WALDMAN, MARILYN ROBINSON

WALDMAN, MARILYN ROBINSON (1943–1996), was an American-born historian of religion with unusually strong commitments, knowledge, and convictions regarding Islam and Muslims. Born in Dallas, Texas, Marilyn Robinson Waldman was of Eastern European Jewish descent. Following undergraduate studies in African history at Radcliffe, she studied Islamic and African history at the University of London (1964–1965) and earned a PhD in Islamic history at the University of Chicago, where Marshall G. S. Hodgson was her most influential teacher. In her work, she combined clarity and toughness of mind with humanity and humor. She loved to find laughter where she could.

Though her life was cut short by cancer at age fifty-three, Waldman established a remarkably prolific record as a speaker, traveler, teacher, consultant, organizer, and university administrator. She was famously active in the American Academy of Religion, the American Society for the Study of Religion, the American Institute of Iranian Studies, and the World History Association. Additionally she served on the editorial boards of numerous journals and consulted on curriculum and program reform for a number of schools. At The Ohio State University (OSU), where she spent her entire professional career, she served on literally dozens of committees and held appointments in the Department of History, the Middle East Studies Program, and the Center (later Division) of Comparative Studies in the Humanities, an experimental interdisciplinary unit that she directed for several years and, in large measure, reinvented.

Professor Waldman's radical reconfiguration of the Center of Comparative Studies is telling of her broader intellectual concerns. Though staunchly committed to a strong presence for religious studies in the public university, she took the bold step of rejecting familiar arguments about the autonomy and "irreducibility" of religion, and thus argued against the need for an autonomous department of religion. She worked to establish an alternative institutional structure that would fully integrate the comparative study of religion with the comparative studies of literature and science, and indeed all versions of human inquiry. Committed to this truly interdisciplinary vision, she invested the same passion, vigor, and skill and the same quality of attention, care, and time in nurturing the Center as she did in raising her family or growing her garden. Overcoming much resistance, she shaped Comparative Studies according to her vision of a "meandering mainstream," a phrase that served as the title of her inaugural address to OSU's College of Humanities in 1988. She urged that comparison be embraced, not avoided; in fact, she regarded comparison as not just an academic exercise, but a ubiquitous human activity, a strategically deployed, socially consequential undertaking in which people are constantly involved. Though her vision has proven difficult to sustain, she regarded such a non-conventional academic unit as Comparative Studies to be not just an option but a necessity, and fought for its integrity and continuation when it was threatened by the wave of restructuring at Ohio State in the early 1990s.

Deeply concerned to find ways of framing the study of religion that avoided the problems of essentialism and reification, Professor Waldman was impressed by the claim that the category of religion is created for the scholar's analytic purposes through imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. In a plenary address at the Midwest American Academy of Religion (1990) she reminded her audience that "religion" is a word that the people whom scholars study do not use, or at least do not use in the way scholars do; in short, religious studies does not have a fixed or fixable object of its attention. Accordingly, she advocated what she termed "stipulative definitions" of religion, which would allow for adjustment or change over time. In her view, religion is neither a thing, nor even a phenomenon, but rather a construct that, imagined by scholars, provides, among others things, "an angle of vision" or a "take" on human beings' ways of living in the world.

Of special concern for Marilyn Waldman were the connections between religion, power, and authority, most notably in relation to prophethood and religious leadership. In fact, informed especially by years of studying Islam, she explained in the same plenary address (1990) that,

Given my own research, I would say that the imagination and study of religion focuses us on strategies for dealing with power and authority that rely on the ability to perceive and/or generate paradoxes, disjunctions, contradictions, conflicts, competition, and discontinuities, and to make sense of them, and in making sense of them, to make connections not otherwise possible.… Perhaps the most fundamental paradox of all is the insistence on establishing human priorities on the basis of an extra-human source and standard …, that is, an insistence on distinguishing special from ordinary, and degrees of specialness and ordinariness, up and down the line, not just a focus on ultimate concern which has been the basis of many efforts to define religion. All sorts of other paradoxes flow from this one.

Given this set of interests, among Dr. Waldman's primary and enduring concerns was to bring Islam out of its marginal position in the academic study of religions. In a 1989 address to the North American Society for the Study of Religion (NASSR) entitled "Islam and the Comparative Study of Religion" she noted that Islam has seldom played a prominent role in the theorizing of the broader history of religions. In her view this was a missed opportunity for both Islamicists and comparativists, especially those like herself with special interests in religious leadership and prophethood; but once again she argued that the situation might be rectified by "reconsidering how we do comparison." Providing an early formulation of what she would term comparison via "catchments" in her final book project, Power and Prophecy, she argued for the creation of heuristic contexts of comparison wherein scholars, including scholars of Islam, could carry on a kind of hypothetical conversation or, as she wrote, operate with "an extra-language that will allow speakers of other languages to converse with each other in new ways." Ever mindful of the ways in which uncareful comparative strategies could reify and distort the specifics of Islamic history, she insisted that "Above all, I want my system to be fluid and tentative, to be able to account for the historical changes and momentary variation of internal systems of thought."

