Aaron W. Hughes was born on August 15, 1968, in Edmonton, Alberta. His father was a Scottish Catholic from Glasgow. His mother came from a Lebanese Muslim family whose roots lay in Srifa in southern Lebanon. Hughes has said that his maternal grandfather became a fur trader in northern Canada and later settled in Edmonton, where he helped finance Al Rashid Mosque, opened in 1938. Hughes grew up in a largely secular household, but the two sides of the family supplied inheritances he would return to much later. His mother’s side gave him an early curiosity about Islam. His father’s side taught him that he was supposed to support Glasgow Celtic. What initially looks like an eccentric scholarly range, Judaism, Islam, Canadian history, religion and football, begins to look autobiographically coherent once those inheritances are visible.
He completed his undergraduate degree in Religious Studies at the University of Alberta in 1993, then moved to Indiana University Bloomington for graduate training, taking his M.A. in 1995 and his doctorate in 2000. His dissertation examined imagination and aesthetics in medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy and became his first book, The Texture of the Divine (2004), a finalist for the Koret Jewish Book Award. Hughes reads difficult philosophical texts closely, sympathetically and historically. The critical edge that later defined his public identity developed as his attention moved from what medieval thinkers said to the academic institutions and categories through which modern scholars claimed to know what Judaism and Islam were.
He began teaching at the University of Calgary in 2001 and remained there until 2009. He later said that his first week in the job coincided with September 11. He watched scholars of Islam become public interpreters charged with explaining Muslims to frightened North American audiences, and he became increasingly suspicious of the distinction between historical scholarship and the defense of an acceptable Islam. A period at the University at Buffalo as the Gordon and Gretchen Gross Professor followed from 2009 to 2012. Since 2012 he has been at the University of Rochester, where he holds the Philip S. Bernstein Professorship and the Dean’s Professorship of the Humanities. In 2023 he served as Fulbright Distinguished Chair at Carleton University in Ottawa. He has held major editorial positions, including co-editorship of Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, and led the American Academy of Religion’s Academy Series at Oxford University Press. In a 2016 Religious Studies Project interview, Hughes said that his location in Jewish Studies gave him a degree of protection when criticizing Islamic Studies because his promotion did not depend entirely on acceptance by the field he was attacking.
The central argument of his career begins with a distinction between studying religion and taking responsibility for religion. Hughes thinks the scholar is employed to explain how religious claims, practices, communities and categories arise. The scholar therefore cannot allow a community’s preferred account of itself to determine the terms of analysis. In the 2016 interview he put the distinction starkly. Religious Studies should be “a more critical enterprise,” populated by “critics as opposed to caretakers.” Religion should be treated as a human and social phenomenon. A scholar may respect religious people without accepting the supernatural or normative premises through which practitioners understand themselves.
That stance places Hughes in a recognizable intellectual lineage. His closest collaborator has been Russell T. McCutcheon. Both draw heavily on Bruce Lincoln and Jonathan Z. Smith, who refused to grant religion a protected ontological status. Religion becomes one classificatory term among others, produced and deployed by people under historical conditions. Talal Asad reaches some related conclusions from postcolonial theory by showing how a modern Protestant conception of religion became universalized as though it described a natural domain. Hughes accepts much of the critique while demanding that it be applied recursively. Western categories require criticism. So do the supposedly emancipatory categories introduced to replace them.
In a 2019 Religious Studies Project interview, Hughes praised Smith for refusing to treat religion as “special, sui generis or unique” and for putting the religious into comparison with the apparently mundane. He worried that the academy would domesticate Smith into a famous name whose vocabulary everyone cited after removing its “edge,” “wit” and “venom.” Hughes’s preferred Smith was playful, comparative and self-reflexive. Near the end of the interview he said Smith asks scholars to “rethink ourselves and rethink our own relationship to that which we study.” That sentence acquires an unexpected autobiographical force in Hughes’s later work.
His argument in Situating Islam (2008) and Islam and the Tyranny of Authenticity (2015) supplies the template for much of what followed. Hughes argued that parts of contemporary Islamic Studies had become entangled with apologetic and political pressures. After September 11, scholars were asked to explain what “real Muslims” believed and to distinguish authentic Islam from the actions of terrorists. Hughes thought the move reproduced theology under academic auspices. The historian’s question was not whether a terrorist represented true Islam. It was who had acquired the authority to define Islam, how that category had been produced, and what work distinctions between authentic and inauthentic Muslims were doing.
He explained the methodological asymmetry through his own teaching. Students could reach the Hebrew Bible and learn source criticism, then reach the New Testament and encounter redaction criticism, only to arrive at Islam and receive a traditional narrative in which Muhammad receives the Qur’an from Gabriel. Hughes thought Islamic materials deserved the same historical scrutiny routinely applied elsewhere. Yet he did not understand criticism as an endpoint. In the 2016 interview he described existing Islamic Religious Studies as a thesis, his own work as “the antithesis,” and added that he hoped some eventual “synthesis” would emerge. That remark looks increasingly important in retrospect. The critic knew that criticism alone was incomplete.
His 2012 book Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History applies the same method to a category whose benign purposes make it easy to leave unexamined. “Abrahamic religions” sounds ancient because Abraham is ancient. Hughes shows that the taxonomy is largely modern and flourished because it became useful to interfaith dialogue, liberal pluralism and diplomatic narratives of common ancestry. Its constructed character means that its social usefulness cannot substitute for historical precision. One of Hughes’s recurring contributions is to ask what happens when a category invented to solve one contemporary problem gets projected backward until it begins organizing the historical evidence.
From Seminary to University (2020) moves this argument from concepts to institutions. Hughes traces the development of Religious Studies in Canada from theological and seminary settings into the modern university. His larger question concerns how much confessional architecture survived the institutional migration. Departments can become formally secular while retaining inherited assumptions about what religion is, who possesses legitimate knowledge of it and what obligations scholars have toward the communities they study. Hughes’s criticism of apologetics therefore becomes a sociology of knowledge. Scholarship is produced through departments, journals, professional associations, peer review and tenure systems. In the 2016 interview he worried that apparently innocuous professional language about promoting good or avoiding harm could eventually influence program reviews and tenure judgments. “Who gets to decide what’s good scholarship?” he asked. The institutional question sits underneath the methodological one.
His work on Jewish-Muslim relations shows another side of the method. Shared Identities (2017) and Muslim and Jew trace the ways Judaism and Islam have defined themselves through encounters with one another. The important move is to refuse the picture of two completed religions subsequently coming into contact. Interaction participates in producing the things that interact. Jewish thinkers working in Arabic and Islamic intellectual environments took up philosophical and theological materials that altered Judaism. Islam emerged amid Jewish, Christian and other late-antique traditions and defined itself partly through them. In a 2021 lecture on Jews and Muslims in the academy, Hughes put the claim vividly: contact with Islam “altered Judaism’s DNA,” while Islam would also have been different without the monotheistic categories circulating in its environment. The two traditions, he said, “have thought a lot about the other to think about themselves.”
That formulation complicates the picture of Hughes as merely a deflator. Human construction in his work can produce exclusions and retrospective myths, but it can also produce traditions. People borrow, translate, reject, imitate and recombine. The resulting inheritance may later present itself as internally generated, as well as consequential. By 2021 the generative half of constructionism was already visible.
In a 2018 lecture on “The Study of Islam in an Age of Trump”, Hughes opened with the story of his maternal grandfather. He described a Lebanese Muslim immigrant who traveled through North America, became a successful fur trader in northern Canada and eventually settled in Edmonton. Hughes said his grandfather helped supply the money for Al Rashid Mosque. He told the story because Muslim lives exceeded the categories imposed upon them. “Muslims are human,” he said. “They have dreams. They fall in love. They care about their children, their businesses and their communities.” People such as his grandfather, he continued, “helped to build Canada.”
The same lecture contains the germ of Hughes’s later Canadian work. During the question period he wondered why scholars were not writing dissertations about Lebanese farmers in Alberta, early Muslim politicians in Canada and local Muslim communities. He proposed “microhistory” and “local histories.” Then he floated the possibility that he might undertake such work himself: “Maybe I almost could do this myself.” Years before his Canadian Muslim history became a major project, he had already identified the absence and imagined filling it.
The lecture also complicates any attempt to place Hughes comfortably inside a political camp. He criticized anti-Muslim rhetoric in the Trump era and described attempts to portray Muslims as alien to Western society as historically ignorant. He also criticized scholars who answered hostile essentialism with benevolent essentialism. In his account, the right can manufacture a single threatening Islam while academics manufacture a single tolerant or progressive Islam. Both can deprive actual Muslims of agency by requiring them to conform to somebody else’s definition. Hughes’s position is easier to understand as opposition to adjudicated authenticity than as allegiance to either side of the political dispute.
The price of that stance occasionally became personal. In the 2018 lecture Hughes described interviewing for a Jewish Studies chair at a major American university after presenting work on Jews whom Muhammad might have encountered. He said prospective colleagues challenged his historical treatment of Islamic sources and that another faculty member wrote to the search committee and dean saying that his presentation had insulted her as a Muslim woman and accusing him of a Zionist or neoconservative agenda. Hughes did not establish that this incident cost him the position, and he also said he had concluded that he would not want the job. The episode gives his institutional critique a concrete setting. Questions about source criticism, identity, professional collegiality and political classification had collided inside an actual faculty search.
His intellectual hero Jacob Neusner offered Hughes a model for navigating such collisions. Hughes admired Neusner as a quintessential Jewish insider who nevertheless insisted that being Jewish did not require protecting Judaism from historical criticism. In the 2016 interview Hughes summarized the model as: “I can be a Jew and I can be critical of this stuff.” Neusner’s maxim for critics was equally congenial to Hughes: if you disagree, write a better book. The later Hughes begins to resemble the model he once described. His relationship to Islam becomes more personal while his insistence on historical criticism remains.
That personal shift is visible across Hughes’s own language. In the 2018 Trump lecture he explicitly said, “I’m not Muslim.” In a 2025 conversation about Islamic origins, he described Islam as “my own tradition” and elsewhere called it the religion of his heritage. “The field’s changed. I’ve changed,” he said. He described himself as more ecumenical than before and more willing to entertain decolonial approaches when they generated arguments capable of critical scrutiny. The change should not be turned into a conversion narrative. Hughes remains committed to methodological naturalism. What has changed is his willingness to admit attachment, inheritance and identification into his account of why this material resonates with him.
Scholars such as Robert Orsi emphasize the sensory, emotional and existential worlds in which religious people live. Charles Taylor, especially in A Secular Age, asks how historical conditions alter what belief and unbelief feel like from within. The pressure these approaches place on Hughes is real. Explaining who constructed a religious category does not exhaust the question of why someone prays, sacrifices, remembers, fears, loves or experiences a tradition as an inheritance.
In a 2022 lecture on divine-human communication in Judaism, he described Jewish history as the repeated “interpretation and reinterpretation” of divine-human communication through the generations. The destruction of the Temple required new forms of communication to be “explored and ultimately developed.” Temple became text. Sacrifice and prophecy gave way to interpretation and prayer. Even movements organized around preserving tradition changed the tradition in the act of preserving it. Hughes was describing continuity as successful reconstruction.
A companion 2022 lecture on Jewish mysticism adds another mechanism. Hughes contrasts elite philosophical contemplation with Kabbalah, which places the ordinary Jew inside a cosmic drama. Performing commandments can repair the divine world. Ordinary life becomes cosmically consequential. That helps explain why religious systems endure. Practices become powerful when people experience their acts as participation in a story extending beyond the individual. Construction can create the conditions under which people experience inherited practices as indispensable.
At fifty-eight, Hughes has therefore become harder to summarize as the outsider who stands apart from religious communities and exposes their scaffolding. His recent work on Canadian Muslims, identity formation and football places him closer to the question of how scaffolding survives long enough to become inheritance. His Canadian Muslim summer-camp research examines institutions deliberately producing Muslim and Canadian identities in children. His football scholarship asks how rituals, symbols, teams and nations generate belonging. His forthcoming Canadian Muslim history returns him to the family story he was already contemplating in 2018.
His interest in Canadian national history also predates that return. 10 Days That Shaped Modern Canada shows his ability to take the analytical habits of Religious Studies and apply them to national memory for a general readership. Canada, like religion, becomes something assembled through institutions, narratives, symbolic events and selective memory. Hughes has little patience for the idea that opacity demonstrates seriousness. His strongest work translates methodological disputes into questions a reader outside the guild can understand: Who made this category? Why did it become useful? Who acquired authority to police it? What gets excluded when we organize the evidence this way?
In 2016 he described himself as a critic or gadfly and acknowledged that his style could be biting because sometimes sharpness is what makes people pay attention. “When scholarship is only skin deep,” he said, “you’re always going to draw a little bit of blood.” The line captures both his strength and his vulnerability. Polemic can reveal assumptions that polite professional language conceals. It can also make opponents experience a methodological disagreement as a judgment on themselves. Hughes knows the risk and has generally accepted it.
The early Hughes asks who constructed the category and whose interests it serves. The middle Hughes shows traditions constructing themselves through encounters with outsiders. The later Hughes increasingly asks how constructed worlds acquire participants, memories, institutions and descendants. In a 2026 IAHR webinar he described culturally central texts as products of “human creativity” and suggested that comparative study might reveal something about “human creativity and perseverance.” The older vocabulary of construction remains. Its implications have widened.
A mosque can be built under contingent historical conditions and still become an inheritance. A summer camp can be deliberately designed and still give a child a Muslim childhood. A football club can be a modern institution and still carry a father’s identity into his son. A religious tradition can absorb foreign materials and later transmit them as ancestral possessions. Discovering that people made something tells us where the historical explanation begins.
Hughes spent much of his career demonstrating that traditions, identities and scholarly fields had been made. His later work increasingly follows what happens next: some constructions collapse, some become institutions, some acquire rituals, some become memories, and a few survive long enough that descendants experience them as something they have received.
Aaron Hughes built his reputation by subtraction. A tradition calls itself ancient and he recovers the date of its manufacture. A continuity presents itself as natural and he finds the people who assembled it. An identity claims to have been given and he reconstructs the institutions that taught people to experience it that way. The three faiths gathered under the Abrahamic name, the line connecting biblical religion to rabbinic Judaism, the authentic Islam scholars police against its supposed counterfeits: Hughes asks who produced the category, when, with what materials and for what purposes. At his best he is one of the field’s great deflators.
That makes Ernest Becker (1924–1974) a dangerous thinker to place beside him. Becker’s claim was that human beings inhabit systems of significance that allow finite creatures to experience their lives as consequential. The system works partly because its bearer experiences it as reality. Hughes’s intellectual hero system, on this reading, would be the identity of the person who sees through such systems. The scholar gains significance by refusing enchantment, resisting credulity and locating the machinery underneath other people’s certainties. The believer says revelation. Hughes asks who wrote the text. The institution says tradition. Hughes asks when the tradition was invented. The scholar says authentic Islam. Hughes asks who appointed the scholar border guard.
The Beckerian interpretation should remain an interpretation. We cannot know that he is terrified of being a dupe. We can see that his work repeatedly gives the highest epistemic prestige to the person who refuses to be taken in. Critical distance becomes a virtue. Reflexivity becomes another. Historical reconstruction strips inherited claims of the immunity conferred by sacred language. The characteristic Hughes pleasure is the moment when something that had appeared inevitable becomes contingent.
Give him his due, and the due is large. The constructions are constructed. The Abrahamic family is a modern ecumenical taxonomy whose contemporary usefulness has encouraged its projection backward. Jewish identity has been repeatedly made and remade. Hughes has spent years arguing that parts of Islamic studies protect their object through standards historians would hesitate to grant other traditions, and he has accepted professional hostility for saying so. In a 2016 interview he described Religious Studies as a field that needed “critics as opposed to caretakers.” He did not imagine criticism as the terminus. He called his own intervention the “antithesis” and said he hoped some eventual synthesis would follow.
In a 2019 conversation about Jonathan Z. Smith, Hughes praised the demand that scholars become “self conscious” and “self reflexive” and said Smith asks them to rethink their own relationship to what they study. In 2025 Hughes said something the younger polemicist rarely said: “The field’s changed. I’ve changed.” He has become more willing to discuss his own Muslim family inheritance, his attraction to the tradition he studies and the limits of the positions he once defended more aggressively.
Reflexivity can establish that the historian also occupies a position without answering why the historian’s preferred rendering should count as the final residue after everybody else’s illusions have been removed. Hughes can show when a category was constructed, who constructed it and what purposes it served. Historical method is exceptionally good at answering those questions. The danger comes when success within that jurisdiction expands into an ontology, when what historical criticism can register begins to stand for everything that is real.
The old temptation was to say that Hughes sees a cathedral and announces that it is scaffolding. His later work makes that unfair. He knows that the scaffolding can become a building. In a 2022 lecture on Judaism he described generations preserving divine-human communication through “interpretation and reinterpretation.” Temple religion disappears and Jews create new forms centered on texts, interpretation, law and prayer. In another 2022 lecture, this one on Jewish mysticism, Hughes described the ordinary Jew as participating through the commandments in a cosmic drama capable of repairing the divine world. He understands that practices do something to people and that traditions survive through repeated reconstruction.
The remaining problem is narrower. Hughes can explain how the practice acquired its form, how it was transmitted and what social or cosmological function participants assign to it. Those explanations still approach religious experience from outside the truth claim that makes the experience religious for the participant. A historian can reconstruct the Day of Atonement liturgy over centuries, show how its language changed and identify the institutions that stabilized it. A different question begins when the congregation sings Kol Nidre and someone experiences judgment, memory, mortality and reconciliation as the deepest truth.
Charles Taylor (b. 1931) spent much of A Secular Age investigating changes in the conditions under which belief and unbelief become experientially available. Scholars of lived religion ask how sacred presence enters bodies, rooms, objects, memories and relationships. Their strongest answer to Hughes asks whether an account of religion can be complete when the analytic procedure brackets the very feature that makes prayer prayer for the person praying.
Hughes increasingly explains why the building stands. The unresolved question concerns what it means to inhabit it as sacred space.
That is a harder criticism than saying he merely explains religion away, because his later work has moved beyond that. His Canadian Muslim research examines institutions deliberately producing identities that later become memories and inheritances. His football work studies modern rituals whose manufactured character scarcely diminishes their ability to create loyalty, grief, ecstasy and belonging. His 2026 work on culturally central texts speaks explicitly of “human creativity and perseverance.” Construction has ceased to function only as a debunking word.
That development creates a problem for the pure deflation story. If a Muslim summer camp can be deliberately constructed and still give someone a Muslim childhood, then construction does not decide authenticity. If a football allegiance can be socially manufactured and still carry a father into the emotional life of his son, genealogy does not dissolve attachment. If Jews repeatedly reconstruct Judaism and experience the reconstructed tradition as inheritance, the discovery of reconstruction does not finish the explanation.
Hughes’s biography now presses the issue against his earlier method. His maternal Muslim family participated in the early history of Islam in Canada. His paternal family transmitted Glasgow Celtic. He grew up secular and later became a scholar who specialized in exposing the production of religious identity. In his late fifties he returned to write the history of Canadian Muslims and began speaking of Islam as “my own tradition.” The person who spent decades investigating how other communities manufactured inheritance found himself standing inside one of the inheritances his method could describe.
A hero system need not consist of propositions its bearer never questions. It can survive criticism, incorporate criticism and even turn reflexivity into one of its virtues. “I know that my standpoint is situated” can become another way of occupying the standpoint securely. No method escapes this merely by announcing its contingency. Becker’s challenge would be to ask what psychic and moral satisfactions come from being the person who knows that everybody, including himself, is situated.
The institutional case requires the same care. Hughes holds an endowed chair in Judaic Studies while producing scholarship that dismantles simple stories of uninterrupted Jewish continuity. Jewish Studies developed partly through institutions concerned with preserving and transmitting Jewish learning while critical scholarship can unsettle the narratives communities preserve. There is no need to infer hypocrisy or financial motive. Modern academic institutions can simultaneously preserve an object and finance its dissection. Hughes inhabits that contradiction.
The same caution applies to cultural memory of the Holocaust. Collective memory can unquestionably be studied as a construction: events are selected, narrated, ritualized, institutionalized and transmitted. That vocabulary raises the harder question Hughes’s method increasingly confronts elsewhere. What follows once we learn that truthful memory also requires construction? Archives are built. Memorials are built. commemorative calendars are built. Testimony is selected and transmitted. The constructed form may be the mechanism by which historical reality remains socially available after the witnesses die.
This turns the knife back on the Becker argument too. Calling Hughes’s criticism a hero system produces another flattering role, the observer clever enough to see through the man who sees through everyone else. Becker can become the critic’s own exemption certificate. The move that deflates Hughes therefore has to deflate the person making it. The argument earns something only if no observer receives immunity.
Hughes deserves additional credit because his later scholarship has moved toward precisely the territory that weakens the easiest criticism of him. He has not stopped asking who built the thing. He has begun asking how things people build acquire lives beyond their builders.
The remaining challenge is to take the final step without surrendering the historian’s discipline. Construction is neither refutation nor vindication. A tradition can be invented and profound, ancient and shallow, historically contingent and morally binding, socially useful and false, psychologically necessary and true. Genealogy tells us how something arrived. It cannot by itself adjudicate every question about what the thing has become.
The deflator’s temptation is to confuse the power of deflation with the completeness of explanation. Hughes has become increasingly aware of that danger. His best late work may amount to the synthesis he hoped for in 2016: keep the cold eye that sees the scaffolding, then ask why some scaffolding becomes a place where generations of human beings learn to stand, remember, worship and belong.
Jacob Neusner: An American Jewish Iconoclast (2016)
The Neusner biography is the most revealing document in Hughes’s career, and not only for what it says about Jacob Neusner. It reveals Hughes at his most complex, because Neusner is his methodological ally, his cautionary tale, his intellectual forerunner, and his mirror.
Neusner did for Jewish studies what Hughes spends his own career trying to do for religious studies more broadly: he dragged a subject out of the confessional and communal ghetto and forced it to answer to the standards of the secular university. Neusner insisted that rabbinic texts were not the exclusive property of the yeshiva world, not sacred objects to be handled with insider reverence, but human documents that could be studied by Jew and gentile alike using rigorous historical and comparative methods. Hughes recognizes this as the same battle he is fighting, and the biography has a quality of family resemblance, a scholar writing about a predecessor who fought his war a generation earlier, with different weapons and in a different trench.
Neusner is presented as a figure of intellectual heroism who was also frequently his own worst enemy. He wrote too much, alienated colleagues with spectacular efficiency, pursued feuds past any point of strategic usefulness, shifted political allegiance toward the Republican right in ways that puzzled even sympathetic observers, and developed late in his career an enthusiasm for ecumenical dialogue that sat uneasily with his earlier polemical mode. Hughes tracks all of this with archival seriousness, having spent years in two separate collections of Neusner’s correspondence and conducted interviews with Neusner himself in the summer of 2013, when Neusner was frail but intellectually still sharp.
The archival depth gives the book something Hughes’s more polemical works sometimes lack: texture. You see Neusner navigating the specific institutional pressures of mid-century American Jewish academia, the tension between the denominations, the resistance of the yeshiva world, the condescension of European-trained scholars who regarded American Jewish scholarship as provincial, the difficulty of building a field from scratch without the institutional infrastructure that had accumulated around Christian studies over centuries. Neusner’s achievement in this context was enormous, and Hughes conveys that while keeping his critical distance.
