Chapter 4 - We Study Muslim Constructions, Not Muslims, Right?

Summary

It is true that we instinctively recoil from seeing an object to which our emotions and our affections are committed handled by the intellect as any other object is handled. The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. “I am no such thing” it would say; “I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone”

(James 1990 [1902], 17).

When one permits those whom one studies to define the terms in which they will be understood, suspends one's interest in the temporal and contingent, or fails to distinguish between “truths,” “truth-claims,” and “regimes of truth,” one has ceased to function as a historian or scholar. In that moment, a variety of roles are available: some perfectly respectable (amanuensis, collector, friend and advocate), and some less appealing (cheerleader, voyeur, retailer of import goods). None, however, should be confused with scholarship

(Lincoln 1996, 227).

In the previous chapter I charted the migration of a particular discourse in vogue among students of religion into the academic study of Islam.