Teaching Religion

"Cairo 'old' Taxi" by Flickr user Michael Colin, used by Creative Commons License

This summer I was riding in a taxi and the driver asked what I do back in the US. I started out with “teach,” which led to the further question of what level of students I teach. OK, I teach at a university. So then he asked what I teach. Well.. I teach religion. Really! What exactly? And then I dropped the fact that I teach Islam. I’m proud of teaching Islam, but if I’m not in the mood for a long conversation I avoid telling people. In my experience it’s hard for people in Egypt or other countries in the Middle East to process how this foreign guy is teaching Islam. I can’t really know anything.. and that’s the open door for a mini lecture, the outlines of which I pretty much know by heart.

So the taxi driver had me cornered on religion, and it was still early in the ride. He was pleasant.. the kind of clean shaven and smart young guy who should not be driving a taxi (too many of these in Cairo!). He was even more curious once I mentioned Islam, and he asked if I was a Muslim. I said no, and he was silent, thinking about that for a bit. Then he asked about my religious background, and I gave my usual Egypt answer of “Christian.” But with some more questions he got down to the fact that I didn’t go to church and may not even believe in God. And he asked: “So you teach religion?” He had a hard time understanding how someone who wasn’t a Muslim and moreover wasn’t even religious was teaching Islam and religion. At the end of our ride he gave me a business card and told me to call if I wanted a taxi to anywhere. We could talk more.

Explaining how to conceptualize the teaching of religion is not easy. I point people (including the taxi driver) to other disciplines. History, for example. There exist people who teach, say, French or Russian history and who themselves aren’t French or Russian. And we would not expect or want someone to teach history who was a diehard nationalist. That kind of buy-in to a national identity doesn’t belong in a university. Similarly, when teaching religion the goal is not to present a religion, but rather a critical view of religion and its history.

And how about philosophy? We probably won’t find actual Platonists and followers of Decartes in a philosophy department. We know these figures were important in the history of thought and set out central concepts that have guided reflection on the world. But we don’t actually believe them.. and we would be suspicious of someone who did. That’s easy enough. So why do expectations shift when it comes to the study of religion? Of course I don’t believe in what the Bible or the Qur’an says, but that doesn’t mean that the ideas in those books are not of great importance for understanding how people—now and in the past— view the world.

I suspect, but can’t prove, that one reason it’s hard to communicate with people about this question is the gradual rise of personal identity as an assumed reason for academic study. Why would someone study anything if it was not ultimately about himself? Here I find the legacy of Edward Said’s Orientalism troubling. Said can be read as discounting the possibility of disinterested or unengaged scholarship, since everyone’s production of knowledge is serving some political interest. That ends up connecting the choice to pursue scholarship with identity commitments. That ultimately gets watered down into an expectation that people who study something are “believers” in one way or another.

I would not call my own scholarship “unengaged,” but my commitments are to some ideals that are not defined by religious traditions.