But the book’s deepest interest lies in what Hughes does with Neusner’s legacy. He makes an argument that cuts against the obvious reading. Neusner is not primarily important for the thousand-plus books on rabbinic literature, though those books established the field. He is most important for his theological writings, his reflections on what it means to be an American Jew, his insistence that Judaism needed to speak to American Jews who had grown up without the Old World formation and who needed a Judaism that was rigorous and open to the world. This is an unexpected claim, and it takes some courage to make it given that Neusner himself was uncertain about his legacy and given that the rabbinics scholarship was his most technically demanding and institutionally significant work.
Hughes’s argument here connects directly to his own methodological commitments. By insisting that Neusner’s theological and journalistic work is his most lasting contribution, Hughes is partly arguing that the attempt to normalize the critical study of Judaism within the secular academy, which Neusner accomplished through the rabbinics scholarship, was not enough. The deeper question, which Neusner addressed in his theological and reflective writing, is what Judaism means and why it matters, questions that cannot be answered by methodological rigor alone. This is Hughes acknowledging, through his treatment of Neusner, a dimension of religious life that his own critical framework sometimes handles less well: the question of meaning and transmission, of why communities sustain traditions and what those traditions do for the people who sustain them.
Applying our analytical frameworks to the biography itself adds several layers. From the Alliance Theory perspective, the book is partly a coalition move. Hughes is claiming Neusner as a forerunner and ally for the critical study of religion coalition, positioning Neusner’s fight to secularize Jewish studies as a precursor to his own fight to demystify religious studies more broadly. This is the transitivity criterion operating across generations: Neusner’s enemies, the insider apologists, the community defenders, the scholars who prioritized identity maintenance over critical inquiry, are Hughes’s enemies too. By writing the biography, Hughes establishes a lineage that gives his own coalition historical depth and moral weight. The critical scholar today stands in a tradition that Neusner helped create.
Stephen Turner’s tacit knowledge framework illuminates something the biography handles unevenly. Neusner’s authority over rabbinic texts was hard-won: he learned Hebrew from scratch, mastered the entire rabbinic corpus, produced translations of everything, and developed methodological innovations that advanced the field. But his authority was also a tacit knowledge claim of the kind Turner would examine carefully. Neusner presented himself as the scholar who could see what insider training prevented yeshiva-trained scholars from seeing: the constructedness of the tradition, the historical contingency of the categories, the literary character of texts treated as transparent divine communication. Hughes is largely sympathetic to this self-presentation, which is understandable given how much he shares its orientation. Turner would press on whether Neusner’s formation produced critical transparency or a different set of trained perceptions that were simply less visible to Neusner and his allies because they were their own.
David Pinsof’s charisma essay adds something specific about Neusner that the biography circles around. Neusner was extraordinarily skilled at the social paradox of claiming authority without appearing to seek it, of presenting his enormous productivity as service to the tradition, of making his methodological innovations look like what any honest scholar would produce. The infamous joke about his productivity — someone calls Neusner’s office and his secretary says he cannot come to the phone right now because he is working on a new book and the caller says that’s okay, I will wait — captures the failure of this paradox in one direction: when output becomes visible as output, the sacred value of scholarly devotion that was supposed to conceal the status game becomes harder to sustain. Hughes is sympathetic to Neusner’s irritation at the joke. But Turner and Pinsof together would note that the irritation itself reveals something: the sacred value was working when it was invisible, and Neusner resented having it made visible.
Neusner terminated friendships over the joke. In a letter to a former friend he wrote that he had first heard the same joke told about Robert Gordis, then about Salo Wittmayer Baron, then about Martin Buber, and about anyone who had published more than three books. He called it ugly and hateful, something that denigrated hard and good work and showed no appreciation for a life’s work. Hughes includes it precisely because it captures one of the central tensions of Neusner’s career. The joke reduces extraordinary productivity to mechanical output, stripping it of the intellectual seriousness Neusner believed it represented. But the joke also points to something real: when you publish over a thousand books, the sheer volume works against you. It becomes impossible for readers to distinguish the transformative works from the repetitive or hastily assembled ones, and the quantity itself starts to look like a compulsion. Neusner understood this intellectually, worrying in his final years that he had written himself out of a posthumous existence. But he could not stop, because writing was his raison d’être since adolescence.
The misunderstanding myth essay generates the most pointed observation about the biography’s framing. Hughes presents Neusner’s fight against insider apologetics in Jewish studies as a fight against misunderstanding: scholars who could not see that their work was compromised by communal loyalty and institutional dependence, who mistook identity service for scholarship. This is exactly the diagnosis Pinsof identifies as the intellectual’s characteristic move. Hughes extends the same diagnosis to contemporary Jewish studies in his conclusion, worrying that the field may have returned to the intellectual ghetto Neusner fought to escape. But the parallel diagnosis applies to Hughes’s own framing of the book. He presents himself as the scholar who sees clearly what Neusner’s peers could not see, what Jewish studies today fails to see, and what Neusner sometimes failed to see about his own contradictions. That is a tacit knowledge claim wrapped in a misunderstanding diagnosis, and it is the same structure whether Hughes or Neusner is making it.
What the biography finally shows, and this may be its most important contribution to understanding Hughes himself, is that even the most committed demystifier finds himself drawn to the question of meaning when he encounters a life fully lived. Hughes set out to write a critical intellectual biography in the mode of his other work: exposing institutional pressures, identifying strategic positioning, resisting the hagiography that Jewish studies tends to produce around its founding figures. He largely succeeded. But in the conclusion, when he makes his case for Neusner’s theological writings as his most important legacy, he reveals something about the limits of pure demystification as an intellectual stance. You can expose how a tradition is constructed and maintained. You cannot thereby answer the question of why it matters and what it gives to the people who live inside it. Neusner spent his career trying to answer that question while also insisting on critical distance from it. Hughes, in writing the biography, found himself doing something similar.
David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory
Alliance Theory predicts that intellectual movements cohere through shared allies and rivals as much as through shared propositions. Hughes’s methodological commitments fit that pattern. Deconstruct inherited categories. Expose apologetic scholarship. Insist on historical criticism when insiders ask for protective exceptions. McCutcheon, Lincoln and Smith are intellectual influences, but they also locate Hughes inside a recognizable disciplinary network whose members share vocabulary, institutions and recurrent opponents. Similarity appears in the common language of construction, authenticity and critical distance. Transitivity appears when scholars who resist crypto-theology, ecumenical scholarship or insider privilege find themselves fighting many of the same battles. Interdependence appears through journals, edited volumes, professional associations, graduate training and citation networks. The coalition is real even when the ideas that organize it are also sincerely held.
Hughes’s commitment to scholarly independence is amply documented. He has accepted hostility rather than soften conclusions he thought the evidence supported. The coalitional question begins after granting the sincerity. Which allies does the principle attract? Which opponents does it identify? Which asymmetries become easier to see once a principle is also treated as a badge?
Hughes’s published work supplies material for that analysis. His recurrent antagonist is the scholar who allows communal obligation, interfaith diplomacy or political advocacy to constrain historical inquiry. A second antagonist is the theoretically elaborate scholar whose conceptual apparatus obscures rather than clarifies the object. Hughes often frames the dispute morally as well as methodologically. The critic possesses the courage to ask the question others avoid. The caretaker allows sympathy or institutional obligation to compromise inquiry. That framing can be accurate in particular cases while also doing the coalitional work Pinsof predicts. It identifies an ingroup organized around critical independence and an outgroup whose scholarship is compromised by loyalties the ingroup claims to have overcome.
The attributional question is therefore worth pressing carefully. Hughes often explains apologetic scholarship through institutional incentives, community expectations and the structural inheritance he traces in From Seminary to University. His critics could ask whether the critical study of religion has analogous incentives of its own. Journals reward recognizable interventions. Professional networks confer standing. Graduate programs reproduce methodological tastes. A scholar who exposes an inherited category can acquire prestige for the exposure just as another scholar can acquire prestige for defending a community’s preferred account.
That is where Hughes’s newer autobiographical record improves the argument. In a 2019 interview on Jonathan Z. Smith, he praised scholars who are “self conscious” and “self reflexive” and said Smith asks them to rethink their own relationship to what they study. By 2025 Hughes was saying, “The field’s changed. I’ve changed,” describing himself as more ecumenical and speaking of Islam as “my own tradition.” The demystifying instrument has begun turning inward.
Hughes can acknowledge that his standpoint has a history without thereby mapping the coalition that makes the standpoint professionally legible and rewarding. The critical study of religion has its own boundary markers, reputational goods and forbidden moves. Category construction, discourse analysis, genealogy and institutional critique can function as analytical tools and as signals of membership. A practitioner can sincerely believe that these are the best available methods while also benefiting from belonging to the community that treats mastery of them as evidence of seriousness. Pinsof’s theory predicts both at once.
Historical rigor and scholarly honesty are therefore better understood as sacred values in Pinsof’s technical sense. They are real values. They also organize status. Hughes has built a career around the demand that Islam, Judaism and religion in general receive the same historical scrutiny scholars apply elsewhere. That commitment attracts readers, students and collaborators who regard the refusal of special pleading as an intellectual virtue. It also produces a hierarchy inside the coalition. The scholar who demonstrates independence from communal pressure ranks above the scholar judged to be serving it. The sacred value works because the hierarchy tracks something participants care about.
Hughes’s prose strengthens the effect. He frequently writes as though the decisive distinction has become visible once the right historical question is asked. When a supposedly ancient category turns out to have a recent genealogy, the exposure carries rhetorical authority because it feels like discovery. The critic appears to have removed an obstruction and revealed what was there all along. Alliance Theory asks us to notice that this style of disclosure can itself create status. The man who sees through the category acquires authority over those who continue using it.
Why Hughes became such an effective representative of this position is partly biographical. His intellectual formation gave him medieval historical depth, the Smithian comparative apparatus and enough distance from the dominant camps in Jewish and Islamic Studies to criticize both. His family history complicated the outsider role further. He could attack apologetic Islamic Studies while carrying a Muslim family inheritance that eventually became one of his own research subjects. His Jewish Studies appointment gave him institutional protection that he explicitly acknowledged in 2016. His accessibility gave arguments developed inside methodological Religious Studies a wider audience. A different configuration of biography, training and institutions might have produced a different spokesman for the same coalition.
The misunderstanding problem also looks different after the later evidence. Hughes sometimes writes as though scholars have failed to recognize the apologetic or political assumptions shaping their work. Pinsof’s framework suggests another possibility. Some scholars may understand the competing obligations perfectly well and choose scholarship that balances historical inquiry against community access, institutional survival, moral commitment or public consequence. Hughes himself increasingly recognizes institutional incentives. In the 2018 Trump lecture he describes disciplinary structures that steer scholars toward some subjects and away from others, and he recounts a faculty search in which methodological disagreement became entangled with identity and political attribution. His sociology is therefore more structural than the simple image of Hughes correcting confused colleagues allows.
What Alliance Theory finally adds is a demand for symmetry. Hughes asks religious communities and scholarly fields to explain the histories, institutions and interests behind their categories. The same question can be asked of critical Religious Studies. Its methods have genealogies. Its practitioners have allies and rivals. Its journals and departments allocate prestige. Its vocabulary can illuminate evidence and mark membership at the same time.
Hughes has moved closer to that symmetry than the earlier polemical portrait suggested. His Smithian reflexivity, his acknowledgment that he has changed, and his return to his own Muslim inheritance all complicate the image of a critic whose apparatus only points outward. The unresolved question is how far the recursion can go. A fully reflexive Hughes would treat the critical study of religion as another historically produced intellectual tradition whose interests and boundaries deserve the same scrutiny he gives everyone else’s.
Hughes’s authority rests on a tacit knowledge claim of a specific kind. His polemical work repeatedly asks why some scholars can see apologetic compromise while others reproduce it. Institutional pressures, community relationships, professional incentives and ecumenical commitments train scholars to notice some things and leave others unexamined. Hughes’s answer has often been better method: historical criticism, comparison, theoretical self-consciousness and refusal to let insiders determine the terms of analysis. The question Stephen Turner’s framework immediately raises is harder. What produces the capacity to recognize bad method as bad method? What is the formation behind the person who can see the formation of everyone else?
The answer is partly biographical and institutional. Hughes was trained at Indiana, entered a network shaped by McCutcheon, Lincoln and Jonathan Z. Smith, immersed himself in the critical study of religion and learned to become suspicious when theological or communal categories appeared inside supposedly historical arguments. That training produced perceptual habits. He developed an ear for authenticity claims, a suspicion of insider privilege and a reflex to ask who constructed a category and what work it performs. Those habits often produce excellent scholarship. Turner’s contribution is to deny that their success makes them transparent vision. They are trained ways of seeing.
When Hughes argues that the category of Abrahamic religions is politically useful and historically misleading, he has evidence. He also has a formation that taught him to look for political usefulness, genealogy and category production. Another scholar might attend more closely to phenomenology, reception, ritual continuity or the ways an imperfect category becomes socially productive. Turner warns that no scholarly formation validates itself merely because its practitioners experience its characteristic perceptions as obvious.
Hughes knows more about this problem than the older version of the criticism allowed. In a 2019 interview on Jonathan Z. Smith, he repeatedly praises the “self reflexive” scholar and ends by saying Smith asks scholars to “rethink ourselves and rethink our own relationship to that which we study.” That is almost Turner’s challenge stated from inside Hughes’s own tradition. A critical formation worthy of the name must eventually make its own habits available for inspection.
The complication is that reflexivity has layers. A scholar can acknowledge that his concepts have histories and still fail to notice what his training makes salient before conscious reflection begins. Hughes can know that critical Religious Studies has a genealogy while continuing to experience certain distinctions as methodologically compelling: scholar versus caretaker, history versus apologetics, second-order analysis versus insider description. Turner would ask which of these distinctions are conclusions and which have become trained perception.
This makes Hughes’s argument in From Seminary to University especially interesting. Hughes traces the institutional inheritance religious studies carries from seminaries and theological education. Departments can become formally secular while retaining habits, categories and obligations inherited from confessional predecessors. Turner extends the question one generation farther. What habits did critical Religious Studies inherit from the institutional rebellion against theology? A field organized around escaping confessional capture can acquire its own tacit orthodoxy about what emancipation from confession ought to look like.
The point is stronger than saying that one coalition is biased and another is not. Every serious intellectual formation trains attention. A philologist notices linguistic detail another scholar misses. An anthropologist notices practice. A theologian notices distinctions internal to doctrine. Hughes notices category formation, institutional interest and apologetic slippage. Expertise consists partly in acquiring these sensitivities. The Turner question begins when expertise becomes difficult to distinguish from the claim that one’s own sensitivities reveal the decisive features of the object.
The transmission problem sharpens the issue. Hughes’s project has always been pedagogical as well as polemical. In a 2016 interview he said younger Muslim and non-Muslim graduate students wrote to thank him for showing them that there was “a different way” to study Islam. What exactly gets transmitted when a student learns that way? Explicit propositions matter. Religion is a human phenomenon. Categories have histories. Texts do not fall from heaven. Insiders do not possess automatic interpretive authority. But much of the formation happens through examples, admired scholars, repeated contrasts and judgments about what counts as an interesting question. The student gradually learns what to notice before learning how to justify noticing it.
Turner’s framework therefore gives Hughes’s intellectual lineage a different significance. Jonathan Z. Smith transmits comparison, playfulness, suspicion of naturalized categories and reflexivity. McCutcheon transmits attention to classification and scholarly redescriptions. Lincoln transmits attention to power. Hughes receives these less as a checklist than as an intellectual sensibility. He then transmits a modified version to students who will adapt it under conditions he cannot control. The method survives through precisely the kind of reconstruction Hughes later describes in religious traditions themselves.
That parallel is worth lingering over. Hughes’s later work explains how traditions persist because later generations reinterpret inherited material. The same is true of scholarly schools. A student absorbs a vocabulary, a set of exemplary problems, a sense of what counts as naïve and sophisticated, then recombines them with new intellectual and institutional pressures. Critical Religious Studies has a transmission history just as Judaism and Islam do.
The issue becomes especially pointed when Hughes rejects insider claims to privileged understanding. Religious practitioners sometimes argue that outsiders cannot fully understand a tradition because they lack the knowledge acquired through participation. Hughes rightly refuses to treat that claim as self-validating. Living inside a tradition does not make every historical assertion about it true. Turner’s symmetry requirement follows immediately. Training inside critical Religious Studies does not make its characteristic perceptions self-validating either. The insider and the critic possess different kinds of formation. Both can see things the other misses. Both can mistake trained sensitivity for unmediated access to reality.
Hughes’s late work makes this symmetry more provocative because the old outsider-insider distinction has become unstable in his own life. In 2018 he said, “I’m not Muslim.” By 2025 he was speaking of Islam as “my own tradition,” describing it as the religion of his heritage and saying, “The field’s changed. I’ve changed.” He has become a test case for his own methodological distinction. Family inheritance does not turn him into an apologetic insider. Critical formation does not erase the inheritance. He occupies both relations at once.
That development weakens the claim that Hughes simply denies insider knowledge. His admiration for Jacob Neusner already pointed toward a more complicated position. In 2016 Hughes praised Neusner as “a quintessential insider” who could nevertheless say, “I can be a Jew and I can be critical of this stuff.” The intellectual ideal was never pure outsiderness. It was the ability to refuse apologetics even when the tradition belonged to you. Hughes’s later relationship to Islam brings him closer to the model he admired.
Turner still leaves a pressure point. Once Hughes accepts that critical distance and inherited attachment can coexist, insider formation cannot be treated only as contamination. It may contain information. A person formed through ritual, language, family memory or communal practice can possess sensitivities an external historian lacks. Those sensitivities remain corrigible. They can mislead. They can also disclose aspects of a practice that historical reconstruction alone will not produce. Symmetry requires skepticism toward privileged insider knowledge without assuming privileged outsider knowledge in its place.
Turner’s essentialism critique reaches a related issue. Hughes repeatedly argues that religion has no fixed essence and that categories such as Judaism, Islam and Abrahamic religion are historically constructed. The negative claim is powerful because it blocks scholars from turning contingent classifications into timeless realities. It leaves a positive problem behind. What do these categories track well enough to survive? Why do some distinctions recur across centuries even while their contents change? What mechanisms allow a constructed object to remain recognizable through repeated reconstruction?
Hughes’s later work increasingly supplies answers that his earlier polemics left underdeveloped. Summer camps produce identity through practice and memory. Judaism persists through “interpretation and reinterpretation.” Kabbalah places ordinary people inside a consequential cosmic story. Culturally central texts generate authority, conflict and new interpretation. Canadian Muslim history is transmitted through families, mosques and institutions. Construction now names a process capable of producing durability.
That development changes the Turner critique. Hughes is no longer simply better at dissolving inherited concepts than reconstructing them. The reconstruction is becoming visible. His late scholarship asks how human creations become formative enough to survive their creators. The remaining question is whether his account of scholarly knowledge will undergo the same development. Critical method is also constructed, transmitted, institutionalized, revised and inherited. Its human manufacture does not make it false. Hughes’s own later theory of religion supplies the reason why.
There is also a stylistic dimension. Hughes writes with deliberate clarity and frequently treats theoretical obscurity as evidence that a field has lost contact with its object. In a discipline where density can signal sophistication, direct prose carries intellectual force. The social paradoxes reading would ask whether clarity can become a cue for something larger: the scholar who appears to require no protective theoretical apparatus because he sees what others obscure. That inference should not be confused with the actual virtue. Clear prose remains clear prose. It becomes epistemologically interesting when readers slide from “I understand his argument” to “he therefore sees the object without mediation.”
What Turner adds beyond Alliance Theory is this distinction between social interest and trained perception. Alliance Theory asks what coalitional work Hughes’s positions perform. Turner asks how Hughes acquired the perceptual equipment that makes those positions seem compelling in the first place. The answer need not diminish them. A microscope is constructed and still reveals bacteria. Training is situated and still produces knowledge. The relevant question is what the instrument resolves, what it blurs and what another instrument might disclose.
Hughes increasingly seems capable of asking that question about himself. His Smithian commitment to reflexivity was present by 2019. His later description of his own intellectual change makes the reflexivity biographical. His return to Canadian Muslim history makes it substantive. The strongest Turner critique therefore cannot be that Hughes never sees his own formation. It is that seeing a formation and escaping its limits are different achievements.
No scholar escapes them. The practitioner formed by a religious tradition sees some things Hughes misses. Hughes sees things the practitioner misses. A scholar formed by phenomenology, anthropology, history or critical theory will divide the same field of evidence differently. Inquiry advances when those perceptions become claims that other people can inspect, challenge and improve.
Turner’s deepest contribution to the Hughes portrait is therefore a demand for epistemic symmetry. Tacit formation is unavoidable. It is neither a warrant nor a disqualification. Hughes’s critical vision was made, just as the religious worlds he studies were made. Its made character tells us to ask how it was transmitted, what it enables him to see and where its resolution fails. Hughes has spent a career teaching scholars to ask those questions of religions. His later work suggests he is increasingly willing to let them reach the scholar too.
The misunderstanding move is most interesting when the intellectual making it is substantially right. Hughes has strong evidence that institutional pressures influence Religious Studies, that the Abrahamic religions category performs political and ecumenical work, and that claims of insider authority can protect propositions from ordinary historical scrutiny. Pinsof’s question begins after granting all of that. A true diagnosis can still flatter the diagnostician. The scholar who identifies another person’s unexamined assumptions occupies the enviable position of seeing what the other cannot.
Hughes’s treatment of Jacob Neusner makes the structure visible. Neusner’s mid-century opponents believed that Jewish scholarship could legitimately remain tied to communal responsibility and inherited categories. Neusner thought those commitments compromised the university study of Judaism. Hughes sides with Neusner and then extends the critique to later Jewish Studies. The sequence creates the escalating structure Pinsof describes in the misunderstanding myth. One generation discovers the limitations of its predecessors. A later generation discovers limitations the first critics retained. The critic occupies the latest vantage point until another critic historicizes him.
The danger is turning chronology into epistemic rank. Later critics can know things earlier scholars did not know. Archives expand. Methods improve. Institutional arrangements become visible after they have operated for decades. Yet every successful act of demystification also creates a role for the demystifier. The intellectual becomes the person who knows which commitments everyone else mistakes for reality. There is no automatic reason to think the latest critic has escaped the structure merely because he understands its previous versions.
Pinsof argues that the misunderstanding story becomes especially attractive when diagnosis forms part of professional identity. That applies to Hughes, though less absolutely than an earlier reading suggested. His methodological polemics, institutional histories and critical biographies repeatedly expose scholars who mistake community service, political hopes or inherited categories for neutral scholarship. That diagnosis has helped define his intellectual role. Yet Hughes has never claimed that critique completes the enterprise. In 2016 he called his work an “antithesis” and said he hoped for a synthesis. In 2019 he praised Jonathan Z. Smith precisely because Smith demanded self-reflexivity. By 2025 Hughes could say, “The field’s changed. I’ve changed.” The diagnostician has shown some capacity to make himself an object of diagnosis.
That evidence changes the strongest Pinsof criticism. The issue is no longer that Hughes cannot turn the analysis inward. He can. The question is how far inward it goes. A scholar can acknowledge his own history, political location and intellectual genealogy while still treating the categories produced by his formation as the categories that best disclose everyone else’s errors.
