15 mm 15 mm front 153 mm 8 mm 17,1 mm 8 mm front 153 mm 15 mm

The study of Islam and Muslim societies has changed drastically during the

Buskens & Van Sandwijk (eds)

last three decades. The traditional methods of philology and intellectual
history have met with considerable criticism by younger generations of
scholars who have started to look at the social sciences, notably anthropology
and social history, for guidance. These changes have been accompanied by
the rise of new fields, such as Islam in Europe and in Africa, and new topics,
such as gender, or the renaissance of older topics, most notably Islamic
law. Scholars have successfully overcome older, unproductive oppositions,
especially between the study of texts and practices. Islamic Studies in the
Twenty-first Century: Transformations and Continuities brings together a
series of essays surveying these transformations written by prominent
scholars in the field. They analyse major innovations and new directions
to take, but are also conscious of underlying continuities with a venerable
tradition of almost two centuries. The collection is an excellent introduction
to state of the art debates for both graduate students and senior scholars.

Léon Buskens holds a chair for Law and Culture in Muslim societies at

Islamic Studies in the Twenty-first Century

Leiden University and is director of the Netherlands Institute in Morocco Edited by Léon Buskens and Annemarie van Sandwijk
(NIMAR). From its foundation in 2009 until the end of 2015 he was the first
director of the Netherlands Interuniversity School for Islamic Studies (NISIS).
His research focuses on Islamic law and society, and the anthropology of Islamic Studies in
240 mm

Muslim societies, with a particular interest in Morocco and Indonesia.

Annemarie van Sandwijk holds a double master’s degree in History and in
Theology and Religious Studies (Leiden University). She worked as an editor
the Twenty-first Century
at NISIS for several years.

Transformations and Continuities

ISBN: 978-90-8964-926-3

AUP. nl
9 789089 649263
15 mm
Islamic Studies in the Twenty-first Century
Islamic Studies in the Twenty-first
Century
Transformations and Continuities

Edited by
Léon Buskens and Annemarie van Sandwijk

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration by Paul Oram

Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden

Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout

Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by
the University of Chicago Press.

isbn 978 90 8964 926 3

e-isbn 978 90 4852 818 9 (pdf)
doi 10.5117/9789089649263
nur 717

© Léon Buskens & Annemarie van Sandwijk / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam
2016

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)
without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.
To the memory of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (1943-2010)
and Jacques Waardenburg (1930-2015)
 Table of Contents

Preface 9

Introduction 11
Dichotomies, Transformations, and Continuities in the Study of Islam
Léon Buskens

Texts

Islamic Texts 29
The Anthropologist as Reader
Brinkley Messick

Textual Aspects of Religious Authority in Premodern Islam 47

Jonathan P. Berkey

What to Do with Ritual Texts 67

Islamic Fiqh Texts and the Study of Islamic Ritual
A. Kevin Reinhart

Gender

Textual Study of Gender 87

Marion Katz

Scholarship on Gender Politics in the Muslim World 109

Some Critical Reflections
Dorothea E. Schulz

Theology and the History of Ideas

Power, Orthodoxy, and Salvation in Classical Islamic Theology 135

Christian Lange
Dialectical Theology in the Search for Modern Islam 161
Abdulkader Tayob

Law

“Classical” Islamic Legal Theory as Ideology 183

Nasr Abu Zayd’s Study of al-Shafiʿi’s al-Risala
Muhammad Khalid Masud

Islamic Law in the Modern World 205

States, Laws, and Constitutions
Knut S. Vikør

Networks

Vernacular Cosmopolitanism as an Ethical Disposition 223

Sufi Networks, Hospitality, and Translocal Inclusivity
Pnina Werbner

Culture and Religion

Middle Eastern Studies and Islam 241

Oscillations and Tensions in an Old Relationship
Léon Buskens

Notes on Contributors 269

Overview of NISIS Autumn Schools, 2010-2014 275

Index 279
 Preface

With pleasure, modest pride and in my quality as chairman of the board of

the Netherlands Interuniversity School for Islamic Studies (NISIS), I present
to you this volume Islamic Studies in the Twenty-first Century: Transforma-
tions and Continuities. It contains a selection of articles written by scholars
who were invited to talk about their work at the seasonal schools that were
organised by NISIS in the past years. In the introduction to this selection
of articles Léon Buskens, academic director of NISIS, will explain how this
volume came about. Let me say a few words about NISIS and the scholarly
field it covers.
NISIS is a research school, founded in 2010, in which nine Dutch universi-
ties participate. The aim of the school is to address Islam in a broad thematic
and interdisciplinary way. This broad approach has certainly contributed
to the success of NISIS. Through the organisation of seasonal schools every
six months and network days where ongoing research is presented, we
have created an academic community of researchers working on Islam at
Dutch universities. But we have also built up and extended an international
academic network of scholars, and we work together closely with several
research institutes in and outside Europe. The contributions to this volume
are the fruits of this endeavour.
NISIS considers interdisciplinarity and thematic focus not just a hollow
mantra to please the academic community, funding agencies, and policy
makers. Islam is more than a religion in the strict theological sense. If we
confine ourselves to doctrinal normativity and Islamic law to analyse what
Muslims motivate and how they build religious landscapes and lifeworlds,
we seriously narrow down our understanding of Islam. Conversely, if we
consider the rich body of theological work that has been written over
centuries, the normative frameworks that guide people, and the canon-
ised practices to which Muslims refer as irrelevant, we also seriously limit
analytical rigor.
This may sound as a truism, but in an academic landscape that is still
largely dominated by disciplinary boundaries, interests, and money flows
it is vital to show that only a broad approach to the study of Islam can
overcome disciplinary myopia. In addition, we have organised our schools
around specific themes that bear relevance to social issues and put the
study of Islam in a wider perspective. We have invited renowned scholars
from all over the world to give keynote lectures and discuss the work of
young scholars. Through the strict interdisciplinary and thematic format
10  Isl amic Studies in the T went y-first Century

of the schools we want young scholars, who are typically trained in a single
discipline, to engage with other scholarly approaches and to reflect on their
own work. The thematic approach encourages them to “think outside the
box” of their own research topic.
NISIS started in 2010 with the generous funding of the Dutch Ministry of
Education, Culture and Science, and of course with the active involvement
of the nine participating universities. The recent academic audit of the
first five years was excellent. It gave us the energy to continue our work.
Hopefully, we will be able to make this volume the start of a series in the
years to come.

Thijl Sunier
Chairman of the NISIS board
Professor of Cultural Anthropology
Chair of Islam in European Societies
VU University Amsterdam
 Introduction
Dichotomies, Transformations, and Continuities in the
Study of Islam1

Léon Buskens

1 Introduction

This book aims to offer an overview of some of the important issues in the
study of Islam that scholars discuss at present. The study of Islam is part
of a tradition that started in Western academia on a professional scale
about two centuries ago, and has always been linked to social concerns.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the major question was how
to govern Muslims living in the newly established colonies, such as British
India, the Dutch East Indies, and, later, French Algeria. About a century
later colonial government still was an important issue, linked at that time
to the declaration of jihad by the Ottoman caliph in an effort to help his
German allies. Again a century later questions of governance continue to
play a crucial role, now mainly linked to the presence of Muslim citizens in
Europe, the control of natural resources in the Middle East, and to what is
perceived as global security and a “war on terror.” Scholars have managed
to capitalise on these public issues, not only to make a living, but also to
pursue their intellectual interests. They have constituted an impressive
body of knowledge, even if this is not always as useful or made use of as
much as the authors might suggest in their applications for funding.
This academic tradition has not only led to an accumulation of knowl-
edge, even if some of it is almost forgotten or badly neglected, but has also
witnessed major changes in interests, questions, methods, aesthetics, and
ethics. Although interest in travelling in the Muslim world and gathering in-
formation through autopsy, exchange with local erudites, and collecting was
practiced earlier on, as the work of Carsten Niebuhr (1733-1815), for example,
demonstrates (cf. Kommers 1982; Vermeulen 2008), the past four decades
show a notable shift from philological and historical to anthropological and
other social science approaches to Islam. In some countries the dominance
of anthropology is now being replaced by the primacy of political science
and its offspring, such as international relations and security studies.

1 With many thanks to Annemarie van Sandwijk for her editing and critical comments.
12 Léon Buskens

The Netherlands has played an important role in establishing this

academic tradition.2 Leiden University has one of the oldest chairs for the
study of Arabic in the world (created in 1599) and a world famous collection
of manuscripts and rare printed books from Muslim lands. In the course of
the nineteenth century this tradition developed into the scholarly study of
Islam, with luminosi such as Keyzer, the Juynboll family, L.W.C. van den
Berg, Dozy, De Goeje, Van der Lith, Veth, and Houtsma. Colonial questions
led scholars to work on more than purely philological questions, such as
ethnography and law. Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936) built on
these foundations and became one of the creators of the academic study
of Islam, together with his Hungarian friend Ignaz Goldziher. Snouck Hur-
gronje was an acute philologist, a gifted fieldworker, and a well-connected
networker. One of the results was the compilation of an Encyclopaedia of
Islam, of which the current third edition is still published by Brill in Leiden.
Although Snouck Hurgronje can be considered as one of the founders of an
ethnographic approach to Islam, his successors were mainly interested in
a philological approach.
The philological approach underwent a renewal in the 1970s through the
work of the students of the former colonial civil servants turned professors.
Some colleagues did important work in Qurʾanic studies and Islamism,
others turned to relations between Muslims, Christians, and Jews, and to
the study of Islam in Europe. Utrecht University became a centre for the
study of Sufism, through the work of Frederick de Jong, Bernd Radtke, and
Martin van Bruinessen. Scholars worked together in the Dutch Association
for the Study of the Middle East and Islam (MOI), which published a series
of edited volumes and the journal Sharqiyyât, which later merged with
ZemZem. Jacques Waardenburg played an important role in this endeavour,
which resulted in a new handbook for the study of Islam in Dutch (1984),
as did Joost van Schendel, who facilitated many important publications by
Dutch scholars, first as a publisher at Het Wereldvenster and later with his
own publishing house, Bulaaq, in Amsterdam.

2 Vrolijk and Van Leeuwen (2014) offer an overview of Arabic studies in the Netherlands until
1950, with further references. Otterspeer (1989) provides the context of the interest in Islam by
surveying other branches of Orientalism as well. Boland and Farjon (1983) offer a bibliographical
overview of the Dutch tradition of studying Islam in Indonesia with an excellent introduction.
The journal Sharqiyyât 15 (1-2) (2003) published a special anniversary issue with overviews of
developments in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies in the Netherlands especially since the
1970s: “25 jaar Midden-Oosten- en Islamstudies en de MOI,” which was complemented by Strijp
(1998).
Introduction 13

The study of Muslim societies was taken up in the Netherlands, as in

many other countries, by anthropologists looking for new accessible fields,
mainly in the Mediterranean. Scholars at the universities in Amsterdam
and Nijmegen took the lead, while for several decades VU University Am-
sterdam organised fieldwork trainings in Tunisia, Morocco, and Gouda
(cf. Buskens and Strijp 2003). Many anthropologists neglected or ignored
the work of colonial and early postcolonial predecessors, such as Wilken,
Snouck Hurgronje, and C.A.O van Nieuwenhuijze. However, Henk Driessen
paid attention to these historical roots and combined his anthropological
interest with historical and philological expertise to produce a new hand-
book for the study of Islam (Driessen 1997). Paul Aarts has consistently
promoted a political science approach at the University of Amsterdam for
several decades. Over twenty-five years of cooperation with Indonesia in
Islamic studies, under the direction of Wim Stokhof and funded by the
Dutch Ministries of Education and Foreign Affairs, has revitalised the study
of Islam in Indonesia and created strong networks with young scholars at
the various Islamic universities (cf. Kaptein 2003).
In the first decade of the present century the social science approach
was strengthened by the International Institute for the Study of Islam in
the Modern World (ISIM). The work of ISIM gained considerable exposure
through its newsletter, in which its editor (and present NISIS board member)
Dick Douwes paid extensive attention to international developments in
Islamic studies. The creation of the Netherlands Interuniversity School for
Islamic Studies (NISIS) in 2009 at the incentive of the Ministry of Education,
Culture and Science was meant to provide society with useful knowledge.
Scholars involved in this venture explicitly aim at bringing together the rich
European tradition of the philological and historical study of Islam with
more recent trends in studying Muslim societies from the social sciences,
as the composition of the NISIS board demonstrates.
This book embodies part of the NISIS endeavour to look for new ap-
proaches consistent with contemporary scholarly and public concerns
by presenting some important issues in the study of Islam and Muslim
societies that NISIS members have been discussing with colleagues from
abroad. The papers collected in this volume were initially presented at
the opening conference of NISIS and at a series of three autumn schools
between 2010 and 2012. The final essay elaborates on the relation between
Islamic and Middle Eastern studies that I initially presented at the NISIS
autumn school “Islam: Culture or Religion?” organised by Christian Lange
at Utrecht University in 2013. Albeit not presenting a fully comprehensive
volume, the papers that we managed to obtain give an overview of major
14 Léon Buskens

developments, questions, approaches, and methods that scholars of Islam

discuss at present. Although the aim of the authors was not to write histories
of their respective fields of inquiry, their surveys often implicitly, and oc-
casionally also explicitly, present the dynamism of the tradition which they
form part of. Most authors both pay attention to major transformations
and to underlying continuities. Looking for productive new questions and
methods, while being critically conscious of working within a tradition,
has been the main guiding principle in the organisation of this volume.

