ABSTRACT
Although postmodernism might suggest a more relaxed tolerance, or perhaps permit an even more genuine objectivity in studying others than in the past, in our case, paradoxically, this is not so. This is because the media, through their forced entry into scholarly and academic discussion, have joined the postmodernist discourse and have thereby coloured the contemporary perception of Islam. This has encouraged a shallow, impressionistic and often execratory assessment in the West; in turn, it creates a strident radicalization among Muslims. The more sober voices tend to be drowned. It is precisely this lack of distinction between high and low culture, the refined and the popular, that Huyssen has pointed out to us as a characteristic of postmodernism (1986). Both Muslim and nonMuslim scholarship are thus affected. But there are also the first flowers of the postmodernist academic spring: scholarship that is free of past racial and sectarian prejudices and which points to the future (I discuss this in detail in 1991e and 1991f).
