Abstract: This review article examines Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic in light of the book’s challenge to the notion that the sharia consists of Islam’s orthodox core, and Muslim literary, artistic, and philosophical truths constitute a periphery. Written from a historian’s perspective, it draws out the ways in which Ahmed is able to illuminate aspects of the past that might be unfamiliar to modern Muslim readers. It also shows how Ahmed’s argument risks flattening Muslim pasts by failing to disengage with the dynamism of historical forces and with how historical texts are embedded in relations of gender and power.
Published in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, May 2020, 40 (1): 214-219. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-8186247
_________________
Modern Muslims do strange things. Shahab Ahmed describes the modern Muslim as “[a] new species of human being” who conceives of being Muslim in terms “crucially different to how pre-modern Muslims conceived of themselves.”[1] A number of modern Muslims reduce Islam to narrow interpretations of what is Islamic or un-Islamic, as evidenced by spectacular acts such as the Afghan Taliban’s destruction of the Buddha statues at Bamyan on the grounds that iconography is forbidden in Islam.[2] Similarly, the Saudi government’s razing of buildings in Mecca, which date back to Islam’s earliest centuries evidences an ideology in which historical preservation either has no Islamic value, or might have negative value.[3] Ahmed himself witnesses modern Muslim myopia at an airport in Saudi Arabia in 1980, where he sees a customs officer using a hammer to shatter chess-pieces he has found in a Pashtun laborer’s suitcase.[4] The first half of this review will address Ahmed’s remedies to the myopia of modern Muslims, which he challenges with a virile, self-assertive, and ambitious appeal to the pre-modern past. In the second half, I will address the limits of Ahmed’s intervention, which—despite its merits—is contingent on a partial and selective reading of this past; such a reading relies predominantly on the writings of male scholars and does not take into account silences in the archive or relations of gender and power.
To the first point, Ahmed rightly argues that while the purist commitments of many modern Muslims cannot accommodate intellectual, cultural, or religious diversity, pre-modern Muslim societies tolerated and engaged “difference, diversity, and disagreement,” all of which cohered to form the everyday.[5] Much of what Muslims would not consider strictly Islamic today, such as the neo-Platonic philosophy of Suhrawardi (d. 1191) or Ibn ‘Arabi’s pantheism (d. 1240), were fundamental to the sensibilities of centuries of Muslims.[6] Pre-modern Muslims also drank wine, read poetry suffused with descriptions of wine, and viewed paintings depicting human figures. These acts did not place them at odds with Islam because for pre-modern Muslims, legal prescriptiveness was a small aspect of their faith. Instead, Islam was a living engagement with revelation made manifest in art, architecture, poetry, a literary ethos that celebrated mystical love, and even in objects such as wine cups that were repositories of meaning.[7]
Ahmed argues that colonialism has created a chasm between modern Muslims and their past; this is irrefutable. Colonial epistemologies, now internalized by Muslims, reduce “religion”—the term itself embedded in Christianity—to legalistic interpretations of orthodox and heterodox that increasingly narrow the scope of what can be considered Islamic.[8] Colonialism has also distanced Muslims from the languages of their ancestors, in which Islam was given an ambit whose inclusiveness is alien to Muslims today.[9] If modern Muslims face the “existential problem of living in terms of a conceptual incoherence with their past,” a remedy is to conceptualize Islam in terms of that past and define what Islam actually is.[10]
Leaving aside modern Muslims, several scholars of Islam—which include men from fields as diverse as religious studies, anthropology, and history and from a time-period ranging from the early twentieth century to the present—have contributed allegedly to the misunderstanding. The book takes to task scholars such as Wael Hallaq, Hamilton A. R. Gibb, Gustave E. von Grunebaum, Ernest Gellner, Brinkley Messick, Khaled Abou El Fadl, and Mohammad Fadel (to name a few) for arguing or implying that the Shari‘ah, and legal discourse, lies at the core of Islam and all non-legal discourses (e.g. art, philosophy, and literature) lie at the periphery.[11] Challenging Marshall Hodgson’s seminal, three-volume work, The Venture of Islam, Ahmed writes that Hodgson too positions the Shari‘ah as the religion’s orthodox core, and delineates a less orthodox periphery around it. Hodgson’s influential notion of the Islamicate, which refers not to “Islam in the proper, religious sense” but to cultural practices associated with Muslims and non-Muslims in parts of the world where Islam is socially dominant, is evidence of what Ahmed calls—in a witty turn of phrase—a “Hodgsonian law of emanation” where one moves from an inner core of Islamic personal piety outward to diluted, Islamicate realms of artistic and literary expression.[12]
