48 – Orientalism’s ‘Other’: Islamic Studies, European Thought, and South Asia
For our panel titled “Orientalism's ‘Other’: Islamic Studies, European Thought, and South Asia”, we invite contributions that explore the interactions between South Asian Muslims and European scholarship on Islam from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, with a focus on the impact and interpretation of Orientalism. Building on recent research, the presentations in this panel will examine the impact of European scholarship on Muslim discourses in South Asia, highlighting unexplored aspects of this intellectual entanglement and the categories of knowledge it produced, particularly in the construction of modern Islamic studies as an academic discipline. The papers assembled here investigate the shaping of knowledge production on Islam through interactions between European Orientalists and South Asian Muslim scholars, educators, reformers, and poets. Themes include, among others, contributions by South Asian thinkers to Islamic knowledge production with an emphasis on the translocal history of Islamic studies, careers of individual Muslim thinkers which highlight the blurry boundaries between Islamism, Muslim modernism, and other intellectual orientations in modern Islam, as well as the relationship between Orientalist translations of Sufi poetry and South Asian Muslim poets' responses during the colonial era, arguing for the discursive co-constitution of world religions and literatures in Islamic studies.
Convenors
Dr. Maria-Magdalena Pruss - Dr. Brannon Ingram - Dr. Francesca Chubb-Confer -
