Border Medicine by Brett Hendrickson

Author:Brett Hendrickson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2014-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

Scholars such as Gomaa have come to understand themselves and the knowledge they produce in fundamentally different—that is, modern and secular—ways than the premodern ‘ulama did, because they understand religious knowledge to be a particular kind of discrete body of knowledge, a scholarly area, a field in which one might be an expert, comparable to the expertise in the field of medicine.25 But the ‘ulama do not acknowledge this as a secular and modern break from the premodern pedagogical culture they claim to inherit and represent.

Both classically trained teachers and students in these networks reproduce a narrative of historical continuities and survivals, of Islamic civilizational highs and lows, of Islam’s “golden age” and centuries of “decline” that correspond to the social prominence of the ‘ulama themselves. Historians have widely discredited such baseless and sweeping dismissals of Muslim societies after the thirteenth century, a period that saw the rise of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires. In fact, the appropriation of such narratives of civilizational high and lows (both premodern and modern) are what postcolonial scholar Partha Chatterjee calls a “derivative discourse”; like Arab nationalists who construct the flourishing of non-Arab Muslim empires in this period as a hiccup in the “normal” evolution of Islamic history, the ‘ulama also adopt the Orientalist historical narratives of decline and stagnation of the Muslim World after 1300 that Europeans used to justify the cultural and intellectual need for their colonial interventions in Muslim societies.26 In other words, just as American student-travelers draw on Orientalist tropes which function as productive mistranslations, so too do the ‘ulama in the Middle East invoke abridgements of history and Orientalist narratives of civilizational decline in order to bolster their own claims to authority and to their proper place in history.

Both the tradition claims of the ‘ulama and the revivalists elide the ways each set of religious intellectuals has acquiesced to a secular conception of Islamic knowledge that would be unrecognizable to the premodern ‘ulama they claim as precursors. Clearly, the real divide is not between secular revivalists and traditional ‘ulama or between those who want pedagogical reform and those who do not. Rather this is a contest between different kinds of reform of Islamic education—each side claims that its vision for reform is genuine and legitimate because it is anchored in the tradition, while the other reformers are insidious and will disfigure the tradition in the name of reform.27

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