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153 pages

English

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This is the first work to address the legacy of Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916–2000), whose intellectual and institutional contributions helped shape the field of religious studies in the latter half of the twentieth century. As a young scholar, Smith taught Indian and Islamic history in Lahore for several years and witnessed the partition of India. Upon his return to North America, he obtained his PhD at Princeton University before embarking upon a long and distinguished career. He founded the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University and served as director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University. Smith emphasized the place of the scholarly study of Islam in the Western academy long before Islam occupied its current position at the center of global politics, challenged the notion of monolithic world religions, and argued for the importance of dialogical processes and a personalist approach to the study of religion. Contributors to this volume, many of whom were Smith's students, provide a wide-ranging exploration of his influence and legacy.
Ellen Bradshaw Aitken and Arvind Sharma
Introduction

Diana L. Eck
Religious Studies—The Academic and Moral Challenge: Personal Reflections on the Legacy of Wilfred Cantwell Smith

John B. Carman
Wilfred Cantwell Smith: Academic Architect

Purushottama Bilimoria
The Meaningful “End” of God, Faith, and Scripture

Thomas B. Coburn
Anticipating the Emergence of “Contemplative Studies”: Reflections on the Work of Wilfred Cantwell Smith

Harvey Cox
Faith and Belief Revisited

William A. Graham
Wilfred Cantwell Smith and “Orientalism”

John Stratton Hawley
Enabling Antinomies: Tensions and Tensile Strength in Wilfred Cantwell Smith

Jonathan R. Herman
Who Cares If the Qur’an Is the Word of God? W. C. Smith’s Charge to the Aspiring Public Intellectual

Amir Hussain
Towards a Hermeneutic of Humanity: Wilfred Cantwell Smith and the Study of Muslims

Sheila McDonough
Wilfred Cantwell Smith in Lahore 1940–1951

Robert A. Segal
Diagnosis Rather than Dialogue as the Best Way to Study Religion

Peter Slater
Wilfred Smith’s Prophetic Sense of History and Proposal Regarding Verification

K. R. Sundararajan
Study of Religion as Study of Religious Persons

Donald K. Swearer
The Moral Imagination of Wilfred Cantwell Smith

Wilfred Cantwell Smith: A Bibliography

Contributors
Index

Sujets

Comparative religion

Islam

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Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	15 mars 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438464701
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1648€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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The Legacy of Wilfred Cantwell Smith
Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916–2000). Photo courtesy of Diana Eck.
The Legacy of Wilfred Cantwell Smith

Edited by
ELLEN BRADSHAW AITKEN
and
ARVIND SHARMA
Published by
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS
Albany
© 2017 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact
State University of New York Press
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Jenn Bennett
Marketing, Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Aitken, Ellen Bradshaw, editor | Sharma, Arvind, editor
Title: The legacy of Wilfred Cantwell Smith / Ellen Bradshaw Aitken and Arvind Sharma, editors.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438464695 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438464701 (e-book)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
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Contents
Ellen Bradshaw Aitken and Arvind Sharma
Introduction
Diana L. Eck
Religious Studies—The Academic and Moral Challenge: Personal Reflections on the Legacy of Wilfred Cantwell Smith
John B. Carman
Wilfred Cantwell Smith: Academic Architect
Purushottama Bilimoria
The Meaningful “End” of God, Faith, and Scripture
Thomas B. Coburn
Anticipating the Emergence of “Contemplative Studies”: Reflections on the Work of Wilfred Cantwell Smith
Harvey Cox
Faith and Belief Revisited
William A. Graham
Wilfred Cantwell Smith and “Orientalism”
John Stratton Hawley
Enabling Antinomies: Tensions and Tensile Strength in Wilfred Cantwell Smith
Jonathan R. Herman
Who Cares If the Qur’an Is the Word of God? W. C. Smith’s Charge to the Aspiring Public Intellectual
Amir Hussain
Towards a Hermeneutic of Humanity: Wilfred Cantwell Smith and the Study of Muslims
Sheila McDonough
Wilfred Cantwell Smith in Lahore 1940–1951
Robert A. Segal
Diagnosis Rather than Dialogue as the Best Way to Study Religion
Peter Slater
Wilfred Smith’s Prophetic Sense of History and Proposal Regarding Verification
K. R. Sundararajan
Study of Religion as Study of Religious Persons
Donald K. Swearer
The Moral Imagination of Wilfred Cantwell Smith
Wilfred Cantwell Smith: A Bibliography
Contributors
Index
Introduction

