Islamic Studies and the Return to Philology

Islamic studies emerged in the nineteenth-century from within the disciples of philology and history. In this initial stage, the field was successful in editing manuscripts and in ‘interpreting’ Islamic civilization through the study of textual sources. The field then reached its zenith with the introduction of Kulturgeschichte through the pioneering works of Alfred von Kramer, Ignaz Goldziher and Carl Heinrich Becker. It continued to oscillate between philology and cultural history until it was taken over by sociology and anthropology. The lecture explores the potential of a new philology in reshaping the realm, methods and objectives of Islamic studies, or “Islamwissenschaft” as Carl Heinrich Becker called it. Ridwan al-Sayyid will begin by presenting the salient features of nahda-oriented, rationalising philology in the nineteenth century and the relation between Islamic studies and Biblical Studies. He will then turn to the accomplishments and problems of the cultural history approach. And, finally, he will address the problems that have arisen due to the complexities of the cultural context, the emergence of a structuralism that is embedded in sociological and anthropological discourses, and the rise of fundamentalist readings, from the political right as well as from the left, in current thought. It will be argued that this is an opportune moment for practitioners of Islamic studies to reflect on the history of their field and to engage in a critical evaluation of their philological approaches in light of new hermeneutical methods. Al-Sayyid will illustrate this through some exemplary cases.