Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World / Edition 1

by Carl W. Ernst

Overview

Avoiding the traps of sensational political exposes and specialized scholarly Orientalism, Carl Ernst introduces readers to the profound spiritual resources of Islam while clarifying diversity and debate within the tradition. Framing his argument in terms of religious studies, Ernst describes how Protestant definitions of religion and anti-Muslim prejudice have affected views of Islam in Europe and America. He also covers the contemporary importance of Islam in both its traditional settings and its new locations and provides a context for understanding extremist movements like fundamentalism. He concludes with an overview of critical debates on important contemporary issues such as gender and veiling, state politics, and science and religion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807855775
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	08/30/2004
Series:	Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks
Edition description:	1
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	385,096
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Carl W. Ernst is W. R. Kenan Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he maintains the website www.unc.edu/~cernst/islam.htm, which provides up-to-date links to resources for learning about Islam. Ernst is author of Sufi Martyrs of Love: Chishti Sufism in South Asia and Beyond, among other books.

Read an Excerpt

Following Muhammad

Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World

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By Carl W. Ernst

The University of North Carolina Press

Copyright © 2003 University of North Carolina Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8078-2837-3

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Preface

What images are conjured today by the word "Islam"? Walk into any bookstore, and you will initially be drawn to a stack of breathless titles that are truly frightening. These journalistic exposés reveal worlds of terrorist intrigue and plots against the United States. Alongside these instant potboilers are books with a more sober tone, delivering with masterful condescension the verdict of failure upon Islamic civilization, and the promise of an apocalyptic clash between Islam and the West. Tucked into a corner one may find a few academic surveys of Islamic theology and history, written in the tedious and excruciating prose reserved for textbooks. There may also be a couple of apologetics written by Muslims, attempting to defend Islam against any accusations. Finally, and most impenetrable of all, there will be two or three translations of the Qur'an, a foreign text that remains an enigmatic and unreadable cipher. How can anyone make sense of all this?

This book has been written to provide a completely different alternative to currently available books on Islam. What is offered here is a sympathetic yet reasoned and analytical view of the Islamic religious tradition and the contemporary issues that Muslims face. My most radical departure from conventional wisdom is to propose a nonfundamentalist understanding of Islam.

Both the difficulty and the importance of this task are illustrated by two events that took place in 2002. First, it was in the summer of that year that I delivered the completed manuscript of this book to the publisher who had initially commissioned it. To my complete astonishment, after considerable delay, the publisher informed me that the press would not be able to publish the book. There was no question regarding the quality of the manuscript; this was, instead, a matter of personal attitudes among the editorial staff, resulting from the terrorist attacks against American targets on September 11, 2001. I was told that some of the editors were now personally uncomfortable with being associated with any book on a subject that could be used to justify terrorism. The identity of the publisher is unimportant. What is most remarkable about this incident is that it demonstrates the extent to which, even in the world of publishing, the subject of Islam has become so controversial that some people cannot confront it.

The second example was the Summer Reading Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), where I teach. Ordinarily this kind of assignment attracts little attention, except as an unwelcome intrusion on students' vacation time. This year, however, the committee in charge of the selection wanted to choose a book that would address some of the issues raised by the September 11 attacks. Having discarded several weighty tomes on Middle Eastern history, terrorism, and similar topics, they asked me whether it would be advisable to assign our first-year students to read a translation of the Qur'an. I enthusiastically recommended Michael Sells's Approaching the Qur'an: The Early Revelations, a brilliant multimedia translation that is ideal for introducing this challenging text. While Sells's book was not designed to explain the mentalities of terrorists, it did offer our students a first encounter with one of the most influential books in world history. This assignment attracted national and international attention, as a conservative Virginia-based Christian group sued UNC, arguing that we were infringing on students' religious freedom by trying to convert them to Islam. Members of the North Carolina state legislature reacted with fury to this assignment, seeing it as equivalent to support for Muslim terrorists. Although federal courts dismissed the lawsuit, so that more than 2,000 students proceeded to discuss the book without incident, the outrage over the university assigning a book about Islam revealed once again a deep-seated fear and hostility that opposed even reading a book on the subject.

Under these circumstances-when publishers, religious groups, and politicians are opposed to an impartial and fair-minded discussion of Islam-it is painfully obvious that such a discussion is exactly what we need. The modern debate about Islam in America and Europe has been conducted primarily through sensational journalism and ideological attack. Although excellent scholarship on Islam is available, it is all too often couched in impenetrable prose and buried in obscure academic journals. Following Muhammad is designed to cut through the fog of suspicion and misinformation; it offers readers the tools to reach an independent understanding of key themes and historical settings affecting Muslims-and non-Muslims-around the world today.