Hughes ends his Neusner biography worrying that Jewish Studies may be returning to the intellectual ghetto Neusner fought to escape. The judgment contains a misunderstanding structure, but “misunderstanding” may be the wrong word for part of what Hughes observes. Scholars who emphasize communal relevance may understand perfectly well that they are choosing a different conception of scholarship. They may believe that preserving a tradition, serving a community, correcting historical exclusion or maintaining access to insiders belongs legitimately inside the academic enterprise. Hughes can argue that those purposes corrupt historical inquiry.
People often understand their institutional situation well enough and navigate it intelligently. A scholar knows that a department depends on donors. Another knows that access to a community requires trust. A third knows that a certain vocabulary opens publication venues and another vocabulary closes them. These pressures need not operate beneath consciousness. People can knowingly balance scholarly, political, moral and professional goals while sincerely believing the resulting balance is defensible.
Hughes’s own career provides the symmetrical case. He has worked inside a network that rewards historical criticism, anti-essentialism, methodological self-consciousness and resistance to apologetics. Those commitments are intellectually serious. They also generate allies, publication venues, editorial relationships and professional identities. Hughes himself acknowledged one especially revealing institutional fact in 2016. Because his chair was in Jewish Studies, he said, he had “protection” while criticizing Islamic Studies. He understood that scholarly freedom was partly produced by institutional location.
The 2018 Trump lecture pushes the point further. Hughes described peer review, hiring, disciplinary boundaries and political attribution as mechanisms that affect which arguments scholars can make without cost. In his account of a faculty search, methodological disagreement over Islamic origins became entangled with accusations about his identity and political agenda. Whatever one concludes about that episode, Hughes was not describing colleagues who simply failed to understand themselves. He was describing people acting inside institutions where scholarship, identity and professional judgment intersect.
The misunderstanding framework therefore works best when it distinguishes cognitive error from strategic adaptation. Hughes is strongest when he shows that a scholarly category has been naturalized so completely that its users forget its history. He is on less secure ground when institutional accommodation is interpreted as evidence that scholars have mistaken advocacy for inquiry. They may know the bargain. The harder criticism is that the bargain changes what gets studied and what conclusions become professionally sustainable.
The same distinction helps with Neusner. Neusner’s extraordinary productivity can look compulsive from outside, and Hughes records Neusner’s own fear that his output might damage his posthumous reputation. Yet a thousand books need not be explained by a failure of self-understanding. Writing was Neusner’s mode of intellectual work. He was translating and organizing enormous bodies of material, constructing a field and operating within an academic system that rewarded publication. Some of the output may have been excessive. Calling the excess a misunderstanding risks replacing explanation with diagnosis. The more interesting question is what mixture of temperament, institutional reward, scholarly ambition and intellectual need could make such productivity rational from inside the life that produced it.
Pinsof’s argument also warns against romanticizing cynicism. The person who refuses consolation and announces the motives, coalitions and incentives beneath respectable language occupies a recognizable intellectual role. That role carries prestige because it signals independence from the comforts that bind other people. Hughes has benefited professionally from being an effective critic. Named chairs, editorial positions and a distinctive intellectual identity followed. Those facts do not establish that criticism was a career strategy adopted for its rewards. The causal arrow may run largely the other way. A scholar develops an intellectual style, persists in it, and institutions eventually reward some of what the style produces.
Hughes says the apologists do not understand the interests embedded in their scholarship. The Pinsofian critic then says Hughes does not understand the status interests embedded in his criticism. A third critic can immediately explain the Pinsofian reading as the status performance of someone who gains standing by seeing through the man who sees through everyone else. The regress has no privileged stopping place.
Hughes’s later work makes that regress productive. His return to Canadian Muslim history, his description of Islam as “my own tradition,” and his interest in how communities transmit identities show him moving from the position of pure diagnostician toward participation in one of the histories he studies. The same scholar who asks how identities are manufactured now has to explain what it means to inherit one.
What the misunderstanding essay finally adds to the Hughes portrait is therefore a discipline of symmetry. Hughes is often right about the institutional pressures, apologetic incentives and naturalized categories he exposes. His opponents may also understand more about their own compromises than his polemical framing allows. Hughes’s critical formation has institutional supports and characteristic blind spots of its own. He now appears more aware of that than the younger gadfly was willing to say.
The strongest version of Pinsof’s challenge asks what remains after everyone understands. Scholars can know their incentives and still follow them. They can know their categories are constructed and still need categories. They can know their traditions were assembled and still inherit them. They can know their methods are situated and still judge some methods better than others. Once misunderstanding is removed, interests, attachments, institutions and choices remain.
That is harder territory than exposing error. It is also where Hughes’s later work increasingly leads.
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization…
Hughes criticizes modern scholars who treat religion as a voluntary, highly individualized lifestyle choice, where a man constructs an identity like a consumer shopping for goods. If Mearsheimer is correct that individualism is of secondary importance, then this scholarly trend is a delusion born of liberal universalism.
A man is born into a specific group that infuses him with a worldview during a long childhood. Hughes’s insistence on looking at the historical, political, and social realities that constrain religious identity aligns perfectly with Mearsheimer’s view. Religion is an instrument of group survival and cohesion, not an exercise in autonomous personal expression.
Mearsheimer notes that liberalism projects its individualistic assumptions globally, pretending that every human desires the same set of universal rights. Hughes tracks a similar move within the academy, where scholars often try to strip religious traditions of their sharp, particularistic, and exclusionary boundaries to make them fit into a comfortable, liberal, multicultural framework.
If humans are tribal at their core, then religious groups are fundamentally particular. They exist to define the in-group against the out-group. Hughes argues that scholars distort history when they try to sanitize religious traditions, smoothing over the conflicts, polemics, and rigid boundaries that historically defined them. Mearsheimer’s logic explains why those boundaries exist: they are necessary for group survival.
Mearsheimer demotes reason to the least important factor in determining human preferences, placing it far behind socialization. This directly supports Hughes’s critique of how religious philosophy is taught.
Scholars often treat religious thinkers as if they operated in a vacuum of pure intellect, moving from one logical proposition to the next. Hughes argues instead that religious philosophy is an ideological tool used to defend the group’s legitimacy, react to political pressures, and police boundaries. If reason is merely a tool used to justify pre-rational commitments instilled by socialization, then religious texts cannot be understood apart from the tribal anxieties and political contexts of the men who wrote them.
If Mearsheimer is right, the liberal academic project to turn religion into a safe, universalist, individual choice is an illusion. Hughes’s work becomes an essential roadmap for studying religion as it is: a product of deeply social, tribal men bound by history and group survival.
David Pinsof defines charisma as skill at social paradoxes, the ability to gain status without seeming to seek it, influence without visible manipulation and signal value through behavior that appears to have another purpose. The framework gives us a way to explain something about Hughes. Other scholars make versions of his methodological case. Hughes has been effective at making the case feel like the discovery of something that had been sitting in front of everyone all along.
His characteristic rhetorical move is disclosure. A category everyone uses turns out to have a recent genealogy. A field that describes itself as scholarly turns out to contain apologetic commitments. A vocabulary of authenticity turns out to transfer authority from historian to practitioner. Hughes usually writes as though the decisive work has already been done once the hidden structure has been named. That style gives the argument force. The reader experiences the pleasure of recognition: of course the category was constructed, of course the institutional incentive matters, of course the supposedly neutral distinction is doing political work.
Pinsof’s framework asks what else happens during that moment of recognition. The scholar who repeatedly reveals what others have naturalized acquires a reputation for seeing through appearances. That reputation can become a status asset even when every particular exposure is sincere and well supported. Nothing in the argument requires Hughes to be secretly pursuing prestige. The social effect arises because observers infer qualities from behavior. Repeated acts of successful demystification become evidence of independence, courage, intelligence and resistance to fashion.
The social paradoxes paper adds the recursive mindreading dimension that the charisma essay implies. People infer traits from cues and know that other people make the same inferences. A behavior can therefore communicate two things at once. It accomplishes its overt purpose and supplies information about the person performing it. The difficulty is that neither sender nor receiver needs to experience the second process as signaling.
Apply this to Hughes’s prose style. He writes with deliberate directness, avoiding theoretical vocabulary, refusing the hedging qualifications that characterize much academic writing in religious studies, naming things plainly and letting the naming carry the argumentative weight. In the context of a field dominated by ecumenical warmth on one side and dense poststructuralist abstraction on the other, this stylistic choice is legible as a signal in exactly Pinsof’s sense. Clarity is the overt good.
That inference can outrun the evidence. Clear prose demonstrates that an argument has been expressed clearly. Readers can slide from that legitimate judgment to the stronger conclusion that the writer therefore possesses unmediated access to the thing being described. Hughes’s style is especially capable of producing that slide because so much of his substantive work concerns other scholars mistaking mediation for reality. The man exposing everybody else’s apparatus can begin to look apparatus-free.
The sacred values section of the social paradoxes paper generates an even stronger application. Pinsof argues that sacred values can organize status competition precisely because participants experience the values as ends worth pursuing for their own sake. Hughes’s sacred value is scholarly honesty: treating religious phenomena with the same historical scrutiny applied to other human phenomena, refusing special pleading and resisting pressure to make scholarship serve communities or political programs.
That value is real. Hughes has spent decades defending it, sometimes at professional cost. His 2016 description of scholars as “critics as opposed to caretakers” states the ethic. Pinsof’s contribution is to notice that a value can also organize a hierarchy. Inside a scholarly culture that prizes critical independence, the person who most visibly refuses apologetic accommodation gains standing for possessing the virtue the group honors. The status effect depends on the sincerity of the value.
The result is a potentially self-reinforcing structure. Hughes identifies a scholar as granting religious insiders too much authority. The scholar objects that Hughes has misunderstood the knowledge available through participation. Hughes can treat the objection as another instance of the insider privilege he was criticizing. A defender of ecumenical scholarship says that moral responsibility belongs inside academic inquiry. Hughes can answer that the response demonstrates precisely how advocacy has entered scholarship. Arguments capable of absorbing objections into their explanatory framework acquire resilience.
Hughes has revised himself. His 2019 praise of Jonathan Z. Smith centered self-reflexivity. By 2025 he could say, “The field’s changed. I’ve changed,” describe himself as more ecumenical and speak of Islam as “my own tradition.” Those admissions matter because a unfalsifiable persona of the clear-eyed critic would have difficulty accommodating intellectual change without converting the change into another proof of superior clarity. Hughes instead acknowledges movement in his own relation to the material.
The stronger Pinsof question therefore concerns what happens socially when the critic changes. Does revision diminish the reputation for clear sight, or can it enhance it? A scholar who says he has changed may signal openness, intellectual security and freedom from dogma. Reflexivity can become another admired trait. This shows why social signaling cannot be defeated simply by choosing virtuous behavior. Almost any virtue can communicate something about the person who displays it.
Hughes’s specific positioning within the social paradox becomes clear in the Neusner biography. The biography is formally a work of sympathy: Hughes spent years with Neusner’s archives, interviewed him, talked to his family and colleagues, and produced a portrait that takes its subject seriously as a human being and a thinker. The book shows capacities that the polemical works can obscure. Hughes can remain critical while entering another scholar’s intellectual world, reconstructing motives, loyalties and disappointments that cannot be reduced to methodological error.
Pinsof allows a second reading without requiring us to reduce the first one to theater. Sympathy broadens what an audience learns about Hughes. Readers who knew the polemicist discover that the same critic can practice patience and generosity. Readers who admired the polemics see that sympathy does not require surrendering judgment. The behavior therefore has signaling consequences whether Hughes intended them or not. That is the useful version of the social paradox claim. Human actions can be sincere in their immediate purpose and socially informative at the same time.
The charisma essay’s account of symbiotic deception needs similar caution when applied to Hughes. Calling the relationship deceptive implies knowledge about intention that the evidence does not provide. A better formulation is symbiotic inference. Hughes’s readers infer independence and courage partly from behaviors that often are good evidence of independence and courage. They receive real intellectual value from the same performances that enhance his authority. The categories he historicizes often deserve historicization. The institutional incentives he identifies often matter. His scholarly persona is powerful partly because the signal and the underlying trait are correlated.
This also explains why Hughes’s authority cannot be dismissed as branding. A reputation for seeing through bad arguments survives only if enough of the exposures work. Polemic without scholarship produces notoriety. Hughes had the medieval languages, archival work, intellectual history and institutional sociology before he became a recognizable gadfly. The underlying competence gives the style credibility. Pinsof’s theory becomes interesting at the next stage, when demonstrated competence in particular cases begins supporting a generalized expectation that the critic will again be the person who sees what everyone else missed.
What the charisma essay and social paradoxes paper add together, beyond what any other framework provides, is an account of why Hughes feels different from other critics of religious studies. He is not the only scholar making similar methodological arguments. McCutcheon makes many of the same points. Asad reaches related conclusions through a different intellectual genealogy. Lincoln possesses his own formidable combination of comparison and power analysis. Hughes’s distinctive asset is the conversion of methodological criticism into a recognizable public character: the scholar who will ask the impolite historical question and say the answer in language nobody needs a glossary to understand.
That character has brought professional rewards, but the rewards do not tell us why the character arose. They tell us that institutions and audiences found value in it. The same persona also brought conflict, accusations and exclusions that Hughes has described in detail. Any serious social-paradox account has to explain both sides of the ledger. A behavior that produces status in one coalition can impose costs in another. Charisma is relational.
The late Hughes makes the case more interesting still. The man whose authority grew partly from refusing enchantment now writes about Muslim inheritance, Canadian belonging, football loyalty and the “human creativity and perseverance” through which communities make durable worlds. The direct prose remains. The historical criticism remains. The object disclosed through them has expanded.
Pinsof’s framework therefore gives us something subtler than the claim that Hughes secretly plays a status game while pretending not to. Everyone generates social information while pursuing substantive ends. Hughes’s particular combination of clarity, polemic, historical competence and visible independence generates strong information about the kind of scholar he appears to be. That reputation then changes how subsequent arguments are received.
The social paradox begins when yesterday’s accurate cue becomes tomorrow’s presumption. Hughes exposes enough constructions that readers begin expecting him to see through the next one. The critic acquires credit before the next case has been argued. His mature reflexivity introduces the necessary counterweight. The scholar who earned authority by exposing other people’s constructions now has to keep showing that the identity of “the scholar who sees through” is another construction too.
Aaron W. Hughes occupies a position in the academic study of religion that makes convenient beliefs easy to study because much of his career has been devoted to exposing them in other people. He asks how scholars mistake inherited categories for natural ones, communal interests for scholarly obligations and institutional arrangements for neutral conditions of inquiry. The obvious reflexive question is what beliefs become easier for Hughes to hold because of the position from which he asks those questions.
Start with his coalition structure. Hughes is a tenured professor at the University of Rochester, trained at Indiana University and formed within the critical study of religion associated with figures such as Jonathan Z. Smith, Bruce Lincoln and Russell McCutcheon. His institutional base is the secular university, academic publishing and the professional economy of peer review, journals, conferences, edited volumes and scholarly reputation. Within that larger world he belongs to a smaller network that values historical criticism, comparison, anti-essentialism and resistance to confessional authority. Those commitments are intellectual positions. They are also the terms through which members of a scholarly community recognize one another.
His relation to the religious communities he studies is more complicated than the simple outsider model suggests. Hughes grew up secular. He has never claimed the kind of participatory Muslim or Jewish formation that would make him an insider in the ordinary religious sense. Yet his maternal family was Lebanese Muslim, his grandfather belonged to the early Muslim history of Canada, and Hughes now describes Islam as “my own tradition” and the religion of his heritage. He therefore occupies a useful intermediate position. He is institutionally an academic critic, religiously nonobservant and biographically attached to one of the traditions he studies. The later Hughes cannot be described as standing entirely outside.
The first convenient Hughes belief concerns what his opponents fail to understand. His polemical work often portrays scholars as allowing community service to pass for analysis, reproducing theological assumptions as history or letting contemporary political obligations determine what counts as legitimate inquiry. Sometimes that diagnosis is persuasive. A scholar can become so accustomed to the categories of a field that their historical contingency disappears from view.
The convenient-beliefs framework introduces another possibility. Some of the scholars Hughes criticizes may understand their situation quite well. They may know that maintaining community trust improves access, that certain forms of scholarship attract donors or students, that moral commitments influence their choice of questions and that sympathetic representation serves purposes they consider legitimate. Their scholarship may still be distorted.
That distinction changes the role of the critic. If the central problem is misunderstanding, the scholar who exposes it restores sight. If the central problem is a system of incentives understood by the people operating within it, exposure accomplishes less. Everybody may already know the bargain. The harder question becomes why the bargain persists.
Hughes increasingly acknowledges this structural level himself. In his discussions of peer review, tenure and disciplinary reproduction, he treats fields as institutions that reward some forms of scholarship and impose costs on others. He has even described his Jewish Studies chair as giving him “protection” while he criticized Islamic Studies. Hughes knows that intellectual independence depends partly on institutional location. His critique has never been purely a theory of confused minds.
The more interesting convenient belief is therefore that correct method can overcome institutional structure. Hughes has spent much of his career arguing for scholarship that is historically critical, theoretically self-conscious and independent of theological commitments. His books repeatedly show what better method can reveal. A genealogy can expose the recent origin of an apparently ancient category. Textual criticism can complicate inherited accounts of revelation. Comparison can reveal distinctions that disappear when each tradition is studied inside its own vocabulary.
Method can improve scholarship. It cannot by itself change the incentive structure under which scholarship is produced. A department dependent on particular constituencies can understand Hughes perfectly and continue rewarding work he dislikes. A journal can recognize the force of his methodological argument while publishing according to the interests of its readership and editors. A field can absorb his critique conceptually without reorganizing itself around it. The persistence of the scholarship Hughes attacks does not necessarily demonstrate that scholars have failed to understand him. They may have other things to lose.
That possibility places a limit on the heroic role of criticism. The scholar who exposes a mistaken assumption can imagine that sufficient clarity will produce correction. The scholar confronting an incentive structure faces a less satisfying reality. People may know exactly what is happening and continue because the arrangement works for them.
A second convenient belief concerns the epistemic value of distance. Hughes has repeatedly resisted the claim that religious insiders possess privileged scholarly access to their traditions. Living as a Muslim does not make one’s historical account of Islamic origins authoritative. Being Jewish does not settle questions about the development of Judaism. Sympathy cannot substitute for evidence. These are powerful arguments against attempts to make identity an academic credential.
Distance removes some distortions and introduces others. An insider may possess forms of tacit knowledge unavailable to the external historian: how authority actually operates, what distinctions matter in practice, which formal rules are ignored, what ritual feels like from inside and which apparently minor practices carry enormous emotional weight. None of that makes insider interpretation self-validating. It does mean that detachment has costs as well as benefits.
Hughes’s own later work makes the point harder for him to avoid. His research on Muslim summer camps asks how deliberately designed institutions create experiences of identity and belonging. His Canadian Muslim history follows families, communities and institutions through which Islam became part of lived Canadian history. His football work investigates attachments whose force would be difficult to understand through genealogy alone. These projects require attention to what people receive from constructed worlds after the historian has explained how the worlds were constructed.
His admiration for Jacob Neusner had already pointed toward a more complex model. Neusner mattered to Hughes because he could be, in Hughes’s phrase, a “quintessential insider” and still subject Judaism to severe criticism. The ideal was never simply outsiderness. It was the ability to prevent attachment from becoming an exemption from criticism. Hughes’s own Muslim inheritance increasingly places him in a version of the position he admired.
The third convenient belief is that Hughes’s critical formation provides a reliable way of detecting other people’s formations. There is considerable truth in that. His training taught him to notice naturalized categories, institutional interests, claims of authenticity and theological assumptions masquerading as historical conclusions. Those habits have generated real discoveries.
They remain habits produced by a formation. Hughes was trained in particular institutions, read particular theorists, inherited particular disciplinary battles and entered networks in which some questions carry more prestige than others. Another formation would make different features of the evidence salient. A phenomenologist might notice experience Hughes backgrounds. An anthropologist might notice embodied practice. A theologian might perceive distinctions internal to a doctrinal tradition that disappear under external redescription.
Some arguments survive evidence better than others. Hughes is often right because his evidence is good. The convenient belief enters when a successful method in many cases begins to feel like the neutral standpoint from which all other methods can be judged.
Hughes has become considerably more reflexive about this than the younger polemicist sometimes appeared. His Jonathan Z. Smith interview repeatedly praises the “self reflexive” scholar and ends with the demand to rethink “our own relationship to that which we study.” In 2025 Hughes said, “The field’s changed. I’ve changed.” His return to his own Muslim family history turns reflexivity from a methodological slogan into biography. The scholar studying how identities are made now has to describe his own relationship to an identity that reached him through family transmission.
That weakens the easy criticism that Hughes turns his method on everyone except himself. He does turn it inward. The harder question is whether reflexivity reaches the intellectual apparatus doing the turning.
A fourth convenient belief concerns the asymmetry between critical and apologetic institutions. Hughes is exceptionally alert to the incentives operating on scholars whose work serves religious communities. He is less interested in the possibility that critical scholarship has an institutional ecology of its own. Anti-essentialism, genealogy, discourse analysis and suspicion of authenticity can become professional competencies rewarded by journals, conferences, graduate programs and hiring committees. The scholar who exposes a category can gain standing from the exposure.
If community-serving scholarship deserves analysis partly through the institutions that reward it, critical scholarship deserves the same analysis.
The beliefs most inconvenient for Hughes are therefore more modest and more consequential than the earlier version of the argument suggested.
The scholars he attacks may sometimes understand their institutional compromises and accept them.
Insider formation may disclose dimensions of a tradition that historical distance does not.
Critical Religious Studies is a historically produced intellectual tradition with its own incentives, blind spots and prestige economy.
A field can understand Hughes’s critique, concede part of it and continue largely unchanged because the forces reproducing the field are institutional.
None of these propositions destroys Hughes’s project. They change its scale. Historical criticism can expose errors without dissolving the institutions that reproduce them. Outsider analysis can correct insider apologetics without exhausting what insiders know. A situated method can produce true findings without becoming the view from nowhere.
The deepest application of convenient beliefs to Hughes therefore ends in symmetry. Hughes is good at seeing how institutional formation enters other people’s knowledge claims. Other people can perform the same operation on him.
The younger Hughes often occupied the role of the scholar who reveals what a field has mistaken for reality. The later Hughes increasingly studies what happens after the revelation. People know that identities are constructed and continue to inhabit them. Scholars know that categories are imperfect and continue to need them. Communities know that traditions change and continue to inherit them. Hughes knows that his own standpoint was formed and continues to judge from it.
The most inconvenient belief may therefore be the one his later scholarship increasingly approaches: understanding the construction makes the terms of participation more visible.
Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity
Aaron W. Hughes gives Jeffrey Alexander’s cultural-trauma framework a difficult test because the objects of Hughes’s criticism are academic fields formed in proximity to communities carrying powerful histories of injury. The relevance of trauma theory lies in what happens when methodological criticism enters an environment where scholarly practices have acquired moral significance. A criticism aimed at historiography can then be heard as a criticism of the community whose history the historiography was partly designed to recover.
