Wilfred Cantwell Smith

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Wilfred Cantwell Smith (born July 21, 1916 in Toronto ; † February 7, 2000 ibid) was a Canadian religious and Islamic scholar and theologian who founded the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal in 1951 and was director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University . In his work The Meaning and End of Religion , published in 1962 , he took a critical look at the concept of religion and demanded that it should be replaced on a scientific level by the terms "personal belief" and "cumulative tradition".

Youth and years of study

Wilfred Cantwell Smith grew up in Toronto in a Presbyterian- oriented family, his father was Victor Arnold Smith (* 1883) and his mother Sarah Cory Smith nee Cantwell. He also had an older brother Arnold Cantwell Smith (1915-1994). A six-month stay with his mother in Egypt in 1933 made him want to work as a Christian missionary in the Arab region. In 1934 he began studying Oriental Studies at the University of Toronto . During his college years he was involved in various ecumenical circles and dealt intensively with Marxist social analysis . After obtaining his Bachelor of Arts in spring 1938 with a thesis on Kohelet , he continued his Oriental studies with a scholarship at Cambridge University in the UK . Here he studied with Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen Gibb, among others . A dissertation on the social situation in British India on the basis of the Marxist social analysis was not accepted by the university because of the anti-colonialist undertones it contained .

Together with Muriel McKenzie Struthers (1917-2010), whom he married in 1939, Smith broke up in 1940 for a stay of several years in British India , which was initially financed by the Canadian scholarship. In 1941 he was named "Representative among Muslims" by the Canadian Overseas Mission Council , which secured his funding for the next few years. In 1943 he published in Lahore under the title Modern Islam in India a revised version of his dissertation rejected in Cambridge. Until 1945 he worked as a lecturer in Indian and Islamic history at the Forman Christian College in Lahore, which was part of the University of the Punjab . After the end of World War II, Smith returned to North America to do his PhD with Philip Khuri Hitti . In 1948 he was awarded the PhD title for his dissertation The Azhar Journal: Survey and Critique on the Islamic monthly Azhar-Zeitschrift ( Maǧallat al-Azhar ) published in Cairo .

Professor of Comparative Religion at McGill University

After an extensive research trip through various Islamic countries with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation , Smith was appointed to the newly established Chair of Comparative Religion at McGill University in Montreal in 1949 . From the beginning, he endeavored to integrate Islamic studies more closely into the university's curriculum. In 1951, with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation, he was able to set up an Islamic studies institute at the university, which he headed as the first director. Fazlur Rahman , Jacques Waardenburg , Toshihiko Izutsu and Ismail Faruqi were among the staff and guest researchers he was able to involve in the work of the institute . In 1957 he published his monograph Islam in Modern History , in which he described the situation of Islam at the time in a manner of taking stock, devoting a separate chapter to the Arab region, Turkey, Pakistan and India.

During this time, Smith was particularly concerned with conceptual history . In 1960 he showed in a lecture in Moscow that the term Sharia barely appeared in early Islamic texts and that it did not play a constitutive role in Islamic confessional writings. In a lecture he gave at the University of London in 1958, he followed the development of the concept of Islam . In it he came to the conclusion that the term "Islam" had lost its connection to God over the centuries, namely through a gradual change in meaning away from "personal piety" via the term for a religious system to the term for a civilization. In another publication from this period he criticized the prevailing concept of Islam as a religion with a fixed, unchangeable essence in Western Oriental Studies.

The Meaning and End of Religion (1962)

In his work The Meaning and End of Religion , published in 1962 , Smith applied his approach of historical conceptual criticism to the concept of religion. His aim was to question the habit of viewing religion as something that takes concrete form in individual religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.). Originally, according to Smith, the Latin word religio denoted an inner direction of piety. It was not until the 17th century that the concept of religion shifted from individual piety to designating a system of beliefs and dogmas. At the turn of the 20th century, "religion" finally became the name for a historical and social phenomenon with geographical spread and temporal development, about which the new discipline of religious studies then collected a wealth of data. Smith calls this process the process of reification of religion.

In most non-Western cultures, however, according to Smith, there was no concept of "religion" in the sense of an organized system, but only equivalents to the concept of "religiosity" or piety ( e.g. bhakti ). According to him, the only non-Western culture that had a concept of religion from the start is Islam, in whose founding document, the Koran , the term dīn, which was adopted from the Iranian-speaking area, is already used in several places for its own religion (e.g. B. 3:19; 3:84) and also other religious orientations. Because of this, Islam represents a "special case" for Smith. Since Islam originally only meant "obedient submission", but was otherwise not filled with content (not even in the case of classical exegetes such as at-Tabarī ), could also Here it can be stated that in the beginning there was not a system of religious ideas and commandments, but only a certain personal attitude. The process of reification did not begin until much later in Islam, namely in the time of colonialism as an apologetic reaction to pressure from the West, and so intensely that Islam can be regarded as the most reified religion at the present time.

From his findings on the development of the concept of religion, Smith drew the conclusion that, due to its reifying connotations, it was completely unsuitable for adequately understanding the dynamics of religious experience. To meet this challenge, the religious studies between personal faith (had personal faith ) and cumulative tradition ( cumulative tradition ) are different. The former means an inner religious experience, the latter the totality of objective data in which the past religious life of a particular community is manifested (temples, scriptures, theological systems, customs, myths, etc.). After studying the various cumulative traditions in comparative religion for a century, it is now the task of discovering the personal beliefs of the people whom these traditions have served.

