Why This Muslim Left Islamic Studies

Apologism, Denialism, and the Complicity of Western Academia

In September 2015, I began what I believed to be the beginning of my formal career in academia, when I joined the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (MEIS) at New York University (NYU) as a doctoral student. My personal background was a key reason why I had decided to pursue this path. I was raised in the Abangan tradition of Indonesian Islam, a syncretic tradition that blends together Islamic mysticism with earlier Hindu, Buddhist, and animist traditions of the archipelago. With this came an open-minded understanding of Islam, something that I greatly valued but also understood to be quite removed from forms of textualist Islam both in Indonesia and elsewhere.

Although I have always cherished my Abangan background, by the time I was in high school, I realized my own academic curiosities about Islamic intellectual history and textualism could never be grounded in the amorphous Abangan way of thinking. Indeed, most religious histories are movements towards textualism as a basis for intellectual debate and exegesis. It was in this period that I discovered what is historiographically referred to as the Renewal of Islamic Thought in Indonesia. The Renewal was a Modernist movement of Santri (scripturalist) Indonesian Muslims, which emphasized pluralism, internal criticism and exegesis, and a broader desire to move away from both the scholarly immobility of Islamic Traditionalism and the puritanical scripturalism of other strands of Islamic Modernism.

I was drawn to the Renewalists because they expressed the same ideals that I did as an Abangan, but their Santri understanding was far more relevant for the future. It grounded these ideals in a pro-active critique of religious text, the very same thing that helped pluralize and open up Christianity and Judaism in the West. Thus, I began my academic journey in Islamic intellectual history not as a matter of apologetics, but rather as a way to highlight the importance of pro-actively pluralistic and self-critical Muslims who stood in opposition to forms of Islamic chauvinism.

Over the years, while I was obtaining both my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, I took note of how many fellow scholars and students in my field of study became increasingly defensive about the Muslim world’s problems, especially if I tried to steer the conversation beyond just terrorism and onto the even more pervasive issues of socio-political chauvinism and intellectual stagnation. There was a time when I thought it might not even be possible to get my doctorate, or then have a meaningful academic career, given how dismissive or hostile many in the field of study were to my views.

Things took a positive turn when I met the man who would eventually become my doctoral advisor. I had received my Master’s degrees and was out of the academy at the time, but still went to as many events and seminars that I could in my spare time so as to remain caught up. During the Q&A session at one particular event, I raised the issue of how elite and lay discourses in many Muslim-majority countries are increasingly consumed by a victimhood mentality that assumes that hidden nefarious forces are constantly at work to undermine Islam. I made the comment assuming the usual dismissive or hostile response, but the man who became my advisor responded positively and added that he, too, had often questioned what factors were causing such problems.

About 10 months later, we reconnected for a phone interview and shortly thereafter I was accepted to MEIS at NYU. During our first meal together shortly after acceptance, the first thing my advisor said to me reaffirmed why I was keen on working with him. “Where can we even send our students anymore?” he lamented, “So much is coming apart.” It is an incredible thing that an obvious statement like that could nonetheless feel so special, because so few in the field of study were willing to speak in visceral terms about the realities of the Muslim world today.

It was thus immensely disappointing that during the core course for master’s and doctoral students, Problems and Methods in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, taught by my advisor, we did not spend a single class nor a single minute talking about Islamism, in both its militant and civil-political forms. Imagine, from September to December 2015, amidst so many events ranging from ISIS’s proliferation to the San Bernardino and Paris attacks to the ever-growing strength of civil-political Islamist movements, a class of nascent Middle Easternists and Islamicists not discussing the issue of Islamism at all. Worse yet, this apparently was not just the individual error of my advisor.

Towards the end of the semester, I was invited to a job talk dinner because the candidate’s area of research aligned closely with mine. Present, among others, were several senior professors of the Department, including my advisor, who arrived to the dinner later. Before his arrival, one of the other senior professors, a giant in the field of study much like my advisor, asked me for my feedback on the core course. I shared my honest thoughts on what worked and what did not, highlighting especially the absence of any discussion on Islamism. To my surprise, this professor admitted that the Department had had a meeting on this very issue and collectively decided not to make it a topic for the class. “Yeah, I guess that was a mistake,” he said.

Yes, it certainly was, and not just on academic principle. At all of the schools I have had the privilege of attending, UC Santa Barbara, Columbia University, The London School of Economics, and NYU, I have met both Muslim and non-Muslim students who are ideologically driven in their belief that the problems of the Muslim world, including Islamism and ISIS, are all tied back to the West and/or Israel directly or indirectly. Not discussing an issue as central to the field of study as Islamism is not just a dereliction of academic duty, but also of civic duty to correct the apologism and safe-space denialism that has gripped Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies as a broad field of study.

All of this, in combination with the mass assaults against women in Europe by migrant Muslim men and negative turns on the Indonesian front affecting people I care about, made me realize I could no longer in good faith remain a student in the field of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. Since my departure in January 2016, other developments, including the academic denunciation of Kamel Daoud and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s appalling shaming of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Maajid Nawaz, have further reinforced the validity of my decision.

As for Islam, I will always feel a deep connection to and affinity for both my Abangan heritage and the Indonesian Renewalists, but when it comes to the greater Islamic Ummah, I feel little beyond disgust and disillusionment. Perhaps Muslims like myself and the Renewalists were never going to be appreciated by other Muslims anytime soon, but it is even more disheartening how little appreciation and support there has been among liberal intellectuals in the West that we thought would aid us in our cause.