Splitting the Kiblat: Consequences of Alternate Strategies for Educating Faculty Members

Abstract

Inayah Rohmaniyah, a faculty member at Universitas Islam Negeri (UIN) Yogya who teaches a course on Orientalism reported that students begin the course thinking that Westerners who study Islam have a limited number of motivations. Either they want to convert or they want to destroy Islam. At first the students are very resistant and emotional. So much so that when confronted with fact that Edward Said was a Christian, they hoist him on his own petard. They understand Said’s thesis to be that Westerners study Islam to colonize Muslims and therefore Said, as a Westerner (his being born a US citizen and his US education taking precedent over his Palestinian birth and his boyhood in Cairo) must write about Islam in order to colonize Muslims. The course then focuses on the wide variety of methods, goals, and even individual scholars. Typically after two or three months, the students have come to see the complexity in Western Islamic Studies. Rohmaniyah finishes her course with a reflection paper that traces the students’ intellectual journey in the class.