These Eurocentric, modern distinctions—in which religion is separated from culture or restricted to a private domain—fail to provide an accurate picture of the Islamic past. Islam, Ahmed argues, should be understood through what he terms Pre-Text, Text, and Con-Text. Pre-Text refers to what is prior to the Text of the Quran, on which the Quran’s truth is contingent and Con-Text refers to the field of meanings that have been produced in the course of human, hermeneutical engagement with Revelation, which are “thus already present as Islam.[13] Islam then has “different expressive registers of truth” that do not map neatly onto an orthodox religious core and a heterodox cultural periphery.[14]
Ahmed illustrates these registers by drawing on the vibrant writing and art produced by pre-modern Muslim men across roughly five centuries (1350-1850), several languages, and a geographical area Ahmed terms the “Balkans-to-Bengal complex.”[15] Ahmed’s intellectual arsenal includes the “un-orthodoxizing” Ottoman intellectual, Katib Celebi (d. 1657), who writes that the intelligent person contemplates the wise purpose of disagreement.[16] The writings of Al-Ghazzali (d. 1111) and Rumi (d. 1273), similarly point to explorative, rather than prescriptive authority.[17] The relationship between jurists and mystics is encapsulated in a statement by Ebu-s-Su‘ud, the Chief Jurisconsult of the Ottoman Empire between 1545 and 1574, who—regarding sufi practices of zikr (contemplation) and the rhythmic movement that accompanied these—declared: “Knowledge of Divine Truth is a limitless ocean. The Shari‘ah is its shore. We [jurists] are the people of the shore. The great Sufi masters are the divers in that limitless ocean. We do not argue with them.”[18]
This statement elegantly communicates how two modes of engagement with religious truth inhabited differentiated but connected domains rather than constituting core and periphery. In a similar vein, the philosophical writings of men such as al-Farabi (d. 951) Tusi (d. 1274), Davvani (d. 1502), Muhsin Fani Kashmiri (d. 1570/1), and Khwushhal Khan Khattak (d. 1689), show that ideas about law, society, and just governance were articulated in literary works of akhlaq or ethics and not simply in texts about fiqh or law.[19] Furthermore, human engagements with the Quran circulated in literary worlds. For instance, the poet Jami (d. 1492) rendered the Quranic story of Yusuf and Zulaykha into Persian verse. Jami’s popular rendition gave the story multiple interpretive registers, including one in which Zulaykha was no longer a source of sinful temptation but instead an embodiment of the mystic’s love for God.[20] The inner worlds of pre-modern Muslims were shaped by poets such as Jami, who celebrated and interpreted the Quran in ways more vital to lived experience than juridical interpretations alone. Through his astute reading of literary and philosophical texts, Ahmed successfully challenges attempts to define Islam through notions of orthodox and heterodox, center and periphery.
Despite its strengths, the book provides a partial—in both senses of the word—representation of the pre-modern Muslim past. This partiality is rooted in Ahmed’s choice of texts, his readings of these, and in the constraints of a universalizing argument about Islam reliant on a past unanimated by the dynamism of historical forces. Pasts kept being rewritten and reinvented as did people’s views about time, space, and the relationship between the human and the divine. The multi-dimensionality of the past means that excellent historical work is possible without requiring an airtight definition of Islam to propel its analytical trajectory. If anything, the gnawing desire to define Islam reflects present-day anxieties and risks constricting the terrain of the past to serve these. On the other hand, studying pasts on their own shifting terms allows analytical categories to emerge from our sources and to remain open to reinterpretation, introspection, and reframing. [21]
The book’s argument that pre-modern Muslims possessed sensibilities thoroughly different from our own and that these were shaped by discourses other than law is a given to historians.[22] But the silencing of one way of thinking at the expense of others is hardly a moral failing on the part of modern Muslims alone. As pasts are rewritten, ideas, arguments, and moral codes popular and center stage in one era might become marginal—or be deliberately marginalized by those in power—in another. The Safavid Empire (1501-1736), for instance, under Shah Abbas I (d. 1629), actively suppressed the messianic religious discourses that had contributed to the rise of its founder Shah Ismail (d. 1524). The Ottomans reworked their origins to emphasize Muslim piety while downplaying earlier Byzantine alliances.[23] The absence of historical forces that shaped the ebb and flow of ideas in the pre-modern Muslim world risks flattening dynamic pasts into a static field whose sole purpose becomes to serve as a contrast to the present.
