Author: M. Mehdi Ali
PhD Candidate in Religion, University of Southern California
Pursuing a PhD in Islamic studies, especially as a Muslim in the West, is a delicate balancing act. Answering the question, “What do you do?” is never straightforward. At this stage in life, most of my peers are beginning to gain serious traction in their careers, including by obtaining high-profile promotions, building innovative technology companies, or even becoming pioneers in the digital currency space (like two of my undergraduate classmates who are now billionaires).
I always dread when people ask me, “Why are you still in school?” or “How do you support yourself?” These are awkward questions that are difficult to respond to in a sensitive manner. How does one explain to someone who views education in purely instrumental terms that I am still in school because I love to learn? That having the time and space to read, write, and think to my heart’s content is priceless? That learning languages in my free time is an absolute joy? That nowhere else in the world would a bunch of professional-age men and women have the opportunity to discuss and debate an arcane point of Islamic law in the middle of a workday? How do I articulate that I only began my PhD after nearly a decade of financial planning, including several years as a corporate lawyer?
Still, this is better than the folks who think that a PhD is effectively an adult Sunday-school program. The notion that religion is a phenomenon worthy of being studied at a graduate level is wholly foreign to some. For example, when I told my dentist, a bubbly South Asian Muslim woman in her forties, about my studies, she responded by saying, “Well, that should be easy!” I can only venture to guess that she assumed a PhD in religion entailed a review of basic information about Islam that any practicing Muslim is already aware of. Multiple others have casually mentioned to me how they also plan to one day pursue graduate studies in religion, without realizing that the process of even getting into a PhD program, let alone graduating from one, is itself highly grueling and requires years of preparation. At the same time, people sometimes give me more credit than I deserve. More than once I have been asked to lead prayers in a congregational setting, give lectures to youth groups, and answer theological questions about the Qur’an, all on the basis of my qualifications as a PhD student in religion. I invariably decline such invitations, because I am highly cognizant of the fact that my training has not prepared me to undertake the role of a religious leader.
But none of the above are things that keep me up at night. Surprisingly, the true challenge of pursuing a PhD in Islamic studies is navigating the politics of religious training, especially among those who are religiously inclined. The Western approach to the study of religion, as a critical discipline that needs to be explored and interrogated, is rarely understood outside of the academy. In fact, engaging in the study of religion beyond the confines of a seminary is often interpreted as a highly audacious, and in some ways political, act, especially given the devastating legacy of Orientalism in Western scholarship.
I am sympathetic to the skepticism. My introduction to the academic study of Islam began with a “Worlds of Islam” course at Stanford, where religion was taught from a purely secular perspective. As a freshman, I did not realize the implications of studying Islam in a university setting. The teacher for the Sirah (i.e., prophetic biography) portion of the course was Joel Beinin, who is a well-known scholar of the modern Middle East, but has absolutely no scholarly background in early Islam. The first reading assigned in the class was a biography of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) written by Maxime Rodinson, a French Marxist historian whose starting point was the rejection of the message of Islam. I vividly recall feeling shaken as I read his interpretation of and disparaging claims about this noble figure who I had revered my entire life. After this experience, I stepped away from university courses in the field until I felt more grounded in the Islamic tradition, and thus more equipped to deal with such challenges to my faith.
To be fair, I have also had many positive experiences with studying Islam in the academy, although usually only with teachers who are observant Muslims that are open about their commitment to the faith. For this reason, when I was applying to PhD programs, I was only willing to study under a Muslim advisor. I was very lucky to be accepted into the Department of Religion at the University of Southern California, where I have learned a great deal under the mentorship of Dr. Sherman Jackson. He is someone who is well-versed in both traditional and Western approaches to the study of Islam. Most importantly, he challenges his students constantly to think outside of biases that are endemic to Western modernity, including the notion that pre-modern actors were not sophisticated or rational.
Even with the best of advisors, however, a PhD is still perceived as inferior to a seminary education, especially in traditional circles. I already sensed this by the way many people questioned my decision to study religion in the United States, rather than travel to a traditional center of learning in the Middle East. Such people are usually really shocked that Islam is taught in the United States, and believe that such material is either tainted in some way or is nowhere near the sophistication of a traditional seminary. The unstated assumption, of course, is that nothing valuable can be gained from studying Islam in the West. But the level of territoriality and competitiveness became especially clear to me a couple of months ago, when I had reached out to a senior Najaf-based scholar for help with reading a highly technical legal text in Arabic. This scholar, who is well respected in the traditional seminary, had conducted classes on this very text, which were recorded and available for Najaf-based students. However, he refused to provide me with the recordings, stating outright that I had acquired a “Mickey Mouse education” and was thus woefully unprepared for the subject material. This was fascinating to me because I viewed it as reflective of a broader problem, which is the rampant gatekeeping that takes place at traditional institutions. I understood his concern at some level, because I was trying to access knowledge that usually required several years of study. In bypassing these steps, I was threatening to undermine the entire enterprise of a seminary education.
I won’t say that there isn’t some merit to his perspective. Traditional learning is superior to the academy in many respects. For starters, it inculcates in the student a reverence for tradition, a notion that is usually anathema in the academy. Furthermore, the works of past authorities are studied in depth, usually line-by-line in Arabic. In a PhD program, on the other hand, breadth is valued over depth, which I actually think has many advantages, although something is certainly lost in studying a little bit of many different genres and texts, rather than becoming intimately familiar with a handful of books.
As far as language skills are concerned, Arabic instruction in the United States is not great, but it is usually the case that most students admitted to religious studies programs already have advanced training in the language, often having obtained some level of Arabic experience abroad. This was the case for me; in addition to studying Arabic for three years at Stanford, I completed a year-long Arabic program in Jordan. While course structure varies, many teachers (including mine) at reputable programs do take the approach of teaching texts line-by-line in class, thus replicating one of the main pedagogical tools of a seminary education. One important advantage for PhD students is that they are usually equipped to engage with multiple languages (in addition to Arabic), often Persian, Turkish, and Urdu, whereas seminary students usually focus mainly on Arabic. Another main advantage of the academy is that students are far better trained to understand historical context when reading texts. This, however, is a double-edged sword, because instead of analyzing texts for what they say, students are tempted to interpret such texts based on their own preconceived notions.
I don’t think it is fair to say that one type of learning is better than the other. The truth is that a PhD program is trying to accomplish goals that are entirely different from the traditional study of Islam. Instead of producing religious leaders, PhD programs are designed to train scholars who will increase our understanding of the past. Furthermore, PhD programs are invested heavily in teaching students to acquire critical thinking skills, especially to challenge established norms and assumptions. An advanced student of a religious seminary, on the other hand, will be intellectually on par with any student of the West, but his end-goal will be the service and propagation of his religion, and thus the types of things he focuses on will reflect this. Such a student will also ideally be driven to spiritual purification as a part of his training, with his teachers serving as guideposts to a higher destination. In both types of education, students will think deeply about certain moral truths, and thus change the way that they approach life.