"McGill has long recognized that this institute is one of its most renowned academic units." —ROBERT WISNOVSKY
Rachel Granofsky

In its 56 years of existence, McGill's Institute of Islamic Studies has grown from a gesture of interfaith camaraderie to a vital site of wide-ranging study.

BY MARK ABLEY

On a high shelf in Robert Wisnovsky's spacious office stands a bust of a bearded man in a turban. It gazes down on a hive of intellectual activity—apart from directing McGill's Institute of Islamic Studies, Wisnovsky is the recent recipient of a Canada Foundation for Innovation grant to develop a searchable database for Islamic philosophy and theology.

"I inherited the sculpture from my predecessor," Wisnovsky says, "and I like to think it's Avicenna"— the great Persian scientist and philosopher. "But I've been told it could also be the medieval poet Sa'di. Or perhaps Ayatollah Khomeini."

That implicit range of disciplines—science, philosophy, literature, theology, politics—suggests a lot about the work of the institute.

Founded in 1952, it's the oldest of its kind in Canada. For several decades it functioned as a small research centre, blessed by a remarkable library and housed in the ornate Victorian surroundings of Morrice Hall. But since 2004, the year before Wisnovsky took over as director, the institute has been transformed. It expanded from five to 15 academic staff; it added about 30 courses; and it made a determined new foray into undergraduate teaching. Last fall it began to offer an official minor in Islamic Studies.

The response from undergraduates has been enthusiastic. Three hundred signed up for courses in Islamic studies this year. The institute hopes to expand its offerings and accommodate as many as 1,000 undergraduates by 2012.

Wisnovsky arrived at McGill with an impressive resumé. Having studied at Yale, he did his doctoral work at Princeton and spent two postdoctoral years at King's College in London, before taking an academic post at Harvard.

Since moving to Montreal, he has gratefully learned that "the institute is more central to the life of the University than the Near Eastern Languages Department was at Harvard, where it's quite marginal. McGill has long recognized that this institute is one of its most renowned academic units. It competes academically at the highest level."

Of course, even a staff of 15 is inadequate to encompass the riches of cultures that stretch from Senegal to Indonesia, that include about 1.3 billion people, and that span 1,400 years of history. The institute's faculty teach everything from the Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Urdu languages to the history of women in the Middle East, and they research such up-to-the-minute topics as Iranian urban culture and religious fundamentalism in Sudan. The logical question, it appears, is not why McGill houses such an institute, but why so few universities in North America have anything similar.

"It has to do with academic history," Wisnovsky explains. In Europe, Islamic scholarship was traditionally an adjunct to either classics or Biblical studies, refracted after the Victorian era through the sometimes distorting lens of Orientalism. "And in North America, Islamic studies was seen through a paradigm of 'area studies' set up during the Cold War. Various imperial projects—be they French or British in the 19th century, or American in the Cold War period—still taint the study of Islam."

IGNORANCE ISN'T AN OPTION

"There need to be more programs like [McGill's] at other universities," says Azim Nanji, MA'70, PhD'72, director of the Institute of Ismaili Studies in England. Nanji, who will join the faculty of Stanford University this summer, is one of many graduates of the institute now teaching and pursuing research at leading institutions throughout the world. Other alumni include senior professors at Harvard, Princeton and Yale.

"The Muslim heritage is part of global history, and an understanding of the world today cannot be based on ignorance about the history, heritage and current challenges faced by a fifth of the world's population, which is Muslim," Nanji declares.

The McGill institute's founder, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, took Islam seriously as a religion long before most Canadians did. Having taught for several years in Lahore (then still part of British India), he wanted to create a haven where North American scholars of Islam would interact productively with their peers from the Muslim world.

After leaving McGill in 1964, Smith took charge of Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions. The Meaning and End of Religion is but the most famous of his many books.

"His kind of interfaith focus is not really central to our mission any more," Wisnovsky says. "But we all benefit academically and personally from a kind of cosmopolitan interaction, and it remains central for us to strive for a balance of backgrounds." The institute aims to be a place where Muslim and non-Muslim students and faculty, both Canadian and non-Canadian, can all feel at home.

Apart from balancing backgrounds, the institute also strives to balance fields of expertise. Khalid Mustafa Medani is one of several professors who recently joined the institute. Medani, who is also a member of the Department of Political Science, has studied the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the allure of Islamic fundamentalism, and the political turmoil in his native country, Sudan. At McGill he enjoys "the very strong exchange of faculty, students and research interests related to topics on the Muslim world. The institute plays an important role in a variety of disciplines."