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This book is the result of many years of thinking, teaching, and writing about Islamic religion and culture. I was initially drawn to Islamic studies by my personal encounter with the Persian poetry of great Sufis (Muslim mystics) such as Jalal al-Din Rumi. Precisely because of widespread ignorance and misunderstanding of Islam, it occurred to me that the study of the great spiritual and humanistic tradition of Sufism, as a major aspect of Islamic thought and practice, would be an appropriate way to bridge the civilizational gap. I still think this is a good idea; years later, much to my amazement, I have observed the remarkable popularity that Rumi has attained in America, thanks to poets and translators such as Coleman Barks and Robert Bly. In the process of my education, I learned Arabic, Persian, and Urdu and got a Ph.D. in Islamic studies. I spent time overseas, primarily in Eastern, non-Arab countries, particularly India and Pakistan, with research visits to Iran and Turkey.

Like everyone else in the small group of American scholars who work on the study of Islam, I have found my humanistic goals running afoul of political events again and again. I had air reservations to go to Tehran for dissertation research in the fall of 1978, but the Iranian revolution forced me to switch to India instead. In 1985 I had a Fulbright Islamic Civilization Research grant to study in India, but someone in the Indian government thought that my research on medieval Sufis was too controversial to permit a visa; consequently, my family and I spent a wonderful year in Pakistan. For a change, I had just finished my research in Istanbul when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. In the fall of 1998, though, I was forced to postpone a research trip to Pakistan when the U.S. government fired cruise missiles into Sudan and Afghanistan in retaliation for embassy bombings in East Africa. And I began to write these lines in the wonderful city of Seville, once a center of the Moorish culture of medieval Spain, in the shadow of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

The educational task faced by specialists in Islamic studies is enormous. There exists, on one hand, a tremendous ignorance and suspicion about Islam in much of Europe and America, now considerably enhanced by recent tragedy. On the other hand, there are extremists from Muslim countries who have used the language of Islam to justify horrific acts of mass violence. Lost in this confrontation are hundreds of millions of Muslims who inhabit the world today who have been classified as outsiders to Western civilization but who do not share the apocalyptic and fanatic vision of an Osama bin Ladin. Those of us who have studied the text of the Qur'an, the writings of the great poets, and the history of Islamic civilization feel very keenly the distortion and perversion of Islamic symbols and authority perpetrated by these modern extremists. How much more anguish is felt by the vast majority of Muslims, who loathe acts of terrorism at the same time that they deeply resent the continued imposition of neocolonial influence over their countries?

Despite these extraordinary challenges, the task of Islamic studies could also be described as minimal. In 1992 I participated in a workshop discussing images of Islam in America. The educational goal that we finally settled on in the workshop was very basic: to convince Americans that Muslims are human beings. This might sound like an absurdly simple point, but the Islamic religion is perhaps the one remaining subject about which educated people are content to demonstrate outright prejudice and bias. Ten years later a workshop on critical issues in Islamic studies came to the same conclusion, but more forcefully: the real issue is to humanize Muslims in the eyes of non-Muslims. I will discuss the nature of anti-Islamic prejudice in detail in Chapter 1, but it still amazes me that intelligent people can believe that all Muslims are violent or that all Muslim women are oppressed, when they would never dream of uttering slurs stereotyping much smaller groups such as Jews or blacks. The strength of these negative images of Muslims is remarkable, even though they are not based on personal experience or actual study, but they receive daily reinforcement from the news media and popular culture.

The arguments presented in this book are designed to bring the reader into a new relationship with the subject of Islam by providing critical and independent access to key information. In my previous books, I have developed a method of explaining unfamiliar religious subjects that avoids the jargon of specialized scholarship. I believe it is possible to write clearly and directly and to engage the reader in the subject, not by authoritarian pronouncements, but by clarifying the debates and showing what is at stake. I draw particularly on religious studies and on historical context to bring out detailed meanings and comparisons. Approaching the subject from religious studies, I draw attention to the important role of modern Christianity, particularly Protestant thought, in shaping modern interpretations of Islam. These interpretations are found in the writings of non-Muslim European and American experts on Islam (the so-called Orientalists), and they also occur in works by modern Muslim authors and critics. By paying attention to historical context, I bring out the political, economic, and social factors behind phenomena sometimes thought to be exclusively religious.

Using these methods, I initially planned for the book to revolve around major Islamic religious themes, with an emphasis on the little-understood role of the Prophet Muhammad as the central figure defining Islamic religiosity. That still remains the basic underpinning of this book. The aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, however, has created an environment in which we can no longer afford to neglect the problem of religious and civilizational confrontation mentioned above; for many people, confrontation is the only way they have ever heard Islam described. The main difference this has made for the book has been to highlight how we have constructed the notion of religion in recent history around the ideas of competition and confrontation, since all too often this modern world-imperial concept of religion is allowed to pass unexamined.

