The Invention Of World Religions

by Masuzawa, Tomoko

• ISBN13: 9780226509891
• ISBN10: 0226509893
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-05-15
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

The idea of "world religions" expresses a vague commitment to multiculturalism. Not merely a descriptive concept, "world religions" is actually a particular ethos, a pluralist ideology, a logic of classification, and a form of knowledge that has shaped the study of religion and infiltrated ordinary language.In this ambitious study, Tomoko Masuzawa examines the emergence of "world religions" in modern European thought. Devoting particular attention to the relation between the comparative study of language and the nascent science of religion, she demonstrates how new classifications of language and race caused Buddhism and Islam to gain special significance, as these religions came to be seen in opposing terms-Aryan on one hand and Semitic on the other. Masuzawa also explores the complex relation of "world religions" to Protestant theology, from the hierarchical ordering of religions typical of the Christian supremacists of the nineteenth century to the aspirations of early twentieth-century theologian Ernst Troeltsch, who embraced the pluralist logic of "world religions" and by so doing sought to reclaim the universalist destiny of European modernity.

Author Biography

Tomoko Masuzawa is associate professor of history and comparative literature at the University of Michigan. She is the author of In Search of Dream Time: The Quest for the Origin of Religion, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Introduction	1	(36)
1 World Religions in the Academy Today	2	(12)
2 The Discourse on Religion as a Discourse of Othering	14	(7)
3 A Synoptic Overview	21	(8)
4 Writing History in the Age of Theory: A Brief Discourse on Method	29	(8)
PART 1
Chapter 1 "The Religions of the World" before "World Religions"	37	(35)
1 "World Religions" in the Age of World Wars	37	(9)
2 Early Modern Taxonomy, or the Order of Nations	46	(18)
3 Before the Birth of Science	64	(8)
Chapter 2 The Legacy of Comparative Theology	72	(35)
1 Two Pioneers: Frederick Denison Maurice and James Freeman Clarke	75	(4)
2 Strategies for Representation	79	(7)
3 A Critic: Charles Hardwick	86	(9)
4 The Variety of Parascientific Comparativism	95	(12)
PART 2
Chapter 3 The Birth Trauma of World Religions	107	(14)
Chapter 4 Buddhism, a World Religion	121	(26)
1 Before Buddhism	122	(3)
2 Europe Discovers Buddhism	125	(13)
3 Buddhism and the Future of Europe	138	(9)
Chapter 5 Philology and the Discovery of a Fissure in the European Past	147	(32)
1 The Discovery of the Indo-European Past	149	(7)
2 The Birth of Comparative Grammar	156	(7)
3 The Supremacy of Inflection	163	(8)
4 The Essential Nature of the Semitic: Ernest Renan	171	(8)
Chapter 6 Islam, a Semitic Religion	179	(28)
1 The Problem of Islam for Premodern and Early Modern Europe	180	(6)
2 The Problem of Semitism and Aryanism for Nineteenth-Century Europe	186	(6)
3 Islam, the Arab Religion: Abraham Kuenen	192	(5)
4 Sufism, an Aryan Islam: Otto Pfleiderer	197	(10)
Chapter 7 Philologist Out of Season: F. Max Müller on the Classification of Language and Religion	207	(52)
1 The Aristocracy of Book Religions	210	(11)
2 On the Possibility of the Common Origin of Languages	221	(7)
3 The Trouble with the Turanian	228	(6)
4 The Real Trouble with the Turanian	234	(10)
5 A Tale of Two Burnoufs	244	(15)
PART 3
Chapter 8 Interregnum: Omnibus Guide for Looking toward the Twentieth Century	259	(50)
1 Bequest of the Nineteenth Century: The Sacred Books of the East, 1879-1910	259	(6)
2 The World's Parliament of Religions, 1893	265	(9)
3 Amateur Interests Have Their Say: Private Foundations and Endowed Lectureships	274	(8)
4 Colonial Self-Articulation	282	(9)
5 Transitional Systems	291	(18)
Chapter 9 The Question of Hegemony: Ernst Troeltsch and the Reconstituted European Universalism	309	(20)
Unconcluding Scientific Postscript	324	(5)
Bibliography	329	(22)
Index	351