Further career

The Meaning and End of Religion was Smith's most influential work. Two years later he was appointed to the chair of World Religions at Harvard University, which was linked to the direction of the "Center for the Study of World Religions". His work at Harvard revolved in a special way around the concept of faith and the question of how human religious history can be understood as a unity despite all differences. In 1967 Smith was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1974 he moved to Dalhousie University in Halifax , where he built up the Department of Religion. In 1978 he returned to Harvard, where he became chairman of the interdisciplinary committee "The Study of Religion". After his retirement in 1985, he was appointed senior research associate at Trinity College, University of Toronto.

criticism

Smith's methodological approach was already heavily criticized from several quarters from the 1970s (including Per Kværne and Ninian Smart ). The Egyptian religious scholar Ismail Raji al-Faruqi , who had worked with Smith for a while, accused Smith in an essay in 1973 that he had denied Islam an unchangeable, fixed essence only on the basis of a preconvinced argument . From the fact that the term islām means "submission", it cannot be concluded that it does not also mean a religious system. According to Al-Faruqi, the process of reification in Islam already took place during the lifetime of the Prophet Mohammed himself, during his farewell pilgrimage in 632, when, as is said, he proclaimed the wording of Sura 5: 4: "Today I have yours Religion completed [...] and I am satisfied that you have Islam as your religion. "

Publications (selection)

  • Modern Islam in India: A Social Analysis. (1943, 1946, 1963), Victor Gollancz, London, ISBN 0-8364-1338-5
  • The Muslim League. 1942–1945 (1945) Minerva Book Shop,
  • Pakistan as an Islamic State: Preliminary Draft. Shaikh Muhammad Ashraf, (1954)
  • Islam in Modern History: The tension between Faith and History in the Islamic World (1957), Princeton University Press 1977 ISBN 0-691-01991-6
  • The Meaning and End of Religion: A New Approach to the Religious Traditions of Mankind. (Macmillan, 1962), Fortress Press 1991 ISBN 0-8006-2475-0
  • The Faith of Other Men (1963), Dutton, ISBN 0-453-00004-5 .
  • Questions of Religious Truth. (1967) Scribner
  • Religious Diversity: Essays. (1976) Harper Collins ISBN 0-06-067464-4
  • Belief and History. (1977) University of Virginia Press 1986 ISBN 0-8139-1086-2
  • On Understanding Islam: Selected Studies editor. Mouton Publishers, The Hague 1981, ISBN 90-279-3448-7 .
  • Scripture: Issues as Seen by a Comparative Religionist. (1985) Claremont Graduate School,
  • Towards a World Theology: Faith and the Comparative History of Religion (1989) Macmillan paperback, ISBN 0-333-52272-9 ,
  • What is scripture? A Comparative Approach. Fortress Press 1993, ISBN 0-8006-2608-7
  • Patterns of Faith Around the World. Oneworld Publications 1998, ISBN 1-85168-164-7
  • Faith and Belief. Princeton University Press 1987, ISBN 0-691-02040-X
  • Believing. Oneworld Publications 1998, ISBN 1-85168-166-3

literature

  • Talal Asad, "Reading a Modern Classic: WC Smith's The Meaning and End of Religion ," in History of Religion 40 (2001) 205-22.
  • Andreas Grünschloß: Religious Studies as World Theology. Wilfred Cantwell Smith's Interfaith Hermeneutics. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1994. ISBN 978-3-52556-278-9
  • Andreas Renz: Man under God's claim. Understanding of revelation and image of man in Islam in the judgment of contemporary Christian theology . Würzburg 2002, 63-126.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Grünschloß: Religious Studies as World Theology. 1994, p. 33.
  2. ↑ Grünschloß: Religious Studies as World Theology. 1994, p. 34.
  3. ↑ Grünschloß: Religious Studies as World Theology. 1994, p. 95.
  4. ↑ Grünschloß: Religious Studies as World Theology. 1994, p. 99.
  5. ↑ Grünschloß: Religious Studies as World Theology. 1994, p. 156f.
  6. ↑ Grünschloß: Religious Studies as World Theology. 1994, p. 158.
  7. ↑ Grünschloß: Religious Studies as World Theology. 1994, p. 161
  8. ↑ See Smith The Meaning and End of Religion 113.
  9. ↑ Grünschloß: Religious Studies as World Theology. 1994, p. 161.
  10. ↑ Grünschloß: Religious Studies as World Theology. 1994, pp. 161-163.
  11. ↑ See Smith: The Meaning and End of Religion 188f.
  12. ↑ Grünschloß: Religious Studies as World Theology. 1994, p. 49.
  13. ^ American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Book of Members ( PDF ). Retrieved April 10, 2016
  14. ↑ See the biographical portrait of Smith by Steffen Führding on the Internet platform of the Department of Religious Studies at Leibniz Universität Hannover ( Memento from September 4, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  15. ^ "The Essence of Religious Experience in Islam" in Numen 3 (1973) 186-201.
personal data
SURNAME Smith, Wilfred Cantwell
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian scholar of religion and Islam
DATE OF BIRTH July 21, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Toronto
DATE OF DEATH February 7, 2000
Place of death Toronto