Hughes’s work in Jewish Studies and Islamic Studies challenges scholarship that he believes allow communal commitments to determine historical conclusions. He objects when Jewish Studies becomes a vehicle for affirming Jewish continuity, when Islamic Studies allows contemporary Muslim self-description to determine what counts as authentic Islam, and when scholars treat sympathy toward historically misrepresented communities as a reason to relax ordinary standards of criticism. His target is usually the academic representation of a tradition.
Alexander helps explain why that distinction can become unstable. Cultural trauma is produced when a collectivity interprets an injury as central to its identity and develops institutions, narratives and moral obligations around its memory. The process does more than preserve information about suffering. It establishes norms governing how the suffering may be represented, who has standing to interpret it and what counts as an adequate response to it. Scholarship touching such a history therefore enters a field already charged with moral expectations.
Alexander treated the Holocaust as a paradigmatic cultural-trauma process. The Shoah became more than an event remembered by survivors. Through testimony, museums, education, commemoration, scholarship and public culture, it became central to postwar Jewish collective memory and eventually to a much broader Western moral vocabulary. None of this implies that the genocide was constructed. The historical event and the cultural forms through which later generations remember it are separate questions. Alexander’s contribution is to show how historical catastrophe becomes socially transmissible.
Hughes’s criticism of Jewish Studies intersects with that process. He argues that parts of the field have been organized around affirming Jewish continuity, preserving communal identity and resisting older scholarly traditions that treated Judaism as inferior, fossilized or derivative. Those purposes have understandable histories. A field created partly to recover Jewish intellectual agency after centuries of exclusion will predictably attach moral significance to the recovery. Hughes enters at the next stage and asks what happens when recovery becomes an obligation governing historical interpretation.
That question can sound harsher than Hughes intends. A scholar may hear “this narrative of continuity was constructed” as “the continuity is fraudulent.” A community may hear criticism of apologetic historiography as criticism of the legitimacy of the community’s memory. Alexander’s framework explains the slippage. Once a historical narrative participates in carrying collective injury forward, criticism of the narrative can acquire moral meanings exceeding the critic’s proposition.
The same structure appears after September 11 under different historical conditions. Hughes has repeatedly said that 9/11 transformed Islamic Studies because scholars suddenly became public interpreters of Islam for frightened Western audiences. The question “What do Muslims believe?” quickly became entangled with the politically urgent distinction between authentic Muslims and terrorists falsely claiming the religion. Hughes objected because the scholar had become an adjudicator of theological authenticity.
That development occurred while Muslims in North America and Europe were also facing suspicion, discrimination and intense public scrutiny. Scholars attempting to correct crude representations of Islam therefore confronted a real moral problem. Describing Muslim diversity, criticizing Islamophobia and challenging inherited Orientalist categories could be both scholarly acts and interventions in a hostile public environment. Hughes’s complaint was that the second purpose could begin disciplining the first. The desire to prevent misrepresentation could determine which historical questions seemed legitimate.
Alexander gives us a way to describe that conflict without deciding that either side was simply confused. Trauma processes generate moral obligations. Academic inquiry generates norms of criticism. Sometimes the obligations reinforce each other. Correcting a demonstrably false stereotype can improve both scholarship and public understanding. Sometimes they collide. Historical evidence may produce an account that a vulnerable community experiences as politically dangerous. The argument then concerns which obligation governs when the two cannot both be satisfied.
In Hughes’s 2017 lecture on Islam in the age of Trump, he defended Muslims against political essentialization and told the story of his own Lebanese Muslim grandfather to insist that Muslims were ordinary participants in Canadian history. “Muslims are human,” he said. “They have dreams. They fall in love. They care about their children, their businesses and their communities.” People like his grandfather, he added, “helped to build Canada.” Hughes was participating in a corrective representation of Muslims while criticizing scholars for producing corrective representations of Islam.
The apparent contradiction disappears once the objects are separated. Hughes was willing to challenge false claims about people. He resisted converting the moral imperative to defend people from prejudice into an academic obligation to defend a particular description of their religion. Muslims can be unfairly represented while Islamic traditions remain legitimate objects of unsparing historical criticism. His argument depends on keeping those propositions apart.
Cultural-trauma theory explains why institutions often have trouble keeping them apart. Carrier groups translate injury into public meaning. In Alexander’s terminology, these can include intellectuals, political organizations, educators, journalists, religious institutions and other actors capable of establishing persuasive narratives of suffering. Academic programs can participate in that work without being reducible to it. Scholars help decide which histories enter curricula, which categories organize research and which narratives acquire authority.
The relevant institutional mechanisms are ordinary. Journals decide what to publish. Departments decide whom to hire. conferences determine which questions receive attention. Foundations choose projects to fund. Senior scholars train students who inherit characteristic methods and concerns. Hughes’s own work emphasizes precisely these mechanisms of disciplinary reproduction. In his 2016 interview he worried that professional norms could work their way into peer review, program evaluation and tenure. In his later account of a faculty search, he described a methodological dispute over early Islam becoming entangled with accusations about his political commitments. Those are documented examples of the general mechanism. They do not establish a coordinated system suppressing his work.
Alexander’s distinction between progressive and tragic narratives adds another layer. A progressive trauma narrative tells a community that suffering can yield recognition, solidarity, reform or moral enlargement. Much postwar Jewish scholarship contains versions of that structure: persecution is followed by survival, intellectual creativity and recovery. Much post-9/11 writing about Muslims similarly hopes that more accurate scholarship will defeat prejudice and produce a more inclusive public understanding.
Hughes distrusts the scholarly consequences of that promise when the desired moral ending begins selecting the history. His preferred narrative is closer to Alexander’s tragic mode. Better knowledge does not guarantee reconciliation. Historical criticism may complicate identities people cherish. An accurate account of a tradition may intensify disagreement. Scholarship earns its value by following the evidence through those consequences.
Yet Hughes’s later work complicates even this opposition. His Canadian Muslim history is partly an act of recovery. He wants forgotten Muslim farmers, traders, politicians, mosques and communities restored to Canadian history. His summer-camp research recovers institutions through which Muslim Canadians deliberately created forms of belonging. In 2017 he was already asking why nobody had written these microhistories. By 2025 he was saying, “I am determined to write the histories of Muslims in Canada.”
The critic of recuperative scholarship has therefore undertaken recuperative scholarship of his own. The distinction lies in what he thinks recovery permits. Recovering forgotten people does not require treating their self-understandings as historically final. Giving Muslims a place in Canadian history does not require producing an authorized Islam. The archive can enlarge a national story while remaining open to criticism.
That development also improves the Alexander comparison. Cultural construction no longer functions merely as something Hughes exposes. It becomes something he studies as a mechanism of transmission. A mosque is constructed and becomes a locus of memory. A summer camp is designed and becomes childhood. A family story is imperfectly transmitted and becomes a grandson’s research project. Alexander’s central insight applies: the constructed form is often the means by which an event acquires consequences beyond the generation that experienced it.
Hughes’s work on Jewish philosophy can be read the same way. When he reconstructs how “Jewish philosophy” became a recognizable category, he asks which thinkers were selected, which continuities were emphasized and what intellectual purposes the resulting canon served. Alexander would add a second question. What did that constructed canon make possible? It gave later Jews an intelligible history of Jewish participation in philosophy. Its selectivity remains open to criticism. Its constructive character also explains part of its social power.
The post-September 11 Islamic Studies controversy presents the inverse problem. Scholars attempted to prevent hostile outsiders from constructing Islam in ways Muslims could not recognize. Hughes worried that the corrective effort produced another authorized Islam. Alexander allows both processes to be visible simultaneously. Islamophobic representation can impose damaging identities from outside. Academic correction can harden another representation into orthodoxy.
Jonathan Z. Smith gives Hughes the methodological instrument for handling this tension. Categories are scholarly creations that organize comparison. They are useful because they select and arrange, and dangerous when users forget the selection. Alexander supplies the next step. Once a category escapes the seminar room, carrier groups can invest it with memory, morality and identity. A construction can acquire people who need it.
That is why cultural trauma is more than another framework for explaining resistance to Hughes. It exposes a tension running through his career. Hughes asks scholars to historicize the stories through which communities understand themselves. Alexander explains why communities need stories capable of surviving historicization. The first problem concerns truth about origins. The second concerns transmission across generations.
Hughes’s later work increasingly occupies the space between them. The historian still asks who built the narrative, when and why. He now spends more time asking how people came to live inside what was built. Cultural-trauma theory supplies a vocabulary for that second process. Historical constructions become memories. Memories become obligations. Obligations enter institutions. Institutions transmit identities to people who did not experience the originating events.
The hardest question for Hughes is therefore no longer whether trauma narratives are constructed. Alexander has already shown that they are. It is what follows from the construction. Some narratives distort history. Some preserve history. Some do both. The historian’s task is to distinguish among them without assuming that construction settles the question of truth and without assuming that moral importance grants a narrative immunity from historical criticism.
Aaron W. Hughes is a hybrid several times over. The hybrid vigor frame tracks his career because the crossings are explicit in his biography and in the structure of his scholarly output.
The first crossing is in his family of origin. His father was Scottish, from Glasgow. His mother was born in Fort Simpson in the Northwest Territories to Lebanese parents from Srifa. The household crossed Scottish Presbyterian and Lebanese Maronite material in the specific conditions of Edmonton in the 1960s and 1970s. Hughes grew up without the bounded ethnoreligious community that produces what Putnam measures as high social capital. The formation that produced him was already an outbred crossing whose co-adapted complexes were not fully stable.
The second crossing is his institutional formation. BA at Alberta, studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Oxford, PhD at Indiana under the religious studies apparatus shaped by the Jonathan Z. Smith school. The apparatus he trained in was itself a hybrid. Chicago religious studies under Smith crossed history of religions, comparative philology, continental theory, and the kind of American pragmatist skepticism that Smith inherited from his Haverford Quaker formation. The hybrid produced real vigor for a generation. It gave religious studies a methodological spine that resisted crypto-theology and phenomenological mystification. Hughes received the apparatus in its mature form.
The third crossing is what Hughes does with the apparatus. He ports it into Jewish studies and Islamic studies, two fields with their own distinct co-adapted complexes. Jewish studies developed under Wissenschaft des Judentums in nineteenth-century Germany, carries the burden of the specific conditions of Jewish entry into European universities, and has institutional dependencies on Jewish communal funding and Jewish communal concerns. Islamic studies developed differently, shaped by orientalist scholarship, area studies, Gulf funding, and the apologetic requirements that major American Islamic studies centers have accommodated. Hughes crosses the religious studies apparatus with each field separately. The crossings produce different results.
The Jewish studies crossing shows something like outbreeding depression. Wissenschaft des Judentums developed tools to defend Jewish entry into hostile academic environments. The tools work inside that context. When crossed with the Smith-school apparatus, which aims to deflate insider claims of authenticity and to treat religious objects as scholarly constructions, the co-adapted complexes disrupt each other. Wissenschaft assumes Jewish continuity is worth defending. The Smith apparatus treats continuity claims as scholarly artifacts. Each parent tradition’s central commitment reads as a weakness from the other tradition’s perspective. Hughes’s Jewish studies books, The Invention of Jewish Identity, Rethinking Jewish Philosophy, The Study of Judaism, and Shared Identities, carry the marks of the disrupted complexes. The books apply the deflationary apparatus to Jewish materials. The apparatus produces something that weakens both parent traditions without generating the hybrid vigor that successful crossings produce.
The Islamic studies crossing produces something closer to hybrid vigor in a specific combat zone. The Smith apparatus crossed with criticism of apologetic Islamic studies produced books that did real work. Islam and the Tyranny of Authenticity identified patterns in the field that apologetic scholarship protected from scrutiny. Muslim Identities offered an introduction to Islam that did not concede the ground Hughes wanted to hold. The hybrid worked because the parent traditions had compatible complements in this application. Critical religious studies and anti-apologetic combat reinforce each other. The co-adapted complexes did not disrupt. They strengthened. The work made enemies and paid costs. Hughes pays real prices for the Islamic studies work. The hybrid vigor the books show is bought with coalition friction that the Jewish studies work does not pay.
The fourth crossing is the most complicated one. Hughes holds the Philip S. Bernstein Chair at Rochester. The chair was endowed by the Bernstein family and the broader Jewish donor community that has funded Jewish studies positions across American universities since the 1960s. The donor coalition intends these chairs to sustain Jewish intellectual life, to train Jewish students in their heritage, and to produce scholars whose work serves the continuity the donors value. The apparatus Hughes brought to the chair was selected by an academic search committee whose criteria do not fully align with donor intent. The crossing of donor intent with academic selection has produced many chairs across the country held by scholars whose work does not serve the continuity the donors hoped to fund.
The hybrid vigor question for this crossing is whether the academic selection mechanism produces scholarship that strengthens Jewish intellectual life even when the scholar’s orientation differs from the donors’. In some cases it does. Critical scholarship can sharpen the community it criticizes. Hughes’s work raises the question without settling it. His students at Rochester include both Jewish students seeking engagement with their heritage and non-Jewish students interested in the material as object of scholarly study. The chair serves both populations. Whether the net effect strengthens or weakens the Jewish intellectual substrate Putnam’s data would measure is an open question the heterosis frame keeps open. The crossing is a crossing. The vigor of its product depends on local conditions.
The Canadian dimension deserves its own analysis through the frame. Hughes is a Canadian by birth and formation. He has taught at Calgary and in the American northeast. Canadian and American Jewish intellectual life differ. Canadian Jewish community remains more demographically bounded, more religiously engaged, and more institutionally coherent than most American equivalents. Hughes’s Canadian formation exposed him to a thicker Jewish substrate than the American Jewish academic environment now reliably provides. His move to Rochester represents a crossing from one Jewish academic ecology to another. The American ecology his career matured in is more atomized, more diverse, more shaped by the coalition-level conflicts the jurisdictional wars series has tracked. The Canadian substrate that might have supported different scholarly choices has thinned in his working environment. He retains Canadian habits of mind, Canadian attention to institutional ecology, and Canadian willingness to identify the apologetic patterns American fields protect. He has lost the thicker Jewish substrate that Canadian Jewish academic life still partly provides. The hybrid is uneven. Canadian formation meets American ecological conditions.
The frame connects to Putnam’s data through this last crossing. Hughes’s scholarship sometimes treats Jewish particularism as a problem to deconstruct. Putnam’s findings suggest Jewish particularism produces the social capital substrate his scholarship depends on. The community that funds Bernstein chairs and reads academic Jewish studies operates on particularist assumptions his work undermines. If his deflationary program succeeded fully, the substrate that supports his academic position would thin further. The hybrid he represents survives partly because the deflationary program has not succeeded. The communal substrate holds despite the scholarly apparatus that aims at its claims. If the apparatus won, the substrate would fail, and the hybrid would lose one of its parent populations.
The specific form of outbreeding depression the frame identifies in the Jewish studies work is worth naming precisely. Wissenschaft des Judentums had co-adapted complexes that included defense of Jewish claims against hostile audiences. The Smith apparatus has co-adapted complexes that include deflation of insider claims in any tradition. The crossing puts Hughes in the position of deploying deflationary tools against claims his predecessors in Jewish studies would have defended. The defense complex and the deflation complex cannot coexist in a stable hybrid. One disrupts the other. Hughes consistently chooses the deflation complex. The defense complex disappears from his work. The hybrid is unstable because it is not a hybrid in the stable sense. It is one parent tradition dominating the other and gradually extinguishing its contribution.
The contrast with the Islamic studies work sharpens the analysis. In Islamic studies the deflationary complex from the Smith apparatus crosses with a critical stance that Wissenschaft would have shared. Nineteenth-century German Jewish scholars of Islam, Abraham Geiger, Ignaz Goldziher, produced critical scholarship that respected the object while declining to apologize for it. Hughes’s Islamic studies work occupies the position Geiger and Goldziher occupied. The crossing works because both parent traditions support critical scholarship of the other religion. In Jewish studies the parent traditions disagree about how to treat the home tradition. In Islamic studies they agree. The hybrid produces vigor where the parents complement each other and disruption where they conflict.
One final point the frame reveals. Hughes’s editorial work at Method and Theory in the Study of Religion and his stewardship of the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophy with Hava Tirosh-Samuelson represent curatorial crossings that the frame reads differently from his authored work. Editorial work requires maintaining the parent traditions in working order for future scholars. The Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophy series publishes philosophers whose work Hughes’s deflationary apparatus would not endorse. The editorial function keeps the parent tradition available to readers even when the editor’s own work argues against the tradition’s core claims. The hybrid operates in this editorial work as a curatorial practice. Hughes preserves what he deflates. Editors who deflate the traditions they curate face accumulating tension between the two functions. Whether Hughes can sustain the editorial work as the deflationary work matures is an open question. The frame suggests the strain will increase as his apparatus produces stronger deflationary claims and the Jewish philosophical community he curates continues to operate on the particularist assumptions his authored work undermines.
Watergate as Democratic Ritual & Cultural Trauma
Hughes’s scholarship is trauma deconstruction applied to religious tradition-formation. The Invention of Jewish Identity argues that rabbinic translations fabricated a cohesive Jewish identity from disparate biblical and Hellenistic elements. Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History treats the Abrahamic triad as a nineteenth-century ecumenical construct projected onto antiquity. His project runs parallel to Alexander’s at the theoretical level. Both treat objects usually presented as natural as outputs of specific representational work.
Alexander’s framework respects the work the construction does. Alexander treats the Holocaust cultural trauma as constructed and also as responsive to genocide, as doing necessary work for the community whose identity the trauma helped consolidate. Hughes sometimes reads construction as revelation of inauthenticity. The framework treats construction and validity as separate questions. Hughes’s apparatus tends to collapse them.
The Smith-McCutcheon religious studies apparatus is a carrier group with specific material interests, social positions, and discursive talents. Material interests include the Method and Theory in the Study of Religion journal Hughes edits, the Routledge series he controls, the Equinox publishing relationships, the chairs and professorships the apparatus credentials people to hold. Social position includes elite research universities and the North American Association for the Study of Religion. Discursive talents include comparative philological precision, historical deconstruction of claims to continuity, and methodological policing of crypto-theology in religious studies departments. The framework predicts that the carrier group specializing in deflating others’ constructions will have particular difficulty seeing its own construction work. Hughes illustrates the prediction. His apparatus does not apply its deflationary tools to itself as a carrier group construction with specific interests.
Hughes presents his deflationary apparatus as the scholarly-neutral default against which insider claims get measured. Alexander’s framework suggests the apparatus is itself a construction produced by a specific carrier group with specific interests. The religious studies deflationary coalition has a civil religion of its own. Truth, rigor, method, objectivity, peer review, historical contingency, critical distance from the object of study. These function as sacred codes within academic religious studies. Hughes deploys the sacred codes of the academic civil religion against the sacred codes of the religious traditions he studies. His position gives him leverage because academic civil religion has more institutional power than Jewish or Islamic communal civil religion in the university context. The scale of the power differential is part of what makes the deflationary apparatus effective.
Hughes has not been polluted the way more exposed figures in similar scholarly positions have been. His work has attracted criticism. It has not attracted sacred-level ritual response. Alexander’s five conditions for societal crisis and renewal help explain the immunity. The conditions require consensus that an event is polluting, perception that pollution threatens the center, activation of institutional social controls, mobilization of differentiated elites, and effective ritual processes. Hughes’s work has not met these conditions in either Jewish studies or Islamic studies because he operates inside the methodological apparatus that academic discourse policing accepts as legitimate. His moves stay at the profane level of methodology. They do not generalize upward to the sacred level of values. A scholar without tenure applying the same deflationary moves would be polluted. Hughes’s institutional position and methodological fluency protect him from the sacred-level response his work would otherwise attract. The apparatus he operates within does not permit the pollution response that his substantive claims would normally trigger if made by someone outside the apparatus.
The asymmetry between his Jewish studies and Islamic studies reception becomes clearer through the framework. In Islamic studies Hughes attacks the apologetic carrier group that constructs trauma narratives around Islamophobia, post-nine-eleven conditions, and colonial history. That carrier group has specific material interests. Gulf funding, area studies infrastructure, the John Esposito network at Georgetown, the apologetic coalition across American Islamic studies departments. The carrier group fights back. Hughes pays real costs for this combat. The coalition has enough institutional power and discursive resources to generate pushback, reviews, and conference rejections. Alexander’s framework makes the combat legible. It is carrier group against carrier group. Hughes’s religious studies coalition against the Islamic studies apologetic coalition. Both are producing representations. Both have material and discursive interests. The combat is not between neutral scholarship and ideological advocacy. It is between two carrier groups with different constructions of the same object.
In Jewish studies the carrier group Hughes attacks has a different structural position. Jewish studies in American universities depends more on communal funding, less on federal grants, less on government and think tank infrastructure. The Jewish carrier group sustaining what Hughes calls apologetic Jewish studies has smaller institutional leverage at the university level. Hughes’s deflationary moves land harder because the defending coalition has less power within the academic environment where the combat occurs. He pays fewer costs for the Jewish studies work than for the Islamic studies work partly because the Jewish carrier group cannot mobilize the academic resources the Islamic carrier group can mobilize. Alexander’s framework makes the asymetry visible once named. The same deflationary apparatus produces different costs and different effects depending on the institutional power of the carrier group it targets.
The Jewish community Hughes’s chair serves constructs its collective identity partly through cultural trauma narratives in precisely the sense Alexander’s framework describes. The Holocaust, the expulsions, the pogroms, the long history of antisemitism, the Shoah as civic religion of contemporary Jewish life, all operate as cultural trauma constructions that sustain the bounded community Putnam’s data locate as producing social capital. Hughes’s scholarship treats Jewish continuity claims skeptically. His deflationary apparatus touches the trauma narratives only indirectly. A fully consistent application of his apparatus to Jewish civil religion would have to engage the trauma constructions that do central work in maintaining Jewish communal identity. Hughes’s published work mostly avoids this engagement. The avoidance is strategic in the biological sense the Hybrid Vigor document describes. Direct attack on the Holocaust cultural trauma construction would trigger the pollution response the apparatus has so far avoided. Hughes keeps his apparatus operating at the level of pre-modern textual and historiographical claims where pollution responses are weaker. The selective application protects the scholar and limits what his apparatus can claim to have demonstrated.
Canadian Jewish community sustains cultural trauma narratives with more civic infrastructure than American Jewish community now typically provides. The synagogue attendance rates remain higher. The day school enrollments remain higher. The Holocaust commemoration infrastructure operates at denser scale per capita. Hughes grew up in this environment and moved to an American academic environment where the carrier group sustaining the trauma constructions has thinner institutional support. The move changed what his apparatus could target without pollution response. Canadian Jewish studies with his apparatus would have generated more friction than American Jewish studies with the same apparatus generates. The carrier group he operates against in his American position is weaker than the Canadian equivalent he would have operated against if he had stayed. Alexander’s framework makes this specific kind of ecological shift legible in ways the biological frames and Putnam’s data together did not fully reach.
The Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophy series Hughes edits with Hava Tirosh-Samuelson functions in the carrier group economy Alexander’s framework describes. The series preserves the philosophical tradition Hughes’s authored work argues is a construction whose invention should be historicized. As editor he sustains the object his own scholarship argues should not be taken at face value. Alexander’s framework names this as ordinary carrier group work. The editorial role requires maintaining the parent tradition in working order so future scholars have something to work on. The authored role permits deflationary analysis that would destroy the object if fully successful. Both functions are part of the same carrier group economy. Neither pretends to be neutral. Hughes operates both roles simultaneously. The apparent contradiction resolves once the framework treats both functions as carrier group work with specific interests. The editorial work maintains the tribal library. The authored work deflates the tribal claims. Both serve the academic carrier group Hughes belongs to, which needs both functions to sustain its institutional position.
