{"title":"Making Islam (Coherent): Academic Discourse and the Politics of Language","authors":"R. Rafii","doi":"10.1215/01903659-10472331","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n Despite the Islamophobic insistence on “Islam” as an alien and hermetically sealed phenomenon in popular and political Anglophone cultures, the field of Islamic and Near Eastern studies—historically subsumed under Oriental studies—has long been studied alongside a multiplicity of pre-Islamic Southwest Asian cultures. Yet the European Orientalist tradition still needed to create a “coherence” out of Islamic history in order to place it within a hierarchy of so-called civilizations. This essay discusses the issues regarding the Orientalist legacy of the terms Middle Ages and medieval in academic Islamic discourse, and how such usage, made to “familiarize” non-European cultures to Anglophone, non-Muslim audiences, served to reinforce Orientalist notions of lack of progress and backwardness in Muslim-majority societies.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"2","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10472331","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"CULTURAL STUDIES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 2
Abstract
Despite the Islamophobic insistence on “Islam” as an alien and hermetically sealed phenomenon in popular and political Anglophone cultures, the field of Islamic and Near Eastern studies—historically subsumed under Oriental studies—has long been studied alongside a multiplicity of pre-Islamic Southwest Asian cultures. Yet the European Orientalist tradition still needed to create a “coherence” out of Islamic history in order to place it within a hierarchy of so-called civilizations. This essay discusses the issues regarding the Orientalist legacy of the terms Middle Ages and medieval in academic Islamic discourse, and how such usage, made to “familiarize” non-European cultures to Anglophone, non-Muslim audiences, served to reinforce Orientalist notions of lack of progress and backwardness in Muslim-majority societies.
期刊介绍：
Extending beyond the postmodern, boundary 2, an international journal of literature and culture, approaches problems in these areas from a number of politically, historically, and theoretically informed perspectives. boundary 2 remains committed to understanding the present and approaching the study of national and international culture and politics through literature and the human sciences.
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