I suspect that Carl Ernst’s Following Muhammad would not be recognized by Snouck Hurgronje, or St. Clair Tisdall, or Sir William Muir, or Tor Andrae, or Maxime Rodinson, or David Margoliouth, or Joseph Schacht, or Ignaz Goldziher, as presenting a recognizable view of Muhammad. On the other hand, the straightforward presentation of Muhammad’s life as set down by the most authoritative Muslim biographers, which is what Robert Spencer has given us in his forthcoming (October 9) biography of Muhammad will no doubt be dismissed as “polemical” and “unscholarly” by Ernst and three-quarters of the membership of MESA Nostra. The remaining ¼, however, will be secretly delighted with Spencer’s book, even if they will not be so brave as to assign it(though they may list it among “Other Reading” on their syllabi, giving the students a hint). They will only wish that they had dared to produce something similar, but they had too much, departmentally, to lose. It required an intelligent outsider to do the necessary job, and Spencer came along and did it.
Carl Ernst’s book on Muhammad leaves out all the unsettling and disturbing and indelicate parts. Instead, it gives us something as if viewed through Karen Armstrong’s vie-en-rose tinted glasses,
Carl Ernst is too modest. He is a prize-winning author, recognized for his services to the better worldwide appreciation of Muhammad with his book. Following Muhammad is a masterpiece of haute vulgarization — what Robert Spencer only pretends to be able to do — and might as well hold the haute. That book, or rather that series of essays, is by authorial intention devoid of the usual apparatus criticus of scholarly books. Apparently Carl Ernst wished to put off, off, those scholarly lendings, and to let down his hair, and deliberately present an “unscholarly text” (no doubt contributors to the Encyclopedia of Islam will sniff, but let them — what do they know?), easy on the footnotes, in order to find and please that wider audience that perhaps had eluded him with his previous scholarly contribution, The Shambhala Guide to Sufism.
I am informed, given Ernst’s contempt, documented here at Jihad Watch, for non-scholarly presses, that that was a book that Clarendon Press would dearly like to have published, if Shambhala Publishing hadn’t gotten there first. And as for the reaction to that book in the Departments of Islamic Studies at Leiden, Aix-en-Province, and Cambridge at the news, later on, that the author of The Shambhala Guide to Sufism had received tenure at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — well, I don’t have to tell you.
Last year I offered a write-in nomination for Karen Armstrong to be awarded the King Faisal Prize, in the category of Services to Islam. But apparently Armstrong did not make the Saudi grade. Perhaps her bizarre flitting from this to that (what is it this week from the fingers and mind of Karen Armstrong? A treatise on Buddhism? How to Bring World Peace? The Search for Bridey Murphy?) offended them, or perhaps there was something in her favorite forms of recreation that might have offended those dour and judgmental Saudi judges. She didn’t win, and I suspect now that she won’t. She’s become, in the Western world, too well-known and too much a figurine of fun.
But I have another candidate waiting in the wings, not quite so obviously silly as Karen Armstrong. True, there is that little matter of all those Shambhala shambolic sham books on Sufism, which Saudis would hardly find to their liking but there is one way to free those judges of their doubtful minds and warm their cold cold hearts. And that way is to point not only to the hagiographical Following Muhammad but far more important, to take note of the tireless toiling in the vineyard of the Lor– no, make that toiling or perhaps lolling in the conquered oases of Muhammad. Let us point to Ernst’s ongoing effort — really, beyond the call of dhimmi duty — in inveigling or forcing non-Muslim students, right in the heart of what Saudis no doubt think of as hopelessly Christian evangelical country (unaware as they must be of the special case of Chapel Hill, and even of North Carolina, the state that in the last century produced, inter alia, Ava Gardner and Walter Clay Lowdermilk, and is hardly part of the Deep South), to read not only Sells’s Approaching the Qur’an but also large doses of both Esposito and Armstrong.
If such an achievement, which required ignoring criticism by parents and students, does not merit recognition as a Service to Islam, and beyond that, a well-endowed (va-va-va-voom) prize, offered in recognition of that recognition, then one hardly knows what would.
And thus it is for me both a rare privilege, and an honor, to nominate at this very posting, at this most relevant website, Professor Carl Ernst, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, to be the 2007 recipient of the King Faisal Prize.
I am sure a great many people, some of them no doubt Professor Ernst’s faculty colleagues, will be happy to second that nomination.
Please note, students of prizes, that in the categories of science and medicine, the King Faisal awards go to recipients who are genuinely and entirely worthy. The results are skewed only by one thing — no one identifiably Jewish has ever won the King Faisal Prize. That does narrow the number of potentially worthy candidates. The Infidels who have won the prize in the category “Services to Islam” deserve to be treated as the object of a separate study. For all you intrepid undergraduates casting about for a thesis topic, here’s the ungainly title you are free to use: “Paying the Scholarly Jizyah: Winners of the King Faisal Prize for Services to Islam.” Make it a prosopographic analysis, year by year, Infidel winner by Infidel winner. Make Sir Lewis Namier proud.