UC Berkeley

Ignaz Goldziher and the Rise of Islamwissenschaft as a `Science of Religion'

by

David Moshfegh

Doctor of Philosophy in History

Professor Martin Jay, Chair

This study discusses the rise of Islamwissenschaft as a `science of religion' in the reformist scholarship of the Jewish Orientalist, Ignaz Goldziher. The `science of religion' tradition in nineteenth-century European scholarship was a historicist discourse that approached religious traditions critically and with the tools of critical scholarship. But, it did so not to debunk their sacred claims, but to argue that their religious meaning was present not in their traditionalist and transcendental demarcation of themselves but in their teleological development as they moved towards the definition and realization of `religion' itself. All religions had something of religion in them and there was religious progress in human history towards `religion' as such. Hence, comparative religious history--History as such--was made a medium for gauging the character of the progress and purification involved in the ultimate fulfillment of `religion', the relative capacity of different religions for such progress and critical reformist prescriptions that functioned as the completion of this process itself. The `science of religion' began as a liberal Protestant theological historicism, but its bid to project and idealize Christianity as `religion' found, over the course of the nineteenth century, an increasing number of competitive historicist rivals. There developed a humanist historicism, out of this stream of thought, that projected the self-conscious divinity of humanity as the end of History and so a `religion of man'. Soon, Protestant historicism was further flanked by a Jewish historicism that worked towards the reformist idealization of Judaism' as the ultimate universal faith of humanity. The fundamental thesis of this study is that the emergence Islamwissenschaft in Goldziher's scholarship represented another such competitive instantiation of the `science of religion'. Emerging from the reformist Jewish tradition of scholarship, Goldziher shifted his project of the critical historicization and idealization of Judaism as `religion' to Islam. Islamwissenschaft was a bid to project Islam as `religion', which Goldziher embraced on the basis of a universalist belief in purified monotheism as the telos of History, which viewed both the Jewish and Islamic heritage as capable of idealization to this end. Admittedly, the emergence and development of Islamwissenschaft have not generally been understood in this fashion. Rather, the discipline has often been seen as having propagated essentialist theologocentric conceptions of Islam and Islamic history that reduced everything in it to a totalizing `Islam'. Or, it has been viewed as also another vector of the Philological Orientalism of the nineteenth century and its invidious essentialist distinction between Semites and Aryans, `Islam' being then made the paradigmatic `Semitic' religion. In this study, I will show that Goldziher's scholarship and his founding of Islamwissenschaft were meant in fact precisely to counter such essentialist understandings of Islam and Islamic history. The critical historicization and idealization of Islam meant showing that Islamic law had in fact never functioned as a positive law but rather as a reified ideal used for ideological purposes of rationalization. One had, through critical historicization, to recover sociopolitical and cultural developments in their own right, if Islam was to achieve its full religious role: one had to overcome Islam as `ideology' for Islam to become `religion'. As for the claim that Islamwissenschaft represented a reiteration of invidious nineteenth-century racial distinctions, I demonstrate that the singular result of Goldziher's reformist reading of the Islamic heritage was to replace the Semitic/Aryan dichotomy as the fundamental framework of Orientalist scholarship with a universalist historicist one between the Medieval and Modern. It was on the basis of this division that Goldziher engaged `dialectically' with the Islamic modernism of his time: the traditionalist consciousness that viewed Islam in terms of a transcendental unity and origin, he argued, had to be displaced in favor of the critical historicist examination of Islam's development, if its providential destiny was to be realized. It is, however, also on this basis that I emphasize Goldziher's scholarship must be viewed within the broader Islamicist context of his time and not read out of it. For, the same reformist, modernist thinking that, in Goldziher, envisaged reform as the ownmost potential of the Islamic heritage and an inherently internal process radically opposed to any European imperialist intervention, could in the hands of other scholarly colleagues be turned to the purposes of colonial politics.