The religious studies deflationary apparatus performs a specific ritual. The scholar approaches the object of study. The scholar applies the methodological apparatus. The scholar produces the deflationary conclusion. The deflationary conclusion credentials the scholar as a member of the methodologically serious coalition. The ritual confers standing within the academic carrier group. It does not depend on the accuracy of the particular deflationary claims made in any specific case. The standing depends on the competent performance of the ritual. Alexander’s framework predicts this pattern wherever professional scholarly communities consolidate around shared methods. Hughes’s entire body of work can be read as competent repeated performance of the ritual his tribe demands. Each book applies the apparatus to a new object. Each application confers additional standing. The accumulated standing produces the chair, the editorial positions, the visiting appointments at Oxford. The ritual works. What the ritual produces, beyond the scholarly career it sustains, is the question the framework keeps open. Alexander would ask whether the ritual serves the broader civic-religious functions its participants believe it serves, and whether those functions would survive honest examination of the ritual’s carrier group economy. The answer is probably not uniform. Some of Hughes’s work produces real scholarly goods. Some produces ritual performance.
Hughes Under Hugo Mercier and John M. Doris
Hugo Mercier and John M. Doris give us two different ways to pressure-test Hughes. Mercier asks when people scrutinize arguments seriously, when they accept them cheaply and when interests make persuasion difficult. Doris asks how much intellectual behavior should be attributed to stable character and how much to situations. Together they shift attention away from the moral drama of courageous critic versus compromised field and toward the environments in which arguments are produced, received and acted upon.
Mercier’s work immediately complicates one of the hopes running through Hughes’s methodological writing: that better criticism can reform a field by exposing its bad habits. Persuasion is rarely that simple. Readers do not encounter arguments with equal stakes. A scholar already dissatisfied with apologetic Religious Studies can read Hughes and experience recognition. A scholar whose professional identity, institutional relationships or substantive commitments are tied to a more sympathetic mode of inquiry will subject the same argument to harder scrutiny. A general reader with little at stake can agree and move on. The intellectual content is identical. The reception environment is not.
This explains why Hughes’s polemics can be influential without producing conversion. They give language and arguments to scholars already uneasy with the conflation of advocacy and inquiry. They may influence younger researchers who have not yet acquired strong institutional commitments. They can force opponents to sharpen their own defenses. None of these effects requires an entire field to reorganize itself around Hughes’s methodological program.
Mercier’s framework therefore gives us a better measure of success. Asking whether Jewish Studies or Islamic Studies has become what Hughes wanted sets an implausibly high bar and assumes that methodological argument is the main mechanism through which disciplines change. Departments change through hiring, retirement, graduate training, funding, intellectual fashion, new evidence and changes in the wider political environment. A book enters that ecology as one cause among many.
Hughes himself understands part of this. In his 2015 interview he worried that apologetic assumptions could enter peer review and tenure. In the 2017 lecture he described hiring, disciplinary boundaries and professional identity as forces governing which arguments become easy or costly to make. He said his Jewish Studies chair gave him “protection” while he criticized Islamic Studies. The important implication is that method operates inside institutions. A scholar can understand Hughes’s argument and still behave according to pressures the argument does not remove.
Mercier’s distinction between reflective belief and operational consequence makes the point sharper. A scholar can agree abstractly that Religious Studies ought to maintain critical distance while continuing to work through institutions whose routines reward other priorities. The distance between intellectual assent and institutional change is therefore part of the phenomenon Hughes is trying to explain.
A scholar may reject Hughes because she thinks he is wrong. She may accept much of the diagnosis but believe other goods outweigh methodological purity. She may calculate that a particular research program is professionally unsustainable. She may simply care about questions Hughes regards as secondary. Mercier gives us no warrant to collapse these possibilities into bad faith.
Hughes’s admirers are not exempt from motivated reception merely because Hughes is correct about something. The reader who already suspects apologetic scholarship has little psychological or reputational cost in accepting another example of it. Hughes’s arguments can therefore travel most easily through audiences already prepared to see the world through his distinctions. Polemical success can measure argumentative force and coalition fit at the same time.
The Neusner biography does not fit the simple picture of Hughes as demolition man. The book is recuperative. Hughes objects to the reduction of Neusner to his productivity, combativeness and difficult personality. He argues that Neusner deserves to be remembered as a major American Jewish thinker. The criticism remains substantial, but the governing project is restoration.
That framing helps explain why the book can accommodate evidence that would sit awkwardly inside either hagiography or indictment. Hughes can document Neusner’s capacity for conflict and still argue that the same ferocity contributed to his accomplishments. He can describe professional damage and insist that the career deserves recovery from caricature. The interpretive structure gives defenders something to accept and critics something to use.
Biography always depends on a nonrandom archive. Families preserve some records. Colleagues remember different episodes. Students who remained close to a subject are easier to identify than people who left the field after destructive encounters. People willing to talk to a biographer differ systematically from people who refuse. Access produces knowledge and introduces selection effects at the same time.
That is where Mercier’s proportionality principle can be used cautiously. The more a claim is exposed to readers capable of checking it and motivated to do so, the harder it is for error to survive. Hughes’s textual claims about medieval Jewish philosophy enter a world of specialists who can inspect the languages, texts and historical context. His factual claims about Neusner can be challenged by archives and surviving witnesses. Broad claims about what Religious Studies ought to become are harder to discipline because their success conditions are less determinate.
The result is an asymmetry without the need to claim that Hughes cares more about one kind of truth than another. Specific historical propositions face tighter error correction than programmatic judgments. “This text dates from this period” can be challenged with evidence. “Jewish Studies needs more critical distance” contains factual assumptions, normative judgments and institutional predictions that cannot be settled by one archive or one counterexample.
Hughes’s empirical scholarship should therefore be distinguished from the larger reform program built around it. The first can succeed proposition by proposition. The second depends on assumptions about institutions, incentives and the purposes of scholarship. A reader can accept the historical findings while rejecting the institutional prescription. The persistence of approaches Hughes dislikes shows that intellectual criticism alone has limited power over the systems that reproduce disciplines.
The late Hughes seems more aware of this limitation. His earlier work often sought to police the boundary between criticism and caretaking. His later projects spend more time studying institutions through which identities are actually transmitted: mosques, families, summer camps, football cultures, national histories and authoritative texts. These are environments in which people acquire attachments before they ever encounter methodological arguments about them. Mercier helps explain why propositions directed at conscious belief will have limited effects on identities reproduced through practice and institution.
Hughes’s Canadian Muslim work can persuade a reader that Canadian Islam has a deeper history than she knew. It can insert forgotten actors into national memory. It cannot by argument alone determine what Muslim Canadian identity will become. That identity will continue to be produced through families, congregations, schools, migration, politics and ordinary social life. Hughes’s movement toward those subjects amounts to a movement from persuasion toward transmission.
John M. Doris supplies a different correction. Situationism warns against explaining behavior too quickly through stable character. Biography and intellectual history tempt us to compress a lifetime of actions into a personality. “Neusner was mercurial” sounds explanatory because it converts many episodes into one trait. Doris asks us to recover the situations.
The better question is when Neusner behaved destructively, toward whom, under what institutional conditions and with what consequences. Did secure authority produce one pattern and threatened authority another? Did he behave differently toward compliant students, independent junior scholars, senior rivals and administrators? Did institutions constrain him in some settings and enable him in others? Those questions produce a more informative biography than treating aggression as a permanent substance carried from situation to situation.
The same caution applies to Hughes. “Hughes is a contrarian” explains less than it appears to. His behavior changes across settings. The younger scholar fighting apologetic Islamic Studies after September 11 occupies a different situation from the chaired Jewish Studies professor reflecting on Jonathan Z. Smith, the biographer reconstructing Neusner sympathetically, the Canadian Muslim historian recovering his grandfather’s world and the late-fifties scholar describing Islam as “my own tradition.”
Those are not merely different expressions of an invariant Hughes personality. Situations alter which parts of an intellectual repertoire become useful. Islamic Studies after 9/11 rewarded and punished different arguments than Jewish Studies did. A biography solicits sympathy that a methodological polemic does not. Family history creates questions unavailable when Islam is treated only as somebody else’s object of study. Age changes incentives and attention. Institutional security can make intellectual ecumenism easier without making it insincere.
Doris therefore strengthens the trajectory argument. “The field’s changed. I’ve changed” should be taken seriously in both directions. Hughes changed, and the situations around Hughes changed. We do not have to choose between personality and environment. Intellectual careers are interactions between dispositions that persist and contexts that activate, reward, suppress or transform them.
Hughes describes Neusner’s “mercurial personality” as connected to the energy that made his vast scholarly production possible. A Doris-style analysis would disaggregate the bundle. Productivity, aggression, mentorship, competitiveness and intellectual courage need not arise from one underlying trait. They may respond differently to different situations. The same man can be generous in one institutional relationship and destructive in another without either behavior revealing his single true character.
That analysis also avoids one of the temptations of recuperative biography. If destructive conduct is folded into the personality that supposedly made greatness possible, harm can begin to look like the price of achievement. Situationism asks a harder counterfactual. Which accomplishments actually required the damaging behavior? Which occurred in situations where the behavior was absent? If the intellectual productivity survived across settings while the harm varied, then the harm becomes harder to defend as necessary.
The same counterfactual should be applied to Hughes’s polemical style. Which of his contributions depended on aggression? Which depended on languages, archives, comparison and methodological training? Could the historical criticism survive with less personalization of opponents? His later work provides some evidence that it can. The analytical apparatus remains recognizable even as the tone becomes more capacious.
Mercier and Doris converge at this point. Mercier prevents us from assuming that a powerful argument changes behavior merely because people understand it. Doris prevents us from assuming that behavior flows straightforwardly from stable intellectual character. Between them lies an institutional account of scholarship. Arguments encounter audiences with different stakes. Scholars respond differently across environments. Careers emerge from repeated interactions between the two.
That framework produces more restrained judgments about Hughes than the adversarial version does. His empirical work cannot be declared reliable merely because specialists have stakes in checking it. Specialist communities make mistakes too. His programmatic work cannot be declared weak merely because its claims are broader. Broad methodological arguments sometimes transform disciplines slowly. His Neusner biography cannot be called compromised merely because family cooperation and archival access affected its source base. Those conditions create questions for the reader.
Hughes’s narrow historical claims are more readily testable than his prescriptions for entire fields. His methodological arguments travel most easily among readers already disposed toward critical Religious Studies. Institutional assent is harder to achieve than intellectual assent. Biography is shaped by source availability. Personality explanations should be decomposed into situations wherever the evidence allows.
The Mercier-Doris reading also changes the assessment of Hughes’s ambitions. The important result of a methodological critic may never be converting a field. It may be creating an alternative intellectual lineage that remains available when circumstances change. Hughes has published books, edited journals, trained students and supplied younger scholars with arguments they can use. A minority approach can matter without becoming a majority approach.
His later career may demonstrate another route to influence. The early Hughes tried to change fields by telling scholars what they were doing wrong. The later Hughes increasingly produces objects other scholars will have to explain: a history of Muslims in Canada, an account of football and religion, studies of how formative texts acquire authority. Empirical objects sometimes travel farther than methodological commands because scholars can use them without first joining the coalition that produced them.
Mercier tells us why that may be so. Doris tells us why the man producing them should not be frozen into the persona established by his earlier polemics. Together they move the Hughes story away from a contest between insight and bias and towards what kinds of situations allow particular insights to become knowledge that other people can use.
Hughes is a buffered scholar in Charles Taylor’s sense, but the description needs qualification. His method begins by bracketing the truth claims through which religious people understand themselves. God does not become a historical actor because a text says God spoke. A tradition does not possess an essence because its practitioners experience it as continuous. “Authentic Islam” does not become analytically useful because Muslims invoke it. The scholar asks instead how texts, categories, identities and institutions were made.
That stance explains much of Hughes’s achievement. Jewish identity can be historicized. The Abrahamic religions can be reconstructed as a modern category rather than projected backward as an ancient family. Claims about authentic Islam can be analyzed as boundary-making devices. The historical constructions Hughes identifies really were constructed. Their construction does not make them false in every sense. It means their authority cannot be established merely by pointing to the communities that inhabit them.
Taylor’s buffered and porous selves distinction reveals what this method brackets. A Jew praying the Amidah may experience herself as addressing a God who hears. A Muslim reciting the Qur’an may experience the words as divine speech. A football supporter may experience a club as an inheritance connecting generations. Historical explanation can reconstruct the practices and institutions that make these experiences possible. It cannot adjudicate the transcendent reality participants believe they encounter.
The older criticism of Hughes went too far by claiming that he therefore misses religious phenomenology altogether. His later work shows otherwise. In his 2022 lecture on Jewish mysticism, Hughes describes how the Zohar places the ordinary Jew inside a cosmic drama in which everyday actions affect the divine world. Putting on tefillin can make even a relatively secular Jew a participant in something larger than himself. In another 2022 lecture he describes Jewish history as a succession of interpretation and reinterpretation through which later Jews remain connected to revelation, ancestors and one another. He understands what participation does.
The disagreement with Taylor therefore lies somewhere more precise. Hughes can describe porous experience with considerable sympathy while refusing to let the experience determine his historical ontology. The worshipper can experience God as present. The historian can study that experience, its texts, practices and consequences. Hughes’s method stops before declaring that the presence the worshipper experiences is an independently existing historical cause. Taylor asks what modern scholarship loses when that bracketing becomes habitual.
Hughes’s biography makes the question increasingly personal. His father was a Scottish Catholic from Glasgow. His mother came from a Lebanese Muslim family whose Canadian history reaches back to the early Muslim settlement of Alberta. Hughes grew up secular and for years described himself as an outsider to Islam. In 2018 he said plainly, “I’m not Muslim.” By 2025 the vocabulary had changed. He called Islam “my own tradition,” described it as the religion of his heritage and spoke about growing up “in the shadow” of the Al Rashid Mosque his grandfather had helped bring into existence.
That is not conversion. It is inheritance becoming intellectually and emotionally salient. The distinction makes the old buffered-outsider description incomplete. Hughes remains methodologically buffered. He is also studying a tradition that now figures in his account of who he is. He wants to know how Muslim life became Canadian life. Families migrate. Mosques are built. Children attend camps. Memories become stories. Stories become inheritances. People who did not experience the founding events nevertheless acquire identities through institutions constructed before they were born.
Taylor’s framework becomes more useful here because construction and porousness cease to be opposites. A mosque can be historically constructed and become a sacred place. A ritual can have a recoverable genealogy and still become the medium through which somebody experiences God. An identity can be deliberately transmitted and later feel inherited. The historical explanation tells us how the porous world became available.
Hughes’s football work pushes the same insight outside conventional religion. Celtic is an institution, a history, a set of colors, stories, rivalries and inherited loyalties. Every part of it can be historicized. None of that explains away why a father transmits allegiance to a son or why the club can become part of a family identity carried across the Atlantic. The constructed object acquires emotional force because people live through it.
The strongest Taylor criticism of Hughes therefore concerns jurisdiction. Hughes’s historical method is extremely good at explaining how worlds are assembled. It deliberately declines to decide whether anything transcendent answers from inside them. That is a defensible scholarly rule. It also limits the questions the method can answer.
Taylor would insist that porosity is a mode of inhabiting a world. The practitioner may experience ancestors, God, ritual obligation and sacred time as realities that act upon the self. A fully external account can describe the conditions under which those experiences arise while remaining unable to reproduce the position from which they are experienced.
Hughes increasingly recognizes that something survives historical deconstruction. His later work repeatedly returns to transmission, reconstruction and participation. Traditions persist because people continually remake them. Texts remain formative because new generations interpret them. Identities survive because institutions teach people how to inhabit them.
This changes the earlier charge that Hughes treats porous experience as error produced by buffered construction. His mature position is closer to a recursive one. Human beings make religious worlds, and those worlds in turn make human beings.
The remaining disagreement with Taylor is ontological. Hughes can follow the causal chain from institution to practice to experience and stop there. Taylor leaves open the possibility that the experience may disclose something the causal history does not exhaust. Hughes’s method brackets that possibility before inquiry begins.
His late career shows the man doing the bracketing has moved closer to what he brackets. The tradition is historically constructed. It is also his inheritance. The mosque was built. That is precisely why it could still be waiting for the grandson.
The Set
Aaron W. Hughes belongs to the critical wing of religious studies, the network associated with the North American Association for the Study of Religion and Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, which Hughes edits. His major intellectual ancestors include Jonathan Z. Smith, Bruce Lincoln, Donald Wiebe and Russell McCutcheon. They share a refusal to let the objects of religious study determine the vocabulary through which scholars explain them.
The decisive distinction is between first-order and second-order discourse. Practitioners say what a ritual means, what God requires, which Islam is authentic and why a tradition possesses authority. Scholars study how those claims were produced, transmitted and authorized. The scholar’s redescriptions may therefore sound alien or offensive to practitioners. That distance is often treated as evidence that scholarship is doing a different kind of work.
The set emerged partly against older phenomenological approaches associated with Mircea Eliade and Wilfred Cantwell Smith and partly against scholarship that allows confessional commitments to enter academic explanation. Hughes’s own vocabulary has been especially sharp. In 2015 he distinguished “critics” from “caretakers.” He complained about scholars functioning as interfaith facilitators. He repeatedly attacked the idea that insider identity grants privileged historical authority.
His books carry this program into specific fields. In The Study of Judaism, he asks how Jewish Studies became entangled with communal self-representation. In Islam and the Tyranny of Authenticity, he attacks the assumption that scholars should defer to claims about what counts as “real” Islam. In Abrahamic Religions, he historicizes a category whose contemporary popularity can disguise its modern genealogy. In his Neusner biography, he finds a predecessor who made a career by forcing Jewish Studies to justify itself according to academic standards.
The recurring intellectual reward is demystification. A natural category acquires a genealogy. An innocent scholarly convention acquires institutional interests. An appeal to authenticity becomes an attempt to police boundaries. A disciplinary consensus becomes something that somebody built.
This style creates obvious temptations. Genealogy can become a prestige language of its own. “Constructed” can begin sounding like a verdict. Scholars trained to detect essentialism can reward one another for finding it. The distinction between critic and caretaker can become a boundary-maintenance device every bit as sociologically interesting as the boundaries the critics expose.
The strongest critique of this set therefore uses its own method. Critical Religious Studies has a history. It has institutions, canonical thinkers, exemplary books, preferred questions, professional networks and characteristic virtues. Students learn which distinctions matter and which errors mark unsophisticated work. The second-order stance is transmitted through a tradition.
Hughes knows this better than the earlier version of the criticism allowed. His 2019 discussion of Jonathan Z. Smith turns repeatedly to self-reflexivity. Smith’s great demand, Hughes says, is that scholars rethink themselves and their relationship to what they study. Hughes worries that the academy will domesticate Smith by retaining the vocabulary while removing the “edge.” The critic’s method therefore includes a mechanism for turning criticism back on the critic.
Critical self-awareness can become another virtue through which a coalition distinguishes sophisticated insiders from naïve outsiders. The sentence “our categories are constructed too” is easier to say than to live intellectually. Scholars still need categories. Journals still make judgments. Departments still distinguish scholarship from work they regard as something else.
The most interesting pressure point is the scholar-practitioner boundary. Hughes’s earlier polemics often make the line look stable. The practitioner inhabits the tradition. The scholar redescribes it. Yet his admiration for Neusner complicates the distinction. Hughes called Neusner a “quintessential insider” who could nevertheless say, “I can be a Jew and I can be critical of this stuff.” The same person can occupy both positions.
Hughes’s later relationship to Islam makes the complication autobiographical. He can call Islam “my own tradition” while continuing to subject it to historical criticism. The man who once derived authority partly from refusing insider privilege now has to show what critical scholarship looks like when the object is also an inheritance.
That undermines the idea that the two terms name mutually exclusive kinds of people. They are roles, commitments and modes of attention that can coexist uneasily inside one person.
The university-seminary distinction deserves the same treatment. Hughes is right that universities and seminaries have different institutional purposes. Historical inquiry requires freedoms confessional institutions may sometimes restrict. Yet “the university” is also a historical institution with its own changing purposes, patronage systems, professional incentives and orthodoxies. It possesses no immunity from the sociology Hughes applies to seminaries.
The critical set therefore needs some ground on which to make judgments without pretending that the ground fell from heaven. The answer need not be another essence. Historical inquiry can defend public evidence, argument, criticism, linguistic competence and corrigibility as institutional norms because they produce better knowledge under many conditions.
This is where the mature Hughes becomes more interesting than the caricature of the demystifier. Construction no longer does all the argumentative work. A category can be constructed and useful. A tradition can be invented and inherited. An institution can be historically contingent and worth defending. A text can be humanly produced and become culturally central. A critical method can have a genealogy and still outperform alternatives for particular questions.
The set’s deepest problem was never that it required one patch of metaphysical bedrock while dissolving everyone else’s. It was the temptation to treat genealogy as sufficient judgment. Hughes’s later work increasingly points beyond that temptation.
Once everything has a history, the difficult questions begin. Which constructions track reality better than others? Which institutions deserve preservation? Which inherited categories remain useful? Which practices create forms of belonging worth transmitting? Which scholarly norms allow correction?
The younger Hughes became formidable by asking who built the categories. The later Hughes is increasingly interested in what happens after they are built.
Trajectory
Aaron W. Hughes’s career looks different once the late work is placed beside the interviews and lectures he gave while the earlier books were appearing. The continuity is substantial. Hughes has never abandoned the proposition that religions, identities, orthodoxies and scholarly categories are human productions. The change lies in what receives his attention after the production has been demonstrated. Early Hughes specialized in recovering contingency from claims of continuity and human classification from claims of essence. Over time, another question becomes more visible. How does something people make acquire enough authority, emotional force and institutional durability to outlive its makers? How does a constructed identity become an inheritance?
In Situating Islam in 2008, the distinction between the believer’s account and the scholar’s account was almost programmatic. One chapter was called “We Study Muslim Constructions, Not Muslims, Right?” The scholar who permits practitioners to dictate the terms of analysis has surrendered the historical problem before beginning it. Hughes used the academic response to September 11 as an example. Scholars became public adjudicators of authentic Islam, explaining which Muslims represented the religion and which could be dismissed as distortions of it. Hughes thought the scholar’s job began elsewhere, with the historical production of the categories being invoked.
He described that position in a 2016 Religious Studies Project interview. Religious Studies, he said, should be “a more critical enterprise,” with scholars acting as “critics as opposed to caretakers” and treating religion as a human and social phenomenon rather than beginning with “the sacred” [2:50]. His target in Islam and the Tyranny of Authenticity was the interaction of identity politics and authenticity claims inside the academic study of Islam. His preferred comparison came from the classroom. Scholars routinely subjected the Hebrew Bible and New Testament to source criticism and redaction criticism, then reached Islam and repeated the traditional account of Muhammad receiving the Qur’an from Gabriel. Hughes thought the methodological asymmetry indefensible.
