Dale F. Eickelman
The métier of academic life usually foregrounds writings over the backstage of proposals, committee meetings, and lobbying governments and foundations for support. Academics downplay these ancillary activities. It is easy to let them detract from academic projects and not all scholars get the balance right. âUnderneathâ here describes how Gudrun Krämer has contributed to building new academic spaces and made such spaces an integral part of her scholarly presence. A keen observer of how universities work, she has used her knowledge of how things work and her negotiating skills to reshape Islamic studies.
How Institutions Work
In most appraisals of academic careers, administrative skills and the learned craft of making committees function successfully form only a background to academic achievement, or are assumed to be ânaturalâ skills effortlessly acquired. In Krämerâs1 case, programme- and institution-building are an essential part of her academic persona, linked to her skill in organising both peers and junior colleagues and students, bringing them together to add scholarly value to her own work and to theirs, but without converting the best and the brightest into disciples obliged to follow a party line. From distant North America, I inevitably miss the finer nuances of the academic life of Germany and Berlin, but the distance also allows me to see the wider context in which Krämerâs skills have developed over the twenty years that we have worked together, never as co-authors but sometimes as co-consultants or co-organisers, joining efforts to make Islamic studies realise its full potential in the face of evolving challenges.
As an anthropologist, I am fascinated by how institutions work, including academic institutions. In the 1970s and 1980s, this interest took the form of exploring the habits of thought, or cognitive style, inculcated by Islamic mosque-universities (Eickelman 1978, Eickelman 1985).2 It is not much of a stretch to
ISIM as a Noble Experiment
Marburg-born Krämer and Evergreen Park-born Eickelman shared at least one crucial place of learning to shape transnational and transdisciplinary Islamic Studies together. We were both founding members of the Academic Committee of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) (1998-2009), now sadly defunct. I was present at the Committeeâs first meeting, which coincided with its formal inaugurationâincluding a major disruption by Iranian émigrés protesting the inclusion of a pro-regime speaker. For a brief initial period, I was the only advisory committee member who was neither a Dutch citizen nor of Dutch origin. Professor Krämerâa rank she already had attained in 1996âjoined for the second meeting. Until the Committeeâs dissolution in 2002, she remained one of its most articulate and persuasive members.
ISIM was an unusual academic experiment. At the outset, it took on the shape of its successful predecessor for Asia, the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), founded in 1993 by Wim Stokhof, a talented polymath whose vision ranged far beyond his initial specialty of Austronesian and Papuan linguistics. He also launched ISIM, in 1998, and became its first director-in-charge. Governance was in the hands of the presidents of three Dutch universitiesâLeiden, Amsterdam, and Utrechtâlater expanded to include the president of Nijmegen. In my private notes, I referred to the governing board as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. This was not because of their fearsome personalitiesâand I got to know several of them reasonably wellâbut because of the inherent challenge of sustaining cooperation among four distinct and competing universities. Some saw Islamic Studies in Leiden as detracting from other priorities. In retrospect, others might argue that resistance to such an ambitious programme was inevitable, and that its survival for eleven years was not a bad outcome.
In the late 1990s, ISIM was an influential game-changer. It hit the ground running, with an impressive series of conferences and working groups, and reports on an array of topicsâincluding Muslims in Europe, visions of Islamic modernity, health care and the family in Turkey, ShÄ«Ê¿Ä« Ṣūfism, Algerian cultural
The task of the Advisory Committee was to identify themes and talent. We also contributed articles to the ISIM Newsletter, distributed worldwide for free in postal and online delivery to anyone capable of requesting a subscription. Thus, Krämerâs first written contribution to the Newsletter was âOn Difference and Understanding: The Use and Abuse of the Study of Islam,â based on the third annual ISIM lecture, which she delivered 15 March 2000 (Krämer 2000).3
The Context of Krämerâs âUse and Abuseâ
Krämerâs essay was appropriately magisterial. It elaborated on ways of knowing earlier introduced in Islamic studies by Gustav von Grunebaum in his edited volume Unity and Variety in Muslim Civilization (von Grunebaum 1955). Astonishingly for the 1950s, the American Anthropological Association, not known for publishing works by scholars seen as âOrientalists,â sponsored the book. The term âOrientalistâ had not yet taken on a negative meaning in the 1950s. Like von Grunebaum, Krämer blended the close reading of texts with an evocation of their social and historical contexts. Of course, there was a generational difference between the two: von Grunebaum was born in 1909 and Krämer in 1953. Another difference was that von Grunebaum was a bricoleur in combining disciplinary approaches. He led by example, without explaining what was new and mildly different in his approach. Krämer came to scholarly maturity in a different era. She was, and remains, skeptical of arguments that lump all predecessors together into crude categories such as âOrientalist,â âcolonialist,â âpost-modern,â or (more recently) âintersectional.â There is a place for such labels, but not as conversation-stoppersâto use philosopher Richard Rortyâs apt phraseâthat block attention to how one thinks about religion, society, or history outside circles of like-minded believers (Keane 1998).