2 Aims and Activities of NISIS

NISIS brings together scholars studying Islam and Muslim societies based
at nine universities in the Netherlands: the University of Amsterdam,
VU University Amsterdam, University of Groningen, Leiden University,
Maastricht University, Radboud University in Nijmegen, Erasmus University
in Rotterdam, Tilburg University, and Utrecht University. Each university
is represented by a member of the board: Gerard Wiegers (formerly Ru-
dolph Peters), Marjo Buitelaar, Maurits Berger, Susan Rutten, Karin van
Nieuwkerk, Dick Douwes, Herman Beck (occasionally replaced by Jan Jaap
de Ruiter), and Nico Landman. The board is chaired by Thijl Sunier of VU
University Amsterdam. At the request of the presidents of the participating
universities, Leiden University acts as the coordinating university, housing
and staffing the NISIS office, with the writer of this introduction currently
being its director. NISIS is an open and inclusive school aimed at welcoming
scholars involved in research on Islam who are based in the Netherlands.
The only distinction made is between senior scholars who have already
obtained their doctorate, and junior members who are still preparing a
thesis. NISIS represents most of the academics based in the Netherlands
active in the field.
The founding members of NISIS were encouraged to cooperate on a
national level by the generous financial support of the Dutch Ministry of
Education, Culture and Science, initially for a period of six years, now ex-
tended until the end of 2017. They agreed that the main aims of NISIS should
be: (1) to advance interuniversity cooperation; (2) to provide high-quality
training and research on Islam and Muslim societies in the Netherlands;
(3) to reinforce the international profile of Dutch scholarship in Islamic
studies; (4) and to link scholarly expertise with debates in society. Starting
in 2010, NISIS has offered scholarships to eleven PhD candidates, coming
from various countries, to pursue their research in Islamic studies at one of
Introduction 15

the nine universities involved, and has developed a training programme to

educate a new generation of specialists on Islam and Muslim societies in the
Netherlands. As this academic field has a strong international dimension we
consider it very important to bring our scholars and students into contact
with colleagues from abroad.
The interests and expertise of the nine board members, its director, and
its executive secretary Petra de Bruijn cover all disciplines and areas that
NISIS promotes, with a strong presence of anthropology and religious stud-
ies, but also law, history, and philology. Diversity in disciplinary, thematic,
and regional expertise is present in the research of all members, both junior
and senior scholars. Many combine several disciplines, work on various
themes, and in more than one area. NISIS pays particular attention to
exchanges and transnational linkages. Integrating the recently developed
studies of Islam in Europe in the broader field is also an important aim. We
encourage conversations between scholars working on history and philol-
ogy with social scientists, as we consider fruitful collaboration a necessary
condition for the further development of our field.
All scholars participating in NISIS share an understanding of Islam as
a historical and socio-cultural phenomenon. They are part of an academic
tradition of more than two centuries in which a historical-critical approach,
which concentrates on the study of texts, has been fused with a social science
perspective. This approach does not essentialise Islam as a force in itself,
but stresses human agency through ideas and practices. It also emphasises
the importance of studying Islam in a broad context as a cultural practice,
not limited to a narrow definition of Islam as a religion. A non-normative
perspective is not only most productive in scholarly terms, but also helps
to address major questions arising in society and policymaking, and might
be of great value for inter-Muslim debates as well.
NISIS has developed a training programme for its junior members, in
which both spring and autumn schools play a vital role. The spring schools
take place in the Mediterranean, until now twice in Rabat, and once in
Istanbul, Tunis, and Madrid, and are organised in cooperation with the
Institut d’études de l’Islam et des sociétés du monde musulman (IISMM)
in Paris and with various local partners. They bring together scholars and
PhD and Research Master students from many different countries, as NISIS
also provides ten scholarships to invite young researchers from all over the
world to each spring and autumn school. The autumn schools take place at
one of the nine participating Dutch universities, with prominent speakers
mainly from abroad, and again PhD and Research Master students based
in the Netherlands and abroad. The schools offer both keynote lectures and
16 Léon Buskens

workshops where junior researchers discuss their work with the keynote
speakers. These schools have also reinforced the national visibility of NI-
SIS and have expanded international cooperation with partners abroad.
Scholars and students from all over Europe, North America, Africa, and
Asia, including India, Indonesia, China, and Japan, with Muslim and other
backgrounds, have participated in the schools.
The keynote lectures during the schools were not only aimed at scholars
in the field, but also attracted a general audience interested in acquiring
high-quality academic knowledge on questions which play an important
role in contemporary public debates. Similar multiple aims are also served
by the annual network day, addressing both scholars and a broader public.
Scholars working outside academia, but engaged in research, are also eli-
gible for membership, thereby strengthening the bond between academia
and society. Since the 1970s, thanks to the work of scholars such as Maxime
Rodinson, Talal Asad, and Edward Said, practitioners in the field have
become increasingly conscious of the public dimension of their work, and
have started to reflect on this dimension as an integral part of their research
practices. This newly gained self-consciousness makes it in some ways easier
to address society and to make solid academic knowledge available to the
public. However, in today’s highly politicised debates on Islam and Muslims,
it is often not easy for scholars to make themselves heard in the cacophony
of opinions and half-truths (cf. Otto and Mason 2012).

3 Dichotomies and the Structure of Islamic Studies

Several of the schools organised by NISIS aimed at scrutinising persistent

dichotomies which structure Islamic studies. Although the pairs might be
“good to think with,” the approach during the first three autumn schools
was to deconstruct three of these dichotomies, in order to look for more
productive questions and methods. The three oppositions under review
came up during the course of NISIS meetings, as they were impossible to
avoid, both in popular and in academic discourses: texts and practices, the
classical and the modern, and centres and peripheries.

3.1 Texts and Practices

The relations between texts and practices have been at the heart of the
study of Islam and Muslim societies since the nineteenth century. At first
scholars discussed the question in a normative way, in order to determine
Introduction 17

the sources of knowledge about the norms which the colonial authorities
were to apply to establish law and order. Their perspective resembled in
some respects the normative angle of Islamic scholars, who also wrote
treatises admonishing Muslims who deviated from the rules laid down in
texts. For philologists texts had primacy, but soon researchers, often with
a background as “practical men” in the field, started to refer to their own
empirical observations, pleading to take practices at least as seriously as
books. Only after the Second World War would an anthropology of Muslim
societies gradually evolve, being dominated in the beginning by folklorist
dichotomies such as Redfield’s great and little tradition.
Texts are present in many Muslim societies, but it took anthropologists
several decades to take them seriously as objects of study in themselves,
partly due to the great divide between philology and anthropology, influ-
enced by a tradition of mutual misunderstandings and biases. Scholars in
both traditions had to come to terms with misleading assumptions about
the universalism of literate culture, for example, still present in Jack Goody’s
seminal work. In spring 2010 NISIS was very fortunate to welcome Brinkley
Messick for the inaugural lecture at VU University Amsterdam on “The
Anthropologist as Reader.” Messick has been one of the first anthropolo-
gists to take texts in Muslim societies as objects of study, resulting in the
seminal monograph The Calligraphic State (1993). In his contribution to
this volume he offers a genealogy of the ways in which anthropologists
have dealt with texts, thereby anchoring the issue much more strongly in
the discipline. He also demonstrates his own approach studying the library
and the archive for his research on the historical anthropology of shariʿa
in Highland Yemen. Ghislaine Lydon also contributes to this thriving field
of inquiry with her studies of texts as social phenomena in her research on
the legal and commercial history of the Sahara (e.g. Lydon 2012; Krätli and
Lydon 2011). Unfortunately, she was not able to transform the lecture she
gave during the third autumn school into a contribution for this volume.
During the first autumn school on “Texts and Practices” Jonathan P.
Berkey discussed the social uses of texts from a historical perspective.
His lecture was another important demonstration which taught fellow
historians and philologists, but also anthropologists, how to question the
cultures of writing, reading, and storing texts in Muslim societies. Berkey’s
contribution to this book offers a clear summary of several of his intel-
lectual interests so far, referring also to his seminal work The Transmission
of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education (1992).
The problems addressed in the section on texts with which this volume
opens underlie to a large extent many of the other questions. A. Kevin
18 Léon Buskens

Reinhart presents a theoretically informed view on how to study rituals,

which has again become a central concern in the study of Islam during
the last decades. The present debates show how much has changed since
the founding fathers, in the Netherlands represented by Orientalists such
as Dozy, De Goeje, and Wensinck, discussed the “origins” of Islamic ritu-
als. Reinhart severely and outspokenly criticises earlier approaches. His
understanding is guided by Seligman’s and by Humphrey and Laidlaw’s
work, looking at ritual as an act, as “subjunctive creation.” The view that
meaning is produced through the ritual act itself leads us to understand
how people attach meaning and how rituals produce sentiments.
The second section on gender presents two papers given on this issue
during the first autumn school. Scholars of Muslim societies started to
study gender in connection with the turn to the social sciences and social
history. Pioneering work has been done in this area in the Netherlands, and
it has been continued by younger researchers, as Willy Jansen, one of its
first scholars, documented in an earlier survey (Jansen 2003). Marion Katz
looks at gender from her position as a prominent historian, an approach less
well represented in the Netherlands. As many other contributors to this
volume, and in the field in general, she turns to legal sources. Her overview
concentrates on studies published in the United States and Britain. Katz
stresses the dialectical relations between norms and practices and the huge
diversity in local understandings. The prominent German anthropologist
Dorothea E. Schulz solidly situates the study of gender in Muslim societies
in gender studies in general, especially in relation to Sub-Saharan Africa.
Her overview demonstrates how the study of Muslim societies has also
made significant contributions to more general debates.

3.2 Classical and Modern

During the first autumn school the opposition between “classical” and
“modern” Islam repeatedly came up. Occasionally it seemed as if historians
working on older periods turned to the work of anthropologists and other
colleagues studying contemporary societies much more frequently for
inspiration than the other way around. For a long time the study of history
and texts provided the main model of academic scholarship. Research on
the present and on practices was considered of secondary importance,
which properly trained philologists could master without much additional
training or grounding in theory. Nowadays the situation has been reversed.
Historians and philologists have to justify their antiquarian interests and
turn to the social sciences for theoretical and methodological guidance,
Introduction 19

expounding on lessons that society can learn from the past. Some call their
library and archival research “fieldwork” and claim to study “multicultural”
and “cosmopolitan” societies of a millennium ago. In the meantime ques-
tions of periodisation and the “modern” and “modernity” have received
considerable attention, with the notion of “multiple modernities” as a way
out, which has been criticised in its turn.
We considered it important to scrutinise these issues more closely in the
second autumn school in 2011, by looking at three fields of inquiry which
have again become quite prominent nowadays: theology and the history of
ideas, mysticism, and law. Our speakers were invited to address the questions
mentioned above, especially the issue of periodisation, and to look more
closely at the opposition between the “classical” and the “modern.” We are
grateful to the speakers whose papers on theology and the history of ideas
and law we can include in the present volume. Unfortunately Carl Ernst
and Mark Sedgwick were unable to send us their contributions on Sufism.
The third section of this volume presents the two papers by Christian
Lange and Abdulkader Tayob, which complement each other. Theology
and the history of ideas have been central and respectable concerns in
Islamic studies since its beginning. They brought texts as sources, philology
as a method, and interpretation together, with a strong emphasis on high
culture, the relationship of Islamic thinkers with the legacy of classical
antiquity and Judaism, and idealist philosophy. In the Netherlands this
line of research was represented by earlier scholars such as Wensinck and
his students, by the studies of G.W.J. Drewes on the intellectual history
of Muslim Indonesia, by the great research project Aristoteles semitico-
latinus directed by H.J. Drossaart Lulofs and continued by Remke Kruk, by
Hans Daiber’s studies on philosophy and theology, by Jan Peters’ work on
the Muʿtazila, by Sjoerd van Koningsveld and his students (among whom
are NISIS board members Herman Beck and Gerard Wiegers) researching
relations between Muslims and Christians in al-Andalus and the Maghrib,
and by the studies of Hans Jansen, Fred Leemhuis, and Kees Versteegh on
the interpretation of the Qurʾan. Recently the field has come under stress,
suffering from limited funding and declining interest from students.
The appointment of Christian Lange by Utrecht University meant a
welcome strengthening of this important specialty. His contribution to this
volume presents the history of ideas as a discipline, stressing the importance
of contextualisation. He demonstrates his approach with an analysis of the
classical case of al-Ghazali, ideas about the community of believers, and
notions of heterodoxy and orthodoxy. He demonstrates the use of literary
approaches in order to analyse the religious imagination.
20 Léon Buskens

Abdulkader Tayob also contributed significantly to the development

of intellectual history and Islamic theology while teaching as an ISIM
professor at Radboud University in Nijmegen, before accepting a prestigious
invitation to return to South Africa. In his contribution he addresses the
issue of Islam and modernity, discussing the views of Western scholars and
Muslim thinkers. As Lange, he also focuses on the issue of membership
of the Muslim community. He stresses the role of Muslims as agents, and
he engages in a conversation with Talal Asad and his notion of Islam as a
“discursive tradition” (Asad 1986).
The fourth and penultimate section offers two papers on law. The study
of Islamic law has been a central concern since the beginning of Islamic
studies in European academia (cf. Buskens and Dupret 2014). Scholars
working in the Netherlands have contributed extensively to this field, and
continue to do so. One might even argue that the study of Islamic law is
a Dutch specialty. From the beginning Dutch scholars have engaged in
exchanges with scholars from abroad, as the work of Salomo Keyzer and
Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje demonstrate. After decolonisation these stud-
ies suffered from a decline, sadly demonstrated by Joseph Schacht moving
from Leiden to Columbia University, also due to the impolite behaviour of
some of his Dutch colleagues. With the settling of larger groups of Muslim
immigrants, at about the same time as important geopolitical changes in
the Middle East such as the “oil crisis” and the “Islamic revolution,” Dutch
scholars started to take a renewed interest in law. Major promoters have
been, also through their involvement in the Dutch Association for the Study
of the Law of Islam and the Middle East (RIMO), the late Jan Brugman,
Frans van der Velden, Gerard-René de Groot, Jan Michiel Otto, and Rudolph
Peters, a former member of the NISIS board on behalf of the University
of Amsterdam. Gautier Juynboll and Harold Motzki have both changed
our understanding of the formative period of Islamic law. The field is well
represented in NISIS by board members Maurits Berger (Leiden) and Susan
Rutten (Maastricht), who both study the place of Muslims in European legal
systems, and by its current director. The current interest is strengthened by
the work of a new generation of NISIS members who recently defended or
are currently preparing their doctoral theses at various Dutch universities.
Muhammad Khalid Masud contributed extensively to the renewal and
dynamism of the study of Islamic law in the Netherlands during his directo-
rate of ISIM. Together with Annelies Moors and Léon Buskens, he organised
a number of scholarly meetings encouraging an anthropological approach to
Islamic law, which further elaborated on his idea of “the social construction
of shariʿa” well (cf. Masud 2001). In his contribution to the present volume
Introduction 21

he continues this approach by studying contemporary understandings of

al-Shafiʿi’s classical Al-Risala. He demonstrates how history can serve as
a critical tool in debates inside Muslim societies. In the same way as his
former colleague in ISIM Abdulkader Tayob he explicitly incorporates an
Islamic perspective, making historical research speak to contemporary
concerns of Muslims.
Knut S. Vikør is internationally known as one of the moving forces be-
hind the current upsurge of interest in Islamic law in Western academia,
through his many case studies and monographs, and through his textbook
Between God and the Sultan. He contributes to the section on law by studying
the relationship between politics and law. As a case study he addresses a
particular stage in the debates about the revision of the constitution in
Egypt. Although many changes have occurred in Egypt since he wrote this
article, his questions and analyses still offer important lessons for all those
who are concerned with the manifold debates about Islam, politics, and
constitutions taking place in many parts of the Muslim world.

