Mapping Islamic Studies: Genealogy, Continuity, and Change.

• Author: BERG, HERBERT
• Position: Review

Mapping Islamic Studies: Genealogy, Continuity, and Change. Edited by AZIM NANJI. Religion and Reason, vol. 38. Berlin: MOUTON DE GRUYTER, 1997. Pp. xxi + 270.

This collection of essays has three main goals: to trace the development of Islamic Studies in the West, particularly Europe; to examine and evaluate Orientalism's distortions and their scholarly and political consequences; and to suggest new or underdeveloped directions in Islamic Studies. Since, an essay collection could be devoted to any one of these goals alone, it is not surprising that this volume is insufficient to achieve them all--despite the high quality of the individual essays.

The first part of the volume examines the growth of Islamic Studies in Germany, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Russia, with essays from Jacques Waardenburg (two), Mohammed Arkoun, C. E. Bosworth, and Dimitri Mikoulski. Much of Waardenburg's first essay reads like a list of scholars and institutions. He also seems somewhat uncritical, speaking of the "search for objective truth" and the "industriousness" of the German scholar. Only at the end of his discussion does he question what kind of Islam German scholarship produced. Unfortunately, he does not provide an answer. Arkoun demonstrates the close links between French scholarship on Islam and France's colonial ambitions in North Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The traditional ethnographic or philological methods of those scholars are no longer sufficient, argues Arkoun. He concludes by offering his "applied Islamology" as an alternative. Beginning with the first mention of Muslims by a British author, Bosworth places major figu res in British scholarship in their historical context and examines their motives for studying Islam. Bosworth is careful to include the impact on British scholarship of religious wars, Deism, the Enlightenment, colonialism, and the work of continental scholars. This excellent paper, unfortunately, stops at the beginning of the twentieth century. Waardenburg's second paper provides a brief discussion of early Dutch scholarship, its connection to Holland's colonial ambitions, and later developments. As he did for German scholarship, Waardenburg outlines the programs of study, and discusses institutions and collections. He also provides a short but useful list of developments in, and a critique of, Dutch scholarship. The last essay is that of Mikoulski, who outlines the history of the Russian and...