It is particularly important to clarify the interplay between religion and history, because the culture of mass media today tends to create the notion that the present is the only time worth considering. The flood of advertisements and entertainment that we all endure on a daily basis encourages amnesia about the past and reinforces contemporary ideologies as if they were eternal. Knowledge of the past, however, can be an important tool for liberating oneself from the tyranny of the current climate of opinion. Words and concepts do not simply grow on trees; they have been invented for specific purposes, and the history of their changing use reveals the crucial issues that define our world. Knowing the origins and transformations of words allows us to decide which of their implications we wish to endorse, and which of our predecessors' objectives we can still subscribe to. Approaching religion from the perspective of history also reveals that behind the apparently seamless unity of religious concepts lie major debates and differences, signs of irrevocable pluralism, and multiple perspectives within every religious tradition. Although it is tempting to listen to voices that claim undisputed authority pronouncing blanket approvals or condemnations on all kinds of subjects, that seduction is open to charges of prejudice and bias. I invite the reader to take on instead the excitement of discovering how rich and varied the changing history of a religion such as Islam has actually been.

This book is not meant to be an apologetic defense of Islam against criticisms; I myself am not a Muslim, and I am not offering preferential treatment to anyone. This book does offer the thesis that Muslims are human beings-meaning that they have history and that they live in multiple social and historical situations defined by economic class, ethnicity, gender, and all the factors that ordinary human beings have to deal with. On a very basic level, I feel personally compelled to make this minimal argument because of the profoundly human relationships I have established with Muslims over the years, with people who have invited me into their homes and welcomed me into their families. Although years ago I originally envisioned my professional task as educating non-Muslims about a foreign culture, the growing presence of Muslims in America and Europe has created a new constituency urgently committed to thinking through what it means to be a Muslim today. Muslims constitute nearly one-fourth of the human race, and that proportion is not likely to change; so it is simply a fact that non-Muslims need to come to terms with Islam as a part of our common humanity. It is also a fact that Muslims who are not satisfied with authoritative pronouncements will need to come to terms both with the history of their predecessors and with the history of the modern world. This book is written for both these audiences rather than for scholars, and it aims to be illustrative and provocative rather than comprehensive or exhaustive.

The basic method of this book is therefore descriptive and interpretive. It intends to provide the reader with the key concepts and questions necessary to understand contemporary debates about Islam. I do not wish to privilege any particular position, but an approach based on religious studies and historical context is bound to give a critical treatment to the issues. That is, as explained above, religious claims are not accepted at face value, and appeals to authority are not allowed to trump rational argument or to ignore history. Instead, everything is evaluated in terms of the elements of historical context that can be discussed by anyone, Muslim or non-Muslim, regardless of background or precommitments.

To make the book more accessible, I have written it in the form of an essay, only lightly burdened by notes except to give due credit or pointers to additional sources, including materials available on the Internet. As I have discovered in the past few years, Internet sources increasingly provide access to an astonishing range of materials relating to Islam that were previously almost impossible for the average reader to find. For the convenience of readers, I have set up a website (http://www.unc.edu/~cernst/islam.htm) containing all the Internet references in this book, which will be regularly updated and expanded in an attempt to keep up with the growth of these resources. Contributions and suggestions from readers will be welcome.

While this book aims primarily to reveal the human face of Islam, it can only do so by removing the veils of ignorance that have cloaked this subject for centuries in the minds of Europeans and Americans. Restoration of anything like an honest picture involves two kinds of mental operations: one is the complication of the cartoonlike stereotypes that dominate our current perceptions, giving Muslims a full three-dimensional human complexity; the other is the revival of memory, to replace the selective amnesia that has blotted out subjects such as colonialism from our common memory even of the recent past. The method that I use is to provide real human examples, which require the reader to construct a narrative that will help to explain how such things have come to be. In this way the reader participates in the creative act of reimagining as human an immense group of people who have been demonized. The reader should not feel, however, that he or she is being blamed for the prejudices that we have inherited. Some audiences to whom I have presented this analysis have reacted with surprise, frequently commenting that they had absolutely no concept of Islam whatever, that it was a great big blank in their minds. While acknowledging the truth of these reactions, I still wish to point out the surprising ways in which the dominant self-conception of Euro-Americans is in conflict with the actual history of our predecessors' engagement with Islam. Restoring a human face to Islam also means coming to a better knowledge of who we all are.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Following Muhammad by Carl W. Ernst Copyright © 2003 by University of North Carolina Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Highly accessible and a major step forward in understanding Islam, this book should be read from the schoolroom to the State Department." —Francis Robinson, Royal Holloway, University of London

Editorial Reviews

[A] thoughtful and finely balanced primer on contemporary Islam." —New York Review of Books



