An accurate historical assessment of the Middle East requires the rigorous examination of existing methodologies employed by social scientists in the study of Islam. Religious discourses are, by their nature, entrenched in complex sociopolitical and historical circumstances. Thus, the work of scholars in the post-Orientalist world is to critique the existing anthropological survey of Islam, in order to produce a conception of it that is sufficient for realistic “cross-cultural” historical enquiry. Such objective enquiry must be equal parts free from fundamentalist fantasy as it is from reductionist essentialism. Talal Asad’s The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam and Aziz al-Asmeh’s Islams and Modernities are two such works that have taken on the challenge of re-historicizing Islam.
The problem of discussing Islam without the constraint of an imposed narrative is twofold. First, existing Orientalist works characterize Islam as a monolithic, static authority, which creates the illusion of Islam as a permanent, fixed object. This interpretation of Islam is, according to al-Asmeh, “the product of a highly specific reading of a small range of sources” (al-Asmeh, p.52) which informs both xenophobic and xenophilic outlooks on Islamic life. In turn, historical analysis of Islam (and Islamic political life itself) is impoverished by these subjective, politicized views. In all of these analyses, the authentic voice of those living under the varying traditions of Islam is crowded out by a poorly conceived notion of Islamic history born out of the tendency to “over-Islamicize” (al-Asmeh, p.55) Muslim life.
Asad utilizes a Foucauldian approach that critiques the power-knowledge structures inherent to anthropological works on Islam. His guiding argument is that a coherent study of Islam requires “thinking as Muslims do”. He successfully argues that the formation of any representation of a tradition is determined by the power and knowledge of each side, and thus, no representation can be considered universally acceptable. Asad insists that instead of viewing religion as a disembodied aspect of society, one should first search for the institutional conditions that made production of social knowledge on religion necessary. The benefit of this method is that it circumvents the need for “Othering”, through re-centering the role of history in understanding other cultures.
Similarly to Asad, al-Asmeh seeks to free Islam from the notion of its fixed singularity. He asserts that “culture” is a mere token of incomprehensions, backed by pseudosociology. The weakness of the culturalist approach is that it is a reductive discourse whose analysis relies on arbitrary signifiers instead of historically grounded evidence. The alternative method proposed by al-Asmeh is a kind of “deculturalization” that allows for historical and social contexts to properly articulate the study of Islam. al-Asmeh locates postmodernism as a reference point for the proliferation of fictitious ahistorical narratives, arguing that the term attempts to abdicate itself of the consequences of modernism. However, as al-Asmeh elaborates, the meaning behind his ideas become opaque through the use of increasingly unclear language.
Historical inquiry of the Middle East must include analysis that fosters an open dialogue between the studier and the studied, that simultaneously does not engender the “Othering '' of the studied. Ultimately, scholars should reject anthropological study that is reliant upon an exoticized form of discourse which conceptualizes Islam as a determinate totality. It is imperative to create a discourse that is “in conversation with”, rather than one that seeks to define from the outside.