Abstract

A disproportionate emphasis on the work of Western European and North American scholars has been a feature of investigations into the development of the academic study of religion. This article seeks to examine how a non-European intellectual, the Syrian Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī (1876–1953), produced and transmitted knowledge about religions in his encyclopedic historical topography of ‘Greater Syria’—the Khiṭaṭ al-Shām (1925–1928). Kurd ʿAlī was a leading figure in the Nahḍa, an intellectual movement that sought to revivify Arab (and for some, Islamic) culture through a rediscovery of its classical heritage and was a proponent of a reformist tendency within Sunnī Islam known as Salafism—often associated with the thought of Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī and Muḥammad ʿAbduh. Kurd ʿAlī’s religiography in the Khiṭaṭ, though grounded in traditional Islamic discourse on the religious other, moves beyond that discourse to privilege the experiences and accounts of insiders. This move from heresiography to religiography is best seen through a close reading of Kurd ʿAlī’s writing on the ʿAlawīs (formerly known as Nuṣayrīs). Kurd ʿAlī’s writing on the ʿAlawīs is also an important witness to a vital phase in the development of that group’s articulation of its own identity in an environment that had been at best indifferent and at worst hostile to its existence.