3.3 Networks

The third autumn school in 2012 dealt with “Centres and Peripheries:
Networks Connecting Muslim Societies in Past and Present,” striving to
overcome this opposition by focusing on connections, exchanges, and
networks.3 Six areas were singled out for special attention, some of which
have also received considerable attention in the Netherlands, such as
Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Arabia, Central Asia and the Caucasus,
and Europe. Unfortunately, this volume only offers one of the six lectures,
on South Asia. We are very grateful to Pnina Werbner for sharing her
research on transnational linkages and networks, published in a series of
monographs and articles, with us. In her case study based on her fieldwork
in Zindapir she links the issues of hospitality and tolerance to the concept
of cosmopolitanism. 4 Her study demonstrates how to study linkages with
the outside world: by paying attention to travel and pilgrimage, which are
prominent in Sufism, and by relating them to representations of the outside
world and views of others. Her attention to local forms of cosmopolitanism
has special relevance considering the debates about Muslim xenophobia
and fanaticism in the West.

3 Ulrike Freitag was one of the speakers during this autumn school. For her view on translocal-
ity see Freitag and Von Oppen (2010).
4 On the notion of cosmopolitanism, see Freitag (2010).
22 Léon Buskens

The two subsequent autumn schools dealt with two more pairs of notions:
“Islam: Culture or Religion?” (2013), and “The Religious/Secular Divide in
the Muslim World” (2014). An elaborated version of the lecture on the rela-
tion between Islamic and Middle Eastern studies in the Netherlands in an
international perspective that I gave at Utrecht University is offered as the
last contribution to this volume.

4 Conclusions: Transformations and Continuities

The contributors to this volume offer surveys of the fields in which they
are specialists. Some of them demonstrate how to practice scholarship by
presenting case studies. The essays identify new trends in Islamic studies.
For example, the strong current interest in Islamic normativity is well
represented in the essays by Messick, Reinhart, Katz, Masud, Vikør, and
to a certain extent also by Berkey. Although the book does not contain a
contribution explicitly discussing the recent turn to political science, which
is quite strong in several countries, interest in the political dimension is
present in a more implicit way in several of the chapters (cf. Osella and
Soares 2010).
During the schools the importance of addressing various regional re-
search traditions became clear. All too often Islamic studies is identified
with Middle Eastern studies. Scholars working in other fields have often
developed new questions and original approaches which enrich Islamic
studies considerably, as, for example, the work of Dorothea Schulz and Ben-
jamin Soares on Sub-Saharan Africa makes clear (cf. Soares 2014). Research
on Muslims in Europe, which is pursued by all NISIS board members, is still
quite isolated from the main debates in Islamic studies, which deprives
scholars of useful cross-fertilisations. The third school demonstrated the
importance of going beyond the opposition between “centres and peripher-
ies” by replacing it with notions such as “translocality” connections, and
networks (cf. Freitag and Von Oppen 2010).
A common theme throughout this volume is the attention to diversity in
Islam and in Muslim societies – geographically, historically, and socially (in
terms of gender, class, etc.) – which complies with the general understand-
ing of Islam furthered by NISIS. Although in this introduction, as in the
name of NISIS, we often use “Islamic studies” as shorthand, we are conscious
of the problems of this term. The research interests of most members of
NISIS are much broader than Islam. Many would perhaps prefer to identify
themselves with a discipline such as history, anthropology, philology, or law,
Introduction 23

than with Islamic studies. In order to understand the particular forms of

Islam, knowledge of the context is fundamental. For some members Islam is
a peripheral research object, one of many issues under study, and they would
rather not be confined to “Islamic” or “religious studies.” As mentioned
earlier, the notion of Muslims making their own Islam, and hence a stress
on human agency, is a crucial starting point for the research undertaken.
Again and again the question comes up whether Islam and Muslims are
appropriate categories to study the phenomena and societies which we try
to understand. In the meantime scholars have produced a considerable
body of literature on this issue, consisting of essays both small and large
(cf. Bayat 2003; Freitag 2013 with comments by Meyer). Although using the
term “Islam” might obscure differences and lead us to idealism, we simply
cannot afford to do without it, if only because it is such an important
emic notion, used by the people we study in highly significant, although
extremely varied, ways. Using the plural “islams” without a capital “I,” as
El-Zein suggested, does not seem to be very satisfactory, if only for aesthetic
reasons (cf. Eickelman 2002, 245). In the end, the questions remain decep-
tively simple: What do people do with Islam?, How do they shape their
Islam?, and How does Islam shape them? Finding proper answers is only
possible by refining the questions, discarding gratifying but misleading
dichotomies.
For several decades Talal Asad’s idea of Islam as a “discursive tradition”
has been a dominant approach, especially among anthropologists. It has
led to important new insights and a considerable body of valuable studies.
We are now witnessing the rise of criticism of this idea, indicating the
diminishing returns on the questions it produces. John Bowen has made
a powerful statement of which direction to take with his textbook A New
Anthropology of Islam (2012). Samuli Schielke formulated a polite but funda-
mental critique of Asad with his “Second Thoughts about the Anthropology
of Islam, or How to Make Sense of Grand Schemes in Everyday Life” (2010).
His ideas fit with a general trend to make Islam as such less central to the
study of Muslim societies, after a strong focus on it during the last decades.
The new buzzwords are “everyday Islam” and “everyday religion,” notions
thoroughly familiar to many anthropologists and historians who cherish
a strong interest in the everyday experiences of “ordinary people,” who
might not always be so busy with religion, but more with making a living,
surviving, killing time, and having “fun.” The notion of everyday religion is
conspicuously present in the titles of recent edited volumes (e.g. Schielke
and Debevec 2012; Dupret, Pierret, Pinto, and Spellman-Poots 2012; Dessing,
Jeldtoft, Nielsen, and Woodhead 2014).
24 Léon Buskens

Overcoming the false oppositions identified in this volume requires

considerable analytical sophistication, thorough familiarity with theories,
and many skills – in methods, languages, libraries, archives, the Internet,
and in the field and social life. For most ordinary human beings it is difficult
to unite these in one person. Some exceptional scholars manage to do so,
as the papers show. Over the last decades we have witnessed important
advances in the education of students, combining theoretical refinement
with solid language training. But we should also question what has been
exchanged for this – such as, for example, partly losing knowledge of the
grander intellectual traditions in which we work. As Stephen Humphreys
stressed in his wonderful handbook Islamic History, “nobody masters all
the necessary skills” (Humphreys 1991, 3). Although much research has
quite an individualist character, for many of us collaborative projects
might also be a fertile approach, uniting the strong points of people with
different backgrounds, educations, talents, and skills. In order to bring
this about scholars from different intellectual traditions should engage
in fruitful exchanges, by gaining insight in different academic traditions
and disciplines. The present volume offers another invitation to do so. In
order to be successful we need to continue our work on reconstructing a
tradition of 200 years. An important step is to move beyond the traditional
divide between anthropology and philology. The scholars contributing to
this volume demonstrate to what kind of results this may lead.
Another dichotomy that often comes up is the supposed difference be-
tween Muslim and academic perspectives. The contributions of two scholars
with a Muslim background demonstrate that such an opposition is by no
means necessary. Both Muhammad Khalid Masud and Abdulkader Tayob
have gained an international reputation with their important studies, with
which they also contribute significantly to internal debates in the Muslim
communities of which they consciously form part. Their work shows how
a constructivist perspective situates Muslim representations and practices
in their historical and social context and thereby enables open debates
within Muslim communities with respect for mutual differences. Both
Masud and Tayob participate in a courageous way in the public debates
in their countries of origin, occasionally at considerable risk for their own
well-being. Their work reminds us of the intellectual and political courage
of our dear colleague Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, a professor at Leiden University
and later at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, from whom
we all learned so much, whose generosity and company we cherished, and
to whose memory we dedicate this volume.
Introduction 25

In this volume we have given much attention to changes, renewal, and

transformations in the academic study of Islam. This process is often
summed up as the demise of classical “Islamology” and the rise of a social
science approach. NISIS strives to go beyond this simplified understanding
of the intellectual tradition of which we form part by questioning the fallacy
of the new. Underlying many of the transformations are continuities which
are often barely recognised. Edward Said has prompted us to seriously
question the genealogy of our knowledge, mainly by pointing to the social
bases of its production. We do not only produce our knowledge for society
– it is also produced by it. But our genealogical quest needs to move beyond
this now less productive questioning of Orientalism, as François Pouillon
and Jean-Claude Vatin have recently demonstrated again in their After
Orientalism (2014).
Critical study of the history of the academic and governmental traditions
of which our scholarship is part is not only necessary to think about the
material conditions and political dimensions of our work. It may also con-
tribute considerably to a refinement of our understanding by questioning
commonplace concepts and methods of research. This kind of reflection will
enable us to self-consciously engage with the tradition and move beyond
misleading divides between texts and practices, and anthropology and
philology. In the European past of Islamic studies we may unearth valuable
ideas and sources in our search for new directions. We need to know the
tradition in which we are working, thinking, practicing, and studying.
History may teach us lessons about the merits and errors of our ancestors.
It is unavoidable that we will err and sin again, but we might try to do so
in good faith.

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 Islamic Texts
The Anthropologist as Reader

Brinkley Messick

In the new millennium, especially in the aftermath of 11 September 2001,

intensified and continuing scrutiny has been brought to bear on movements
that invoke the shariʿa in their calls for reform and for the establishment of
Islamic states. Sensational cases and aberrant regimes, such as the Taliban
of Afghanistan, also have reinforced simplistic Western perceptions and
fears of the shariʿa as backward, arbitrary and cruel. At present in the West,
in the estimation of Muslim philosopher Ramadan (2004, 31), “the idea of
shariʿa calls up all the darkest images of Islam.”
In its basic meaning, the shariʿa refers to the divine design for the com-
munity of Muslims as set forth in the Qurʾan and as exemplified in the words
and actions of the Prophet Muhammad. But the term refers as well to a
corpus of humanly authored legal thought elaborated at the meeting points
of divine revelation and prophetic practice example with human reason.
This large body of literature, technically known as the fiqh, was created
and studied across Muslim societies over the course of many centuries. In
books that served as the centrepiece of classical madrasa instruction, the
shariʿa includes not only the precise formats for the ritual life but also the
detailed bases for a comprehensive moral and political economy, specifying
the potential acts, rights and obligations of the individual Muslim subject.
As a matter of faith, the sacred identity of the shariʿa placed emphasis on
its perfection and unity, but its human receptions, the necessary efforts
by generations of Muslim jurists to understand and adapt the revelation
and the Prophet’s example, inevitably entailed differences of analysis and
opinion, and these eventually were manifested in a number of distinct
schools of interpretation.
Understood to be divine in origin and human in interpretation, the
shariʿa comprised a character both transcendent and immanent, a reality
at once timeless and historical. Yet beyond these twin formal senses – as
a revealed law and as a humanly created jurisprudence – its further range
as a lived historical phenomenon may be indicated by colloquial usage.
In a down-to-earth sense, dropping the definite article, shariʿa refers to
litigation, to conducting a lawsuit before a judge. “You and me, shariʿa” is
an age-old challenge to an adversary to take a matter to court.
30  Brinkley Messick

In the West, the study of the shariʿa, or Islamic law, was a key part of the
old academic field of Oriental studies. The exemplary twentieth-century
statement of that thought is found in the superbly synthetic study by Joseph
Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law, which appeared in 1964. Schacht’s
seminal and definitive work challenged the next generation in what has
become known as Islamic legal studies. While many criticised (or defended)
his perspectives, Schacht’s accomplishment remained the standard general
work in the field, until 2009. In that year, Wael Hallaq published Shariʿa:
Theory, Practice, Transformation, a scholarly accomplishment that, in my
view, represents the new standard in the field.
As is expressed in the last word of his subtitle, “Transformation,” one of
the large themes of Hallaq’s new book concerns the “epistemic” break and
the “structural death” of the shariʿa as a “system” that occurred with the
advent of modernity (Hallaq 2009, 15-16). In the third and final section of
the book Hallaq details and analyses this historical break, by region and by
country, under the various colonialisms and nationalisms. He characterises
what exists today as but the “veneer of the shariʿa,” which refers to what
remains in civil codes and in institutions of “traditional” education. I gener-
ally agree with this view of the present status of the shariʿa, and a major
thrust of my own book on Yemen (Messick 1993) was to analyse an historical
instance of such an epistemic rupture. From this perspective of the break
brought by modernity (as well as from the pressing need to address popular
conceptions in the West) we must find new ways to analyse the old problems
surrounding the shariʿa in history.
It is perhaps too soon, and there certainly is not sufficient space here
to offer a proper assessment of Hallaq’s 600-page account, but I would like
to note a couple of points Hallaq makes by way of introduction. At the
outset of his book he mentions the practitioners of my humble discipline,
anthropology. He assigns a prominent role in the recent study of the
shariʿa to “legal anthropologists” (Hallaq 2009, viii, 22), whose collective
work, he states, “has helped reinvent Islamic legal studies.” Together
with the anthropologists on his honour roll, Hallaq also mentions the
social and legal historians of the Ottoman period, which he accurately
describes as “the best-covered area in the historical study of the Muslim
world.” I note this reference to scholarship on the Ottoman Empire since
the case materials I will refer to are different (even though Yemen, too,
was influenced by the Ottomans). While the history of the shariʿa in
the Ottoman Empire is exceedingly important, there is a danger that
this particular history may be confused with the essential or timeless
character of the shariʿa.
Isl amic Tex ts 31