To give a sense of the mid-twentieth-century context for Islamic studies, let me describe the distinguished historian who led my first-ever seminar in Islamic history at McGill University in 1964, informing our class that the key texts
My Pakistani classmatesâsome of us remain in contact to this dayâreveled in the discovery that when they did not want, or were unprepared, to discuss certain topics, it sufficed to assert that the non-Muslim instructor was treading on a tenet of faith. It was not that they objected to âcriticalâ studies of religious texts, but rather they saw how they could use othersâ perceptions of interfaith dialogue pragmatically to deflect unwelcome questions.
Further background is needed to how we studied. McGillâs Institute for Islamic Studies was founded by Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916-2000), with support from the Rockefeller Foundation. Smith left McGill University for Harvard in the spring of 1964, and I joined McGill in the Fall of that year. The composition of the student body was almost unique to the Institute. When the Institute had sufficient funds, and it still did in the mid-1960s, the goal was to recruit 30 graduate students per year. Of these, 14 were Christian, 14 Muslim, plusâsaid some advanced studentsâone Jew and one social scientist. I think that I fell into the latter category. Of course, there was no explicit policy of which we students were aware, but the âbalanceâ of admitted students held for the years I was at McGill.
The idea of such numerical diversity was to stimulate dialogue. Yet if one instructor relegated us to scanning the works of leading predecessors for typographical errors, informing us that all major scholarship had been completed, this was not Smithâs founding vision. His influential book The Meaning and End of Religion, published in 1963, made a powerful argument for how the analytical category of âreligionâ evolved over time both in the English language and in Arabic, and had a powerful influence on the comparative study of religion (Smith 1963). Thus, thinking about religion in earlier eras was far from immobile, and from the nineteenth century onward necessitated making explicit the categories by which we think about faith and society.4
For rigidity and fixed ideas, nothing beat the arrogant assumptions of âmodernisationâ theory in the mid-twentieth century. The received wisdom was
Evoking these academic and public understandings toward religion and the Muslim world offers insight into the challenge of institution-building faced by Krämer in Europe and those of us in North America. For example, after several yearsâ discussions that began in the late 1970s, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) established in 1983 (with the American Council of Learned Societies, ACLS) a Joint Committee for the Comparative Study of Muslim Societies, and I was a founding member. This Committee, dissolved in 1991, came into being over the strenuous objections of the SSRCâs Middle East Studies Committee, which strongly felt that the study of any religion was âepiphenomenal,â unlike the study of the hard surfaces of economics and politics, which was presumably âreal.â
The voices of political scientists such as Benedict Anderson and James Scott, who took peoplesâ ideas and ideologies as seriously as the so-called âhard surfaces,â were just beginning to reach a wider public (Anderson 1993; Scott 1985). In one of our early workshops, intended to bring together advanced doctoral students and recent doctorates from different disciplines, one participant, then a philologically-oriented pre-doctoral historian and now a tenured full professor, said at the concluding session that it was âdivertingâ to hear the views of sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists, but that he would now return to the ârealâ work of history, presumably in his view, text-based, with unexamined implicit contextual understandings.
