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      Ordinary Matters in Islamic Studies: Notes from the Field

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      research-article
      ReOrient
      Pluto Journals
      post-orientalism, Islamic Studies, critical philology, ethnography of knowledge, history, language, theory, archive, politic
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            Abstract

            This essay is a reflection on the everyday conceptual matters that inform the workings of the academic field of Islamic Studies and constitute its conditions of possibility. The research is based on observations I made while working at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University. The everyday of the Institute is marked by arguments that reject orientalism but also foreshadow its return in different guises. In this context, historical and linguistic approaches, with their own tensions and limits, appear as safeguards, but they are inevitably caught up in a binary that juxtaposes theory to the archive as two opposing but equally necessary modalities of knowledge. While several ideas about what constitutes Islam seem to cohabit without much friction, a quite fixed and stable notion of politics overdetermines the possibility to think otherwise. The essay is primarily descriptive, but it contains a few personal and “extra-territorial” notes on how to inhabit these matters differently and follow desire.

            Content

            Author and article information

            Journal
            10.2307/j50009694
            reorient
            ReOrient
            Pluto Journals
            2055-5601
            2055-561X
            1 October 2019
            : 5
            : 1 ( doiID: 10.13169/reorient.5.issue-1 )
            : 6-24
            Affiliations
            McGill University, Montreal, Canada
            Article
            reorient.5.1.0006
            10.13169/reorient.5.1.0006
            0c1b5b05-ca3c-45f2-bcbf-987944bd5668
            © 2019 Pluto Journals

            All content is freely available without charge to users or their institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission of the publisher or the author. Articles published in the journal are distributed under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

            History
            Custom metadata
            eng

            Literary studies,Religious studies & Theology,Social & Behavioral Sciences,History,Philosophy
            archive,ethnography of knowledge,critical philology,politic,language,post-orientalism,theory,history,Islamic Studies

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