I refer in what follows to the shariʿa system that existed in highland

(North) Yemen around the middle of the twentieth century, in the decades
leading up to the Revolution of 1962. The period in question came to an end
well in advance of my own field research, which began in the fall of 1974 and
has continued, intermittently, until the present. I concentrate on this recent
historical period rather than, more conventionally for an anthropologist,
on the years contemporary with my own research residence, for the special
opportunity that the earlier time offers. This is to understand an historical
instance of the shariʿa in a unique set of circumstances: (1) at a moment just
prior to the local onset of a variety of characteristic modern changes, notably
including nation-state codification and legislation; (2) since highland Yemen
was not colonised by a Western power, and was also at some distance from
the many, equally characteristic transformations connected with colonial-
era relations, such as the sharp limitation of the sphere of shariʿa application
to family law. Most significant, however, is (3) the opportunity presented
by this slightly earlier era to study the shariʿa within the framework of a
distinctive polity, a classically styled Islamic state.
Focused on the middle decades of the last century, this is a project in
historical anthropology. Such an inquiry entails retrospection from ethno-
graphic research conducted in the following decades, under the republic; the
use of oral history; and, based on a wide corpus of books and documents,
my emphasis today, several techniques for anthropological readings.
The Islamic state in question was headed by an imam, that is, a “great
imam” – as opposed to the prayer leader in a mosque – a leader who was
meant to be a qualified interpreter of the shariʿa. The formula of rule is
much like that set forth in the law books. Schacht (1964, 76), however,
stated, unequivocally, “the state as envisaged by the theory of Islamic
law is a fiction which has never existed in reality.” Against such view, the
thousand-year history of the Islamic states of highland Yemen offers a
lengthy counterexample.
Yet this Yemeni version of an Islamic state remains relatively unknown,
not least among the younger generations in Yemen itself. Beyond its im-
portant place in the political history of south-west Arabia, the existence of
such a state also may inform us, in wider terms, about the general nature
and the range of possibilities of Islamic states. Modes of leadership aside,
an Islamic state may be defined, in simple terms, as one that applies the
shariʿa. To examine the specifics of its shariʿa regime is to go to the heart of
such a state. My broader hope is that an understanding of this distinctive
former shariʿa regime will help forestall narrower conclusions as to what
was standard, or conceivable, with respect to Islamic law in history.
32  Brinkley Messick

Within the complex world of this Islamic polity, my specific focus in

the following pages is upon the varieties of shariʿa texts. If the systematic
thought found in the doctrinal treatises of the shariʿa may be considered
one of the greatest intellectual achievements of Islamic civilisation, the
judgement records of the shariʿa courts and related archives of legal docu-
ments represent the most important group of sources for the last several
centuries of its social history. Connections between accumulating doctrine
and the ongoing tasks of judgement-giving and notarial drafting, between
an academic tradition of the law and the rulings and other acts that pertain
to concrete human endeavours, are at the crux of any functioning system
of law.
My highland sources range from books of fiqh and their commentar-
ies, the last of which was written in the 1930s and 1940s, to the personal
opinions of the ruling and interpreting imams, the fatwas of local muftis,
the judgements issued by shariʿa courts and the many types of local primary
documents, including such instruments as contracts and wills. Beyond their
unusual range, the further important features of this array of sources are
that they are mutually contemporaneous in time and also that they pertain
to the same place.
I use the terms “library” and “archive” to refer to two major clusters of
shariʿa texts. Encompassing the local realms of the book and the document,
writings that pertained, respectively, to the few and the many, these terms
are intended to point at an analytic distinction within literate traditions.
The library was associated with the madrasa, the site of academic learning,
while the mid-century archive had primary links to the maḥkama, the
judge’s court, and its surround, including the private notarial writer. While
the writings of the library and the archive entailed separate discursive
dynamics, they nevertheless had interrelated histories. Placing a period
library and a local archive together at the centre of the inquiry is integral to
my examination of the shariʿa as a “written law.” Extending this old notion
beyond its normal referent of the law on the books, the legal literature or
jurisprudence proper, here centred on the fiqh, I also take into account legal
writing at the less exalted, but hard-working levels of both court litigation
records and ordinary instruments. This more holistic approach to what
Raymond Williams (1977, 145-148) termed the “multiplicity” of writing is
designed to bring the complex interactions among doctrine, opinions,
judgements, and instruments into view.
In my usage, “library” and “archive” summarise contrasting discursive
structures within an overarching juridical culture. Shariʿa traditions
operated on the basis of a textual divide between doctrinal genres that
Isl amic Tex ts 33

were relatively context-free, a-temporal, and strictly technical-formal in

expression versus a spectrum of richly circumstantial applied genres that
were context-engaged, historically specific, and linguistically stratified.
As opposed to the consistently general phrasing of doctrinal discourse,
the practical acts of the courts and the notarial writers were resolutely
specific. A defining feature of library texts is their reference to legal actors
and objects using the noun fulan and its variations and extensions – the
standard “so and so” or “John Doe,” and the “such and such” of formal
Arabic. In shariʿa regimes, this generalising library discourse of fulan is
the discourse of theory and law.
Archival texts, in contrast, equally characteristically contained proper
names. Where the doctrinal literature assumed a non-referential guise,
consistently avoiding particular coordinates in time and space, court rul-
ings and notarial instruments were carefully dated and located. Where
doctrinal works engaged formal logical thinking, archival texts, while
comprising some of the results of this thought, additionally embodied
varieties of informal logic. And where literary jurists commonly distin-
guished between formal Arabic (the lugha, or “language”) and their own
specialised linguistic usages, in court transcripts, these two registers of
tutored discourse were joined by some colloquial expression excerpted from
primary texts both oral and written. Adopting all manner of regional and
locale-specific vocabularies and terminologies, archival texts brimmed over
not only with the names of people and the specification of things but also
with precise indications of amounts and quantities, using named currencies
and the variety of existing measures. In shariʿa regimes, this particularising
archival discourse of the name is the discourse of practice and custom.
My general premise is that a complex legal regime may be instructively
approached through an analysis of its written acts. That to inquire into what
kind of writings these are is also to ask what kind of law that was. This is to
treat written texts, literary or documentary, library or archive, not simply
as the means for an inquiry – that is, as conventional sources – but also as
ends. The historical nature of my inquiry also necessitates a distinction
between acts and artefacts, between the fleeting historical events of writing
and their extant material objects. I study the latter, the textual artefacts,
for traces of the former, the earlier acts of writing. Genre refers not only to
types of texts but, equally, to institutions of human action. My aim is to
understand an historical instance of the shariʿa in terms of its systematic
dimensions. How, in short, did the shariʿa work?
Unlike most existing research on Islamic law, which has focused either on
library works or on archival documents, I emphasise their coexistence. As I
34  Brinkley Messick

detail the multiple genre make-ups and the distinct discursive histories of
the period library and the local archive, my further interest is in how these
fundamental categories of shariʿa texts were interlocutors.
This inquiry addresses one of the venerable problems of Islamic legal
studies: that of the relation between theory and practice in the shariʿa.
Schacht (1964) sets this problem for us in clear, but largely negative terms.
As noted, the subtitle of Hallaq’s new book begins, “Theory, Practice …” In
suggesting how an analysis of the relations between shariʿa texts contributes
to the understanding of the larger dynamic of theory and practice in Islamic
law, however, I draw more specifically on a couple of Hallaq’s earlier papers
in which he outlined examples of what he refers to as textual “stripping”
(Hallaq 1994, 1995). Also in these articles his interest was in the dialectic
of theory and practice.
How might an approach to texts, to genres, written acts and artefacts,
the library and the archive, contribute to the study of theory and practice
in the shariʿa? This will depend on methods for utilising these sources, in
this instance on the work of the anthropologist as reader.

1 Genealogy

A century ago in anthropology, at its modern birth, the discipline was

disinclined to regard written texts as proper sources. Franz Boas defined
the field as the study of societies “without written languages” and “without
historical records” (Boas 1903, quoted in Stocking 1988, 18). Before I outline
some of my own approaches, I will digress to sketch some elements of a
genealogy of the anthropologist as reader.
Boas advocated the sort of primary inquiry in original languages that he
compared to the Oriental studies research of his day. “A student of Moham-
medan life in Arabia or Turkey,” he wrote, “would hardly be considered a
serious investigator if all his knowledge had to be derived from second-
hand accounts” (Boas 1969 [1911], 60). His own work was founded upon an
elaborate textual method, which resulted in grammars and collections of
oral texts, notably including myths. For a given myth, the published research
could involve as many as three distinct versions: a phonetic transcription
of the native language text, an interlinear (word-for-word) translation, and
a free (narrative) translation. As later observers have remarked, this was
philology in all but the name.
According to Michel Foucault (1970, xii, 280-307), modern philology
emerged out of an earlier tradition of general grammar. For Foucault,
Isl amic Tex ts 35

philology ultimately involved “the analysis of what is said in the depths

of discourse,” and its hallmark was “to turn words around in order to
perceive all that is being said through them and despite them.” He saw the
advent of this new philology as heralding nothing less than the birth of
“modern criticism.” The new philology also was at the methodological heart
of modern Orientalism in Edward Said’s account. Said (1978, 22, 130-149)
adopted Foucault’s periodisation and his analysis of philology, and he wrote
(elsewhere) that “philology’s ‘material’ need not only be literature but can
also be social, legal or philosophical writing” (Said 1969, 2).
Chapter 3 in Said’s posthumous Humanism and Democratic Criticism is
titled “The Return to Philology.” His aim is to “suggest how philology, an
undeservedly forgotten and musty-sounding but intellectually compelling
discipline, needs somehow to be restored, reinvigorated, and made relevant
to the humanistic enterprise.” This “compelling” philology is defined as a
mode of hermeneutic reading anchored in a “detailed, patient scrutiny of
and a lifelong attentiveness to the words and rhetorics by which language
is used by human beings who exist in history” (Said 2004, 6, 61).
For the Boasian anthropologist, a solid corpus of native texts enabled
both narrower linguistic and broader ethnological analysis. Ethnology, the
general science that subsumed both language and culture, was defined by
Boas as “dealing with the mental phenomena of the life of the peoples of the
world,” or, as he also put it, their “psychology.” In the light of this conception,
the data Boas valued most derived its authority from its largely unreflective
or fully unconscious character. Linguistic data were especially important
because the categories of language “never rise into consciousness.” As for
other ethnological phenomena, “although the same unconscious origin
prevails, these often rise into consciousness, and thus give rise to secondary
reasoning and to re-interpretation” (Boas 1969 [1911], 63, 67-73). Boas gener-
ally turned away from what he perceived as the dangers of such “secondary
explanations,” although he acknowledged that this sort of information
filled field workers’ notebooks. Boas understood what he termed “esoteric
doctrines” as a further type of “secondary phenomenon.” Such doctrines
were the “product of individual thought” and of the “exceptional mind.”
But ethnology, he asserted, “does not deal with the exceptional man; it
deals with the masses” (Boas 1940 [1902], 312-315). In this theme, which
also entailed a disregard for what later would be termed “native models,”
Boas connected anthropology, not to the humanities, but to the other side
of its split disciplinary identity: the social sciences. It should come as no
surprise that such social scientists would have a problem with the figure
of the author.
36  Brinkley Messick

Few in the next generation of anthropologists could make productive use

of the large corpus of published but otherwise raw texts left by Boas. An
important exception was Claude Lévi-Strauss (d. 2009), the consummate
student of New World mythology. His four-volume Mythologiques references
over 800 myths from both North and South America collected by many
previous ethnographers, Boas and Boasians prominent among them. For
a subset of these myths Lévi-Strauss goes into fine detail, but since he
mastered none of the original Amerindian languages he disclaimed the
possibility of a conventional philological approach. “I am not a philologist,”
Lévi-Strauss states, and yet he created an innovative comparative science
of texts, studied mainly in translation. His elegant and elaborate structural
analyses of myths purport to reveal the “inner workings” of the societies in
question (Lévi-Strauss 1981, 639, 643-645). They also display dense patterns
of a type of intertextuality that was, by his fourth volume, intercontinental
in scope.
Another lineage of anthropologists sought to understand the “native’s
point of view.” Bronisław Malinowski (1884-1942) is credited with instituting
extended ethnographic fieldwork as the basic research technique, and he,
too, utilised a highly refined textual method. For Malinowski, old-school
philology was the explicit foil. “The typical philologist,” he wrote, “with his
firm belief that a language becomes really beautiful and instructive … when
it is dead, has vitiated linguistic studies.” “The needs of the Anthropologist,”
he continues, “are entirely different, and so must be his methods.” In the
“pre-literate” societies studied by anthropologists, language “does not live
on paper,” but instead “exists only as free utterance” located in “its context
of situation.” Seeking to avoid the “sterility of the philological approach,”
Malinowski also rejected the closely-linked interest in historical reconstruc-
tion (Malinowski 1965 [1935], xix-xx). He contrasted his method with an
earlier mode of anthropological “text-taking” that involved dictated set
pieces, via an interpreter, and thus entirely (excepting technical terms) in
translation. His key improvement, thereafter a hallmark of the field, was
to learn the language himself and eliminate the interpreter. He referred to
his collected texts, in italicised Latin, as a “corpus inscriptionum.” He also
compared his work to that of Egyptologists, who studied “a similar body of
written sources” (Malinowski 1961 [1922], 23-24).
For Malinowski, the anthropologist’s “documents of native mentality”
included “statements, characteristic narratives, typical utterances, items of
folklore and magical formula.” Like Boas, Malinowski published extensive
transcriptions together with interlineal and narrative translations, but
he also created a formal place in his method for native commentaries.
Isl amic Tex ts 37

