Introduction: Power, Intersectional Identity and the Study of Islam

This important volume explores the tensions and opportunities that emerge from the intellectual encounter in Europe between what are perceived as ‘confessional’ and ‘academic’ approaches to the study of Islam and Muslims. As indicated in a number of chapters in this volume, this dichotomy positions as ‘confessional’ the study of Islam by believing Muslims (e.g., Jones, Chapter 1; Johansen, Chapter 3; Gilliat-Ray, Chapter 4; Dreier, Chapter 6). Islamic studies as undertaken in European universities is usually positioned or labelled as ‘academic’. A dichotomy on its own would be unproblematic. However, key to this dichotomy in approaches to the study of Islam is a power dynamic that, at least in Western intellectual contexts, posits ‘academic approaches’ to Islamic studies as more critical, more rigorous, more desirable and somehow as being superior to what are termed as ‘confessional approaches’. This can be contrasted to preferences within diverse Muslim communities that continue to valorise traditional forms of Islamic learning, especially in relation to positions of religious authority and leadership within Muslim communities. However, as a young alimah (traditionally trained female Muslim scholar) stated to me in a discussion about Islamic scholars in Britain, ‘Alims and alimahs need jobs and for these we need university degrees’. And so even in Muslim contexts, traditional forms of Islamic studies are devalued in liberal and marketised contexts that privilege employability. It is these power dynamics that determine how we produce knowledge, and why and how new knowledge is disseminated and shared.

These power dynamics are gendered. In wider Western/European society female Muslim scholars suffer multiple penalties in relation to their minority-ness (visible or not), Muslim-ness and their woman-ness. Enduring patriarchies in Muslim and wider Western contexts can devalue their scholarship and their societal authority. These power dynamics are also racialised and/or ethnicised with particular ethnic voices being allocated more authority (Nurein and Iqbal 2021). They are determined by intra-Muslim relations – for example, a Shia scholar who participated in the ‘Islam on Campus’ research project, underlined the criticality of the course he taught by emphasising the fact that he did not include books that were published in Saudi Arabia (Scott-Baumann et al. 2020).