Islamic Studies in Korea *

Abstract

Islamic Studies in Korea began with the demand for specialized knowledge about Middle Eastern countries during the oil boom after the Arab-Israeli War in the 1970s. It was then that the Korean government paid special attention to the Middle East. A pioneer of the Middle East and Islamic Studies in Korea is Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS). The university has departments of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Malay-Indonesian and Central Asian Languages, and offers some Islamic-related curricula. The emphasis on the Middle East as pursued by Korea led to the inauguration of The Institute of the Middle East Studies (MES) at HUFS in 1976, The Korean Association of the Middle East Studies (KAMES) in 1979, and finally The Korean Association of Islamic Studies (KAIS) in 1989.

At the same time, Islamic Studies in Korea have faced many problems and challenges. One of them has been that some scholars, as well as the public, are prepossessed with simplified bad images of Islam. Rapid expansion of Islam has been incorrectly described with the phrase, “A sword in one hand, a Quran in the other hand” by the West. The misrepresenting expression on Islam as “war-like”, “terror”, and “a forced propagation” religion in Korea blocked any true understanding of Islam. That is the result that one sided reports of powerful Western mass media on the affairs of the Islamic world have penetrated into Korean society without any filtration for half a century. Islam has been widely spread as a strange religion in Korea. These facts have functioned as a barrier which prevented our society from having the right image of Islam.