Pitfalls of Scholarship ― Lessons from Islamic Studies

Pitfalls of Scholarship offers an array of reflections on higher education, its entanglements with human's pursuit of natural and social knowledge, and the impact of national environments on it. It considers the humanities and the vocational and scientific/technological side of the university from the vantage-point of an Islamic studies scholar in 21st century American academy. Four discussions and a personal note make up the parts of these pages. The first discussion sets the stage with a description of the irregularities of our age of late modernity and the limits of scholarship in it. The second focuses on clashes of personal and academic knowledge with social assumptions and convictions. Guiding the discussion is an unlikely narrative from an old era where academic freedom was not there or at least not called that. The third points to surprisingly negative impacts of obsessions with research method in the modern academy. 'Scholarships of negation' is identified as the main illness of the age, next to popular exaggerations of the value of standard assumptions and excellent academic institutions. The fourth deals with modern education's aspiration toward acquiring a democratic quality, and the implications of further democratizing of education.

Ahmad Atif Ahmad is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. He also served as Chair of Middle East Studies at the College of William & Mary, USA, and associate academic director of the University of California, Washington Center, USA. He is the author of The Fatigue of the Shari'a (2012).