ISIM and Its Sequel
The pervasive ideological divide among disciplines and ideologies continued long after Krämerâs 2000 ISIM annual lecture, when slogans such as the âWest versus the restâ continued to prevail. Unfortunately, she was correct that the idea of âcultureâ still invoked by some in the 1990s was an outmoded notion of the concept of âcultureâ as inflexible and static, rather than as contested, contingent, and emerging, and therefore easier to integrate into both social history and the study of contemporary societies. As Krämer wrote, âScholars
The ten members of the ISIM academic committee were equally divided between Dutch and non-Dutch members. Discussions were robust but never acrimonious, although Dutch members of the board would sometimes explain to me, and perhaps to others, the points of contention among the Dutch themselves, usually related to the allocation of resources. Before September 2001, there was a disinclination to focus on the policy issues of Muslims and Muslim institutions in Europe, although this reluctance was gradually overcomeâalthough not resistance to doing the bidding of policy-makers.
Our work consisted of the fine art of academic investment, reviewing projects and activities that should be funded and advanced, with particular emphasis given to projects and personnel with the capacity to influence disciplinary and academic trends across disciplines and topics, including women and religious politics, the mainstreaming of Islamic banking, the representations in architecture and speech of religious authority, inter-communal violence in South Asia and Indonesia, Islam in European schools, religious brotherhoods in the contemporary world, parallels in Jewish and Islamic studies, and homosexuals and imÄms. The tools to explore these and other topics included conferences and workshops held in Leiden and elsewhere, degree programmes, the ISIM Newsletter, lectures, and occasional papers. Krämerâs ability to connect historical with contemporary studiesâa passion that I shareâand to range across disciplines, stood out. In 2002, budget cuts and reorganisation led to the dissolution of ISIMâs academic committee, but our paths continued to converge.
Concurrently with our responsibilities on the ISIM Academic Committee, I saw firsthand Krämerâs ability to work with students and recent post-doctoral scholars during the year that I spent at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, from August 2000 through July 2001. From January through May 2001 we co-directed a Berlin-wide non-credit graduate seminar/working group on Islam and Modernity (Islam und Moderne). Gudrun socialised me into managing a German seminar, one with a diversity of nationalities and academic levelsâgraduate students and recent post-doctoral fellows. We both were challenged to keep discussions on track and to convey that direct questioning and comment were acceptable in a successful seminar.
Since 1996, Krämerâs scholarly career has been based in Berlin. She maintained her focus on scholarship in what must have been a challenging and sometimes tense administrative and political environment. I recall attending an African Studies conference at the Freie Universität Berlin just after Draconian reductions in the size of its political science department had been
Trouble in Tahiti (and Berlin)
Gudrun Krämer consideredâat least brieflyâleaving Berlin for Los Angeles in 2003. This unrealised flight allows me to invoke Leonard Bernsteinâs 1951 âTrouble in Tahiti,â a Broadway musical about a troubled couple in seemingly perfect American suburbia. Berlin, of course, is as remote from an American suburb (or Tahiti) as one can imagine, but the turbulence of academic institutions in Berlin at the dawn of the twenty-first century can only be imagined. Perhaps her interest in becoming a candidate to direct the Middle East Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, was in part inspired by her 2001 participation on the selection committee for the Levi della Vida award, which at the time was still administered by UCLA.
Having chaired an external review committee for UCLAâs Center for Near Eastern Studies in October 2001, I shared with her what I knew of the position.5 It had enormous potential and Gudrun would have been ideal for the position. However complex the academic politics of Berlin and the challenges to secure funding, the skills in one setting did not readily transpose to the other equally complex setting. In my view, as an academic, Krämer would have excelled at UCLA, but UCLA had institutional and political challenges of its own. As head of a major programme inevitably caught up in American public politics,
My sense of Gudrunâs comprehensive grasp of issues and how to make institutions work was further reinforced when we once again collaborated, this time in Jerusalem in January 2005, co-conducting an external review of the M.A. in Islamic Studies programme at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Such external reviews intensively cram into two or three days the evaluation of how other peopleâs students and faculty work together. Both of us were familiar with Islamic and Middle Eastern studies in Israel, and Krämer in particular was at ease in noting the strong parallels between Jewish and Islamic approaches to the study of text and context.
