Accurate Knowledge: Implications of ‘Lived Islamic Theology’ for the Academic Study of Islamic Disciplines

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the relationship between, on the one hand, the academic study of Islamic disciplines within university faculties of humanities and theology, including religious studies, and, on the other, ‘lived Islamic theology’, i.e. the diverse Islamic institutional discourses that inform individuals’ religious knowledge and practices. Here, ‘lived Islamic theology’ refers to research from the Norwegian cities of Trondheim and Oslo. The analytical model is Michel de Certeau’s, Pierre Bourdieu’s and Jürgen Habermas’s concepts of discourse and ‘capital’. We argue that the academic study of Islamic disciplines is a prerequisite for accurate public knowledge about ‘lived Islamic theology’; that it potentially increases the ‘cultural capital’ assigned to Islamic knowledge in the public sphere, and thereby enables citizens to contribute to the common good through Islam; and that it can enrich the humanities by showing how Islamic disciplines correlate with ‘Western’ philosophical, hermeneutical, ethical, linguistic, political and historical disciplines.

KEYWORDS:

• Islamic academic theology
• lived Islamic theology
• Islamic disciplines
• Islam and humanities
• cultural capital
• Norwegian Islam

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See Mårtensson (2015, 7–15) for application of de Certeau’s analytical model to al-Tabari’s historiography in The History of the Messengers and the Kings (Taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-al-mulūk); on comparisons of al-Tabari’s hermeneutics with modern counterparts, see Heath (1989); Mårtensson (2008, 2009).

2 On the politics of the doctrinal and exegetical debate over the nature of the Qur’an between ahl al-ḥadīth and the Muʿtazila, see Carter (1983, 68); Cooperson (2000, 28–32); Vasalou (2002, 25).

3 For studies of the development and interconnections between the Islamic disciplines, see e.g. Makdisi (1990); van Ess (1990–1997); Jokisch (2007).

4 A recent important study of uṣul al-fiqh as hermeneutics is Vishanoff (2011); see also Schwarb (2007).

5 On the rhetorical character of Arabic according to the ‘founding father’of classical linguistics, Sibawayhi, see Marogy (2010); Baalbaki (2007); Carter (2007). This theory of language and meaning as context-dependent is also reflected in the exegetical genres wujūh and ashbāh; see Rippin (1988).

6 On the emergence of Islamic humanism and imperial law in the reign of the ʿAbbasid Caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd (r. 786–809), and in a relationship with Byzantine and Carolingian legal and scholarly culture, with the Islamic contribution at least as constructively contributing as the others, if not more, see Jokisch (2007, 67–71).

7 Abu Zayd (2004, 2006); Arkoun (1988, 1994, 2002, 2006); Charfi (2004); Soroush (2000); on Soroush’s hermeneutics, see also Amirpour (2011).

8 Arabic: la-inna al-mukhāṭab wa-al-mursal ilayhi in lam yafham mā khūṭiba bihi wa-ursila bihi ilayhi fa-ḥāluhu qabla al-khiṭāb wa-qabla majīʾ al-risāla ilayhi wa-baʿdahu siwāʾ idh lam yafidhu al-khiṭāb shayʾan […] wa-Allāhu julla dhikruhu yataʿāla ʿan an yukhāṭiba khiṭāban aw yursila risālatan lā tūjabu fāʾidatan li-man khūṭabu aw ursalu ilayhi; al-Ṭabarī (1995, vol. 1:1, 18–19); see Mårtensson (2016, 19).