Understanding the influence of pre-modern texts would also mean asking deeper questions about their production, reception, and circulation. What did each text suppress in favor of its argument and whose voices did it leave out? Not asking these questions implicates the book in upholding relations of power it fails to recognize. For instance, Ahmed’s universalizing claims about Islam are based on a discussion of only the writings of pre-modern men and overwhelmingly the writings of modern male scholars. Citations of male-authored texts outnumber citations of texts by women in a ratio of roughly seven to one. Consequently, a book seeking to define Islam through a temporally and spatially limited surface area (the Balkans-to-Bengal between 1350-1850) further confines its scope.
One might argue that not a single woman in the Balkans-to-Bengal complex, between 1350 and 1850, wrote anything of value to an argument about pre-modern Islam. Or, even if there were such women, they were less influential than male writers. Or, women’s writings are difficult to find. But the task’s difficulty does not render it unimportant. Instead, difficulty raises important questions about the invisible workings of power, from the act of writing (a privilege afforded to a handful of women), to the collection of written work into archives and libraries (repositories of knowledge usually constructed by powerful men), to the availability of archives to scholars today (many of whom continue to be men), to the modern male scholar’s choice about which texts to include when defining Islam.[24] These very questions have led historians to produce a fuller picture of the past by excavating women’s writings, analyzing silences in the archives, and reading male-authored texts for information about gender. But the book does not engage this scholarship; consequently, a text that draws upon a rich array of historical material is surprisingly thin on historical method. [25]
Scholarship on the Ottoman Empire, for instance, challenges Ahmed’s effervescent portrayal of poetic social worlds in the Balkans-to-Bengal complex as integral to Muslim experiences of love, longing, or desire. These worlds were largely closed to women and women poets entering them faced obstacles men did not. Writing romantic poetry ran the risk of calling a female poet’s chastity into question, for one. Second, when women did succeed as poets, they both emulated male voices in order to be taken seriously and used poetic tropes subversively to point to the difficulty of their position.[26] Ahmed’s universalizing argument about how poetic social worlds shaped Muslim selves would require more nuances were it to apply to both men and women, to complicate gender in depictions of romantic love, or to examine all-female poetic worlds absent of men.[27]
Similarly, Ahmed’s discussion of Yusuf and Zulaykha points to the pitfalls of failing to locate the story within relations of power. Gayane Karen Merguerian and Afsaneh Najmabadi write that in Abbasid male commentaries, Zulaykha personifies the guile of all women and justifies male control of female sexuality. Tusi, with whose work Ahmed is familiar, in his Akhlaq-i Nasiri, cites a hadith stating that women should not learn Surah Yusuf (the chapter in the Quran devoted to this story), because it would incline them toward unchastity. Wine should also be forbidden to women, adds Tusi, because even a small quantity can excite their passions and make them shameless. The gendered trope of chastity appears even in Jami: Zulaykha pursues Yusuf but becoming the object of his desire redeems her. The text ends with her adorned and waiting for him. When Yusuf finds her a virgin, Zulaykha says that she was able to save herself for him because her husband was impotent.[28] Ahmed also depicts the story of Layla and Majnun—in which Layla symbolizes both a human female and a divine beloved— as central to Muslim experiences of love and desire. This depiction assumes that Muslim male experiences of love and desire were inclusive of female experiences or, if women’s experiences were different, this is not worth exploring.[29] As Kecia Ali has argued, even contemporary scholarship by Muslim men, while making universalizing claims about Islam, almost always assumes the normative Muslim subject to be male and willfully ignores a growing body of female and feminist scholarship.[30]
If modern Muslims could move away from their emphasis on only the Shari‘ah and engage with their “philosophical, Sufi, and larger literary heritage,” writes Ahmed, much could change.[31] But while women might have been free to read the same literary texts as men—in which female figures such as Zulaykha and Layla had symbolic power in male imagination—having a female body meant being seen as analogous to an owned slave when contracting a marriage and being considered an inferior category of legal subject in general. [32] Ignoring pre-modern women’s negotiations of laws written by men diminishes the latitude of an argument that emphasizes lived experience in its definition of Islam. Patriarchal views still influence Islamic law—and women’s experiences of the law—today, which explains feminist scholarship’s engagement with past and present Islamic legal codes. Ahmed dismisses feminist scholarship, however, with a quote from another male scholar, Ebrahim Moosa, who writes that Muslim feminists, in seeking gender justice in the Quran are engaging in “a hermeneutics of wishful thinking.”[33] While reading a seventh century text with a view to searching for modern notions of gender equality is certainly anachronistic, Ahmed’s configuration of Islam can be read as evidence of another kind of wishful thinking.
