ReOrienting Religion?

Abstract

This study presents a case of East–West entanglement not confined to dynamics internal to the Western trajectory of production and critique of Eurocentric notions of religion. It explores how the critical opening initiated by Wilfred Cantwell Smith in 1962 against reifying “religion” cannot be treated exclusively as an antecedent to the critical genealogy of religion performed by Talal Asad. We suggest that it needs to be read in the context of Smith’s collaboration with Toshihiko Izutsu, whose approach possessed a stronger counterhegemonic potential than the genealogists’ interventions in the critique of religion, which are still inscribed within a Western conceptual compass. We argue that thanks to his original skills as a philosopher of language, Izutsu put to better fruition Smith’s embryonic approach to the power-fraught character of language and discourse by studying Islamic traditions semantically, discursively, and contextually.