9/11 and the Study of Religions in the Age of Confusion

By: Paul Heck

September 10, 2016

9/11 15 Years Later: Where Are We Now?

The events of 9/11 ushered in the age of confusion. During the Cold War it was clear who was friend and who was foe, but the 9/11 attacks made it clear that we as a nation had no idea how the world views us. This confusion came out in the colossal U.S. failure to grasp perceived threats. We’ve only succeeded in strengthening terrorists and dictators. Our varied partners took our aid and used it for corrupt ends. The results couldn’t be worse. Billions wasted, fear and hatred spreading, and terrorism as familiar news.


But signs of new life amidst despair are noticeable. One is the Muslim interest in interreligious relations. Before 9/11, interreligious initiatives came largely from Christian communities, but after 9/11 Muslims became more actively involved in interfaith work. They did so at first as a shield against anti-Muslim suspicions, but today it’s Muslims, no less than Jews and Christians, who spearhead the effort.

And yet there’s more to the story. Dialogue between religions can become exercises in flattery. We want to nurture a culture of global coexistence, and so faith leaders gather to affirm one another but don’t really know the other religions. Behind the smiles lurks the suspicion that others still view us as infidels.

The practice of condemning the religious other as infidel is still with us. It’s a big issue in Islam today where it’s known as takfeer. It poisons relations with other communities and even more so intra-Muslim relations, fueling the idea that it makes sense to fight religiously motivated wars. The disastrous consequences of this outlook for Islam became real with 9/11 and even more so with the rise of ISIS.

This has made it all too clear that we need to think deeply about the nature of interreligious relations.

As a result, universities in Muslim societies are starting to move beyond the niceties of interreligious dialogue and are developing the study of interreligious relations as a serious object of scholarly inquiry. In other words, the events of the last decade and a half are helping to move educational institutions across the globe beyond refutation to understanding as the proper approach to studying other religions.

On the one hand, universities in Muslim societies that had tended to dismiss Western methods in religious studies now look increasingly to sociology and anthropology to understand religion as a human phenomenon. On the other hand, scholars in Muslim societies are less burdened by the secular anxieties of Western scholars. The increased interest in the study of religions in Muslim societies can help bring new life to Western universities, where scholars hesitate to wade into the waters of theological reasoning with the goal of forging life-giving visions of faith in service of human society and our natural habitat.

In short, the disastrous policies pursued in the wake of 9/11 have not endeared our beloved nation to Muslim societies around the world, but universities in those societies have become keener to study what Islam has in common with other religions, to ground that commonality in real knowledge, and to use it as a platform for the development of a richer understanding of God’s relation to creation.

I speak from lived experience. The Study of Religions Across Civilizations (SORAC), a project in Georgetown's Department of Theology that seeks to go global with the study of religions, has had great success in partnering with research centers and religious studies departments at universities across Morocco.

They’re keen to learn about other faith traditions, their relation to Islam, and ways to move forward together. And they want to do it as a discipline of knowledge and not merely for the sake of co-existence. Similar developments are taking place in other Muslim societies. Are we ready to view these scholars and these institutions as real partners, or do we still look at them as objects of Western tutelage? U.S. universities can be blinded by lucrative offerings in the Gulf or political trends that see Islam through the lens of counter-terrorism, and so we fail to grasp key developments shaping the future.

The challenges to networking in such places are considerable, but we risk impoverishing our own knowledge pursuits if we ignore the enthusiasm in these places to make the study of religions a real science on the global stage that we can all grasp and that will help make terrorism a thing of the past.
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