The Legacy of Wilfred Cantwell Smith by Ellen Bradshaw Aitken Arvind Sharma

Author:Ellen Bradshaw Aitken,Arvind Sharma
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2017-05-17T04:00:00+00:00

The Public Intellectual: Whither and Why

Smith’s Qur’an essay, like the historical episodes examined here, addresses relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, but it is obvious that this is merely a single case study that can be generalized to broader questions of religious diversity. In a final footnote, Smith appends one final coda: “It is perhaps unnecessary to add (I hope the point has been manifestly implicit throughout) that this whole discussion may presumably be transposed, whether on to parallel Hindu or Buddhist issues, or back into internal Christian terms. A consideration of the Western-Muslim divergence over the Qur’an is applicable at least in principle to a secular-Christian divergence over Christian positions.”40 Be that as it may, “Is the Qur’an the Word of God?” is light years away from being a quaint speculation over an odd theological riddle; it is an earnest charge to the aspiring public scholar of religion to take a leadership role in the unfolding of history yet to be made, across all religious traditions. And now, nearly a half-century after Smith first dropped the gauntlet, it seems fair to interrogate the reasonableness and relevance of his challenge, to assess the state of the public religious discourse, and to gauge what progress the “next generations” have made in steering the new century to its anticipated “major new turn.” To all of these, it is tempting to confess some measure of despair, that the present religious conflicts are as fierce as ever, that the world is sitting on a proverbial powder keg, and that Smith’s intellectual heirs—I strive to count myself as one of them—have simply proven unfit for the task. Indeed, during one of my last conversations with Smith, I confessed that I was eagerly on board with his desiderata, but could not really imagine, concretely, what the new discourse might look like, even embryonically.

Still, as one of the “next generation” who aspires to be the type of public religious studies intellectual that has been elucidated here, I have been forced to arrive at my own “interim conclusion,” and it is one that my final correspondence with Smith suggests he would endorse. In short, I pass the problem on to my students; I force them to confront the challenges, much as Smith has done for me. This is actually not a difficult or uneasy step to take, and not primarily because it assumes a posture of abdicating responsibility. It is the current generation that has grown up amid the real religious diversity that Smith knew was coming, that is fluent in the expanding technologies that I can barely manage, and that had their youth marked not by the assassination of a president or a cloak-and-dagger Cold War, but by the specter of September 11 and the knowledge of religious conflict occurring simultaneously in all parts of the globe. And I remind them that even after a modest survey class in world religions, even after a fifteen-week whirlwind tour of Chinese or Japanese religion, they are in a position where

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