurd Alıwas uniquely placed to participate in the articulation of a new Arab subjectivity

Summary

Introduction

Westerners have written masses of books in their languages on the antiquities, civilization, history, economy, and the changing fortunes of this region. Kurd Alıwas more than familiar with the norms and expectations of Western scholarship: he was personally acquainted with many of the scholars who had produced it, he had visited their libraries, he had read their works, and made use of the critical editions of classical Arabic texts they had produced. Had he wanted to produce a work, such as Hitti’s (1951) own History of Syria–including. The Khitat charted, or at least anticipated, the course which modern historical writing about Syria’s long Ottoman past was to take

Religions and Denominations

Findings

Conclusions