The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (review)

Leigh Eric Schmidt

Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 74, Number 1, March 2006 , pp. 229-232 (Article) Published by Oxford University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/aar/summary/v074/74.1schmidt.html

Accessed 23 Mar 2014 12:03 GMT GMT

Book Reviews

229

perception (123), which prepares the way for Derridas radical uncertainty of diffrance (123). The general trajectory, then, is summarized as the following: Each operates by identifying and dismantling a false apodicity, showing the play of shadows for what it is, like the prisoners in Platos cave who releases the blinkers on the others (123). The key question that troubles the remainder of the book comes from Mark C. Taylors 1992 essay nO nOt nO in which he asks is his [Derridas] nonsaying a saying? A denegation? (123). RaymentPickards response to this difficult question is to posit a series of responses that begin with a consideration of Jacques Derrida as a negative theologian (John D. Caputo) and ends with the possibility of Derrida as a Kantian idealist la Kevin Hart. Between these two theological poles lies, of course, the khora, which serves as an impasse, making a conclusive exposition of Derridas theology impossible. This impossibility, however, is an apophasis of khora, which invites speculation on a Christological heterology (163) as well as other figurations of the multiple that do not compromise the radicality of Derridean anti-theology. This final meditation on the failure of closure/completion and the primordial status of the chiasmus as the other figure in philosophy offers a careful reassertion of the deconstructive principle of indeterminacy. Herein lies the significance of Rayment-Pickards title: Is Derridean indeterminacy theologys impossible God? One could argue, as the author does, that it is. With its clear discussions of Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida and its reassessment of philosophical impossibility through the lens of theology, Impossible God is an important addition to current discussions in religious theory.
doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfj037 Advance Access publication January 9, 2006

Victor E. Taylor York College of Pennsylvania and The Johns Hopkins University

The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. By Tomoko Masuzawa. University of Chicago Press, 2005. 359 pages. $19.00.
In this ambitious work on the nineteenth-century science of religions Tomoko Masuzawa makes the the world religions discourse part of the critical theorists anatomy theater (xiv). On the surface the patient might look healthy enoughthe inherited talk of ten to twelve world religions no more than an honest attempt to reckon with the global plurality of faiths. But the anatomist knows better, and the knife will expose the malignancies within the discourse, the hidden racial and imperial presumptions of European universality. Sometimes the demonstration proves spectacular, the current epistemic regime exposed, if not excised (xii); at other times the exhibition proves painful to watch in its blunt execution. Masuzawa positions her work within the larger turn toward historical analysis of the discourses that have shaped the study of religion from the seventeenth

230

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

through twentieth centuries. The fourfold schema of JewishChristianMuslim pagan that had long held sway in early modern compendia and dictionaries was gradually broken up in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. That model was replaced by longer lists of national, universal, or great religions, and these late nineteenth-century representations, in turn, crystallized by the 1920s and 30s into a taken-for-granted world religions classificatory system. Masuzawa does a fine job of setting out that history, in so far as she cares to credit such empirical or documentary endeavors. Her own chosen method of discourse analysis delights in textual fissures, precipices, gaps, billows, and black folds, so her historical narrative necessarily does not convey a strong sense of precision, connection, or meticulous contextualization. Indeed, even when it looks like Masuzawa is quite capable of pinning down the history of world religions as a categoryunearthing a crucial entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1884 by C. P. Tiele, for exampleshe readily slips back into a preferred rhetoric of opacity, the uncertainty of the appellation, the various indeterminacies lurking within the discourses compromised heritage (107). The discipline of religious studies may well need more histories of its lack of discipline, but Masuzawas own launching point for that enterprise is itself curiously polemicalor, to use a word favored in this kind of analysis, ideological. At the outset she takes up the axe for two very familiar critiques of Religious Studies: (1) the field is peopled by a bunch of unreconstituted religious essentialists who are too friendly to religion in general, and religious experience in particular, to subject the disciplines categories to rigorous historical and critical analysis and (2) faculty in departments of religion keep themselves institutionally and financially viable by continuing to offer world religion courses that they know, at least dimly, are intellectually irresponsible (7). In other words, the history of the discipline is not getting done properly because scholars of religion are mostly nave romantics and economic opportunists. It is quite unlikely, though, that this history is going to get done any better when undertaken with this political alignment as the starting point. That critical discourse on the current study of religion needs itself to be carefully historicized within longer traditions of freethinking naturalism. Unmasking the covert operations of the world religions discourseits hidden agenda to preserve European and Christian supremacysounds like a work of counter-espionage, not laborious scholarship (327). In better moments in the book (and there are many of these) Masuzawa presents her work in more nuanced terms, that is, an effort to recover the half-forgotten worries, hopes, and controversies that animated practitioners within the nineteenth-century academy (21). She rises to that level especially in the chapter on Max Mllers comparative philology and its relation to his conceptualization of the science of religion. Mller, in some sense, does not play to form remaining stalwart in his refusal of a racialized use of philology and its underwriting of a larger Aryan mythology (242). Here Masuzawa allows herself to be surprised by her sources, by Mllers oddity and adamancy, by the distance he maintained from at least some of the racial presumptions that ran through the work of many of his renowned colleagues, including Ernest Renan (254). In this long central chapter Masuzawa adopts a patient and judicious approach that enables her to