Reading Ahmed’s text with a view to reading its silences—in keeping with historical method— reveals it to be a text in which a modern male scholar rails against the Islam of modern men while marshalling the writings of pre-modern men to propose a better alternative for all Muslims. This echo chamber of men’s voices brings to mind what Leila Ahmed describes as a male Islam that has traditionally filled the pages of books, been proclaimed from pulpits, and declared itself loudly in public space. In her account of growing up in British Egypt, Leila Ahmed describes how the cadences of her everyday life were instead shaped by an Islam passed from mother to daughter, that was—and remains— “a way of holding oneself in the world,” communicated through touch, glance, gestures of the body, “subtle and evanescent,” neither “studied in books, nor learned from men who studied books.” Leaving no trace in archives or written language, writes Leila Ahmed, this Islam remains “written only on the body and into the scripts of our lives…ancient as any written tradition.”[34] The omission of women’s experiences of Islam—past and present, written and oral—and of scholarship on gender points to inadequacies in method and imagination that are too glaring to ignore in an otherwise worthwhile project.
The forces that erase women from the Islamic past and the scholarly present are not as spectacular as the Saudi state’s razing of buildings or the Taliban’s destruction of statues. But I would argue that they are equally, if not more, powerful. [35] Naming them risks having the scope of one’s argument questioned; in Sara Ahmed’s words, sexism is a problem with a name, but to name the problem is to become a problem.[36] As a male colleague recently asked, “Shahab Ahmed is writing about Islam, not gender. Why must you bring gender into it?” No doubt, men from the Balkans-to-Bengal complex articulated Islam in ways deft at handling multiple registers of truth. But bringing gender into it, so to speak, reveals how Ahmed’s universalizing argument about Islam is a selective argument reliant on a partial reading of the Muslim past. This argument replicates silences in the archive and attenuates the dynamism of historical forces in its need to construct a past that can serve as a contrast to a disenchanted present. Conversely, we could see both the present and the past as moving fields animated by registers of truth we have yet to consider, especially those that offer up more radical challenges to core and periphery than can be accomplished by men’s voices alone.
[1] Ahmed, What is Islam, 156.
[2] Ahmed, 51.
[3] Ahmed, 532-7.
[4] Ahmed 52.
[5] Ahmed, 147 and 152. All italics in quotes are Ahmed’s.
[6] Ahmed, 27-28.
[7] Ahmed., 409-420.
[8] Ahmed, 180-5.
[9] Ahmed, 524.
[10] Ahmed, 245
[11] Ahmed, 118-127.
[12]Ahmed, 159-162.
[13] Ahmed, 347, 356.
[14] Ahmed, 386.
[15] Ahmed, 73. This appears to be an extended conception of what the Arabs called ‘ajam, and what Hodgson calls the “Irano-Semitic” cultural complex in the “Nile-to-Oxus” region. See Hodgson, Venture of Islam vol. 1, 60-62, 115, and 117, fn. 9.