Part of its challenge, perhaps, is to speak the intellectual truth in an increasingly politicized atmosphere. Wael Hallaq, an eminent scholar of Islamic law who has taught at the institute since 1985, expresses regret about the angry debates in Ontario, Britain and elsewhere that have hauled sharia law onto the front pages.

To Hallaq, "the controversies are based on an almost complete ignorance of what the sharia is and how it worked for over 13 centuries. It is being cast as a political manifesto, a political marker of identity, but not as a cultural or a legal system, which it certainly was. The irony is that even Muslims today, both in the West and in the Muslim world, have a highly distorted, in fact mutilated, vision of what Islamic law meant, and how it operated in communal and social contexts."

In the 21st century, of course, the "Muslim world" includes tens of millions of people living in Western Europe and North America. According to Statistics Canada, the size of this country's Muslim population is expected to almost double within the decade—from 783,700 in 2006 to 1.42 million in 2017. Large cities like Montreal contain thriving mosques that offer sharply contrasting visions of Islam.

"Scholars tend to be pretty conventional unless someone points you in a certain direction. The picture has been skewed up till now—a big chunk of the story has been left out." —F. JAMIL RAGEP
Rachel Granofsky

As Medani notes, "the fact that Montreal has a substantial Muslim community is extremely important in two ways. First, there is greater interest in Islam in politics and public life since this is very much viewed as a 'Canadian' and not just a foreign policy issue. Second, there is a clear advantage in that Muslims from various parts of the globe provide immediate and visible evidence that Islam represents a range of different modes of social practice, intellectual traditions and views about local and international issues. This pluralistic notion of Islam is more evident here than in some parts of the United States."

The winner of a prestigious Carnegie Corporation scholarship in 2007, Medani is looking into the various factors—including poverty, unemployment and ethnic loyalties—that entice some young Muslims into joining militant Islamist groups in Egypt, Sudan and Somalia. His conviction is "that research should not merely be motivated by intellectual stimulation in the abstract, but rather by an effort to come to terms with some important political, social and economic challenges that impact the lives of communities."

A LIBRARY LIKE NO OTHER

Adam Gacek, the head of the Islamic Studies Library, stands on the ground floor of its Octagon Room and gazes up at the books that pack its top level. With its eight symmetrical stained-glass windows, the room was the original library of McGill's Presbyterian College. The Islamic Studies Library, which holds well over 100,000 volumes, lies at the heart of Morrice Hall. In most fields it covers, the library's holdings, both printed and manuscript, are unparalleled in Canada. "The singular nature of the collection is reflected not only in the fact that it is housed in one location," explains Gacek, "but also in its special emphasis on the coverage of traditional Islamic disciplines in addition to the social sciences."

You wouldn't know it from his modest demeanour, but Gacek—a Pole who came to McGill in 1987 from London—ranks among the world's foremost authorities on Arabic and Persian manuscripts. He has published several books and articles about the manuscripts at McGill, hundreds of which were collected in the early 20th century—and they include some extraordinary treasures. Gacek mentions a manuscript from Yemen that is about 300 years old: a beautifully decorated commentary on the Koran and other texts, it was owned by a vizier and is filled with notes in his handwriting.

"I teach a course in the Arabic manuscript tradition," Gacek says, "which has become more and more important because of the new ventures at the institute." He's referring mainly to the CFI grants, totalling more than $2.4-million when combined with matching funds that were earned by Wisnovsky and by F. Jamil Ragep, the institute's Canada Research Chair in the History of Science in Islamic Societies.

Their two projects have now been combined under the title "Rational Sciences in Islam." The aim is nothing less than to provide a new infrastructure for the analysis of a vast corpus of Islamic manuscripts, one that will be made freely available online to scholars and non-professionals alike. Ragep's work focuses on topics as diverse as astronomy, mathematics and music theory.

An American by birth, he came to McGill from the University of Oklahoma, where he ran a centre for peace studies. Since September 2001, scholars from the Middle East have found it increasingly difficult to visit such centres in the United States. "It's not the main reason I moved," Ragep says, "but the opportunities that Canada provides, in terms of dealing with a wider range of people and countries, make life a lot easier here."

"Research should not merely be motivated by intellectual stimulation in the abstract, but by an effort to come to terms with political, social and economic challenges." —KHALID MUSTAFA MEDANI
Allen McInnis

With his wife, Sally, who doubles as his research associate, Ragep is the managing editor of the bilingual Journal for the History of Arabic Science, produced at the University of Aleppo in Syria. "I don't even know if it would be legal for me to do this in the U.S.," Ragep says ruefully. "I also do a lot of work in Iran. And it has become difficult for an American to establish any connections for scholarly work in those countries."