With the Iranian revolution, Marilyn Waldman's enduring historical and theoretical concerns about Islam were intensified and widened into more practical concerns. Her efforts to put her knowledge of Islam into more general circulation led her to cultivate a second career as a public speaker on issues of broad general concern; in all, she gave more than five hundred community presentations. The titles of some of her public lectures give a sense of how she projected her academic interests into the wider community: "Human Rights and Islamic Law" (1980), "Women Leaders: Why Are There More outside the U.S.?" (1989), "Behind and beyond the Gulf War" (1992), and "Islam in International Affairs" (1993).

This sense of obligation and her relentless efforts "to carry our knowledge into the wider world" earned her the 1992 Richard Bjornson Distinguished Service Award from the Ohio Humanities Council. As she stated in her acceptance speech, she believed in "disseminating the public significance of academic scholarship as widely as possible." Her public scholarship, she said, improved her academic scholarship, "not just the other way around." In 1987 she addressed Ohio State's summer commencement and in 1989 she served as guest lecturer on OSU's Alumni Association tour of Egypt. The Islamic Council of Ohio recognized her in 1989 for her efforts to advance public understanding of Islamic history.

If scholarship is judged by the questions it stimulates rather than the answers it provides, then Marilyn Waldman was a true scholar, for in her effort to fight stereotypes, she thrived on raising questions and complicating them through comparison. Underneath all of her pursuits was her desire to get to the heart of what it means to be human. "For me," she said, "it's not just a question of whether we survive, but how we survive, and what human possibilities we open up for ourselves in the process" ("The Meandering Mainstream: Reimagining World History," OSU Inaugural Address, 1988). She believed, as she wrote in the preface to her final book, "the commitment to cross-cultural interpretation is a moral act, a practical necessity, and an intellectual challenge; the circumstances of our time make it possible for us to address all three, and unwise to neglect any of them" (2005). A quote from Spinoza, which she had pinned to the bulletin board outside her office, sums up her investments, both personal and professional: "I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, nor to scorn human actions, but to understand them."

Bibliography

The Exemplary Faculty Award that Marilyn Waldman received from OSU's College of Humanities (1996) attests to the delicate balance she negotiated in the ways that she imparted her knowledge and understanding. Her enduring influence probably owes more to the people she affected in conferences, meetings, and classes than to her published writings. Nonetheless, the following titles are worth consulting, as they reflect the scope and depth of her thinking.

The Islamic World, which she coedited with William H. McNeill (Oxford, 1973; reprint, Chicago and London, 1983), contains translations of representative works by Muslim writers from all periods of Islamic history. Toward a Theory of Historical Narrative: A Case Study in Perso-Islamicate Historiography (Columbus, Ohio, 1980) challenges prevailing practice in Islamic historiography by undertaking a multifaceted analysis of a single text, Tārīkh-i Bayhaqī, written by a tenth-century premodern Muslim historian. It urges historians to abandon traditional attempts to deduce supposed historical realities from historical narratives, and argues that such narratives should be seen rather as part of a history of images and representations of the past.

Together with her colleague Richard Bjornson, Marilyn Waldman conceived and edited the series Papers in Comparative Studies, which explored issues of fundamental human concern from a variety of disciplinary and cultural perspectives. For example, Religion in the Modern World, edited by Waldman and Hao Chang (Columbus, Ohio, 1984), explores the relationship of religion to modernity; Rethinking Patterns of Knowledge, edited by Waldman and Bjornson (Columbus, Ohio, 1989), straddles fields such as medical research, mathematics, environmental engineering, zoology, psychology, history, literature, religious studies, and the performing arts; The University of the Future: Problems and Prospects, edited by Waldman and Bjornson (Columbus, Ohio, 1990), comments on the relationship of higher education with government and corporate America; Judaism and Islam: Fostering Understanding, edited by Waldman and Helena Schlam (Jewish Education News, 13[1], Columbus, Ohio, 1992) and Muslims and Christians, Muslims and Jews: A Common Past, a Hopeful Future, edited by Waldman alone (Columbus, Ohio, 1992), offer a clear, nontechnical, and accessible public scholarship; and Understanding Women: The Challenge of Cross Cultural Perspectives, edited by Waldman, Artemis Leontis, and Mügé Galin (Columbus, Ohio, 1992), investigates the study of women, advocacy for women, and women themselves around the globe, touching on issues of colonialism, Orientalism, racism, modernization, and feminism.

At the time of her death, Dr. Waldman was working on yet another re-visioning of her thoughts on religion, authority, and comparison, under the working title of Inviting Prophets and Entertaining Comparisons. In this study of religious leadership, prophecy, and prophethood, comparison figures large as both subject and method. She uses the theme of "privileging communicator" to help her meditate on the benefits and perils of cross-cultural comparison, category formation, and the role of perspective in constructing knowledge in Power and Prophecy: A Comparative Study of Islamic Evidence (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).

MÜgÉ Galin (2005)