[16] Ahmed, 277.
[17] Ahmed, 282.
[18] Ahmed, 289.
[19] Ahmed, 481-2.
[20] Ahmed, 305.
[21] See Bashir, “Everlasting Doubt.”
[22] On the multi-layered lives of Ottoman subjects, see Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultan and Ze’evi, Producing Desire.
[23] See Babayan, Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs and Finkel, Osman’s Dream.
[24] On power and the archive, see Truillot, Silencing the Past, 26.
[25] For three pioneering works, see Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, Peirce, The Imperial Harem, and Najmabadi, Women with Moustaches and Men without Beards. For how women teachers shaped ‘Ibn Arabi’s thought, see Shaikh, Sufi Narratives of Intimacy. Despite extensive discussions of ‘Ibn Arabi, Ahmed does not engage this text.
[26] See Havioglu, “On the Margins and Between the Lines,” and Silay,“Singing in his Words: Ottoman Women Poets and the Power of Patriarchy.”
[27] See Bradshaw, “Women in Praise of Women.” Andrews and Kalpakli’s Age of Beloveds, which Ahmed cites, complicates gender and romantic poetry, but Ahmed does not engage with its arguments on gender. See Ahmed, What is Islam, 33, fn. 81.
[28] See Merguerian and Najmabadi, “Zulaykha and Yusuf.”
[29] For Majnun Layla, see Ahmed, 312-317.
[30] See Ali, 61-73.
[31] Ahmed, 514.
[32] Virginia Woolf has named the female condition of having symbolic rather than legal, social, or economic power. See Woolf, Room of One’s Own. On women and Muslim law, see Tucker, Women, Family, and Gender in Islamic Law, Ali, Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam and, Peirce, Morality Tales. For an analysis of Muslim feminist hermeneutics, see Hidayatullah, Feminist Edges of the Quran.
[33] Ahmed, 512, f., 226.
[34] Leila Ahmed, “A Border Passage: From Cairo to America—A Woman’s Journey,” (New York: Farrar, Straus, an Giroux), pp. 120-127.
[35] On this point, see Truillot, iii.
[36] See Sara Ahmed, 5–13.
References
Ahmed, Shahab. What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.
Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
Ahmed, Sara. “Sexism: A Problem with a Name.” New Formations, no. 86 (2015): 5-13)
Ali, Kecia. Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.
—.“The Omnipresent Male Scholar.” Critical Muslim 08: Men in Islam (2013): 61-73.
Andrews, Walter G. and Mehmet Kalpakli. The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005.
Babayan, Kathryn. Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Bashir, Shahzad. “Everlasting Doubt: Uncertainty in Islamic Representations of the Past.” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 20, no. 1 (2008): 25-44.
Bradshaw, Dominic Parviz. “Women in Praise of Women: Female Poets and Female Patrons in Qajar Iran.” Iranian Studies 46, no. 1 (2013): 17-48.
Faroqhi, Suraiya. Subjects of the Sultan: Culture and Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire. London: I. B. Tauris, 2005.
Finkel, Caroline. Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire. New York: Basic Books, 2005.
Hidayatullah, Aysha A. Feminist Edges of the Quran. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Havioglu, Didem. “On the Margins and Between the Lines: Ottoman Women Poets from the Fifteenth to the Twentieth Centuries.” Turkish Historical Review 1 (2010): 25-54.
Hodgson, Marshall G. S. The Venture of Islam Volume 1: The Classical Age of Islam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.
Merguerian, Gayane Karen and Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Zulaykha and Yusuf: Whose “Best Story”? International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 29, no. 4 (1997): 485-508.
Najmabadi, Afsaneh. Women with Moustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Peirce, Leslie. The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
—Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Shaikh, Sa‘diyya. Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn ‘Arabī, Gender, and Sexuality. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
Silay, Kemal. “Singing in his Words: Ottoman Women Poets and the Power of Patriarchy.” In Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era, edited by Madeline C. Zilfi, 197-213. New York: Brill, 1997).
Truillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.
Tucker, Judith. Women, Family, and Gender in Islamic Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929.
Ze’evi, Dror. Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500-1900.” Berkeley, University of California Press, 2006.