When William Montgomery Watt wrote his PhD thesis on ‘Free Will and Predestination in Early Islam’, presented to the University of Edinburgh in 1944 and published four years later, in 1948, Islamic studies were still an undisputed waqf, ‘endowment’, of the Europeans. Certainly, there were some internationally renowned Islamists in the Arab world, in Turkey, in Iran and in the United States, but for the great scholarly tradition one was accustomed to look upon the English, the French, the Germans – to name only a few – who were then once again meeting on the battleground and applying their skill in the most ‘relevant’ way their governments could think of: by deciphering codes and performing secret missions behind the lines. In our days, more than thirty years later, Europe has become part of a larger world in this respect as well. Islamic studies, having established new outposts as far as Mexico and Australia, are drawing their energy from a constant dialogue with the Near Eastern countries; Muslims and Christians are mixing with one another as never before. The self-understanding of the ‘Orientalist’ could not remain unaffected. Only the governments seem to continue looking at him as somebody who might best be used in deciphering codes.

The methodical tool of European Orientalism was the ‘hermeneutic circle’, applied in what was normally called philology. This is how W. M. Watt started: his thesis demonstrated an unusual gift for textual interpretation, combined with a certain lucidity of arrangement which made the argumentation immediately clear to the reader. Yet there was more than sound method and persuasive style. There was also a feeling for the individuality of historical situations and ideological decisions which was not so common among philologists. Theology was not treated as an impersonal fight of ideas or, even worse, as a catalogue of notions and values, but as an expression of the way specific persons or groups reacted to the demands of their time. Traditional units (‘the’ Mu’tazila, ‘the’ Sunnis) were broken up into individual thinkers, the classifications of a biased heresiography reduced to their original meaning. This was far from pointillism or fragmentisation; the epochal forces and currents were always kept in mind.