1 - Introduction: Why New Methods in the Study of Islam?

Summary

Arts, crafts, and most human activities always have more or less well-developed methods. Experience teaches us that following such methods, developed in the course of experience, leads to desired results. There is no need for further critical reflections.

Most of the research and studies on prevailing scientific practice adhere to customs, traditions and procedures that researchers have not traced back to their origins, and the authoritative point of reference for which they have not attempted to identify. Rather, they content themselves with the knowledge that these methods are familiar and widely practiced.

Introduction

With this volume, we, the editors, inaugurate a new series devoted to the methods and methodologies that have defined the academic study of Islam in the past, and that inevitably will continue to do so moving forward into the future. What is novel about this emphasis is that, too often, we tend to focus overwhelmingly on data, oftentimes at the expense of the methods that conjure said data into existence. Such privileging risks the assumption that our data is all that is important and we just have to discover more and more of it in order to reach some Archimedean position of repose. We argue, however, that this is not the case and instead is itself a position that emerges out of its own methodological assumptions that elevate philology to the level of a divine science. Change the interpreter, however, and the interpretation will also change. While so-called Muslim data – texts, beliefs, rituals, historical events – are seemingly available to scholars from a wide array of disciplinary perspectives, we duly note the manifold ways that such data have been and continue to be interpreted. Do not get us wrong. Manifold interpretations are certainly richer and theoretically more nuanced than monolithic or monothetic ones. There can, after all, be no singular let alone definitive interpretation of human behaviour and institutions. Political scientists who deal with Islam, for example, approach their material using the methods supplied by their larger field; ditto for sociologists and anthropologists of Islam. While there is a plethora of methods used to study Islam, there is not a confusion of such methods, but there most certainly is a need to sort them out, classify them and reflect on their utility.