Continuing his allusion to classical humanism, he referred to these

commentaries as “scholia”; a generation later, Victor Turner would speak
of “native exegesis.” Much as in the actual practice of Boas’ research, a
named individual “of exceptional intelligence” provided Malinowski with
fundamental linguistic assistance, “helping to obtain a definition of a word,
assisting to break it up into its formative parts, [and] explaining which
words belong to ordinary speech, which are dialectic, which are archaic,
and which are purely magical compounds.” Referring to one of his texts,
a magical spell, Malinowski explained that it “cannot be considered the
creation of one man.” A social text with a reception history, the spell bore
the “unmistakable signs of being a collection of linguistic additions from
different epochs … constantly being remoulded as it passes through the
chain of magicians, each probably leaving his mark, however small, upon
it” (Malinowski 1961 [1922], 428, 429, 433).
Introduced into a field of research then confined to small-scale, non-
literate societies, such sophisticated textual understandings marked the
discipline’s modern origins. In this displaced philology of the spoken word
we may locate part of a genealogy for the anthropological reader of written
texts. But it is a history which must be actively reclaimed.
Such continental sensibilities regarding anthropological texts and the
centrality of language preparation eventually were challenged. Anthropo-
logical linguistics branched off to develop as a specialised sub-field, while,
for the mainstream, Margaret Mead, Boas’ famous student, exemplified
the break with the older philological methods in the face of an advancing
science. As opposed to the previous generation’s pattern of sustained work
on a single region, Mead’s new “problem-oriented” research went society
hopping. Mead rejected what she referred to as linguistic “virtuosity” on
the part of the anthropologist, that is, any more language capacity than the
minimum necessary for the research task at hand (Mead 1939). An expanded
emphasis on observation, on the trained omniscience of the fieldworker,
was to be coupled with techniques of efficient questioning.
By the mid-twentieth century, anthropological research moved on to the
peasant margins of literate societies. It was the era of the Great and Little
Traditions, with anthropologists specialising in the latter, the rural and
non-literate part of a complex civilisation. By the end of the century, that
is, in our own day, especially with the “historical turn,” we have seen the
normalisation of archival inquiry, initially in Western-language colonial
sources. There also were indications of disciplinary fetters concerning writ-
ten sources being thrown off. Akhil Gupta (1995, 385), for example, asked,
“by what alchemy time turns the ‘secondary’ data of the anthropologist
38  Brinkley Messick

into the ‘primary’ data of the historian.” Anthropologists, meanwhile, had

been consumed with “reflexive” analyses of their own writings, but these
new interests in authorship did not extend to their source texts. Jonathan
Boyarin’s landmark edited volume, The Ethnography of Reading (1993),
however, initiated new interdisciplinary research on a range of literate
textual cultures while also commencing the critique of the long-standing
anthropological resistance to the study of written texts.
Because most anthropologists did not pause to rethink their disciplinary
positions regarding non-Western writings, reading methods emerged
without a great deal of thought about the new activity. This was due, in
significant part, I think, to the large achievements of two intervening
figures, Clifford Geertz and Jack Goody. While Geertz (1973) initiated a
decisive “textual turn” in the discipline, Goody’s work would serve as the
default reference for the comparative study of writing and literacy (Goody
1968, 1986). Representing important, late-twentieth-century trends in the
American and British schools, their analytic vocabularies were roughly
opposites: Geertz’s humanist (reading, construction, hermeneutics, un-
derstanding) versus Goody’s social scientific (hypothesis, data, evidence,
explanation).
Geertz introduced an influential interpretive anthropology of the
“text,” but with the significant irony that this did not refer to written texts.
While not specifically ruled out, the examination of texts in the literal
sense of indigenous writings was not the anticipated activity. Accord-
ing to Geertz’s well-known formulation, the “said” (1973, 19, 20) of social
discourse was to be “inscribed” by the ethnographer. For James Clifford
(1988, 38), who has understood Boas’ work in related terms, interpretive
anthropology was “based on a philological model of textual reading.”
Geertzian anthropologists did not initiate readings in written sources,
but instead read second-hand in Orientalist or area studies scholarship.
Interpretive anthropology focused on the broadly “public” and “shared”
levels of culture rather than on more narrowly reflective or specialised
forms of analytic thought. Instead of the “esoteric” flights of refined im-
agination or instances of sophisticated conceptualisation that might be
found in artistic or scholarly writings, Geertz held that the proper object of
cultural analysis was “the informal logic of actual life.” His field research,
conducted in the traditionally literate and predominantly Muslim societies
of Indonesia and Morocco, brilliantly adapted the interpretive sociology
of Max Weber, including his culture concept and his modes of historical
and comparative analysis, to a variety of ethnographic projects. Unlike
Weber’s own treatments of Lutheran and Calvinist doctrine, however, the
Isl amic Tex ts 39

Geertzian anthropologist was neither trained nor inclined to be a reader

of a culture’s written works.
Goody, in 1968, introduced a comparative anthropology of the “conse-
quences” of literacy. He, too, is a longstanding student of Muslim societies,
initially in Sub-Saharan Africa and most recently in Europe. The irony in
Goody’s case was that he remained profoundly distrustful of writings as
sources. This indefatigable student of “writing” as a social fact resisted the
notion of utilising documents and other written sources as anthropological
data. In his view, only observational fieldwork, the disciplinary standby,
could lead to a scientific understanding of practice. Should an anthropolo-
gist be “forced to rely on documentary evidence alone,” there were clear
dangers. Written evidence, he explained, was “often composed with specific
purposes in mind,” and, as a result, writings “play a very variable role with
regard to custom and practice, including largely ignoring them” (Goody
1990, 482). A salutary caution, no doubt, but might such an understanding
be converted from an obstacle into an opening for inquiry?
In his well-known piece on “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” Talal
Asad (1986) set forth the key concept of a “discursive tradition,” which
provided a general mandate for anthropological approaches to written
sources. An excellent specific instance of the anthropologist as reader is
found in Asad’s own subsequent work on the shariʿa in colonial Egypt. His
treatment of a text by Muhammad Abduh is exemplary. In order to pinpoint
the advent of new usages and the contours of a new discursive space that
were emerging at the turn of the twentieth century, he selectively translates,
and also transliterates, key passages from Abduh’s text (Asad 2003, ch. 7).
Before I turn, finally, to my own methods and a sketch of the textual cul-
ture of highland Yemen, I want to make some brief observations regarding
this (incomplete) genealogical sketch of the anthropologist as reader. First,
will overcoming this deeply engrained disciplinary disinclination to the use
of written sources result in a distinctive quality or a disciplinary difference
in anthropological readings? In this connection, will criticism of the old
epistemology of the “eye,” the visualism of social scientific observation, as
advanced by anthropologists such as Johannes Fabian (1993), be comple-
mented now by a new criticism attuned to the “eye” of the anthropological
reader? My second observation concerns the old anthropological philology
of the spoken word, as practiced by Boas, Malinowski, and many others. Is
it possible to draw on this disciplinary legacy of textual sophistication in
constructing new methods for the anthropologist as reader of indigenous
written texts? A third observation concerns a gap I would like to span: the
distinction between the informal or implicit in culture versus the formal
40  Brinkley Messick

or explicit, specifically in connection with textuality. From Boas forward,

anthropologists have placed an emphasis on inquiring about everyday, com-
monsensical, or colloquial assumptions as opposed to “esoteric” indigenous
knowledge, what they often rejected as “secondary explanation” and “native
models.” In my prior work on the formal, text-based knowledge of the shariʿa,
I have, at the same time, maintained an interest in the “informal logic” of
the textual tradition, in the “habitus” of the written text (Messick 1993).

2 Methods

I want to briefly explicate my own reading methods. In doing so I tease

apart and discuss separately a series of techniques that often must collapse
together in actual readings.

2.1 Ethnographic Methods: Reading with

Basic among these reading methods is the fundamentally ethnographic

activity of reading with. To work on the mainly archival documents I ob-
tained from local family holdings, I sought out local readers. As with Boas’
or Malinowski’s assistants, my fellow readers helped me to explicate terms
and parse phrases. But I also learned broader techniques of informal textual
analysis, and how to do things with texts. Thus I learned how a complex
dispute or a compound undertaking could be broken down into a series of
written acts, or how a single text could be dismantled into its constituent
stipulations and its component clauses. This was to tap, ethnographically,
into informal modes of contractual or transactional thought. I learned
that a dispute could generate a formidable paper trail as it progressed, and
also that many of these texts were blinkered with respect to others in the
same cluster or series. That is, each of the constituent texts in a complex
undertaking would offer a partial rather than a full sense of the encompass-
ing event. I also observed that certain types of documents did not mention
all of the existing terms in an undertaking. In general, however, rather than
judging texts for what they did or did not do with respect to a presumed
and governing “reality,” that is, in terms of their successes and failures as
representations of prior acts, I began to approach writings as separate acts,
as forms of reality in their own right.
Closely related to these readings was my ethnographic work on local
scenes of writing, which I studied for the retrospective purposes of his-
torical anthropology. These scenes focus on particular transitions from
Isl amic Tex ts 41

spoken words and quotidian realities to written documents and shariʿa

discourse. They prompted preliminary understandings of the in situ status
of legal documents and about archives at their points of creation. Such
micro-studies of writing and reading have helped me clarify some of the
possibilities and the limitations of an archival anthropology.

2.2 Analytic Methods: Reading for

My more solitary reading methods also draw on what I learned in the

activity of reading with. These further methods may be described as ways
of reading for. These are of two major types: readings for implicit textual
logics and readings for explicit textual theory.

2.2.1 Implicit Logics

In this category of reading I reverse the conventional order of the source.
That is, I read not for what the source says about the world, but for the
evidence of its own constitution as an act of writing. These are present
readings of existing textual artefacts in order to understand historical acts
of writing.
In particular, I read for the material features of a given text and for its
citational structures. My approach to textual “materialities” takes a cue
from Foucault on the “archive” and also from the specialised field of “bibli-
ography;” that to citation draws on conceptions developed by Bakhtin (1986)
and by linguistic anthropologists on “reported speech,” which I extend to
reported texts of all kinds, including written. In general, I read for the many
minor elements of form, or genre. Reading for “materialities,” I pay attention,
for example, to the spatial organisation of a page, whether in a document or
a manuscript, and to any later additions of notes (on a contract instrument)
or marginalia (in a book), as these provide indications as to the temporalities
of the text. Included among what I term the “elementary” features of such
writings are the statuses of original and copy, security devices of various
types, archival locations such as a register versus a home cache, etc.
Citational structures are fundamental to text-building, comprising many
of the minor and informal methods of composition. The most dramatic
example is found in shariʿa court judgements where the final record is
constructed out of excerpted and integrated passages from other texts,
both spoken and written. Thus I read for the recording of witness testimony
and the entering of notarial documents as evidence. In addition to this
archival example, I also read library texts such as law books for their forms
of wholesale quotation, such as in the commentary genre. Although Muslim
42  Brinkley Messick

linguists theorised certain forms of quotation, like the familiarity with

material features of texts in a given setting, most of the small techniques
of composition were acquired informally. These techniques were among
the features of a textual habitus gained directly through practice, through
the experience of handling local writings.

2.2.2 Explicit Theories

I also read for textual ideologies and meta-textual thought. Thus I am
interested in model texts of various types. The shariʿa library as a whole had
the status of a model with respect to a given shariʿa archive, just as specific
doctrinal chapters provided detailed language, rules, and stipulations for
particular notarial acts. Modelling also is dialogical. Thus archival docu-
ments may be read both in terms of the implementation (or not) of various
models and also in terms of their potential (or not) to impact the works
of the library. In this relational sense, modelling pertains to how theory
enters into practice and also to how practice enters into theory. Both of
these reciprocal movements are vitally important to any living legal system,
and neither has been properly understood with reference to a functioning
instance of Islamic law.
In the earlier mentioned articles from the mid-1990s, Hallaq made an
important contribution to the dialectics of modelling. In one study, he
read a corpus of treatises in the specialised genre of “stipulations” (shurūṭ),
which provided model documents for notarial writers to follow. While
Hallaq worked on the relationship that obtained over centuries, however,
I looked at one over a period of decades. Also, while Hallaq had numerous
examples of these stipulations treatises, I had but one. The key differences
of my historical anthropological project are that I also had an extensive
corpus of actual historical documents to compare to the models of the
“stipulations” treatise, and that the treatise itself was from the same locale
as the documents. In the introductory sections in the treatise I also found
more formalised, explicit versions of what I had initially understood ethno-
graphically, in reading with. Thus I found conceptual passages on breaking
a transaction down into a series of related texts and that involved thinking
in terms of the clause-structure of a given text, which in the instrument
models takes the form of branching possibilities.
Hallaq’s important contributions regarding “stripping” involves move-
ments between genres, such as from the fatwas of muftis to the pages of the
doctrinal literature in another example he studied, and from an instrument
to a document model in this case. An analysis in terms of textual “strip-
ping” concerns not only how historical documents could provide the raw
Isl amic Tex ts 43

materials for the creation of a model text, but also how, in the process,
a version of factual material from the world could find its way into the
technical discourse of the law. Viewed the other way around – since the
process was dialectical – the same channels also enabled the descent of
rules, model to document, into every day life situations. Such approaches
to the shifts that occurred in textual genres thus directly address the larger
question of the relation between theory and practice.
Beyond the models that figure in their jurisprudential writings, Yemeni
jurists also thought about writing itself. In such analyses, they considered
form apart from any particular content. That is, they isolated writing as
an object of inquiry in a manner related to my own analytic project. The
examples I now turn to represent further instances of library-on-archive
thinking, and they mainly concern the evidential status of written texts.
How did this “native” theory conceive of and configure the activity and
the space of archival writing? One example doctrinal discussion creates
a conceptual relationship between the archive and memory. Thus an
authoritative Zaydi law book, a late-fourteenth-century text (in italics)
as commented upon in the early twentieth century, states: “and it is not
permitted that a witness testify nor that a judge rule purely on the basis of
what he found in his archive, among papers written in his handwriting and
under his seal or signature, [whether in] a document or other than it, if he
does not remember” (al-ʿAnsi 1993 [1938], 4: 111). This passage pertaining to
the evidential status of ordinary legal documents links writing and memory,
asserting the primary authority of the latter.
Another doctrinal discussion concerns the place of writing in the court
forum. According to this conception, documentary evidence does not stand
alone. Witnesses present at an original event, such as a contract session, had
to appear in court to testify as to the associated document’s contents. An
important further feature of this method set forth in the doctrine was that
these witnesses had to “complete” their testimony with an “oral reading”
(qira’a) of the document in question. The term qira’a, which also may be
translated as “oral recitation,” links this courtroom plan to Qurʾan recitation
and to one of the basic methods of the madrasa lesson circle. The relevant
fragment from the Zaydi law book again mixes the fourteenth-century text
(again, in italics) with the language of the twentieth-century commentary.

