Presenter
Ingram Brannon - Northwestern University, Northwestern University, Evanston, United StatesPanel
48 – Orientalism’s ‘Other’: Islamic Studies, European Thought, and South AsiaAbstract
This paper interrogates disciplinary and thematic boundaries in Islamic Studies by way of the career of Mazheruddin Siddiqi (1915-1991), a Pakistani scholar whose prolific reform-minded work in Urdu and English exemplifies the entanglement of the academic study of Islam and Muslim activism at the middle of the twentieth century. A student of Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s at McGill and associate of Fazlur Rahman, Siddiqi was active in Muslim modernist circles in Pakistan in the 1960s and 70s. He was also deeply critical of Orientalism and colonialism, associated as freely with Mawdudi’s circles as with Rahman’s, and campaigned to Islamicize all aspects of Pakistani life and society, admittedly by way of an Islam with distinctly modernist inflections. This paper examines how Siddiqi helps us understand the blurry boundaries between Islamism and Muslim modernism, on one hand, and between the academic study of Islam and applied Muslim thought and practice, on the other.