The same interview reveals something that becomes more important in retrospect. Hughes did not imagine criticism as the final state of the field. He described Islamic Religious Studies as a thesis and himself as “the antithesis,” adding, “I hope that there will be some kind of synthesis” [16:33]. He had already given the later career a conceptual place to go. The gadfly was performing one moment in an argument whose endpoint he expected to lie beyond gadflyhood.
That move became portable. Find a category that presents itself as ancient, stable or natural. Recover the circumstances under which people created it. Identify the work the category performs in the present. Refuse to let its beneficiaries supply the scholar’s vocabulary.
In Abrahamic Religions, Hughes attacked a modern taxonomy whose usefulness in interfaith relations had encouraged people to project it backward. Shared Identities: Medieval and Modern Imaginings of Judeo-Islam pushed the argument further. The Judaism and Islam that later historians imagined meeting each other as finished civilizations had emerged through unstable encounters. Hughes argued that later categories had been retrofitted onto a world of porous populations and uncertain boundaries. The Jewish-Muslim “golden age” also became an object of historical inquiry. Nineteenth-century Jewish scholars had reasons in their own European present for imagining Muslim Spain as a lost arena of tolerance and intellectual achievement. Their description of history had a history.
The title of a chapter in Shared Identities almost gives the mechanism away: “The Manufacture of Orthodoxy.” Saadya Gaon and other actors participated in defining what Judaism would become, using conceptual materials furnished partly by the surrounding Islamic world. Hughes’s Judaism and Islam come into focus through boundary drawing. Centers arise through relations with margins.
Yet the positive half of this mechanism appears earlier than the late books initially suggest. In his 2018 lecture, “The Study of Islam in an Age of Trump: Notes from the Field”, Hughes began with his own family. He told the story of his maternal grandfather, a Lebanese Muslim immigrant who became a fur trader in northern Canada before settling in Edmonton. Hughes said his grandfather supplied money for the establishment of Al Rashid Mosque, which opened in 1938. The family story served an analytical purpose. “Muslims are human,” Hughes said. “They have dreams. They fall in love. They care about their children, their businesses and their communities” [5:35]. Their agency, he continued, exceeds the narratives constructed around them.
This was already a different use of construction. Hughes still attacked categories imposed on Muslims, yet his grandfather appeared as more than evidence against stereotyping. People such as him, Hughes said, “helped to build Canada” and formed part of its national fabric [6:07]. The scholar who would later write Canadian Muslim history was already imagining Muslims as makers of Canada.
The 2018 lecture also clarifies Hughes’s relationship to Edward Said and the postcolonial tradition. He accepted the need to expose the ideological assumptions built into Western categories and argued that scholars should apply such criticism to the concepts they inherit. His objection concerned selective reflexivity. A scholar could expose Orientalist categories and then naturalize a new vocabulary of authentic, tolerant, egalitarian Islam. Hughes wanted the acid applied to both sets of categories.
His own family made the problem harder to reduce to slogans. “Muslim,” “Arab,” “Canadian,” “Jewish Studies professor” and “white male” could all be used to classify Hughes or the people around him, but the classifications repeatedly failed to capture actual biographies. His grandfather crossed religious, geographic and economic boundaries. His extended family mixed Muslims and non-Muslims. Hughes himself occupied Jewish Studies while working on Islam. The theory of overlapping and constructed identities was visible in his genealogy.
The same lecture contains a remarkable anticipation of the work he would undertake years later. During the question period Hughes asked why scholars were not writing dissertations on Lebanese farmers in Alberta or early Muslim politicians in Canada. He proposed “microhistory” and “local histories” of Muslim communities [1:02:09]. Then, discussing the possibility of researching the Lebanese Muslim history of Canada, he said, almost in passing, “Maybe I almost could do this myself” [1:01:07].
Years later, he did.
The football project is foreshadowed in the same discussion. Asked how public prejudice against Muslims might be reduced, Hughes suggested showing Muslims in ordinary life and wondered aloud about Muslim footballers in the English Premier League [1:22:49]. The later movement into football therefore looks less like an eccentric change of subject. The connection among sport, everyday life, Muslim identity and public belonging was already present.
The theoretical bridge becomes clearer in Hughes’s 2019 Religious Studies Project interview on Jonathan Z. Smith. Hughes calls Smith perhaps the most important theorist of religion of the previous half-century and praises him for refusing to treat religion as ontologically special. Smith’s comparison of religious and mundane things gave Hughes permission to move between objects that disciplinary boundaries normally kept apart. Hughes wanted scholars to preserve Smith’s “edge,” “wit” and “self reflexivity” rather than convert him into another safely cited name.
Near the end of that interview Hughes says Smith asks scholars “to rethink ourselves and rethink our own relationship to that which we study” [33:12]. That sentence becomes much more interesting beside Hughes’s later work. Reflexivity eventually has to reach the scholar doing the deflating. A method built to expose other people’s inheritances also asks what the scholar has inherited and why he chose this object rather than another.
By the 2021 “Jews and Muslims in the Academy” talk, Hughes was stating the generative side of construction. Academic fields, he said, “artificially structure what goes where,” and Jewish Studies and Islamic Studies construct their data through disciplinary boundaries. Yet the historical argument moved in the other direction. “Contact with Islam and Muslims gave Jews a new way to mine the depths of their tradition,” Hughes said. Islam “altered Judaism’s DNA.” Islam likewise emerged in an environment saturated with monotheistic categories associated with Judaism. The two traditions “have thought a lot about the other to think about themselves” [9:54–11:06].
Traditions in this account do more than encounter each other after their formation. Encounter participates in their formation.
That insight was already central to Shared Identities: Medieval and Modern Imaginings of Judeo-Islam, but the 2021 formulation helps locate the positive half of Hughes’s constructionism. Human construction creates differences, orthodoxies and exclusions. It also creates intellectual traditions capable of absorbing outside material and transmitting the result as inheritance.
An Anxious Inheritance: Religious Others and the Shaping of Sunnī Orthodoxy in 2022 represents a high point of the critical method. Its subject is Sunni orthodoxy, but its deeper subject is the production of the self through the production of others. Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Shiʿa and less stable categories of religious deviance become materials through which a Sunni center defines itself. Later writers project that center backward until the result appears to have existed from the beginning. Hughes’s treatment of the pre-Islamic jāhiliyya makes the mechanism especially visible. A loose category describing an imagined age before Islam becomes a means of sharpening Islamic boundaries afterward.
Yet Hughes was giving lectures in the same year that complicate any picture of 2022 as simple maximum deflation. In a 2022 lecture on divine-human communication, he opened with a proposition that could serve as a theory of cultural transmission: “The history of Judaism is the history of divine-human communication, and more importantly, the interpretation and reinterpretation of this communication throughout the generations” [0:37].
Interpretation and reinterpretation are doing the work of continuity.
His treatment of the destruction of the Temple makes the mechanism explicit. Judaism underwent a transformation “from a temple to a book” and from sacrifice, divination and prophecy to interpretation. “New means of divine communication thus had to be explored and ultimately developed” [8:31]. An institution disappeared. People created replacement practices. Those inventions became the inherited forms through which later Jews experienced continuity with the past.
The same lecture observes that even Jews who defined themselves against religious reform inevitably changed Judaism while attempting to preserve it. Preservation becomes one form of reconstruction. Hughes had spent years exposing retrospective claims of changeless tradition, but the historical material was teaching the complementary lesson. Traditions can remain recognizable because people keep modifying them.
His 2022 lecture on Jewish mysticism adds another mechanism. Hughes describes the Zohar as giving “the average Jew” a role in a divine drama. In Kabbalistic thought, ordinary acts performed in this world affect the divine world. The commandments acquire cosmic consequences. The individual can participate in repairing divine reality.
This helps explain why some constructions endure. A worldview that gives ordinary people consequential roles has an advantage over one that leaves ultimate significance to an intellectual elite. Hughes contrasts Maimonidean contemplation with a mystical system in which everyday practice participates in cosmic repair. A commandment is easier to transmit when the act connects household life, ancestry, community and the fate of the universe.
The late work therefore grows out of mechanisms already visible across the earlier scholarship: boundary formation, reinterpretation, practice, institutional reproduction, participation and memory.
The biographical emphasis becomes stronger in a 2024 interview. Hughes said his maternal grandparents came from Srifa in southern Lebanon and were Twelver Shiʿa. He described them as members of the pioneering Muslim families associated with Edmonton’s mosque. His mother was Lebanese Muslim, though religion played little role in his childhood home. His father was a Scottish Catholic from Glasgow. Hughes grew up secular, but his mother’s family gave him something he found provocative enough to pursue Arabic and Islamic Studies as a young man.
Approaching sixty, Hughes said he had “returned back to that question” of his mother’s family. He had completed a roughly 100,000-word history of Islam and Muslims in Canada. The Institute of Ismaili Studies had commissioned another history of Canada’s Ismaili community. “I am determined,” he said, “to write the history of Muslim presences in Canada.”
The wording sounds like a late turn until the 2018 lecture is restored to the chronology. Hughes had been wondering publicly why scholars ignored Lebanese Muslims in Alberta and saying that perhaps he could write the history himself. The later work is the commitment of years and books to a possibility he had already identified.
The change in self-description is more substantial. In the 2018 lecture, “The Study of Islam in an Age of Trump: Notes from the Field”, Hughes explicitly said, “I’m not Muslim” [52:38]. In a 2025 Sképsislamica conversation, he described Islam as “my own tradition” and spoke of it as the religion of his heritage. “The field’s changed. I’ve changed,” he said [9:07]. Later he added that he had become “more ecumenical” and somewhat more receptive to decolonial approaches when they produce arguments capable of critical examination [13:12].
That development should not be turned into a conversion story. Hughes remains a methodological naturalist and continues to insist that historians cannot treat God as a historical actor. What changes is his willingness to describe his relationship to the object of study in language of inheritance and attachment.
The same 2025 conversation shows how far the positive vocabulary has moved. Discussing Islamic origins, Hughes says the purpose of critical historical inquiry is “not to undermine Islam, far from it, but to show the ingenuity, the creativity of Islam” [30:13]. He calls Islam “a tradition in and of the West,” placing it inside the late-antique inheritance shared by Judaism and Christianity. Religious people, he says elsewhere in the conversation, are always “making up their social worlds, cobbling together all kinds of things” [31:26].
The verb remains “making.” The judgment attached to it has widened. Making a world can be ingenuity.
The younger Hughes remains present. In 2025 he contributed the epilogue to The Production and Consumption of Non-Muslim Islams, a project concerned with politicians, journalists, courts and other non-Muslim actors who participate in producing public versions of Islam. Hughes still asks who receives authority to manufacture a religion for other people.
The new work lies beside that criticism.
His “Early Muslim Summer Camps in Canada: Spaces of Identity Formation and Belonging” reconstructs camps that combined Qur’anic memorization and Islamic arts with canoeing, camp songs and other conventions of Canadian summer-camp culture. Their organizers deliberately produced Muslim and Canadian identities together. Children learned ways of inhabiting Islam inside a larger non-Muslim society.
This is Hughes’s old mechanism operating as an accomplishment. Adults choose a site, construct a schedule, select prayers, songs and stories, and decide what a Muslim Canadian childhood should contain. Years later the child remembers the lake, the counselor, the prayer before dinner and the song around the fire as pieces of personal memory. The institution succeeds when deliberate construction becomes biography.
Construction explains how the inheritance entered the world.
Somebody has to build the mosque. Somebody has to found the camp. Somebody has to teach the words.
The work on football pushes Hughes into the same territory. With Leif Stenberg he edited The Beautiful Game on a Muslim Pitch: How Football and Religion Shape Identities, which treats football as a window onto religion, politics, identity and social cohesion in Muslim societies. Hughes’s own The Football Paradox: Religion, Nationalism and Globalization, published in 2026, expands the comparison. Football generates nationalism, ritual, symbolic communities, political power and attachments capable of resembling religious belonging.
Football also reconnects Hughes to his father. In the same 2024 interview in which he discussed his mother’s Muslim ancestry, Hughes recalled learning from his father’s side that he was supposed to support Glasgow Celtic. One family line gave him a Muslim history. Another gave him Celtic. His late scholarship investigates both kinds of inherited belonging.
The book Hughes described in 2024 as Islam: A Canadian History is being published by the University of Toronto Press as Islam: A Canadian Story. The project reaches backward from contemporary Muslim Canada into the families, institutions and local communities through which a Muslim presence became part of Canadian history.
“Canadian Islam” is a construction. Canada is a construction. Islam as a bounded historical category is a construction. “Canadian Muslim” joins histories produced by different institutions and narratives of belonging. Hughes has spent his career teaching readers to ask how such categories came to exist.
Then his own family enters the archive.
His grandfather comes from Lebanon, moves through the Canadian north, establishes himself in Edmonton and, according to Hughes’s account, helps finance Al Rashid Mosque. His daughter grows up Muslim largely in name. His grandson grows up secular, studies Arabic, becomes a scholar of Islam and spends decades examining how religious identities are manufactured. In his late fifties that grandson returns to the Canadian Muslim archive and devotes books and articles to explaining how such lives became part of Canada.
No primordial essence is required for any of this to matter.
The mosque was built. That is why it can be inherited.
The identity was transmitted imperfectly. That is why its survival requires explanation.
The story was assembled by human beings. Human beings receive stories from other human beings.
The final development appears in Hughes’s response during a 2026 IAHR webinar on Rastafari scripturalization. The series asks how texts become formative, how they operate, who receives authority to interpret them and what purposes they serve. Hughes says the comparative project may reveal something about “human creativity and perseverance” [2:21].
That phrase brings much of the career together.
Later in the webinar he says that culturally central texts “do not simply fall from heaven” and are products of “human creativity” connected to social and political change [41:56]. The old Hughes occupies the first clause. Texts do not fall from heaven. The historian studies their human production. The later vocabulary arrives in the second. Human production is also creativity.
His questions about Rastafari make the additional mechanism explicit. Hughes is interested in “decentering, recentering and centering,” in authoritative texts emerging through relationships among older and newer texts, and in the possibility that such recombinations can subvert inherited structures. He asks whether culturally central texts generally can be decentered and recentered. Construction has become a cycle.
People inherit a center.
They move it.
They combine inherited material with new material.
They establish another center.
Later people inherit that one.
The trajectory therefore runs differently from the simple story of a deflator becoming interested in belonging. Hughes had already identified most of the later mechanisms years earlier. In 2015 he called himself the antithesis and hoped for a synthesis. By 2018 his grandfather, Canadian Muslim history, local microhistory and even football were already present as possible objects of inquiry. In 2019 Jonathan Z. Smith supplied a methodological demand for reflexivity. In 2021 Hughes emphasized traditions making themselves through encounters with other traditions. In 2022 he described Judaism surviving through repeated reinterpretation and Kabbalah giving ordinary people a consequential place inside a cosmic drama. By 2025 and 2026 these dispersed interests had become sustained projects.
The change concerns allocation as much as theory. Hughes began spending more of his finite scholarly attention on the generative consequences of the mechanisms he had spent decades exposing.
There is a difference between demonstrating that a boundary was made and explaining what happens after people live inside it. There is a difference between tracing the invention of a tradition and explaining its transmission. There is a difference between discovering that an identity has a history and writing the history through which descendants can understand what they inherited.
Hughes spent decades showing that communities mistake products of history for things given before history. His later work adds another possibility. Becoming an inheritance is one of the things historical constructions can do.
The summer camp can be deliberately designed and still give a child a Muslim childhood. Celtic allegiance can descend through a Scottish father while being sustained by the rituals and mythology of modern sport. A mosque can arise from contingent decisions in Depression-era Edmonton and become part of Canadian religious history. A secular grandson can return decades later to a Muslim family story and decide that its transmission deserves a historian.
The critical instrument remains. People project the present backward. Institutions conceal their histories. Authorities naturalize categories. Scholars sometimes convert political hopes into historical conclusions. Hughes continues to attack all of that.
His later work follows the construction farther.
You reconstruct what people built.
You ask why anyone wanted it.
You watch it acquire users its builders never imagined.
You follow it through institutions, rituals, children and descendants.
Eventually something produced under contingent circumstances becomes material from which another person builds a life.
That may be the synthesis Hughes hoped for in 2015. Religions are made. Nations are made. Communities are made. Traditions are made. Their made character opens the historical question of how some constructions disappear with their makers while others become inheritances.
The strongest late Hughes question is no longer who invented the tradition.
It is why one invention survives long enough for a grandson to inherit it.
‘Religious Studies as a Discipline with Aaron Hughes’ (March 1, 2016)
The interview was recorded at the 2015 AAR meeting. It catches him just after Islam and the Tyranny of Authenticity, when he understands his role almost entirely as critic, gadfly and disciplinary irritant.
The contrast with 2025-26 is substantial. The method barely changes. The emotional register and the range of questions do.
Hughes: “I think Religious Studies should be a more critical enterprise, one where we see ourselves as critics as opposed to caretakers, where we look at religion as a human and social phenomenon rather than talking about ‘the sacred.’” [2:42-3:13]
“Critics as opposed to caretakers” explains why he repeatedly clashes with scholars who believe their work carries obligations toward the communities they study. Hughes thinks the scholar’s institutional role differs from pastoral care, advocacy and interfaith diplomacy.
He explicitly connects that orientation to Islam and the Tyranny of Authenticity. He describes the book’s target as “the identity politics” and “rhetoric of authenticity” that he believes “undermine the academic study of Islam.” [3:22-4:04]
This helps date the polemical phase. By 2015, authenticity has become one of the master concepts he wants to attack. His objection to moralized research standards is epistemological as much as political.
Discussing an AAR statement calling on scholars to “promote good” and “avoid harm,” Hughes asks: “Who gets to decide what’s good scholarship? Who gets to decide what’s avoiding harm?” [5:29-5:54]
Hughes worries that professional-association standards can filter downward into program reviews, tenure decisions and other forms of academic evaluation. [6:02-7:06]
Then comes a central sentence: “We don’t just operate in vacuums as disembodied scholars in the ivory tower. All our concepts and our genealogies come from places, and they have real repercussions.” [7:06-7:35]
This is Hughes applying constructionism to the academy itself. Scholarly concepts have histories, constituencies and consequences.
His Qur’an example gives the method in concrete form. “When we just repeat back that Muhammad received the Qur’an from the Archangel Gabriel without looking at the historical consequences of how a text comes to be, we’re just kidding ourselves.” [7:28-7:50]
He explains that when teaching Judaism and Christianity he would introduce source criticism and redaction criticism, then encounter textbooks that suddenly reverted to the traditional revelation narrative when they reached Islam.
Hughes draws a distinction between “Islamic Studies” and what he calls “Islamic religious studies.”
He says critical scholarship exists, particularly among scholars working outside the Religious Studies setting, while work inside the latter can be dismissed as “Orientalist” or “Islamophobic” when it subjects Islamic origins to historical criticism. [8:31-9:27]
He identifies September 11 as the turning point. “Everything hinges on 9/11.” [9:51-10:17] Then he describes what he thinks happened afterward: “The scholar of Islam had to explain Muslims to Americans. The only way they wanted to do that was to use this rhetoric of, ‘This is what a real Muslim believes.’” [10:09-10:34]
He says the distinction became one between the “good Muslim,” compatible with liberal democracy, and the violent actor deemed an inauthentic or fake Muslim. “We can’t believe that the Qur’an just fell from heaven, so what is some of the critical work being done to show the various sources? Where did the text come from?” [12:12-12:37]
But he immediately says he juxtaposes that critical scholarship with Muslim accounts.
He wants both accounts visible, with the scholar supplying an analytic framework.
Jacob Neusner appears here as something more than a biographical subject. Hughes calls him a paradigm.
“Jacob Neusner is an insider, a quintessential insider. But then someone who had a real problem with the way Judaism was taught and said, ‘I can be a Jew and I can be critical of this stuff.’” [14:54-15:35]
Hughes admires Neusner because he demonstrates that insider status need not entail apologetics.
And in light of Hughes’s later description of Islam as “my own tradition,” Neusner becomes a model for Hughes.
Hughes describes how he thought the field saw him. “Now I think a lot of people know me in the field as either someone who is a critic or a gadfly.” [16:08-16:33]
Then he supplies his preferred Hegelian description: “In Islamic religious studies we have a thesis. I’m providing the antithesis, and I hope that there will be some kind of synthesis.” [16:24-16:49]
Hughes did not see critique as the final product. He understood himself as supplying an antithesis that might eventually permit synthesis.
He says younger scholars were already responding. “I get a lot of emails every time I write something from young graduate students, both Muslim and non-Muslim, saying, ‘Thank you for doing this, for showing us that there’s a different way to do it.’” [16:42-17:06]
This supports his self-conception as someone trying to create intellectual permission for a younger generation.
His institutional sociology becomes much harsher immediately afterward.
“When the apologists call the shots, they’re the ones who do the blind peer reviews. They’re the people who read tenure files. Fields are inherently conservative.” [16:57-17:29]
He is making a structural argument about peer review, tenure and disciplinary reproduction.
Then comes a very revealing autobiographical admission: “Because I also work in Jewish Studies, and my chair is a chair in Jewish Studies, I’m afforded protection. I don’t have to worry about this.” [17:06-17:37]
Hughes believed his institutional location in Jewish Studies gave him latitude to criticize Islamic Religious Studies that a scholar dependent on that field for promotion might lack.
When asked whom he is trying to persuade, Hughes says: “My audience is in part the people I criticize, but I’m not going to convince them.” [20:04-20:29]
His larger target is the “crypto-theologizing” he believes exists within the American Academy of Religion.
This tells us the books are interventions addressed partly to future scholars and adjacent critical theorists.
Asked whether his style can be too biting, Hughes says: “Sometimes it is, but sometimes that’s how you get people to listen. If not, they just don’t pay attention.” [24:57-25:22]
“When scholarship is only skin deep, you’re always going to draw a little bit of blood.” [26:45-27:17]
The interviewer has just observed that if Hughes argues scholars insert their identities into their scholarship, criticism of the scholarship inevitably touches the person.
This is Hughes accepting the consequence.
Hughes insists that his criticism is symmetrical.
“I’m no less charitable with the study of Judaism than I am with the study of Islam. I’m an equal-opportunity critic.” [27:49-28:11]
Then he complains that critics reduce him to the fact that he holds a chair in Jewish Studies, treating that institutional identity as coded evidence against his arguments.
His historical comparison between Jewish Studies and Islamic Studies is provocative: “I think Islamic Studies today is where Jewish Studies was in 1800 at its formation.” [28:19-28:43]
He argues early Jewish scholarship had an apologetic political purpose, demonstrating Jewish historical depth in support of emancipation, and thinks something analogous is happening with Islamic scholarship after 9/11.
Asked whether the 1990s looked the same, Hughes says he does not think the normative tendency was as strong then. He describes post-9/11 Islamic Religious Studies as perhaps undergoing “a hiccup in its growth.” [29:16-30:19]
“As Neusner would always say about his critics, if you don’t agree with me, write a better book.” [30:19-30:45]
In 2015 Hughes calls himself the antithesis.
In 2015 Neusner is Hughes’s exemplary insider-critic: “I can be a Jew and I can be critical of this stuff.”
A decade later Hughes can describe Islam as “my own tradition” while continuing to subject it to historical criticism.
The model he admired in Neusner may have become autobiographical.
