Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916–2000) on Islam in India

Abstract

Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s influential conclusions concerning the nature and critical understanding of religion were developed during many years studying Islam, combining close attention to texts with ongoing discussions with contemporary Muslim scholars in India and elsewhere. He convinced subsequent scholars not to talk of “religions” as reified cultural artifacts but of living faith and its expressions in cumulative traditions. During his first phase, he registered more sympathy for Marxist deconstructions of organized religion than critics of his later crusades against dehumanizing sciences have noticed. Throughout, his paramount concern was for social justice, heeding the voice of conscience heard in dialogue with all who read “world history” as a challenge to every vestige of religious and political provincialism, in the academy and in government. The rules he deemed mandatory for realizing global community were, above all, moral rules, forever driven home by the traumatic partition of India in 1947.