1 Religious Studies and the Jargon of Authenticity Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm The jargon of authenticity, which sells self-identity as something higher, projects the exchange formula onto that which imagines that it is not exchangeable. – Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity In Islam and the Tyranny of Authenticity and the chapter included in this volume, Aaron Hughes criticizes standing presuppositions of the academic study of Islam. In so doing, he builds on an impressive body of previous scholarship and it is difficult in the space allotted to do justice to the extensive and important intervention of this extensive work. 1 Pressed to summarize, I would say that throughout his writings on the subject, Hughes’s main contribution has been to explore the role theologically committed scholars have played in the construction of idealized notions of Islam. In particular, he argues that much of “Islamic religious studies” functions as a species of apologetics designed to anachronistically differentiate a supposedly authentic “good Islam” from a contemporary “bad,” violent, political Islam that is discounted as not really Islamic. He specifically focuses his criticism on converts to Islam and other putative Muslim insiders and what he sees as their role in inventing an early Islam largely to meet contemporary progressive agendas. As he summarized elsewhere, these Muslim scholars of Islam “have largely invoked their authority to elevate their particular and idiosyncratic interpretations of Islam (e.g., liberal and egalitarian) over others and, in the process, deemed their version to be somehow more authentic and normative” (Hughes 2012: 2). I am not a specialist in Islam, but like Hughes I have worked on the self-reflexive analysis of the academic study of religion (see Josephson 2012, Josephson-Storm 2017). In that respect, I would count myself as a fellow traveller in the critical analysis of our larger discipline and I have found his work vital, important, and stimulating. But what I want to do here is show how the disciplinary logics of religious studies both support and in some cases undercut Hughes’s broader characterization of the discipline. To telegraph my broader argument, first, while agreeing with Hughes that something very suspicious is going on in religious studies and our continual rehashing of insider/outsider polemics, I problematize Forthcoming in: Hijacked: A Critical Treatment of the Public Rhetoric of Good and Bad Religion, ed. by Leslie Dorrough Smith, Steffen Führding, and Adrian Hermann, Sheffield: Equinox, 2020 (submitted).