Response to Moosa

I find much to be grateful for and much to agree with in Professor Moosa's advocacy of thinking contrapuntally. I know neither the work of al-Ghazali nor Moosa's work on him, but this elegant essay makes me eager to read both. Moosa is certainly right that those who have practiced Religious Studies (and its cognomens) in the past have often spoken and written in a flat-footedly totalizing way, attempting to account for what they study while refusing to countenance the possibility that they might themselves be accounted for or put to the question by it. Some still do speak and write like this, though there is now an air of quaintness and preciosity about such talk. Moosa is right, too, that there are other ways to do things. Al-Ghazali can be read, for example, in full awareness that the act of reading him may, and almost certainly will, inform the reader's future reading and thinking in unpredictable ways; and he can be read, as Moosa apparently does, in admiration and partial imitation of his bricolage, exile, and habitation of interstitial spaces. All this is good, and when done with wit and delicacy as Moosa does it, it is very good.

But two questions at once suggest themselves, neither of which leaves a trace in Moosa's text. First, there is the question of what any of what Moosa writes has to do with religion and its study, which is the putative topic of this symposium. And second, there is the question of whether Moosa is sufficiently aware of the commitments of value and purpose that inform his own work to be able to see that they are no more insulated (or insulatable) from critique and replacement than are those he criticizes and replaces. A few words more on each of these questions.

To the first question Moosa commends Benajmin's theory of translation, attention to post-Foucauldian understandings of power and the other, and a consequent provincialization or molestation of "the historicist, totalizing and modernist constructions that have become orthodoxies in the study of religion." Does not this result in an effective removal of the term "religion" as one of analytical use? Is not the relevance of Moosa's intellectual program to the study of religion that of removal by dissolution? Would not the founding fathers of Religionswissenschaft be thoroughly cannibalized and then excreted as how-not-to footnotes if what Moosa commends were itself to become the dominant mode of practice? Is not Moosa's program applicable quite generally to the study of the past—or at least to certain kinds of literary artifact from the past—and thus without special relevance to texts or objects or practices that we might once have called "religious"? Moosa seems to me to be an instance of a now very widespread tendency among those harbored in one way or another by the AAR, which is to find the term "religion" of no use for their own work. This tendency is in my view a very good one, but perhaps it implies that the AAR ought either to dissolve or rename itself. Does Moosa think so too?

To the second question Moosa commends a strong program (bricolage, provincializing, molestation, &c), and identifies the goal of this program, which is "to inaugurate desirable transformations resulting in pluralities." This is a formulation whose abstraction and imprecision strongly suggests that Moosa has not thought through what he means by it, and perhaps also that he resists thinking it through (language often degenerates in this way when its user is avoiding thought). It is nonetheless a purpose or goal even if it is not possible to tell what it comes to, and this means that Moosa hews to an axiology and a teleology—or, if you do not like Greek, that he espouses a set of values and a purpose that he thinks should order intellectual work. But what, in his view, is the status of these values and this purpose? Should we wish (does Moosa wish?) these to be the values and this the purpose that inform all the work that the AAR sponsors and blesses and gives its imprimatur to? To what extent is Moosa prepared to open his own values and purposes to the question, and with them the understanding of human beings, intellectual work, and the social order intertwined with them? Were he to do so he would have to overcome the coyness with which at the moment he veils them, and I suspect that were he to disrobe in this way he would find himself advocating just one more rationally disputable understanding of what human beings are like, and what they are for. And if he were to be consistent with his own critique of quaint, high-modernist Religionswissenschaft, he would have to allow that his own axiology and telology might be framed and accounted for, consumed, and excreted, by the Islam he studies with as much ease as he can frame and account for, consume, and excrete, the work of the founding fathers of the study of religion. Moosa's work beckons theology. Would he welcome its warm embrace?