Since 9/11, many Islamic studies scholars working in the U.S. have had to contend with an uncomfortably charged political environment. "You had to be on the defensive every time you critiqued the government," associate professor Rula Abisaab, an expert on Shia and pre-modern Islamic societies, told the McGill Tribune. "It became quite suffocating." Both Abisaab and associate professor Michelle Hartman, an authority on Arabic literature, left American universities to join the institute, citing the political atmosphere in the U.S. as part of the reason for their moves.

A BROADER VIEW OF SCIENCE

Genial and mild-mannered in person, Ragep is unafraid to engage in heated intellectual debate. Last year he confronted the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg on the letters page of the Times Literary Supplement. Weinberg had claimed that after the early 12th century, "there was no more science worth mentioning in Islamic countries."

Ragep coolly pointed out that between the 12th and 18th centuries, Islamic scientists "proposed the pulmonary circulation, built the first large-scale astronomical observatories, conceived trigonometry as a separate discipline, constructed new calculating devices and maps of astonishing accuracy and sophistication, allowed for the possibility of a moving Earth, [and] developed the mathematical and conceptual tools that were essential for the Copernican revolution."

This is a far cry from the history of science as most people understand it, and Ragep seems almost boyishly excited about the implications. Sitting at his office computer, he shows off a digital image of a diagram by Nasir al-Tusi, a 13th-century thinker from Khorasan (a region of Central Asia now divided among Iran, Afghanistan and several other nations). "It's almost identical to one by Copernicus!" Ragep says. A few clicks later, he produces an image of a text by a hitherto obscure scholar in 15th-century Samarkand, who set out a mathematical proposition of how to move from an earth-centred model of the solar system to a suncentred model. Half a century later, the same idea emerged in Europe.

"It has taken an enormous amount of time to piece all this together," says Ragep, who will take over from Wisnovsky as the institute's director in June. "Scholars are like everyone else—they tend to be pretty conventional unless someone points you in a certain direction." The CFI grants, he emphasizes, "are not just for making accessible what's already been discovered, but for finding new material." Scholars have not examined some manuscripts for hundreds of years. "So it's a pretty good assumption that we'll discover a lot of things and end up with a much better picture of how modern thought came into being. The picture has been so skewed up till now—a big chunk of the story has been left out." The Rational Sciences in Islam project will make some of this information, including biographies of scientists and essays about their work, accessible online.

Many people, Ragep notes, are shocked to learn that Islamic science, philosophy and theology were intimately linked. Great thinkers like Avicenna and al-Tusi saw no contradiction in being at the same time theologians, scientists and philosophers.

"Islamic theology is often seen as very backward, very anti-science," Ragep says, "but for the people Professor Wisnovsky and I are studying, it's just the opposite. Islamic theology is freeing them from the constraints of earlier thought. It shouldn't be surprising that what happened in Europe was influenced by what happened in Samarkand. What we call globalization began a long, long time ago."

Hallaq, the sharia specialist, believes that "Islam and its law are severely misunderstood in Canada, as well as in the Western world at large. I find that ignorance of Islam, even among the learned, is both staggering and shocking. Not only is there so much misunderstanding and stereotyping, but people are able to say things about Islam that they cannot say about any religious or ethnic group."

Similarly, Medani deplores the persistent view expressed in the North American media "that Islam is a monolithic entity. This is related to a popular bias that is evident in some policy circles which assumes that political Islam is rooted in an organic hostility to Western values and interests."

A task of the institute, in short, remains what it was in the days of Smith: public enlightenment. Yet to do everything its professors hope, it would need to expand further. At present, it does not accept graduate students in the fields of Koranic Studies and Sufism because it lacks the specialists needed to supervise them. The institute also has ambitions for new programs that would explore the history of Islamic art and architecture and the development of medicine in the Arabic-Islamic world.

"The singular nature of the [Islamic Library] collection is reflected in its special emphasis on the coverage of traditional Islamic disciplines in addition to the social sciences." —ADAM GACEK
Rachel Granofsky

The institute's international reputation has attracted support.

Hopeful of encouraging the study of Islam in North America, the government of Kuwait presented the institute with a $350,000 gift last year. The money will fund four undergraduate scholarships and two graduate prizes, all of them earmarked for Canadian students. Wisnovsky says the gift is indicative of the respect his institute receives internationally.

"It's amazing that McGill has this institute," marvels Wisnovsky. "It's a Canadian treasure."

Mark Abley is a Montreal-based author, poet and journalist. A columnist for the Montreal Gazette and the Toronto Star, his profile of McGill AIDS Centre director Mark Wainberg appeared in the Winter 2007/08 edition of the McGill News.