Ideas and Institutions
In scope, authority, timeliness, substance, and ability to communicate across a wide range of disciplines, Krämer offers the conceptual framework and organisational skills necessary to reshape how we think about Islam, religion, and modernity. To have attained a professorship at the Freie Universität Berlin in 1996 indicates an early recognition of her talent. The collection Speaking for Islam (2006), which she co-edited with Sabine Schmidtke, shows her ability to infuse solid scholarship with commentary on changing academic fashion. Both her co-introduction to the volume and her essay on YÅ«suf al-Qaraá¸ÄwÄ«âs views on apostasy use with skill the academic tropes of the day, including in her title, âDrawing Boundaries.â But the essay also points out the irony of â(post-) modernâ scholars drawing fixed boundaries of what is ârightâ and âwrongâ that offer strong parallels to the habits they condemn among their predecessors (Krämer 2006, 181). Her preface to Global Mufti (2009) exemplifies her style in succinctly presenting the work of colleagues and students without claiming explicit credit for making things work for others (Krämer 2009, ixâxi).
I lack firsthand knowledge of the behind-the-scenes efforts involved in creating the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies (BGSMCS) in 2007, for which Krämer has served as director from its inception until today. It is clear that in scope and substance, any graduate programme based in two
What makes the Berlin Graduate School stand out from other programmes is its emphasis on graduate trainingâa long-term investment in higher education open to Germans and non-Germans alikeâfacilitating the work of advanced students, recent post-doctorates, and advanced scholars who can make use of the multiple resources available in Berlin. BGSMCS is further abetted by Krämerâs modus operandi. From the first time that I met Dr. Krämer in her ânatural habitatâ of Berlin in 2000â2001, she introduced me promptly to her students and junior colleaguesâa habit of opening networks to others that cannot be taken for granted. After BGSMCS was launched in 2007, her concern with creating opportunities for the next generation became all the more apparent. In April 2010, I took part in a BGSMCS conference on âIntegrating Media and Transcultural Communication Research within Islamic and Area Studies.â The conference was vintage Krämer in at least two ways. It was actually organised by then-junior colleagues with a special interest in Islamic and media studies, Bettina Gräf and Nadja-Christina Schneider. It brought together a number of younger scholars, not all of whom were working on Islamic themes. Some were involved in other aspects of media studies, and the conference was an effort to find common ground among scholars and practitioners with different skills and understanding of the implications of the new communications media. Krämerâs style was to let others learn to lead and organise, with her preparing the way. My contribution as an âelderâ was to link these new directions in media studies with earlier approaches.6 Krämerâs contribution was quietly to level the playing field in academic life between women and men, and advanced scholars and those whose careers were just beginning. Sometimes the most dramatic changes come not through proclamations, but by example. Between words and practice, Krämer has been a powerful voice in shaping Islamic studies today.
Many of us can write books and share good ideas in conferences and seminars. What distinguishes a few scholars such as Gudrun Krämer is the ability
A distinctive Krämer characteristic is the ability to seize the particular, as with her earlier work on Jews in Egypt in the first half of the twentieth century and her important later work on Egyptâs Ḥasan al-BannÄ (d. 1949), founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and to relate such âspecificsâ to wider issues central to contemporary social thought. She communicates her ideas to wide audiences and works with others to enhance their own skills at research, interpretation, and communication. BGSMCS was not the heroic creation of one person, but one can impute to Krämer the ability to create âties that bind,â enabling the creation of institutions and habits of thinking likely to endure for years to come.
Krämerâs work is good to think with, as Lévi-Strauss might say. She translates key concepts across global and national lines, bringing clarity to ongoing debates. Her knowledge of historical and present-day contexts contributes significantly to our understanding of major issues of religious and secular authority, and how the struggle over peopleâs imaginations in public and political space has played out earlier in history and today. Her writings and activities advance scholarship, and she addresses issues that have immediate implications for European and global policy issues. In a word, she has had a global impact. An important part of her enduring legacy will be BGSMCS, recently awarded the Einstein Award for Doctoral Programmes.