It is required that the witnesses complete their testimony about the

document of a will, or [about] the document of a judge to his counterpart,
and like these, such as transaction papers, by an oral reading, by the maker
of that [document] to them [the witnesses]. (Al-ʿAnsi 1993 [1938], 4: 104-105)
44  Brinkley Messick

This “oral reading” of the text was to be carried out in court by the notarial
writer of a legal instrument. It was to be directed “to” the witnesses to the
contract or disposition. In their testimony the witnesses must be able to
say, “he [the notarial writer] read it aloud to us and we listened,” or, the
other way around, “we read it aloud and he listened to our reading.” This
doctrinal conception may be matched with case records from local shariʿa
court jurisdictions in Yemen which contain examples of a version of this
technique used in actual litigation.
Elsewhere, the doctrinal jurists reflected on writing itself, and in so
doing distinguished between different types. The issue at hand concerned
a husband putting his repudiation statement into written form. The jurists
identify two kinds of writing, but only one of these can constitute the legal
archive. Although both types of writings are understood to involve a “trace,”
only one of these remains manifest and legible. For it to be legally authorita-
tive, the doctrinal passage states:

it is necessary that the writing leave a trace which may be seen externally,
and this does not occur unless it is inscribed writing, as in writings on paper,
or boards, or stone, etc., on which the letters of the writing remain inscribed.
[This could even include] writing with earth or flour, or upon them.

Equally recognised in their analysis as a type “writing,” but not meeting the
criterion of leaving a legible inscription, is that which occurs,

in the air, or on water, or stone, on a surface not manifesting the trace

of the writing and which is impossible to read, either immediately or
[because] the first part of a letter disappears before the second part is
begun. (Al-ʿAnsi 1993 [1938], 2: 122)

Derrida (1996, 100) speaks in similar terms (but to different ends) of “separat-
ing the impression from the imprint.” The jurists’ simple classification
scheme and its quick survey of materialities yields one act of writing in
which an “impression” results in an artefact and another in which it does
not. This last, also an act of writing, but taking the form of a trace without
an “imprint,” shares a fleeting quality with an act of speech. The possibility
of a subsequent reading is thus the condition for a written act to register as
a part of shariʿa practice.
A final example of my reading for explicit textual ideologies concerns an
analysis of “basing action on writing,” which returns to the issues connected
with written evidence in court. This analysis departs from an opinion issued
Isl amic Tex ts 45

by one of the twentieth-century imams of Yemen. Again, written form is

separated from any particular content. Routine writings were deemed
absolutely necessary by the jurists, but also potentially dangerous. The
resultant dilemma animated a set of stock problems (masā’il) that reverber-
ated through the history of the shariʿa library. The twentieth-century imam
held that “the basing of action on writing is acceptable, if the writing is
known and the writer is known for justness” (see Messick 1993, 211-215).
The related analysis is a further instance of complex local juridical thought
about archival practice. This, again, is the sort of material that must be the
object of inquiry – and of related techniques of reading – in a historical
anthropology of the Islamic shariʿa.

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 Textual Aspects of Religious Authority
in Premodern Islam
Jonathan P. Berkey

In People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority, Moshe Halbertal

described Judaism as a “text-centered community” (Habertal 1997).
What he meant is that Judaism, as a community, is defined by the texts,
principally the Torah and the Talmud, which it placed at the centre of its
religious experience. In his analysis, it was not an idea about God which
distinguished a Jew. As Halbertal pointed out, historically Jews have had
radically different, even contradictory conceptions of the deity. Nor was
Judaism defined by ritual, not even a ritual as central to Jewish identity
as circumcision. It was rather the text, or certain texts, and the way in
which those texts were employed both in religious discourse and in social
life, which gave to the Jewish tradition its coherence. And not just Jewish
identity, but Jewish divisions. Attitudes towards the foundational texts
lie at the heart of the major sectarian divisions within the Jewish world.
For example, it is a textual dispute which in the Middle Ages marked the
difference between Rabbanites and Karaites: the Rabbanites accepting the
authority of the Talmud in addition to the Bible; the Karaites rejecting the
authority of anything but the canonical scriptures.
Change a key term or text, and these remarks also describe the situation
in Islam. For the Torah and Talmud, substitute the Qurʾan and the hadith –
the word of God and the words of his Prophet. The texts may be different,
but Islam, too, is a “text-centered community.”
Of course, behind the simple focus on texts lies a more complex reality,
not least because the text or texts in question are not easily defined. In
the case of Judaism, the Torah alone is not the text: it is the Torah plus the
Mishnah and the Talmud plus the entire universe of commentaries on the
sacred texts which define the tradition. Islam constitutes a “text-centered
community” in precisely analogous terms. It is not the Qurʾan and hadith
alone which define the community, but a complex array of commentaries on
those texts – especially those commentaries which came to define Islamic
law.
As an observation about Islam, all this is, perhaps, self-evident. But it
has very important consequences for Islamic history. For example, there
is the question of the identity – almost, we might say, the very existence of
48  Jonathan P. Berkey

Islam – during the first Islamic century. The radical ideas articulated by
Michael Cook and Patricia Crone in Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic
World and by John Wansbrough in his various studies of the Qurʾan have
not been accepted in their entirety by many historians of early Islam (Cook
and Crone 1977; Wansbrough 1978, 1987). Nonetheless, it is fair to say that
they have highlighted the fragility of the traditional narrative of Islamic
origins, so much so that it is now difficult to speak with great confidence of
a fully-formed and precisely delineated “Islam,” even perhaps of a definitive
Qurʾanic text, before the later years of the seventh century.1
If this is so, then it may be necessary to rewrite the history of Islam in its
formative decades as the history of a “text-centered community.” This would
mean that the proper framework for an understanding of early Islamic
history would not be one centred on the individuals or the families or the
dynasties who exercised political power – that is, on those around whom
we are accustomed to construct the story. The history of early Islam should
be conceptualised not so much as that of the “rightly-guided caliphs,” or
of the Umayyads or Abbasids. Rather, the history of early Islam should be
construed as the story of the formation of a textual authority.
One advantage of casting early Islamic history as the “formation of a
textual authority” is the reminder that the process was precisely that – a
process. Virtually all of those things to which we might point in order to
define “Islam” developed only gradually. This may be true of the Qurʾan
itself, although that question is better left to specialists in the history of
Muslim scripture. It is, however, certainly true of the ʿulamaʾ, the religious
scholars who defined the Islamic textual tradition and in whom a mature
Islam vested its religious authority. The ʿulamaʾ were not there at the origins
of the new religion, nor do they correspond neatly to any pre-Islamic social
or religious group. This is an important point, which historians of early Islam
have recently begun to explore. At what point can the ʿulamaʾ be said to
have come into existence? At what point did they come to exercise religious
authority? These questions are reminiscent of that involving chicken and
eggs. Which came first: the chicken or the egg? Which came first: Islam?
Its fundamental texts? The religious scholars who defined what the religion
was, and what it was not? It may well be that, as with chickens and eggs, a
precise and definitive answer is impossible. Perhaps it would be better to
say, simply, that all of these things constitute aspects of a textual authority
which developed over the course of the first century or so of the Islamic
period.

1 See Donner (2010).

Tex tual Aspects of Religious Authorit y in Premodern Isl am 49

The topic of this essay, “textual aspects of religious authority,” is thus

central to the Islamic experience. There are many places in the history of
Islam, and in particular of its understanding of religious authority, in which
the text and the idea of the text have had important consequences. What
I would like to do here is to identify three aspects of this preoccupation
with the text and its complex relation to religious authority. My goal is to
explore certain broad themes of recent scholarly literature about texts and
religious authority in the Islamic tradition, as a way of highlighting possible
areas of future research.
The first of these themes concerns the persistent orality of texts – that is,
the stubborn preference for the oral transmission of texts – the Qurʾan of
course, but also most other religious texts. It is a commonplace in scholarly
literature that, in the Islamic tradition, books do not really exist until they
are actually pronounced, that is, spoken out loud. Books might be written
down; they might be copied; they might be bound and arranged on shelves
in libraries. But books were routinely and preferably read out loud, and their
essence was found in their spoken rather than written form. One can find
examples of this preference for oral transmission in virtually all premodern
Muslim societies. It was certainly present in the world of religious educa-
tion in medieval Cairo.2 There, books were routinely read out loud, either
from memory or from a written text, and the act of reading was sometimes
described as a “buzzing” sound. There were practical advantages to “speak-
ing” books rather than reading them silently. For one thing, it meant that
more people had access to them, since many could listen where only one
at a time might read a written text. But the preference for oral rather than
written transmission goes well beyond practical concerns and reflects
deeply-rooted cultural priorities.
Of course, the oral nature of the Islamic conception of the text is most
evident in the case of the Qurʾan>. One of the classic statements of the
importance of the oral transmission of texts is found in the important book
by William Graham, Beyond the Written Word (1987). In that work Graham
was concerned principally with the Qurʾan, the Muslim holy scripture, in
which the oral nature of the Islamic conception of the text is most evident.
As he points out, the very name of the Qurʾan – from an Arabic verb meaning
“to recite” – suggests the oral nature of the text. The Qurʾan, says Graham,
is a “wholly oral” text – although it might be preferable to call the Qurʾan
“originally oral” rather than “wholly oral,” since eventually the writing down
of the revelations created a more complex text, in which oral and written

2 See Berkey (1992).

50  Jonathan P. Berkey

elements both played a role. Moreover, the Qurʾan refers to itself as a “writ-
ten book” (kitāb maktūb) and attributes its glory to a “preserved tablet” (lawḥ
maḥfūẓ). Such expressions may suggest that the Qurʾan’s understanding of
its own origins presumes the priority of a written celestial text.
But despite these ambiguities and complexities, the oral nature of the
Qurʾan as experienced is surely clear. The very name of the text (qurʾān or
“recitation”), its euphonic language and the frequent presence within it of
the imperative qul (Speak!) indicate unequivocally the oral character of
the Prophet Muhammad’s encounter with the Word of God (even if we are
agnostic on the highly-charged question of whether or not Muhammad was
illiterate). Graham sought to distinguish the Muslim experience of scripture
from the Jewish and Christian. Jews and Christians, he argued, have tended
to stress the written nature of scripture, recognising in the written book
“a physical symbol of divine as opposed to human knowledge” (Graham
1987, 51). This was especially true after the Protestant Reformation and the
rise of printing, although the roots of the privileging of the written word
are older, and lie in ancient Near Eastern ideas. By contrast, he said, “[i]n
Muslim piety, the written word of its scripture has always been secondary
to a strong tradition of oral transmission and aural presence of scripture”
(Graham 1987, 79).
There are in fact two questions, two distinct aspects of the orality of
the Qurʾan, and it is helpful to separate them. The first is a religious ques-
tion – the type of question which might concern theologians, on the one
hand, and on the other historians of religion influenced by the approach
of scholars such as Mircea Eliade. This question concerns the sacred power
of the written Qurʾanic text. Where does the power of the written Qurʾan
come from? One possible answer: from the power of the sacred oral word,
from the word pronounced by God. This is certainly plausible, from the
point of view of the theologian or the historian of religion. The theologian
proceeds with certain assumptions about the character of God which render
judgements about the power of God’s speech credible. The historian of
religion is interested in the subjective experience of religion, and in patterns
in the religious experiences of people living in different times and places.
But on all of this, the social historian has little to say, since he is uncomfort-
able making judgements about abstract ideas (such as God) or subjective
experiences which are not anchored in a social reality.
There is, however, a second question, and one which from the standpoint
of the social and cultural historian is far more important. The oral character
of the word of God was not Graham’s principal subject. He wished to discuss
the oral character of reading “beyond the written word” – that is, not the
Tex tual Aspects of Religious Authorit y in Premodern Isl am 51

Qurʾan itself, but the reading of the holy scripture during the centuries that
followed its revelation, the encounter between the holy book and the Muslim
believer, and the Islamic conception of the book and of religious literature
more generally. And here we abandon the domain of the theologian and
enter that of the social historian.
To be sure, at least in the premodern period, most Muslims have in most
cases experienced the Qurʾan as an oral text. They encountered the Qurʾan
recited, rather than the Qurʾan in written form. Take one example. One of
the principal features of the madrasas and mosques of medieval Cairo were
professional Qurʾan readers employed to recite the holy scripture, at all
hours of the day and night, from the windows of the structures – all for the
benefit of those passing by in the street. It is a delightful scene to imagine:
as a Muslim passed through the streets of the noisy and crowded city, he
heard the Qurʾan recited from open windows high above the street. Anyone
who has visited modern Cairo is familiar with the public recitation of the
Qurʾan that one occasionally hears in the streets of the city, particularly
during holidays or on solemn occasions. But if the endowment deeds which
established the religious and educational institutions of the medieval city
are to be believed, this must have been a permanent and ongoing experi-
ence, a defining feature of urban life (Berkey 1992, 63-64).
But drawing too sharp a contrast between Muslim and Christian (and
especially Protestant) attitudes and practices may obscure a complexity in
the actual Islamic experience of the text. Medieval Muslims heard Qurʾanic
verses being recited in the streets, but they also saw them written on the
walls of buildings. It is important to remember the ubiquity of Qurʾanic
inscriptions in the physical fabric of medieval Muslim cities. This is one
of those places where the social historian must take his/her cue from
historians of art. In addition, there is the question of the usage of the text
of the Qurʾan. Graham mentions in passing various magical practices and
acts of “bibliomancy” or “book magic” – that is, foretelling the future by
randomly opening the pages of a book. (Something similar occurs in a
famous passage at the end of Book 8 of St Augustine’s Confessions.) But from
the point of view of the actual experience of the faith, such practices may
have been more important than we might assume. The invocation of the
magical power of the Qurʾan often depended heavily on actual written texts,
on amulets inscribed with Qurʾanic verses and the like. As a written text of
spiritual power, the Qurʾan, in fact, had to compete with other scriptures,
even among Muslims. Consider, for example, an observation by Ibn al-Hajj,
a rather excitable and pessimistic jurist living in Cairo in the fourteenth
century. Ibn al-Hajj complained that it was the habit of the inhabitants of
52  Jonathan P. Berkey