‘The Study of Islam in an Age of Trump: Notes from the Field’ (Mar. 21, 2018)
By 2017 Hughes was already using his maternal Muslim family as an analytical object, telling the story of his grandfather and Al Rashid Mosque, asking why nobody had written microhistories of Lebanese Muslims in Alberta, and even suggesting that he might do the work himself.
Hughes tells a long migration story beginning with a young Lebanese Muslim who eventually became a successful fur trader in northern Canada and then moved to Edmonton. Hughes identifies the man as “my grandfather.”
He says his grandfather, after becoming a successful Arab businessman in Edmonton, “supplied the money to create Canada’s first mosque, Masjid Al Rashid,” which opened December 12, 1938.
His reason for telling the family story is explicitly analytical. He says he is not establishing “Abrahamic bona fides.” His purpose is to remind the audience that “Muslims are human. They have dreams. They fall in love. They care about their children, their businesses and their communities.” [5:20-5:51]
Then: “Their agency is independent of the narratives we construct about them and around them.” [5:51-6:07]
Hughes says people such as his grandfather “helped to build Canada” and “form an intricate part of Canada’s national fabric.” [6:07-6:29]
That language anticipates the Canadian-history project almost exactly.
Hughes says social groups require others against whom they construct themselves and their imagined values. Identities remain fluid as groups “imagine and reimagine, define and redefine themselves” through encounters. [7:42-8:39]
This strengthens our 2021 finding. Generative construction was present well before the late period.
People do not merely fabricate labels. They become who they are through contact.
His target is symmetrical essentialism.
Hughes argues that hostile political rhetoric and well-meaning academic advocacy can converge because both demand that Muslims perform recognizable Muslim identities. [16:43-17:46]
Then comes one of his strongest formulations: “We manufacture this tradition in our Western universities, disseminate it in our writings, and act surprised when our politicians pick away at certain threads.” [17:56-18:21]
He says the deeper problem is categorical coercion.
Hughes argues that people often live with overlapping identities and ambiguity while scholars demand adherence to categories “that we have invented and then assumed to be natural markers.” [18:21-19:15]
That line bears directly on his own identity. Muslim ancestry, secular upbringing, Jewish Studies chair, Islamic Studies scholarship, Canadian nationality and Scottish paternal inheritance do not need to resolve themselves into a single category.
His treatment of Shahab Ahmed shows that he was already attracted to a richer conception of Muslim life. Hughes praises the move in What Is Islam? away from defining Islam solely through legal correctness. He stresses the “complex and often contradictory ways in which Muslims make sense of their worlds” and appreciates Ahmed’s effort to suspend inherited definitions of Islam.
Hughes wants to restore agency and complexity to actual human actors.
His position toward Edward Said is much more nuanced than “anti-decolonial.”
Hughes says he has “no problem” with exposing ideological assumptions behind Western categories and “actively encourage[s] such forms of analysis.” He says scholars have an obligation to interrogate the ideologies of their fields.
Hughes says Daniel Pipes offered to pay his expenses and a “really handsome honorarium” for him to attend selected MESA panels and write about them, presumably in a direction useful to Pipes’s organization. [24:06-24:54]
Hughes interprets the offer as evidence that right-wing political actors noticed his criticism of Islamic Studies and assumed “the enemy of my enemy” principle made him an ally.
This is excellent evidence that Hughes resisted appropriation from the anti-Islam right long before his 2025 comments about Islamophobes using his work.
The job interview story is one of the most important biographical discoveries in this entire search.
Hughes says that in the summer before this lecture he interviewed for “a chair in Jewish Studies at a major university in the United States.” His job talk concerned Jews Muhammad might have encountered.
A prospective Islamic Studies colleague challenged his willingness to question later Islamic narrative sources. Another prospective colleague, whom Hughes says was a convert to Islam, told him radiocarbon dating proved the traditional dating of the Qur’an. Hughes says his methodological objections “fell on deaf ears.”
Then the interview became personal.
Hughes says another colleague wrote the search committee and dean saying that his talk had “insulted her as a Muslim woman” and accusing him of a “Zionist and/or neoconservative agenda.” [38:16-38:42]
He says sometimes on the academic job market “you just know,” and his reaction was effectively that even if he got this job, “I’m not gonna go.” [38:42-38:58]
The incident triggers reflexivity about his own identity.
Hughes complains that the other scholar’s identity was treated as complex while he became “just the white guy,” then “the white male Jew.” [38:58-39:29]
After recounting a story about religious apologetics, Hughes says: “I worry that we’re heading in a direction where truth is the first casualty.” [45:05-45:28]
Then he asks why critically examining early Islamic sources should count as tendentious or “contrarian.”
Hughes argues that studying Islamic origins reveals a fluid late-antique world in which Islam participates in the formation of neighboring orthodoxies. Islam emerges as a catalyst inside that environment.
And he says this approach “situates Islam smack dab in the middle of the so-called West.”
That anticipates almost word for word his 2025 line that Islam is “a tradition in and of the West.”
“The critical and analytical study of Islam benefits us all.” Hughes says it shows Muslim and non-Muslim audiences “the heights to which historical actors have imagined their tradition” and demonstrates that Islam is an intricate part of Western civilization. [51:24-51:49]
He also concedes that Islamic Studies should affect public life. “The study of Islam has the potential to take an active role in shaping popular opinion of Islam,” but should avoid simplistic apologetic responses to hostile rhetoric. [51:49-52:30]
The Q&A contains the largest surprise. Asked about disciplinary structures, Hughes wonders why scholars are not writing dissertations on Lebanese farmers in Alberta or on his uncle, whom he describes as one of the first Muslim politicians in North America.
Then: “Why aren’t we” doing localized studies of early Muslim communities? He mentions early mosques and Lebanese communities in Alberta and recommends “microhistory” and “local histories.” [1:01:55-1:02:47]
He says of researching Lebanese Muslim Canada: “Maybe I almost could do this myself.” [1:01:07-1:01:23]
“Let’s do microhistory or local histories.” [1:02:09-1:02:25]
When asked how to combat prejudice among young people, Hughes says one answer may be to show Muslims “in their everyday lives.” He suggests popular culture and then asks how many Muslim footballers there are in the English Premier League. [1:22:41-1:23:12]
That is nine years before The Football Paradox.
‘2021 Lowe Family Conference — Jews and Muslims in the Academy’ (Nov. 1, 2021)
In 2021, he is still highly critical of the academy. Identity politics, disciplinary boundaries and interfaith agendas are all distorting the objects scholars claim to study. But when Hughes turns from the academy to actual Jewish-Muslim history, construction stops looking merely corrosive. Judaism and Islam make one another. Borrowing becomes transformation. Contact produces new religious possibilities. That anticipates the later Hughes.
“In the academy, whenever Jewish and Muslim colleagues get together, there is inevitably an elephant in the room, and that elephant is Israel.” [6:05-6:22]
He continues that Israel and everything it is perceived to stand “for or against” remains in the background and periodically rises to the surface.
Hughes says identity increasingly governs scholarly specialization.
“We increasingly occupy an academy where identity politics tends to reign supreme.” [7:17-7:32]
He observes the familiar pattern of Jewish scholars studying Judaism and Muslim scholars studying Islam. His concern is that personal identity, disciplinary organization and the object of study increasingly line up.
That belongs with The Tyranny of Authenticity.
He gives a concise warning against making individuals representatives of entire peoples. “‘Saul, tell us what the Jews think,’ or ‘Ahmed, how come Muslims always insist on doing X, Y or Z?’ Such generalizations get us nowhere and do more harm than good.” [8:11-8:35]
His anti-essentialism protects individuals from being reduced to identities as much as it attacks identity claims.
“Our academic fields and subfields artificially structure what goes where.” [8:43-8:58]
That is Hughes applying his constructionist instrument recursively. Judaism and Islam are historically entangled. Jewish Studies and Islamic Studies divide them institutionally. The academic taxonomy begins determining what scholars can see.
He then makes the recursion explicit. “We have to pay attention to the ways the fields of Jewish Studies and Islamic Studies construct their data.” [9:23-9:39]
Religions construct identities. Scholars construct religions as objects. Departments construct the scholarly fields that decide which constructions become visible.
Here is where the positive Hughes starts appearing. “Contact with Islam and Muslims gave Jews a new way to mine the depths of their tradition.” [9:54-10:10]
This is already moving beyond debunking. Encounter generates intellectual capacity.
Then comes the strongest historical formulation in the talk: “Islam, and to some extent Judaism’s encounter with Islam, altered Judaism’s DNA. Judaism quite literally would not be what it is today without this contact.” [10:25-10:42]
Notice how different the verb is from “borrowed.” Contact transforms a tradition from inside. The result becomes Judaism. Once enough generations have inherited the transformation, separating original material from borrowed material ceases to tell us very much about the lived tradition.
And he immediately makes the relationship reciprocal. “Islam would not be what it is today if it had not emerged from an environment saturated with monotheistic categories supplied by Judaism, categories like creation, revelation and redemption.” [10:34-10:50]
Traditions do not merely interact after becoming finished objects. Interaction helps produce the objects.
He supplies the theoretical formulation immediately afterward. “These are two traditions that have thought a lot about the other to think about themselves, and vice versa.” [10:50-11:06]
Hughes then turns the same instrument on nineteenth-century Jewish scholarship. “Jewish scholars were very much interested in Islam as a way to better understand themselves, Judaism and Jewish history.” [12:04-12:21]
He adds that their constructions of Islam were inevitably filtered through positive and negative needs that suited their frameworks.
This is quintessential Hughes. A description of the other becomes evidence about the describer.
“Those of us who work in medieval Judaism, at least on the Sephardic side, continue to learn the languages, cultures and histories of medieval Islam. Those working in medieval Islam are unfortunately rarely, if ever, interested in the Jewish communities who lived under Islam’s orbit.” [12:45-13:09]
He complains that Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic are rarely regarded as languages of Islamic Studies. He then states the consequence: “We need the study of Muslims to enrich our understanding of certain aspects of Judaism. We also need Jews to enrich our understanding of medieval, and I might even add modern, Islam.” [13:27-13:42]
Hughes is describing reciprocal enrichment. The critical study adds dimensions that become invisible when communities are studied separately.
Then he diagnoses why the potentially natural scholarly partnership fails. “Identity politics, criticism of Orientalism, Israel and the larger conflict in the Middle East, and a growing disinterest in textual traditions have all worked to create a barren terrain between the two scholarly traditions.” [14:14-14:47]
“Instead of engaging in historical and text-critical work on the intersections between Jews and Muslims, Judaism and Islam, we see interfaith dialogue. Indeed, the very manufacture of a category, so-called ‘Abrahamic religions,’ is an attempt to do precisely this, something that often emphasizes platitudes at the expense of actual interactions.” [14:39-15:05]
“Abrahamic religions” creates affinity from above. Hughes wants the messy history from below. The interfaith category says Jews and Muslims share Abraham. Hughes says show me who read whom, borrowed which concept, translated which text, argued with whom, lived under whose government and changed which doctrine.
“Very few people working in Islamic Studies, unless they happen to be Jewish, are interested in Jewish poets or thinkers.” [15:42-15:57]
He then asks why Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian and Hebrew are not treated as languages of Islamic Studies.
By 2021 Hughes already has two constructions in his intellectual vocabulary. One is suspicious construction. Scholars manufacture “Abrahamic religions.” Departments manufacture disciplinary boundaries. Nineteenth-century Jewish scholars manufacture versions of Islam that answer Jewish needs. Identity politics manufactures authorized relationships between scholar and subject. The other is generative construction. Muslims change Judaism. Jews participate in the conceptual environment from which Islam develops. Traditions “think about the other to think about themselves.” Contact alters Judaism’s “DNA.” Religious traditions become what they are through recombination.
That second Hughes is already very close to the man who later studies Muslim summer camps producing Canadian Muslims.
‘The Concept of Divine-Human Communication in Judaism’ (Oct. 14, 2022)
This is Hughes at his maximum-deflation phase. The lecture exposes his machinery. Religion is made and remade by human actors. Claims about God have to be studied through the people who make them. Political and social contexts alter what revelation means. Comparison reveals contingent patterns. Judaism survives because people repeatedly invent new channels through which an inherited relationship can continue.
His governing thesis: “The history of Judaism is the history of divine-human communication, and more importantly, the interpretation and reinterpretation of this communication throughout the generations.” [0:37-1:24]
“Interpretation and reinterpretation throughout the generations” is already an account of inheritance through reconstruction. Continuity exists because every generation changes the means by which continuity is expressed.
Hughes describes an enormous historical transformation in one sentence: “The idea of this communication has remained central over the millennia, but it has also witnessed massive recalibrations, from animal sacrifice in ancient Israel to intellectual conjunction in medieval philosophy to contemporary religious Zionism.” [0:37-1:15]
His starting account of Judaism stresses practice. “Judaism is often referred to as an orthoprax religion. It is predicated more on performance and less on belief. That’s not to say belief is unimportant.” [1:55-2:19]
He then gives the reciprocal model: “God communicates to humans through revelation of the commandments, and humans in turn communicate with God through their performance of those commandments.” [2:19-2:35]
Religion survives through things people repeatedly do.
“Because ‘Jew’ can be constructed as both a religious and ethnic signifier, such particularism, at least in certain circles, can give way to xenophobia predicated on the religious language of this communication.” [2:53-3:16]
A category becomes socially powerful because it moves between religion, ethnicity, peoplehood and political identity.
Here is the epistemological rule behind almost everything he does: “There is no way to prove that such communication has ever existed. All we possess are subsequent textual accounts written by one side of the relationship. Humans are telling us what they say to God. God’s not telling us what he says to them.” [4:11-4:36]
“We must attune ourselves to the political and ideological implications of what it means for a religious actor to lay claim to such communication.” [4:36-4:53]
Then: “Claims of divine-human contact have created some of the wonderful works of the three religious traditions, but they have also been used to justify and legitimate sexism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia and a host of other phobias.” [4:44-5:12]
His formulation of his own method: “The focus of my presentation will be on the human side of divine-human communication. Since we have no way of ascertaining either the existence of God, let alone establishing God as a historical actor, attention must instead be firmly placed on human actors.” [5:12-5:35]
He adds that those actors are products of “real historical, social, political, legal and economic contexts.” [5:27-5:49]
One example of construction becoming inheritance comes with the destruction of the Temple. “We now witness, certainly not overnight, the transformation of Judaism from a temple to a book, and from sacrifice, divination and prophecy to the interpretation of that book. New means of divine communication thus had to be explored and ultimately developed.” [8:31-9:01]
The Talmudic example gives Hughes an even more radical version. After recounting the famous Bava Metzia 59b episode, he says: “God’s voice is neither more important nor more central to the conversation than that of the rabbis. God’s voice and those of the rabbis are on equal footing with one another.” [11:32-11:55]
Then: “The key to understanding the divine will is not through miracles, prophecy or a divine voice, but through established processes of Jewish legal reasoning and proper interpretation.” [11:55-12:19]
This is an example of an institution manufacturing authority while narrating that authority as fidelity to revelation.
But it is also generative. Interpretation keeps the communication alive after prophecy is gone.
He gets a laugh out of his own failed terminological crusade. “I’ve always put ‘Abrahamic’ in quotation marks because I wrote a book about Abrahamic religions where I tried to show it was a rather dubious interfaith category and not of much analytic rigor. It didn’t win the day. We still use ‘Abrahamic.’ I tried.” [12:34-12:56]
Constructed categories can be analytically weak and socially durable.
The modern-period section contains another striking example of traditions adapting while denying adaptation. “The rise of the modern European nation-state brought massive changes to Judaism, transforming it from a way of life into a religion according to the Western, namely Protestant, model.” [23:08-23:31]
Then, discussing Orthodox reaction to Reform: “Even those who styled themselves as traditional or observant inevitably changed parts of Judaism.” [25:51-26:21]
There is one phrase in the Orthodox section that helps explain how inheritance feels from inside: “Such performance not only connects Orthodox Jews to God, but also to his or her ancestors, namely the entire Jewish people.” [27:16-27:39]
Hughes acknowledges what practices do for practitioners. Repetition creates intergenerational belonging.
His religious-Zionism section shows the dark side of inheritance and sacred claims. He describes a theology in which Jews become uniquely privileged recipients of divine communication and says: “In this vision it was quite easy to cast non-Jews, read Arabs, as a pollutant on the land, one that must be removed by any means possible, from expulsion to murder.” [29:40-30:23]
He qualifies the claim immediately: “This vision is by no means shared by all Zionists, especially secular political Zionists.” [30:14-30:31]
“Critical religion seeks to show how the category ‘religion’ is always interconnected with and brought into existence through other categories such as the social, the political or ideology.” [31:15-31:40]
His warning about sacred authority is broader than Zionism. “The concept of divine communication can be used to justify or legitimate any number of claims that we might call political.” [31:32-31:56]
Then: “Divine-human communication can be manipulated in all sorts of ways, from the high-minded to what we might call the nefarious or the low-minded.” [32:05-32:21]
“The three traditions need to be examined in counterpoint with one another. To examine only one makes features appear unique or idiosyncratic. The moment we put them in counterpoint, we begin to see patterns emerge.” [32:59-33:23]
Then he gives the Smithian conclusion: “We can only do this by appreciating each tradition in its own historical and social context. Similarities are not essential. They are contingent.” [33:23-33:44]
The constructive or generative Hughes is clearly present by 2022. He says the history of Judaism consists of continuing reinterpretation. Temple religion becomes textual religion. Prophecy gives way to interpretation. Reform reconstructs Judaism for modern Europe. Orthodoxy reconstructs Judaism while describing itself as preserving the eternal tradition. Practice connects people with ancestors.
Hughes did not suddenly discover that constructions can survive. He had spent years explaining exactly how they survive. What seems new after 2022 is where he stands in relation to the process. He moves from analyzing how other communities inherit constructed worlds toward investigating how a world connected to his own family became inheritable.
‘The Concept of Mysticism in Judaism’ (Oct. 14, 2022)
Mystical traditions intensify features already present in a religion. For Hughes, Jewish mysticism magnifies particularism, ritual obligation, language, male privilege and peoplehood.
He begins by locating himself outside the specialist guild. “I’ll always come at Jewish mystical traditions through other aspects, such as philosophy or the critical study of religion.” [1:08-1:25]
He is approaching Jewish mysticism as a theorist and comparativist.
His account of “world religions” is pure Hughes. “The term ‘world religions’ is only a nineteenth-century invention. Judaism is many things, but a world religion it ain’t.” [1:33-2:05]
Then comes the better theoretical line: “Judaism was elevated to the ranks of world religions because both Christianity and Islam needed it in that rubric to make sense of themselves.” [2:05-2:20]
He sharply distinguishes Judaism from Christianity and Islam.
“Christianity and Islam are universal traditions. Judaism is many things, but universal it isn’t.” [2:13-2:43]
Judaism contains a persistent tension between universal and particular elements. That tension becomes the organizing principle for the lecture.
Hughes emphasizes the double character of “Jew.”
“A Jew is both a religious individual and a marker of ethnicity. One can be a devout religious Jew or one can be a Jew and not practice religion at all, a secular or atheistic Jew.” [3:20-4:16]
“Jew” resists the tidy religious categories imposed by the modern academy because it can designate religion, peoplehood, ancestry and ethnicity at once.
“Mysticism takes central themes of the religion and intensifies them.” [4:33-4:56]
He says, “I like that concept,” and then applies it to circumcision, Hebrew, God and the commandments.
This gives us a way to understand Hughes’s method: extreme or intensified forms often expose structures that remain less visible in ordinary versions of a tradition.
Hughes’s characterization of Jewish mysticism is severe. “The mystical dimension is perhaps the most particularistic. It’s Judaism at its most insular, at its most xenophobic and at its most misogynist.” [5:12-5:43]
He insists that Jewish mysticism is fundamentally about practice. “Jewish mysticism focuses a lot on the performance of the commandments. An Orthodox religious Jew’s life is spent in and with the commandments, so action becomes more important than belief.” [6:05-6:52]
“If Maimonides represents Judaism at its most universal, the Zohar represents Judaism at its most particular.” [10:09-10:32]
Then:
“The Zohar gives a new paradigm. It involves the average Jew in a divine drama.” [10:49-11:14]
Hughes is describing why one construction outcompetes another at the level of lived participation. Maimonidean metaphysics demands intellectual elites. Kabbalah gives ordinary people a role in cosmic history.
He goes further: “The Zohar opens up a different world for the average Jew who doesn’t read Aristotle.” [11:51-12:22]
A worldview survives partly because it gives ordinary participants something consequential to do.
Hughes calls Jewish mysticism “a Jewish paradigm as opposed to a non-Jewish paradigm.” [12:29-12:52]
That is his way of explaining Kabbalah’s appeal against philosophical Judaism. Philosophy had been heavily mediated through Greek and Muslim intellectual traditions. Kabbalah could present itself as more internally Jewish.
“According to the Zohar and later kabbalistic texts, non-Jewish souls come from the sitra, the ‘other side.’ There is this distinction between Jewish souls and non-Jewish souls.” [13:13-13:40]
The Hebrew-language section gives another powerful example of making a social boundary sacred. “In Jewish mysticism, language is paramount. Hebrew is a sacred language. It’s the language that God used, not just metaphorically but literally, to create the world.” [13:48-14:28]
A contingent historical language becomes embedded in a cosmology that makes it constitutive of reality.
He then describes the extreme male particularism of some kabbalistic systems. “There’s this relationship between the circumcised male and access to the secrets of the Hebrew language, which in turn reveal the building blocks of creation.” [15:44-16:28]
“The average Jew here and now has a role to play in repairing God. Every action that one does in this world has a bearing on that world.” [17:51-18:25]
Religious action becomes compelling because ordinary behavior acquires cosmic significance.
“The average Jew according to Kabbalah is involved in this cosmic drama in which he or she is able to repair the divine world through their actions down here.” [19:20-19:54]
Why do constructed religious systems become durable? Because they can make ordinary action matter immensely.
The commandments therefore acquire a second-order justification. “One performs the commandments not simply for the sake of performing the commandments, but for the sake of repairing the divine world.” [19:54-20:19]
A practice may begin as inherited obligation. A later interpretive system supplies a cosmic theory explaining why the practice matters.
“Mystical traditions intensify things that are already in the tradition, and I think we completely see this in Judaism.” [20:27-20:51]
He then lists particularism and male-centeredness among the features being intensified.
Radical movements often reveal the latent architecture of moderate ones by intensifying existing commitments.
He says that when Hasidic Jews ask him in New York whether he is Jewish, his joke response is: “I’m not, but my mom is.” [21:32-21:56]
“If you say, ‘No, I’m not Jewish,’ they’ll say, ‘Thank you, have a good day.’ If you say, ‘I’m Jewish,’ they’ll say, ‘Have you put on tefillin today?’” [21:56-22:28]
“By getting a secular Jew to put on tefillin, they’re trying to right the world. They’re trying to get that person to be part of this cosmic drama.” [22:28-22:51]
His final formulation: “According to the Jewish mystical tradition, the average Jew has a major role to play in messianic redemption.” [22:51-23:15]
A system becomes durable when it places the individual inside a consequential story.
The commandment is no longer an arbitrary inherited rule. It repairs God.
The Hebrew language becomes more than inherited speech. It contains the architecture of creation.
Jewish peoplehood becomes more than ancestry. It confers a role in cosmic redemption.
That gives us another mechanism to add alongside institutions, childhood socialization, ritual and memory: cosmic consequentiality.
