Introduction by Katherine Schimmel
In my right hand I hold a small, square, black metal box. It is very dusty now from years of non-use and looks nothing like the sleek recorders of today. But this tape recorder and I have a shared history. It is the same voice recorder that I used in Egypt almost twenty years ago on the hot, noisy streets of Cairo while conducting graduate field research there. Later, it was the faithful instrument I used to playback what amounted to hours and hours of Arabic interviews once I arrived back in Cambridge to write my thesis. I turn the small device over and over again in my hands, examining it from all sides, its well-worn buttons, its lightly scratched face, taking special note of the damaged “Record” button. And as the eighty-nine collective voices from that project spontaneously play through my mind, I know it will be perfect for what I am about to do.
(…)
Dr. Annemarie Schimmel — Pakistan, 1964
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ISLAM
HARVARD LECTURE COURSE
LECTURE 1
HARVARD, SPRING 1992
AS DELIVERED BY DR. ANNEMARIE SCHIMMEL
…The Phenomenology of Islam for this last semester of mine. I think that for all of you that have worked in the history of religion would be aware that Islam is usually treated rather badly or briefly because most historians of religion and most people in general think it a rather primitive religion with very little interest, but I think if you approach it from a different angle, it can yield highly interesting results. And the fact that put me on this track many, many years ago was when I was teaching in Ankara, at the Faculty of Islamic Theology, and I was at great pain to explain to my students the theories of Rudolph Otto about the numinous and the Mysterium Tremendum and the Mysterium Fascinans, and one of my students got up and said, “But this is very simple, we have had that in Islam for centuries and centuries. We have always spoken about God’s Jalal, his tremendous majesty, and his Jamal, his fascinating beauty.” And I thought, couldn’t one look at Islam also from this angle and see whether definitions that have been current throughout the centuries cannot be explained in terms of modern phenomenology of religion and would it not be fairer toward Islamic culture to do it this way instead of dwelling upon all the borrowings and influences from outside, so that Islam would be stood up in its true variety and its colorful forms? And so, in the course of the years I thought I should try to do it this way.
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I personally think that phenomenology of religion is particularly suited to understanding Islam because there is an ‘Aya, a verse in the Qur’an, where it is said that God has shown mankind: “ayatana fil afaq wa fi anfusihim, we have shown them our signs in the horizon (that is in the external world) and in themselves.” [Quran 41:53] Which means that a Muslim can certainly approach everything he or she sees under this heading in everything as an Aya, a sign by which the believer is led to what’s behind it, namely to a divine origin or a divine creator. And I think if we take phenomenology from this viewpoint, then it will be comparatively easy and I feel (I may be absolutely mistaken) but I feel that modern Muslim theologians and those who want to defend Islam and explain it in the Western World could easily use this method instead of relying on time- honored traditions and not dare to venture into these modern fronts which are absolutely compatible with what the Qur’an says. But this is my personal impression, I don’t know, perhaps someone will contradict me very badly.
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