the city to visit schoolteachers and ask them to inscribe Qurʾanic texts as
charms and amulets. This custom annoyed him, but he was positively livid
about Muslims who went further and asked that those charms be written in
Hebrew characters. The power of these “judaizing” amulets resided in their
strange character, a character manifested in writing (Ibn al-Hajj 1929, 2: 323).
This is not to deny the importance of the oral recitation and transmission
of texts for medieval Muslims. It is simply to insist on the complexity of
the phenomenon. Medieval Muslim societies were full of books – the large
number surviving in the libraries of Europe and the Middle East attest to
that. The scribal profession was one of the most widespread open to an
individual with a degree of education. A comparative example may be
useful. Brinkley Messick recognised the importance of the oral nature
of reading in his investigation of juristic culture in nineteenth-century
Yemen. But he also acknowledged a fundamental ambiguity: that the intel-
lectual milieu was inundated with actual, physical books. As he put it, “the
coexistence of recitational forms and their written versions was taken for
granted.” “Indeed, the complex interplay between written and spoken word
was characteristic,” he said, “of a distinctively Islamic mode of literacy”
(Messick 1993, 28-29).
Clearly, the power and the status of the written book was a subject of
controversy in medieval Islam. There are many hadiths in which Muham-
mad or his companions condemned the writing down of the Prophet’s
words. They did so for many reasons – for example, that copying down
Muhammad’s words might distract believers from the supreme text (that
is, the Qurʾan), or that doing so might diminish memory and encourage
forgetfulness. But these objections seem somewhat artificial and formulaic.
In any case, there were at the same time plenty of contradictory hadiths,
approving the writing down of Muhammad’s utterances.
In the end, the scholarly tradition managed to surmount the objections
and insisted upon the compatibility of religious knowledge and writing, so
that we cannot understand the social role of books without an apprecia-
tion of the power of the written text and the logic of writing. Indeed, the
famous historian and jurist al-Khatib al-Baghdadi argued for the necessity,
indeed the superiority of writing as a means of transmitting and preserving
religious knowledge. “For practical reasons,” “people rely on books and on
writing for the safe transmission of religious knowledge. Hearts tire at the
commitment of names and texts to memory” (al-Khatib al-Baghdadi 1974).
This was a phenomenon replicated at different levels of culture. So,
for example, as Jeanette Wakin demonstrated some time ago, despite the
suspicion of documents embedded in the juristic thought, they nonetheless
Tex tual Aspects of Religious Authorit y in Premodern Isl am 53

played a critical role in legal life. It is true that a document which described,
for example, a contract of sale did not represent the contract itself – the
contract was found rather in the personal relation between the seller and
buyer. But from a practical point of view, the documents nonetheless defini-
tively decided the sense and the consequences of the contract (Wakin 1972).
The second major historiographic theme emerging from the Muslim
preoccupation with texts is linked to the question of orality. This is the
question of what I shall call the informality of medieval Muslim society, by
which I mean the informal and personal relations which determined the
contours and also the hierarchies of social, intellectual, and even political
life. This too is a textual question – at least if we use the term “textual” with
a certain flexibility. This is because the archetypal mode of the “informal”
relationship is that of a shaykh and his disciple, the master and student who
sit, whatever the milieu, and read books – out loud, perhaps from memory,
perhaps from an actual, physical text. In this model, the important thing is
not the text itself, nor the environment, nor any institutional structures. The
important thing is the personal relation between the shaykh and student,
the master and disciple.
Like the preference for oral transmission, the emphasis on personal rela-
tions in structures of intellectual authority is deeply rooted in the Islamic
experience. It was, for example, central to the study of hadiths, as in the
famous dictum that “knowing hadiths means knowing the men.” In other
words, it was necessary for a scholar to know not only the text of a tradition,
but also the identities and characters of the individual transmitters who
relayed the hadiths, whose names were included in the “chains of authority”
(isnāds) which were attached to each tradition, and in particular to know
the connections between them: how they met, when, where, at what age,
and under what conditions. The personal connections and relationships on
which the transmission of hadith rested were replicated in various ways
across the intellectual spectrum. As Messick nicely put it, “this prefer-
ence for personal, informal transmission meant that texts were ‘literally
embodied’” (Messick 1993, 15).
The situation in medieval Cairo provides a clear example of an intellec-
tual world defined by these informal and personal relationships between
scholars and students. Most medieval Muslim cities saw the proliferation
of madrasas and other institutions, created to encourage and support the
transmission of the Islamic religious sciences. But these institutions had
little, if any, effect on the actual transmission of religious knowledge.
Religious education never came to rely on a system of institutional de-
grees or other formal mechanisms. Rather, the system rested on the close
54  Jonathan P. Berkey

personal relationships established between teachers and students. What

was transmitted between master and student was not simply knowledge,
but rather “an authority over texts and over a body of learning that was
intensely personal, and that could be transmitted only through some form
of direct personal contact” (Berkey 1992, 23-24). The force of that personal
authority is evident in the case of the fifteenth-century scholar al-Suyuti.
Al-Suyuti wrote a book on the science of the variant Qurʾan readings.
Nonetheless, he refused to teach it, because he had never studied the
subject properly under the personal supervision of a recognised master
(al-Suyuti 1975, 204).
This theme has been fundamental to all studies of the transmission of re-
ligious knowledge over the last several decades. There is a particularly stark
expression of it in a fascinating paper by the eminent Iranian philosopher
Seyyed Hossein Nasr – a scholarly study exploring “oral transmission and the
book in Islamic education,” but also serving as an exemplum of the survival
of traditional modes of Islamic intellectual discourse in the modern world.
In this essay, Professor Nasr outlined his own experience studying with the
grand masters of Persian philosophy and theosophy. These teachers, he said,
would mention at the beginning of their instruction that the good student
must learn not only to read correctly the black lines of the text in Arabic
or Persian, but that he must also read what he would call “the white parts”
of the page or what in English would be called “reading between the lines.”
But this reading of the “unwritten” text had to be carried out not according
to the student’s individual whim and fancy, but in accordance with the oral
transmission stored in the memory of the master and going back through
generations of teachers to the original author of the text. One hears in his
words a not-too-distant echo of the teaching of the rabbis of late antiquity,
who held that they possessed a second Torah, a purely oral Torah distinct
from the written text which was transmitted exclusively through the close
personal contacts between teacher and student (Nasr 1992).
The theme of informality may be rooted in the transmission of religious
knowledge, but it has shaped our understanding of social life in medieval
Muslim societies more broadly. “Informality” – that is, the reliance on net-
works of personal relationships rather than formal or institutional arrange-
ments – is visible in virtually all types of social relations, and not simply in
educational ones. We see it in the relationships between Sufi masters and
their disciples. We see it in the commercial relationships described by S.D.
Goitein, Avrom Udovitch, and others (Udovitch 1977). We see something
similar, too, in the intimate relationships between amirs and their mamluks
in the military regimes which dominated the Middle East in the medieval
Tex tual Aspects of Religious Authorit y in Premodern Isl am 55

period. It would not be too much to say that this model has become one of
the defining tropes of modern studies of medieval Islamic society.
There are many reasons why this idea – the idea that authority was
located in personal relationships rather than institutional forms – has been
popular among social historians of the premodern Islamic world. One is that
it tends to draw our attention to people, to persons, to individuals rather
than to institutions and more formal structures. This is fortuitous, because
we have plentiful information about those individuals – and especially
about the ʿulamaʾ, the religious scholars – from medieval biographical
dictionaries. By contrast, institutions, both those of the state and of the
religious establishment, have left a less prominent imprint in the historical
record. The emphasis on informality and personal relationships, in other
words, is confirmed by the very nature of the surviving evidence. Another
reason why this model has been so influential is that it serves to distinguish
these societies from those of medieval Europe, where institutions such as
the Church and the more formalised relationships of feudal vassalage were
dominant.3
An especially sophisticated and compelling application of the model of
informality is found in Michael Chamberlain’s important book on Knowl-
edge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus. If Graham’s book Beyond the
Written Word was a kind of summum of the idea of the orality of texts, we
might say that Chamberlain’s is an epitome of the importance of informal-
ity and the personal relationships which held medieval Muslim societies
together. The author did not like the term “informality” and sought to avoid
it, but in fact he discussed in detail and with conviction the character
of the personal ties that bound master to disciple, and showed how they
were characteristic of the understanding and the experience of authority
at all levels of medieval Muslim society, those of both the scholars and
the military rulers. For Chamberlain, this model served to distinguish the
societies of the medieval Middle East from others. In Europe, he pointed
out, power and authority rested in the more formal and precisely delineated
ties of feudal obligations. In China, they were found in imperial institutions
and offices. But in medieval Islam, they resided in the fluid structure of
the “household,” or bayt, the grand family dynasties which dominated both
intellectual and political life. And here, again, the model takes us back to
the book, to the text. The authority of shaykhs operating under this system
rested on books, but these books did not exist as fixed and permanent
objects. For Chamberlain, this was not merely the distinction between

3 For a study which made informality a central theme of its analysis, see Berkey (1998).
56  Jonathan P. Berkey

a written book and oral reading. On the contrary, it was the book itself
which lacked a determinative and fixed form. One did not “read” a book,
he said; rather, one “created” it new each time it was read, “fortuitously” (as
he cogently expressed it), in a public “performance” (Chamberlain 1994).
The model of informality has proved as important to our understanding
of medieval Islam as has that of the oral transmission of texts, and with
as good a reason. But as with the earlier question, it is important not to let
its analytical force oversimplify the picture. The model of informality can
obscure as well as clarify.
The model of informality may be especially problematic on the political
side. Chamberlain addressed a textual problem which has vexed historians
of medieval Islam for years: namely, the almost total absence of documents
and archives from before the Ottoman epoch. The contrast really is quite
stark. With the Ottomans, we suddenly have archives of enormous propor-
tions, preserving the institutional history of a powerful state. Before that,
there is virtually nothing. Chamberlain resolves this problem with an
elegant and creative solution, one that relies on the model of informality.
There is no point, he argues, in complaining about the lack of documenta-
tion. Rather, we should simply accept it as a consequence of the character
of power and political authority, that is, of the state, and in fact of the
book itself in medieval Muslim societies. None of these things took a fixed
and definitive shape, neither books nor the state. They were all created
and re-created “fortuitously” in time, as manifestations of the authority
of an amir or of a shaykh, an authority which was founded on personal
relationships, informal and constantly shifting. Chamberlain contrasts
the situation in medieval China, as well as that in the Ottoman Empire.
Both of those had extensive and institutionalised bureaucracies, and both
have consequently left a prodigious documentary legacy. By contrast, the
“formal state agencies” in the medieval Middle East were “rudimentary”
(Chamberlain 1994, 17).
To this there is, perhaps, an obvious objection. The “formal state agencies”
of the Mamluks, for example, or of the Ayyubids were not “rudimentary”
in comparison to those of, say the Angevin or Anglo-Norman kings. But
we have lots of documents prepared by the scribes of those medieval
European states. The sophistication of the institutional apparatus of the
Mamluk state is clear from the enormous encyclopaedia prepared by Ahmad
ibn ʿAli al-Qalqashandi. Al-Qalqashandi, who was himself a scribe in a
government office, envisioned his work as a sort of handbook that would
provide scribes and bureaucrats with the information they needed to carry
out their practical tasks – drawing up official correspondence, drafting
Tex tual Aspects of Religious Authorit y in Premodern Isl am 57

treaties, or putting into effect the decrees of the rulers – all those documents
reflecting a formalised political authority which now appear to be missing.
Al-Qalqashandi clearly did not compose his work as a useless distraction;
he composed it because the many scribes and bureaucrats who staffed the
chanceries of the Mamluks had constant recourse to it.
The scribal tradition was not the only place where authority was actually
experienced in more formal terms. At all levels, social and political relations,
while defined by personal and informal relationships, were registered in
formal, written documents. In the field of religious knowledge, we might
take note of the care with which teachers and students inscribed their
names in ijāzas – those certificates which testified that an individual had
studied some text, or mastered some field of study, under the direction of
a particular teacher. The absence of formal archives from the pre-Ottoman
period is a puzzle. Perhaps they were carted off by the Ottomans when they
conquered Egypt and Syria; perhaps they have simply not survived the
vicissitudes of time. The explanation for their absence, however, cannot be
attributed solely to the informal character of the medieval Muslim state.
A more interesting question, from the standpoint of religious author-
ity, is that of education itself. Why did an individual participate in the
transmission of religious knowledge? There were many reasons, and one of
the major accomplishments of Chamberlain’s book is that he illustrates in
detail the broad social value of religious knowledge, of ʿilm. As Chamberlain
put it, the transmission of knowledge created “social capital” on which
all of the participants – masters and disciples both – could draw in their
relations with each other and with the social and religious elites. In other
words, participating actively in the transmission of knowledge, both as
one who transmitted knowledge – that is, a teacher – and as one to whom
it was transmitted – a student – had a significance above and beyond its
intellectual and professional value.
This is certainly true, but surely the transmission of religious knowledge
also had a practical and professional value of which participants were
aware. Chamberlain observed that “in all the literature for high medieval
Damascus there is not a single citation … that any young person … [was]
enrolled in a madrasa to acquire certified mastery of law” (Chamberlain
1994, 87). The suggestion seems to be that the intellectual activity which
went on in a madrasa – transmitting religious texts, reading them, reciting
them, memorising them, commenting on them – was simply a means to
build the relationships with other scholars which defined an academic
career. In other words, they did not perceive a formal connection between
the intellectual activity of transmitting religious texts and the religious
58  Jonathan P. Berkey

careers which the scholars might later pursue – as professors, as qadis, as

preachers, whatever.
Here, perhaps, we should tread with caution. It is likely that the medieval
ʿulamaʾ understood the connection between what they studied/how they
studied/with whom they studied and their later careers within the religious
and academic establishment. They understood, in other words, both the
informal and the formal value of what they studied. Only slightly later, the
Ottomans understood the connection perfectly well. For them, enrolling in a
madrasa was a conscious step one took in a carefully structured career path: a
student enrolled in a madrasa precisely in order to acquire a certified “mastery
of law,” which would enable him to advance through the ranks of the academic
and judicial establishment. It is true that medieval madrasas, whether in
Damascus or Cairo or anywhere else, never embraced a set curriculum or
the formal degrees of the later Ottoman system. But the Ottoman system
did not emerge out of nowhere, and most likely reflected simply the formalis-
ing of a professional system which was already in place. (Indeed, one of the
most promising avenues for future research lies in exploring the continuity
between Ottoman and pre-Ottoman Middle Eastern societies, and the roots
of Ottoman practice in that of the Saljuqs, Ayyubids, Mamluks, and others.)
So far, then, we have identified two major issues, that of orality and
informality, which have stood at the centre of recent scholarly discussions
about this “text-centered community” – the communities of medieval
Islam. A third major theme of recent scholarship – that of the specifically
textual nature of religious authority – is perhaps even more important,
and constitutes the most promising field for future research. To begin, I
would return to the book of Moshe Halbertal, and in particular to certain
comments he made about the canonisation of the Jewish scriptures.
“Canonisation” here indicates the establishment of definitive limits to the
texts which are identified as those of God, which are holy books. This pro-
cess of canonisation, Halbertal said, changed the character and the locus of
religious authority in Judaism. In the first place, the process of canonisation
shifted the locus of religious authority from God to human beings. That is
because canonisation also implied the closing of the book of prophecy – that
is, it brought to an end the era in which God could speak directly through
his prophets. In other words, the source of religious authority was no longer
to be found directly in the voice of God, but rather in the voices of those
who talked about God. Religious authority was found less in the scriptural
texts themselves than in the ever-expanding universe of commentaries
on those texts. In theory, God could no longer speak directly; rather, it
was scholars, jurists, and rabbis, who now spoke in his place. To be sure,
Tex tual Aspects of Religious Authorit y in Premodern Isl am 59