People are more likely to inhabit a world when the world tells them that their ordinary acts matter beyond themselves.
That also helps explain why Hughes’s later interest in football makes sense. Football likewise takes ordinary embodied acts, places them inside inherited symbols and stories, and gives individuals a role in something much larger than themselves.
The comparison would have delighted Jonathan Z. Smith.
‘The Politics Behind Islamic Origins | A Conversation with Prof. Aaron W. Hughes’ (April 10, 2025)
Hughes: “My maternal grandparents were, from what I can tell, the first two Shia immigrants to Canada in the 1920s. They were fur traders up in the Canadian Arctic, and they were one of the pioneering Muslim families responsible for the first mosque built in Edmonton in 1938, which is my hometown. So I kind of grew up in the shadow of that mosque.” [4:17-4:47]
He explicitly calls Islam his own tradition.
“I love the tradition, not only because it’s my own tradition, but also because I think it’s important to study.” [5:26-5:41]
He gives an excellent explanation for why intimacy produced criticism instead of apologetics. “Because I had a certain familiarity with Islam, I didn’t feel like I had to treat it with kid gloves the way I think a lot of people do. I was interested in critical questions like identity formation, boundary maintenance, and what happens when religions cross cultures.” [5:41-6:05]
His account reverses the usual assumption that personal proximity produces greater protectiveness. He says familiarity freed him to be rougher with the object.
September 11 was almost absurdly well timed as a formative event.
“My very first week on the job as a young assistant professor was the week of September 11th, 2001. It was crazy. It was difficult. I think it really left a mark on me and so many of my generation on what it meant to study Islam and what it meant to study religion.” [6:18-6:51]
Hughes’s professional identity formed exactly when American public discourse demanded that scholars say what Islam “really” was.
His reaction to post-9/11 essentialism: “After September 11th, a lot of people began to say Islam is X, Islam is Y, Islam is Z. I was like, Islam is X, Y and Z and A, B, C, D, E and F and all kinds of things. How can we simply lock it into one thing?” [7:11-7:34]
“The field’s changed. I’ve changed.” [9:07-9:25]
He later tells us what the change consists of: “I’ve changed. I’ve gotten older. I’m more ecumenical. I really want to see what some of these approaches to the study of Islam look like. I need to see a good decolonial approach.” [13:12-13:37]
The younger man who mocked or distrusted some of this vocabulary now wants to see whether it can produce scholarship he respects.
His position on decolonization has become conditional openness. “I think we have to be careful that we don’t silo ourselves off even further. I’m all for seeing what a decolonial approach to the study of Islam would look like, but it has to be articulated in non-jargony language that those of us who don’t necessarily buy into it can argue with, digest and struggle with. I’m a little more sympathetic than I was, but it has to be done properly, and I don’t think I’ve yet seen it done properly.” [58:18-58:57]
“Religious people are always making up their social worlds, cobbling together all kinds of things.” [31:26-31:43]
This is pure constructionism, but “making up their social worlds” can be read as creation as easily as exposure. People cobble worlds together. Then they live in them. Their children inherit them. That sentence could become the hinge between early and late Hughes.
He explicitly resists the inference that historical construction diminishes Islam. “What’s Islam emerging from? To me, that is the most interesting question. And not to undermine Islam, far from it, but to show the ingenuity, the creativity of Islam.” [30:13-30:46]
Borrowing, recombination and historical emergence become evidence of creativity.
His Late Antiquity argument likewise has a positive political meaning for him. “Islam is a tradition in and of the West that has been in conversation with Christians and Jews ever since its beginning. It’s part of this late antique heritage that we’ve all inherited.” [28:20-28:53]
“Some Islamophobes have picked up my work because I’m critical of some people who study Islam. You have to look through all my work, and I don’t think you’d ever find anything in which I’m critical of Islam or Muslims. I’ve been critical of some of the methodological and theoretical lenses that have been used to study it.” [45:20-45:51]
His targets are scholars, categories and methods. He explicitly denies that Islam or Muslims are the target.
His reason hostile readers misunderstand critical scholarship is concise. “Islamophobes and people who want to undermine Islam are very rarely into messiness. They’re into black and white and hard boundaries. The minute you begin to articulate nuance to them, their eyes glaze over.” [48:43-49:07]
Hughes’s anti-essentialism functions as a barrier against both apologetics and Islamophobia. Both want a stable object called Islam upon which a verdict can be rendered. Hughes keeps dissolving the stable object.
“My own research has sort of moved into Islam in Canada recently.” [41:33-41:48]
“My new work has now moved into, sort of, I’m determined to write the histories of Muslims in Canada.” [1:19:23-1:19:38]
“The things that we’ve talked about today were things that I saw as really problematic in the study of Islam. I didn’t claim always to offer solutions, but I wanted to articulate things. I would want my work to be seen as someone who wasn’t afraid to ask particular questions and to try to shift and orient the field in a particular way.” [1:19:30-1:20:01]
This reinforces the “maximum deflation” interpretation. He describes much of that work as diagnosis and intervention. He was identifying problems, not supplying the final positive account.
Then comes the most surprising quotation of the interview. “In terms of fellow Muslims, I would say Islam is a big, bold, beautiful, ambiguous, multifaceted tradition. Scholarship can show that. Don’t be afraid of scholarship. It doesn’t undermine faith. If anything, showing the depth and breadth of Islam encourages faith and makes it deeper.” [1:20:01-1:20:41]
The author of The Tyranny of Authenticity ends a 2025 interview speaking of “fellow Muslims,” calling Islam beautiful, and saying historical scholarship can deepen faith.
Hughes’s mature critical stance has become compatible with attachment. Historical criticism and affection no longer appear as opposites in his own rhetoric.
‘Rastafari Scripturalization: A Case Study’ (March 28, 2026)
“Such questions ideally bring us out of our intellectual silos and allow us to talk together and to one another.” [1:53-2:04]
Then he asks what Qur’an and hadith scholars might learn from Biblical Studies, Indigenous Studies, constitutional studies and classical studies.
This is Jonathan Z. Smith translated into institutional practice. In 2019 Hughes said Religious Studies at its best consisted of scholars with different data asking comparable questions. In 2026 he is helping build the institutional apparatus to make that happen.
Hughes says comparative inquiry can reach questions that transcend any one tradition and reveal “what these questions and the answers to which they give rise say about human creativity and perseverance.” [2:21-2:50]
“Human creativity and perseverance” is miles away in tone from the Hughes we initially framed as the deflator.
The underlying theory has survived. Humans make religious worlds. But what interests him here is the creative capacity involved in making them and the persistence those constructions permit.
He says the project will study texts together with “the social dynamics that they provoke or tend to engender, their structural and ideological roles,” plus the people who claim authority to give those texts their proper meanings. [2:50-3:14]
That is almost a synthesis of Hughes’s career: Text. Institution. Authority. Interpretation. Social consequences.
His response to Davidson gives the most Hughes-like constructionist sentence imaginable: “Culturally central texts do not simply fall from heaven, but are the product of human creativity and the need to justify or legitimate social and political change.” [41:56-42:20]
This quote is gold because both Hugheses occupy the same sentence.
“Do not simply fall from heaven” is the deflator.
“Product of human creativity” is the late positive turn.
“Justify or legitimate social and political change” preserves the older sociology of power.
Hughes immediately pushes the reductionist claim about as far as he can. “What we call ‘religious,’ aware of all the critiques in the study of religion about the Western, Eurocentric and Christocentric notion of that term, is but a byproduct of the social and political orders.” [42:20-42:37]
Hughes’s mature model may be, says ChatGPT: decenter → recombine → recenter → inherit → decenter again.
He is fascinated by authoritative texts emerging from relationships among older and newer texts. “I also like how you state that authoritative texts come about through relationships between pre-existing texts as well as new ones, and that these relationships can actually subvert traditional hegemonic structures.” [45:57-46:15]
In the Rastafari example, recombination can even become a technology of resistance.
Hughes asks whether this mechanism may be general. “I wonder if this is a common feature of culturally central texts, that they can all be decentered, recentered and centered.” [46:15-46:31]
This is Hughes doing Smithian comparison in real time. Rastafari matters because it might disclose a mechanism that can then be tested against the Qur’an, Bible, Torah or other culturally central texts.
Then comes the authority question. “One of the main features of all culturally central texts is that they demand, not just need but demand, interpretation, which of course leads to the question of authority. Who has the authority to interpret these texts, and what determines such authority?” [46:44-47:07]
He asks how the authority to interpret comes into existence.
“In the humanities we talk a lot about decolonialization in the academy. I wonder how culturally central texts, with the Rastafari case study you’ve given us, can contribute to this larger process.” [47:26-47:50]
He then states the comparative principle: “What does your case study have to say to those of us who work with other case studies? I think that’s the key. We have to think of all of us as working in case studies. This webinar is important because it’s a way we can connect our own specific case studies to one another.” [47:58-48:32]
No religion supplies the master model. Islam is a case. Rastafari is a case. Judaism is a case. The Bible is a case.
Then comparison seeks mechanisms operating across them. That is Jonathan Z. Smith without having to cite Jonathan Z. Smith.
He asks whether there are limits, “what the rabbis called hedges around the Torah,” that constrain how far decentering and recentering can go. [46:25-46:44]
This is a sophisticated extension. Construction is not infinitely plastic. Traditions have path dependence. Some inherited materials can be rearranged. Some boundaries resist rearrangement.
One exchange near 59 minutes captures the mechanism in almost evolutionary language. After another participant remarks on reproducing scriptural forms while displacing the old authority, Hughes comments: “At the same time, decentralizing it.”
Then, after Davidson agrees, Hughes calls it “a very interesting process.” Davidson describes “picking up on these practices and then dropping them after you’ve made your point or gained power from using them.” [58:47-59:23]
By March 2026 Hughes is helping organize a comparative research program around a question that his earlier work often left unresolved: what happens after people manufacture something? His answer is increasingly visible. It becomes formative. It generates interpretation. Interpretation generates authority. Authority can be challenged. Texts get decentered. Inherited materials get recombined.
A new center appears. The new construction becomes capable of sustaining autonomy, resistance, identity and memory. Then someone else inherits it and starts the cycle again.
That makes the phrase “human creativity and perseverance” especially valuable. In early Hughes, “human construction” usually carried acid. By 2026 the same fact can name one of the most remarkable things human beings do.
They inherit materials they did not choose and make worlds from them.
‘Thinking with Jonathan Z. Smith‘
In June 2019, scholars gathered in Trondheim, Norway, for a conference called “When the Chips are Down, It’s Time to Pick Them Up: Thinking with Jonathan Z. Smith.” Aaron W. Hughes delivered the keynote. The surviving recording linked here is a subsequent conversation between Hughes and Andie Alexander about the conference and Smith’s legacy. It captures Hughes making a series of predictions about where the academic study of religion was headed. Seven years later, some of them look remarkably good.
Hughes begins from an enormous estimate of Jonathan Z. Smith. “Smith has probably been the most important theoretician over the past 50 years,” he says. Smith’s achievement, in Hughes’s account, was to help destroy the old phenomenological model associated especially with Mircea Eliade, in which religion possessed some irreducibly religious essence. Smith “refused to treat religion as special,” Hughes says. Religion might be unique to the people practicing it, but it was not ontologically unique. Once religion became another kind of human activity, the scholar could compare it with politics, economics, ritual, games, classification, territory, power and other ostensibly mundane things. Smith’s genius lay partly in revealing the “incongruous relationship between the quote-unquote religious and the quote-unquote mundane.” [2:20–3:54]
That distinction supplies the background for everything Hughes says afterward. His worry is that religious studies defeated Eliade intellectually while retaining, or reconstructing, some of the habits that made the Eliadian paradigm attractive.
Hughes thinks the old temptation survives even among scholars who would reject Eliade’s terminology. “A lot of people still believe in the sacred,” he says. After 9/11, he argues, another conception of the discipline gained force. Scholars increasingly imagined religious studies as something capable of helping religions understand one another. Hughes makes the joke that has aged best:
“I didn’t spend ten years in graduate school to be an interfaith dialogue facilitator.” [7:30]
The line is funnier because Hughes immediately qualifies it. “As important as that work is,” he says. He even describes trying to get Jews and Muslims talking to one another. His objection concerns the purpose of the academic classroom. He distinguishes the civic good of interreligious dialogue from the analytical job of the scholar. “I do think a lot of people in the Religious Studies Academy think that that’s the goal of Religious Studies,” he says, “to show the similarities between religions. I disagree. I think Smith would disagree.” [7:22–8:12]
Seen from 2026, Hughes identified an institutional movement. In January 2025, the American Academy of Religion approved formal guidelines for supporting and evaluating public scholarship in religion. The guidelines encourage universities to recognize public scholarship in hiring, promotion, tenure, merit pay and other systems of evaluation. They also recommend redesigning doctoral education to give students experience in public scholarship and supporting community partnerships. Public scholarship can include work in which nonacademic actors function as audiences, research participants and co-producers of knowledge.
The movement has acquired its own institutional infrastructure. The AAR offers a Public Scholarship Grant and has created programming devoted to publicly engaged scholarship and partnerships with communities outside the university.
Then there is the almost laboratory-grade confirmation of Hughes’s joke. At the AAR’s June 2026 meeting, one session was titled “What does graduate training in religious studies bring to community-based interfaith dialogue work?” Its premise was that religious-studies graduates could assume leadership roles in improving interreligious and interfaith engagement. One of the constituent papers was called “Interfaith Dialogue as Community-Based Scholarship.”
Hughes’s complaint therefore survives the easiest empirical test. A professional organization representing the discipline now formally sponsors almost the exact vocation he used as his comic example of what he had not spent ten years training to become.
Yet that does not settle whether Hughes was right about the intellectual consequences. Public scholarship does not logically require apologetics, consensus-building or treating religion as sacred. A Smithian scholar can enter the public sphere and still make familiar things strange, compare apparently unrelated practices and interrogate the categories used by participants. Recent scholarship has returned to Smith’s idea that scholars should make the strange familiar and the familiar strange as one possible model for scholarship addressed to publics.
The sharper Hughes question therefore concerns what public engagement does to the scholar’s incentives. Does engagement mean bringing critical inquiry to a larger audience? Or does it create an implicit obligation to produce socially desirable relationships and outcomes? Smith would presumably have had little difficulty with the first. Hughes suspects the second changes the scholarly role.
He makes the institutional version of the argument a few minutes later. “With the contemporary Academy we’re always encouraged to do community engagement,” he says. Candidates encounter the question on the job market: “How will you interact with the community? What will you do with them?” Hughes thinks that introduces expectations alien to Smith’s intellectual world. The problem, as he formulates it, is preserving “the edge of a Smithian analysis” so that Smith does not become “a bromide.” [10:49–11:42]
“Edge” is one of Hughes’s central words in the conversation. “Smith was edgy. Smith was critical,” he says. His fear is that the discipline will neutralize precisely those qualities while continuing to honor Smith.
He imagines two routes. One is crude rejection. Scholars could dismiss Smith as “another dead white guy.” Hughes’s accompanying remark that Smith “wasn’t even white, he was Jewish” is much less persuasive in 2026. Jewish identity does not prevent someone from being socially classified as white in the contemporary United States. The more interesting prediction is Hughes’s second one: “The field will inoculate Smith.” [8:42]
Smith, he predicts, will become “a name or a trope.” Scholars will invoke him “in a way that takes off the edge.” Hughes imitates the resulting scholarship: “According to Smith blah, blah, blah.” His complaint is that scholars can acquire the canonical citation while avoiding the operation Smith wanted performed on their own categories. [8:42–9:05]
That prediction is harder to score. Smith certainly has not disappeared. His work remains alive in scholarship on comparison, classification, reflexivity and the construction of religion. The AAR’s Critical Theory and Discourses on Religion Unit explicitly defines its work around scrutinizing scholarly categories, disciplinary presuppositions and concepts such as experience, the sacred and ritual. That could almost have been written as a description of Smith’s inheritance.
So Hughes’s prediction of simple intellectual displacement has not happened.
“Inoculation” remains plausible. It is also the part of his critique most worth testing. Take a large sample of articles citing Smith in 2000, 2010, 2020 and 2025. Code each citation. Does Smith supply historical background? A ceremonial quotation? A proposition about comparison? Or does the paper redescribe its object, question the categories supplied by its participants and subject the scholar’s own classifications to scrutiny? Hughes’s strongest proposition could be converted into a dataset.
His second large concern is specialization. Smith belonged to a scholarly ecology that allowed a learned generalist to range across texts, periods and civilizations. Hughes says that jobs devoted simply to “theory and method in the study of religion” had become extraordinarily rare. “I think in the past 20 years I’ve maybe seen three or four of those,” he says. Instead, a scholar must be located in a tradition.
“Smith was a generalist at a time when religious studies is into particularists.” [13:01]
Hughes sees a structural problem. A scholar working in Islamic studies must satisfy Islamic-studies specialists. A scholar working in Jewish studies must satisfy Jewish-studies specialists. Buddhist studies, American religion and South Asian religion have their own literatures, languages, archives and professional conversations. The Smithian intellectual project requires scholars to move across those boundaries and ask questions that make the objects comparable. “How can you translate a Smithian analysis or Smith-type analysis into the particular fields?” Hughes asks. “That’s difficult.” [12:39–13:33]
The contemporary AAR program structure shows why. Its units cover an extraordinary number of traditions, populations, regions, methods and topics. Comparative religion and critical theory remain present, but they operate inside an academic system built around specialization.
Hughes’s career depends upon deep competence in Jewish and Islamic studies. His most revealing pedagogical statement comes when Alexander presses him about what students need before they can start deconstructing categories. Hughes answers that students need narratives, texts, languages, description, details and facts.
“You can’t play unless you know the rules of the game.” [21:30]
That sentence may contain more of Smith’s legacy than the conspicuously radical formulations. Before redescription comes description. Before an unexpected comparison becomes illuminating, somebody has to know enough about both objects to know what has been made comparable. Hughes calls himself “old-fashioned” on this question. Students need “the description” and “the details and the facts.” Only afterward can they interrogate the ideological construction of those facts. [20:50–21:38]
His argument is therefore about the relationship between specialization and imagination. Smith possessed enough learning to play because he knew the rules. Contemporary academic organization produces extraordinary specialists while making the career of the free-ranging comparativist more difficult.
Hughes returns repeatedly to “play.” Smith encourages “odd comparisons that might not make sense,” he says. He encourages scholars to trace strange etymologies and use their imaginations. [17:08–17:36] The comparison succeeds when it makes us see ordinary categories differently. A scholar who merely applies an approved theory to an expected object has missed this ludic element.
Smith’s own Imagining Religion made this style of intellectual movement central to the study of religion. Comparison was not the passive discovery of similarities already sitting in the world. It was an operation performed by a scholar for a purpose. The comparison could therefore expose as much about the scholar’s categories as about the religions being compared.
That brings Hughes to another prediction whose validity has probably increased since 2019. He thinks the institutional rhythms of academic life work against Smith’s intellectual virtues. Smith asks scholars to do almost “the opposite of what the modern Academy encourages us to do,” Hughes says:
“to read quickly, to read fast, to not have an imagination, and to not take pedagogy seriously.” [25:50]
The phrasing is deliberately excessive, but Hughes immediately supplies the mechanism. Graduate students and tenure-track scholars face so many “demands on production” that there is insufficient time to investigate something outside their area or patiently work out an unfamiliar application. [25:41–26:37]
The employment situation makes that critique harder to dismiss. The contemporary AAR devotes substantial professional-development attention to contingent employment, alternative academic careers and the changing faculty labor market. Public scholarship has partly become a response to this environment. Scholars are being asked to publish, teach, serve institutions, communicate with publics, cultivate partnerships and demonstrate social relevance. The 2025 AAR guidelines are themselves an attempt to make universities recognize work they increasingly ask scholars to perform.
This complicates Hughes’s argument. Community engagement did not expand simply because religious-studies scholars developed a sentimental desire to make religions get along. Universities themselves increasingly demand evidence of impact. Public engagement can be simultaneously an intellectual commitment, a moral commitment and an institutional adaptation.
The deepest part of Hughes’s argument emerges near the end of the conversation, when he asks what fidelity to Smith would mean after Smith’s death. His answer is wonderfully anti-canonical. Hughes imagines Smith saying:
“Forget about me. I’m gone.” [27:56]
Take the tools and use them. “You don’t even have to mention my name.” Take “the self-reflexivity,” “the playful element” and “the comparison.” Recognize that the terms scholars use “probably have baggage in them” and refuse simply to reproduce them. [27:56–29:04]
That imagined Smith is almost the opposite of the thinker preserved through reverential citation. The appropriate tribute is intellectual disobedience.
Smith’s famous claim that “religion” is a category produced through scholarly acts of selection and comparison made reflexivity unavoidable. The scholar who classifies another person’s practice is doing something. The categories do not arrive untouched from the people being studied. They are tools. Smith’s work repeatedly asked scholars to notice the purposes those tools serve.
Hughes identifies comparison as the connective tissue capable of saving religious studies from fragmentation. Scholars studying East Asia and scholars studying American religion do not share an archive. What they can share is “a common set of questions.” His definition of the discipline at its best is a community in which people “working with different texts and different traditions and different data sets can learn from one another by asking similar sets of questions.” [31:05–32:03]
That formulation also exposes the limitation of treating Hughes’s 2019 remarks simply as another complaint about a politicized academy. His target is larger. Professional specialization can blunt Smith. Production incentives can blunt Smith. Public-service expectations can blunt Smith. Reverence for Smith can blunt Smith. Even methodological sophistication can blunt Smith if it settles into predictable gestures.
The standard is severe because Smithian reflexivity is recursive. The scholar who explains how religious actors construct the sacred must ask what the scholar constructs. The scholar who treats religious categories as historically contingent must extend the same treatment to the categories fashionable within the academy. The scholar who identifies the interests served by someone else’s classification must become curious about the interests served by his own.
That is the sense in which Hughes says Smith “didn’t ask too much of us” and yet “asks everything of us.” The demand is to “rethink ourselves and rethink our own relationship to that which we study.” [33:12–33:37]
From the vantage point of 2026, Hughes got the institutional direction largely right. Public and community-engaged scholarship have become substantially more formalized. Interfaith work has entered professional religious-studies programming in almost exactly the language he joked about. Specialization remains the basic architecture of the field. Academic precarity and demands for productivity make the slow reading, broad learning and intellectual wandering he associates with Smith harder to sustain.
He overstated other things. Critical theory has not vanished. Smith has not been purged from the discipline. Public engagement need not collapse into interfaith reconciliation or apologetics. Some contemporary scholars use Smith to think seriously about scholarship’s relation to publics.
The question is whether religious studies absorbed Smith so thoroughly that it ceased to experience him as a threat. A thinker can win canonically and lose methodologically. His vocabulary survives. His name survives. His propositions become introductory knowledge. The disturbing operation he performed on scholarly categories becomes optional.
Hughes understood that possibility in 2019. He said Smith’s successors would have to “absorb his wit” and “absorb his edge,” then “create new edges and new wits.” Otherwise Smith would become “a name or slogan” without “venom.” [16:37–17:08]
That is the critique that looks strongest seven years later. The appropriate measure of Smith’s influence is how many intellectual arrangements he still makes uncomfortable. A fully domesticated Jonathan Z. Smith would be the most un-Smithian outcome imaginable.