Author: Norman Calder
Method & Theory in the Study of Religion Vol. 9, No. 1 (1997)

Abstract:
In the fourth chapter of The Sectarian Milieu, John Wansbrough asks the question of whether Islam gives expression to a concept of history as an event or as a process, the one implying a nostalgic, the other a dynamic approach to community history. This paper accepts the distinction while suggesting that there are more ways of exploring the question than that exemplified in his analysis. While his study comes to a tentatively negative answer (Islam as nostalgia), this article suggests that the processes of reading scripture constitute precisely a means for the preservation of events and for its transformation into the process. Section 2 looks at a liturgical and Section 3 at a scholastic (exegetical) reading of scripture, while Section 4 proposes that the literature of the law must also be understood as a “reading” of scripture. In each case, it is argued, the meanings of salvation history are re-discovered from generation to generation through the experience of the community, in an ongoing hermeneutical tradition which stresses not an event but the process (in Wansbrough’s own words “the afterlife of an event perpetrated by constant interpretation”). Sections 5 and 6 offer some concluding remarks about Islamic epistemology and the process of reading, which is both the activity of contemporary scholars and the object of their studies.

Bibliography:
Calder, Norman, History, and nostalgia: Reflections on John Wansbrough’s “The Sectarian Milieu”, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion Vol. 9, No. 1 (1997), pp 47-73.