Ode to Islamic Studies

Islamic studies is more than a specialized field of academic study; it is a series of discourses that play important educational, social, and political roles in multiple settings both within and beyond the academy. No one party, especially not its chief academic practitioners, controls its scope or outcomes. Offering outlines multiple examples of institutional growth and discursive strength, this essay contends that any narrow definition of the field, especially polemical ones, ignores the power, the allure, and the danger of Islamic studies--and its centrality to contests over what it means to be human in the contemporary world.