E LLEN B RADSHAW A ITKEN AND A RVIND S HARMA
I
Professor Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916–2000) left a deep impression on the study of religion, and his influence has only grown with the passage of time. The Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill University, of which he was once a member, held a symposium on November 6, 2009, to honor and assess this legacy. This volume is the precipitate of that symposium.
II
The legacy of Wilfred Cantwell Smith is of course only further proof of his continuing impact on the academic study of religion, an impact that was already obvious during his teaching and writing career. It may not be out of place to reprise the contribution he made while alive, to help pave the way for assessing his legacy.
Smith received a BA (honors) in Oriental Languages from the University of Toronto in 1938 and went on to pursue higher studies at Cambridge University, where he worked under the famous Islamicist, H. A. R. Gibb. Smith at the time was inclined toward Marxism, and was critical of the British and their approach to the “communal problem,” as Hindu-Muslim tensions in India were called at the time. His thesis was therefore rejected. He thereafter taught Indian and Islamic history at the Forman Christian College in Lahore from 1941 onward, and was an eyewitness to the Independence and Partition of India in 1947. His days in Lahore are discussed in detail in this book, in the chapter by Sheila McDonough. He then obtained a PhD in Oriental Languages from Princeton University and began teaching at McGill University, where he founded the Institute of Islamic Studies. Subsequently, Smith served as the director at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University (1964–73), and then founded the Department of Religious Studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax. He returned to Harvard University in 1978, to work with the Harvard Committee on the Study of Religion. After retiring in 1985, he became a senior research associate of the Faculty of Religious Studies at Trinity College, University of Toronto, and was awarded the Order of Canada in 2000, the year he died. John Carman’s essay in this volume explores these various dimensions of Smith’s legacy.
III
Smith’s influence radiated in pedagogical circles through his numerous students (many of whom have contributed to this volume), but it was in his role as a writer that he exerted his influence over larger academia. In this regard, two broad phases can be discerned; in one, his primary focus was Islam, and in the other, it was religion as such. Smith’s early career and his work in Cambridge and Lahore concentrated on Islam; the establishment of the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University was perhaps the most visible manifestation of this aspect of his work. The emergence of the next phase is represented by the publication, in 1959, of an essay, “Comparative Religion: Whither—and Why?” in a volume entitled History of Religions: Essays in Methodology , edited by Mircea Eliade and J. Kitagawa. 1 According to Frank Whaling, this essay “represents a kind of watershed between Smith’s greater concentration on Islam, during his work in Lahore in Muslim India from 1941–49 and his leadership of the McGill Institute of Islamic Studies which he founded in 1951, and his global concern for the total religious situation of mankind which became a feature of his later years.” 2
It is worth recalling that Islam as a religion, and Islamic studies as a branch of academia, did not enjoy the profile in Smith’s time that it does today. In fact, when Smith was pursuing Islamic studies, one rarely spoke of the Abrahamic tradition, an expression that places Judaism, Christianity, and Islam under the same umbrella. One spoke, rather, of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and stopped at that. Islam was considered an “Eastern” religion for all practical purposes. Smith’s commitment to the study of Islam thus precedes, by several decades, the attention being bestowed on it now. It is not often recognized that it was only after the oil crisis of 1973 that Islam earned the dignity of being bracketed, along with Judaism and Christianity, as a member of the Abrahamic tradition. 3 The public profile of Islam became more prominent after the Iranian revolution in 1979, and even acquired a spectral dimension after the events of September 11, 2001. An Islamic presence is now an inescapable feature of the international landscape, but such was not the case when Smith embarked on its study, almost intuiting the role Islam was destined to play in world affairs.
The nature of Smith’s contribution to the study of Islam is equally significant, apart from the fact of his having presciently engaged in it, and is best dramatized by the fact that there is not a single reference to Professor Wilfred Cantwell Smith in the book that created such a sensation in Islamic studies, Edward Said’s Orientalism . 4 This book brought about a seismic shift in the meaning of the word orientalism itself. Before this book, orientalism meant “scholarship or learning in oriental subjects.” 5 It had a neutral connotation. After the publication of the book the word acquired a pejorative connotation, as a result of the book’s claim that such a study of the Orient is inescapably tainted by the ruler-ruled relationship that obtained between the Occident and the Orient. It is perhaps not unfair to assume that Said did not, or would not, or could not, refer to Smith, because he did not find his scholarship of the Orient to be tainted in this way. William Graham’s essay in this volume bears on this issue.
That Smith could, even when writing during the age of imperialism, escape its intellectual consequences could well be the outcome of the attitude that Smith espoused toward the study of religion itself, which remains to this day a powerful element in his legacy. Smith discusses the evolving attitudes to the study of religion in his seminal essay referred to earlier, which has been summarized by Frank Whaling as follows:
In this essay, Smith traced the progress in the study of the History of Religions in various stages. The first stage saw the accumulation and analysis of facts. At first there was the impersonal accumulation of facts about “they,” the people of a religion, by scholars still personally uninvolved. The next stage saw the personalization of the work so that scholars as people, as “we” were investigating “they” who were also seen to be people. Not only was it the glory of the scholar to “study not things but qualities of personal living,” the investigator’s own personal qualities were also seen to be relevant. A further step came when it was seen that personal relationships with people of other traditions were important so that dialogue was no longer a merely conceptual matter conducted from a study at Oxford, Harvard or Edinburgh with “they” but an actual discussing with other people who through this relationship became “you.” A final stage involved not merely the inter-dialogue and study of two people or traditions on the basis of “we-both” are doing this together, but that “we-all” should do this together. 6
Frank Whaling then goes on to say:
The scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith has argued in his book The Meaning and E