An impressive scholarly work."—The Telegraph-Calcutta



Well-written and lucid. . . . The book's narrative flow is generally masterful. Ernst successfully moves from present to past and back again in a manner that is both logical and clear to follow. . . . An elegant and masterful presentation of a religious tradition in an accessible manner, as well as a heartfelt plea for non-Muslims to understand it." —American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences



A pleasure to read. Ernst has a multilayered and self-assured understanding of Islam, and his writing exemplifies a fluency in explaining it that is unique to him. . . . Delicate and complex points about Islam as a religion and culture, about Sufism, and even about Osama bin Laden, flow off the page effortlessly. . . . The book's greatest strength is Ernst's unrelenting but well-reasoned critique of how the West has consistently marginalized Islam and Muslims from the first encounters onward. Ernst is fair, however— while he admonishes the West for indulging in negative and inaccurate stereotypes of Islam and Muslims, he calls upon Muslims to participate fully in the pluralistic society the world has become."—Publishers Weekly



In seeking to restore a sense of proportion and balance to the image of Islam for his Western readers, Ernst gives proper weight to the layers of mystical humanism, philosophical speculation and hermeneutical flexibility that are no less a part of the Islamic tradition than the legacies of conquest and militancy. He also points out that intolerance and bigotry are far from being the exclusive prerogative of the Western media industries." —Times Literary Supplement



A helpful resource for university religion departments. It is not a straight 'Islam 101' resource, and because of that, it is very refreshing. . . . A very helpful tool as an introduction to a course on Islam and contemporary religion."—Journal of the American Academy of Religion



Ernst introduces the larger Islamic world and its history in engaging, thought-provoking prose. . . . Readers will come away with a good understanding of the different schools of Islamic thought and practice. . . . Ernst's obvious passion for Islam comes through quite beautifully here, and the rare mix of clear writing and careful scholarship makes this an important purchase for any Islamic studies collection."—Booklist



This timely volume should be recommended enthusiastically to anyone who wants to gain a nuanced and balanced understanding of the contested position of Islam in the modern world. It fully deserves to be recognized as the single best choice for academic courses dealing with Islam and Middle Eastern studies, in both the undergraduate and graduate levels. . . . This is the rare work that only a scholar at the very zenith of his/her field can write, an even more daunting task given all the polemics about Islam today. There is no better, more profound place to begin - or end - a sophisticated discussion about contemporary Islam than Ernst's masterpiece."—Middle East Journal



Ernst provides an overview of Sufism, Shi'ism, and Islamic art. Here we really see the richness and diversity of this tradition."—Spirituality and Practice

From the Publisher

Ernst, a professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is not a stranger to Islam-related controversy. His recommendation of Michael Sells's book Approaching the Qur'an to the UNC Summer Reading Program for incoming freshmen spurred an international firestorm. Following Muhammad itself was rejected by the publisher that had commissioned the manuscript, as some editors there objected to publishing a book that could be construed as supporting terrorism. Despite these obstacles, Ernst brought the book to another press with rewarding results: it is a pleasure to read. Ernst has a multilayered and self-assured understanding of Islam, and his writing exemplifies a fluency in explaining it that is unique to him, even compared to better-known scholars of the religion. Delicate and complex points about Islam as a religion and culture, about Sufism, and even about Osama bin Ladin, flow off the page effortlessly, with only a few spots that are too abstract. Rather than addressing the standard introductory information about Islam, like the Five Pillars, he has organized his book by themes, with chapters on topics such as ethics and spirituality. The book's greatest strength is Ernst's unrelenting but well-reasoned critique of how the West has consistently marginalized Islam and Muslims from the first encounters onward. Ernst is fair, however-while he admonishes the West for indulging in negative and inaccurate stereotypes of Islam and Muslims, he calls upon Muslims to participate fully in the pluralistic society the world has become. (Oct.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Rebutting media-induced stereotypes, historical amnesia, and religious ethnocentrism, Ernst (religious studies, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) argues that North Americans must know their own history and the development of their own values before they can truly understand the faith of others. Hence, Ernst informs readers of the roles played by colonialism, Christian missionary efforts, and Western conceptions of just what "religion" is, all in relation to American conceptions of Islam. In broad strokes, he sketches out a religious studies perspective on Islam, minus the scholarly jargon. Given such broad strokes, Ernst's conclusions may sound like unsubstantiated (or under-substantiated) generalizations to those outside debates in religious studies of recent decades. A further qualification is that Ernst gives so much attention to this context that his discussion of the character and attributes of Islam suffers by comparison. Nonetheless, this notable book truly sketches out a background that informed citizens should be able to take for granted when they enter into any discussion of Islam and its place in the contemporary world. Recommended for public and academic libraries.-Steve Young, McHenry Cty. Coll., Crystal Lake, IL Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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