Book Reviews

231

correct previous scholarship and to clarify earlier misconceptions of Mllers thought. (To be sure, in this enterprise she builds on, rather than departs from, the scholarship of other recent interpreters, particularly Lourens P. van den Boschs monumental biography Friedrich Max Mller: A Life Devoted to the Humanities.) Sure-footed on the relationship in the nineteenth century between the classification of languages and the classification of religions, Masuzawa is similarly canny on representations of Buddhism and Islam in these budding sciences. Outside the relatively strong-middle section of the book Parts I and III are noticeably thinner and less assured. The handling of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources can be quite clumsy, hemmed in repeatedly with the rhetorical uncertainties of such expressions as seems, probably, apparently, and most likely. Of Samuel Purchass famed early seventeenth-century compendium on religions in all places and ages, Masuzawa remarks, for example, The endeavor appears to have been something of a novelty then (51). Of Bernard Picarts eighteenth-century engravings for Ceremonies and Religious Customs of the Various Nations of the Known World, she calls them a very fine, and oftentimes very amusing part of a proto-culture industry in which religion becomes purely consumptive (67, 63). In a book that pays little attention to visual representations beyond the preface that note of amusement and that kind of analysis are equally trifling. Efforts to create museums for the display of religious objects were also part of the nineteenth-century science of religions, and no sweeping allusion to the culture industry can substitute for careful examination of that ambiguous and momentous aspect of the modern study of religion. Even in the nineteenth century Masuzawas reach is sometimes questionable. In her discussion of comparative theology (most notably, the figures of F. D. Maurice, James Freeman Clarke, and Charles Hardwick) she claims to have come across only a few women who contributed to this nineteenth-century enterprise (74). And women are indeed largely absent from this account, which essentially accepts the emergent nineteenth-century norms of academic professionalization rather than tracing the contestation of their enshrinement. In any case, gender, alongside race, would have been a relevant category to explore, because there was actually no shortage of women who saw the connection between the comparative study of religions and larger projects of nineteenthcentury emancipation, including Lydia Maria Child, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Helen Gardner, Ida Craddock, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Now, all these women were Americans and that points to another largely unexamined tension in Masuzawas work. She presents the book as being distinctly about European identity, the ways in which the world religions discourse helped preserve the hegemony of European universalism in the face of collapsing claims about Christian exclusivism (as evidenced, for example, in select lectures of Ernst Troeltsch). Yet, she concentrates primarily on the Anglophone literature, British and American, which raises some vexing questions about whose identity she is really examining. Is American identity to be subsumed into European identity without more discussion of the multiple ways Americans defined themselves against Europe? There are hints of these tensions in Masuzawas all

232

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

too brief discussion of the Worlds Parliament of Religions, but the issue is pressing far beyond Chicago in 1893. Since, by her account, the world religions discourse ultimately comes into its own in North American college and universities in the 1920s and 30s, how is this story adequately told under the moniker of European identity? If this is very much an American phenomenon, then surely the scholarship on American religious and cultural pluralismincluding such obvious sources as the intellectual histories by David Hollinger and William Hutchisonhas to be engaged (32). By the end of this book, one has the distinct impression that it is Masuzawa herself who cannot resist the universalizing gesture of containing the multitudinous worlds of European and American thought in a flattened totality, her own enormous apparition, the essential identity of the West (20).
doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfj038 Advance Access publication January 10, 2006

Leigh E. Schmidt Princeton University

Islamic Architecture: Form, Function, and Meaning. By Robert Hillenbrand. Columbia University Press, 2004. 645 pages. $30.00.
Ever since it came out, Hillenbrands book has served as a major source for the study of Islamic architecture and has been awarded two prizes: an Association of American Publishers Professional/Scholarly Division award (1994) and the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion from the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (1996). The book is an elaborate and extensive survey of premodern Islamic architecture that covers over a thousand monuments from different parts of the medieval Islamic world extending from Spain to Afghanistan and dating from 700 to 1700. It distinguishes itself from previous surveys by tackling the material in a thematic fashion. While previous surveys have been chronological, stylistic, or monographic, the author adopts a typological approach. The novelty of the book lies in its classification of buildings into functional types and its analysis of their corresponding formal types. Emphasis, therefore, is not on chronology but on evolution of building types: their origin, development, and regional adaptations. The survey is illustrated and supplemented by a remarkable number of photographs and drawings totaling about 1600. Among them are 1249 line drawings and 282 three-dimensional drawings that reveal the spatial qualities of the buildings. The supplementary catalogue of drawings is organized into thematic groups and offers the reader the advantage of comparative review. The book addresses a vast range of buildings: religious, civic, funerary, commercial, and palatial. It focuses on six major Islamic building types: mosques, minarets, madrasas, mausoleums, caravanserais, and palaces. Accordingly, the book is divided into chapters, each devoted to one functional type. Each building type is then studied through the analysis of the single or multiple formal types that correspond to its function. The chapters devoted to madrasas and