Abstract
This essay is a reflection on the everyday conceptual matters that inform the workings of the academic field of Islamic Studies and constitute its conditions of possibility. The research is based on observations I made while working at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University. The everyday of the Institute is marked by arguments that reject orientalism but also foreshadow its return in different guises. In this context, historical and linguistic approaches, with their own tensions and limits, appear as safeguards, but they are inevitably caught up in a binary that juxtaposes theory to the archive as two opposing but equally necessary modalities of knowledge. While several ideas about what constitutes Islam seem to cohabit without much friction, a quite fixed and stable notion of politics overdetermines the possibility to think otherwise. The essay is primarily descriptive, but it contains a few personal and “extra-territorial” notes on how to inhabit these matters differently and follow desire.
Highlights
This essay is a reflection on the everyday conceptual matters that inform the workings of the academic field of Islamic Studies and constitute its conditions of possibility
The research is based on observations I made while working at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University, especially during the period between 2005 and 2014
While my aim is mainly descriptive, I accompany the discussion of these ordinary matters with short, extra territorial intermissions that aim at introducing a set of at once more distancing and more personal comments meant as prolegomena for future discussions
Summary
At the Institute, the tension in the arguments outlined above, engendered by the will to overcome orientalism and its return under a variety of guises, finds its foremost expression in history and language. As methods and objects of research, history and language are the two dominant and unifying axes of all knowledge at the Institute They are seen as safeguards against the return of orientalism and with a normative role operate as vectors for the three arguments outlined above. A project that draws on Mulla Sadra to discuss being and temporality without engaging in a historical genealogy of the seventeenth century thinker, or his reception in the West, and uses Sadra’s vocabulary in presentist and abstract terms to study European thought or to rethink media theory, is unacceptable for a postorientalist Islamic Studies, because it is considered as “essentializing” Sadra and unduly appropriating his views out of context.
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