God did not suffer his reduction in rank quietly, and there remained many
voices which defied the authority of the rabbis. Even in the Talmud, one
can detect efforts by God to find his voice, in the form of dreams, auguries,
etc. But those voices were always pushed to the margins by the hegemony
of the commentators. Consequently, if the texts which commented upon
the holy scriptures assumed the responsibility of religious authority, they
were also transformed into a field of battle. It is there, in the interpretation
of the text, that we find the struggles which would determine the identity
of the Jewish tradition itself. And for this reason, the critical question was
that of access to the text.
Once again, these remarks pertain to Islam as well. The development of
a canonised scripture was not a simple affair. It is possible that the Qurʾan
itself did not exist in a fixed form before the final years of the seventh
century. And it was not until the late ninth century that definitive compila-
tions of hadiths began to be written down, in collections such as those
of al-Bukhari and Muslim. More important, however, was the process by
which these collections came to have a canonical status. This development,
recently studied by Jonathan Brown, was a product of the tenth and eleventh
centuries, and marks a turning point in the history of Islam (Brown 2007).
In the centuries which followed – in the epoch which Marshall Hodgson
referred to as the “Islamic Middle Period” – the problem of religious author-
ity presented itself to Muslims in new and socially complex ways. Now that
the canon had been established, what was critical was determining who
would be recognised as authoritative commentators – who, that is, could
shape the community’s understanding of its canonical texts.
Consequently, one common feature of this Middle Period was an ef-
fort to limit the social base of religious authority> – to limit access to the
textual foundations of authority. The men of religion, the ʿulamaʾ, tried to
define their own “text-centered community” in such a way as to exclude
the vast majority of Muslims from participating in the exercise of religious
authority. It is a truism that Islam is not a church, that religious authority is
more diffuse and – to borrow a term –“informal.” But to say that religious
authority is “informal” is not to say that it does not exist. In fact, the need to
set limits to this authority – to determine who, that is, could speak for the
tradition – was greater for Muslims precisely because religious authority
was so loose and flexible.
The history of the ʿulamaʾ in the Islamic Middle Period is best viewed as
the history of a crisis of authority – a crisis of that textual authority on which
the power of the ʿulamaʾ was founded. The need to limit access to texts and
to the community of acceptable and legitimate commentators may have
60  Jonathan P. Berkey

become more acute in the Middle Period as a result of broader developments

in Islamic society. It is easy to forget how unnerving it must have been to live
in the medieval Middle East. From a Muslim perspective, things must have
seemed to be falling apart. It was not simply the threat posed by new and
terrifying enemies, the Crusaders, for example, or even worse, the Mongols.
Even your friends might be dangerous. A Muslim inhabitant of Egypt or
Syria might well have felt grateful to the Turkish regimes which dominated
the Middle East in the Middle Period for having saved Islam – as, indeed,
Ibn Khaldun urged them to do. But his gratitude might have been tempered
by feelings of repugnance and fear at those same Turkish overlords, with
their monopoly on state-sanctioned violence and the un-Islamic habits in
which they reportedly indulged.
The religious scene itself must have seemed unstable and disconcerting.
So, for example, it was probably around the outset of the Middle Period
that Islam became a majoritarian religion in most of the Middle East. This
condition surely created pressures to define more precisely the contours
of religious authority, for many reasons, not least because of the large
numbers of non-Muslims who now embraced Islam, but who sometimes
brought with them the customs and beliefs of their former faiths. There
were pressures from the ideological struggle between Sunnism and Shiʿism
which, in many ways, grew more acute during the Middle Period. Another
factor was the growth and popularity of the fraternities of Sufis. Sufism
presented many challenges, not least because of its tendency to borrow
liberally from the religious experience and insights of non-Muslims. But
even leaving its syncretism aside, the Sufi tradition posed challenges to a
religious tradition which defined authority in textual terms and through
personal and informal networks. So, for example, in Andalusia, Sufis were
embroiled in a controversy over the question: was it possible to arrive at
mystical knowledge only through books, or was it necessary also to have a
shaykh to guide you? (Mahdi 1975)
Ironically, the most destabilising factor of all may have been the prolif-
eration of madrasas and other educational institutions during the Middle
Period. The madrasa was a new feature of medieval Islamic life. From their
origins in Khurasan in the eleventh century, they spread throughout the
Middle East as rival regimes dominated by mostly Turkish soldiers sought
to establish their Islamic bona fides. Their ubiquity in the cities and towns
of the Islamic world created the conditions in which many Muslims, profes-
sional students but also individuals from quite disparate walks of life, were
able to participate in the transmission of religious knowledge. In many
respects this was a remarkable and praiseworthy development – after all,
Tex tual Aspects of Religious Authorit y in Premodern Isl am 61

more and more Muslims could participate actively in the transmission

of religious knowledge and texts. But from the standpoint of those who
guarded the religious tradition, it also posed a danger. By increasing op-
portunities for many Muslims, even those who were not full-time students,
to participate in the transmission of religious texts, it blurred the lines
between ʿulamaʾ and others and thereby threatened the integrity of their
religious authority.
All of these factors, and others as well, helped to create a crisis of textual
authority within the Muslim community. This crisis manifested itself in
multiple ways. One of the more important was that involving ijtihād in
the domain of jurisprudence. For years, the received notion was that the
so-called “gates of independent reasoning” closed sometime around the
tenth or eleventh century. From that point on, Islamic jurists were limited
to the “imitation” (taqlīd) of the opinions of those who had gone before.
Many recent scholars, most notably Wael Hallaq, have demonstrated that
this notion is untenable, that on the contrary, ijtihād or “independent juristic
reasoning” remained both possible and, for juristic theory, necessary, right
down through the end of the Middle Period.
But we can acknowledge this and still recognise that medieval Muslims
sought to limit the range of individuals who were capable of exercising
independent jurisprudential authority. Sherman Jackson, for example, in his
important book on constitutional jurisprudence under the Mamluks, dem-
onstrated that, despite the persistence of ijtihād, the actual practice of the
law was dominated by what he called a “regime of taqlīd.” “Jurists,” he said,
“were more and more restricted in their rulings by the general consensus of
the schools of law” (Jackson 1996). Other studies have affirmed the general
trend, for example, by demonstrating the increasingly important role of
mukhtaṣars, what modern students might call “hornbooks,” in medieval
legal education. A mukhtaṣar was a treatise which provided an abridged
résumé of the rules of the four orthodox schools of law. The historian Ibn
Khaldun objected to their use, seeing in them a “corrupting influence upon
the process of instruction” (Ibn Khaldun 1967, 3: 290-291). But such texts
proliferated nonetheless, and spoke to a perceived need within the juristic
community: namely, to attain what has been called “univocality” within
each school of law. That is to say, they reflected an effort to restrict the range
of individuals who exercised the textual authority rooted in the Qurʾan and
the other foundations of Islamic jurisprudence (Fadel 1996).
In a recent book, Kevin Jaques traced some of the practical consequences
of this drive for univocality. His subject was the of the Mamluk-period
scholar Ibn Qadi Shuhba, a biographical survey of jurists of the Shafiʿi
62  Jonathan P. Berkey

school from the ninth century through to the fifteenth century. Tabaqat
works provided a map of authority within a given f ield of knowledge.
By tracing the connections between one scholar and another, and be-
tween one generation of scholars and those that went before – in other
words, by describing the web of informal and personal relationships we
discussed earlier – a writer such as Ibn Qadi Shuhba could identify “the
chains by which authoritative knowledge is transmitted from generation
to generation and in doing so present readers with overviews of trends in
the development of different scholarly traditions and schools of thought”
(Jacques 2006, 11-12).
Ibn Qadi Shuhba’s text was one of many such tabaqat works produced
during the Mamluk period. Jaques sees them as a “manifestation of the
crisis of religious authority” of the age (Jacques 2006, 17). That crisis was a
product of all that political and cultural turmoil which characterised the
Middle Period, and also of the intrusion of what Ibn Qadi Shuhba considered
“corruptions” into the body of Shafiʿi law. Through a careful analysis of the
names of Shafiʿi scholars mentioned in the work, and also of the various legal
texts referred to and approved of by the author, Jaques shows how Ibn Qadi
Shuhba’s purpose was to limit the number of those Shafiʿi scholars and texts
who were recognised as authoritative transmitters of accepted legal rulings
within the Shafiʿi school. In effect, Ibn Qadi Shuhba provided Shafiʿi jurists
of his day with a convenient but restrictive map of the intellectual range of
their school of law. By limiting the number of earlier scholars recognised
as authoritative, Ibn Qadi Shuhba tried to promote consistency – or, to
put it differently, univocality – in the legal rulings handed down by his
contemporaries.
These developments were tied to the polemical tradition condemning
innovations, what are called in Arabic bidʿa. The problem of bidʿa was
extremely complex. Some jurists condemned all innovations on principle.
Others sought to distinguish between innovations that were acceptable and
those which were not. But a general suspicion of that which was new and dif-
ferent was characteristic of much medieval Islamic discourse. The hostility of
medieval jurists (such as al-Turtushi, Ibn al-Hajj, Ibn Baydakin, and others)
was not new: the discourse was rooted in very old Islamic traditions. But the
level of hostility seems to me more pressing, more urgent in the Islamic Mid-
dle Period. The frenetic character of juristic opposition to bidʿa was, I think,
the result of the scholars’ perception that their tradition was threatened by
the absence of a visible and distinct – that is, of an institutional – authority.
One aspect of the discourse on innovations, and one that reflects the
question of books and textual authority, was the polemic against popular
Tex tual Aspects of Religious Authorit y in Premodern Isl am 63

preachers and storytellers. As with innovations more generally, the op-

position to these preachers and purveyors of religious narratives to the
masses was deeply rooted in Islamic culture. But here, too, the concerns
grew more acute during the later Middle Period. The Hanbali jurist Ibn al-
Jawzi’s treatise Kitab al-qussas wa al-mudhakkirin is a famous example, but
it is only one of many produced in this period. In fact, the polemic against
preachers constituted a distinct sub-genre of medieval Islamic religious
discourse. This is an important point. Preaching and the transmission of
edifying religious tales were, of course, in and of themselves good things.
Nonetheless, Islamic writers such as Ibn al-Jawzi were adamant in their
efforts to de-legitimise a broad array of individuals, men and also some
women, who spent their time preaching and telling religious tales to the
common people. 4
What was the problem with these preachers? There were many. In the
f irst place, some were imposters, deceiving the common people with
fraudulent claims and deceptive tricks – for example, placing mustard
seeds in their eyes to make them cry, and so to make them appear like
pious penitents, weeping for their sins. By the Middle Period, many of
these preachers were Sufis, and their critics condemned their recitation
of erotic poetry to people who could understand that verse properly – that
is, as a kind of metaphor for spiritual as opposed to physical love. There
was a further problem of a sexual nature. Many members of the audience
of these popular preachers and storytellers were women, as were some of
the preachers themselves. And to the pious mind of an Ibn al-Jawzi or Ibn
Taymiyya, the mingling of the sexes constituted a danger to the proper
Islamic order.
But these problems were really secondary and derivative. The greater
threat, the structural danger, concerned textual authority – the very founda-
tion of the authority of the ʿulamaʾ and of the Islamic tradition itself. In
the first place, the threat had a political dimension. Critics such as Ibn
al-Jawzi were worried about the tremendous popularity of the preachers and
storytellers among average Muslims. The situation, he said, was reminiscent
of that of the Banu Israʾil: they, too, had had storytellers and preachers who
corrupted their traditions, and as a result their nation had been destroyed.
Muslims who relied on popular preachers, Ibn al-Jawzi concluded, would
share the fate of the Israelites (1986, 37, 127; Eng. trans., 122-123, 211). This
was, therefore, a danger not just to individuals, but to society and the state.
Critics of the popular preachers frequently connected their activity to

4 See Berkey (2001).

64  Jonathan P. Berkey

fitna, or disruption of the proper Islamic order, that is to say, civil war. For
this reason, they were wont to describe their struggle against the popular
preachers as a form of jihad. “To combat the storytellers and to wage jihad
against them is more important than doing so against the unbelievers in
lands outside the abode of Islam,” said one, “since the evil of the storytellers
is greater” (al-Idrisi, ca. fifteenth/sixteenth centuries).
But the greater threat was to religious authority. Much of what the
preachers and storytellers recited to their gullible audiences took the form
of hadiths, or at least of what they claimed were hadiths. And yet, in the view
of scholars such as Ibn al-Jawzi, al-Suyuti, and others, many of these texts
were false. Ibn Taymiyya went so far as to compile a collection of hadiths
told by the storytellers, most of which, in his account, did not accurately
record the Prophet’s words (Ibn Taymiyya 1972). And his collection only
scratched the surface of the problem. Suyuti warned that there were more
than 12,000 false hadiths on which the storytellers drew (al-Suyuti 1972,
167). And it was not just a problem of transmitting false hadiths. Even some
of the legitimate traditions they recited might do damage by confusing the
unsophisticated and the untrained in their audience. Those who listened
to the popular preachers were neither intelligent nor intellectual. They
were comprised, said Suyuti, of “the common people, and the rabble of the
markets, and women” (al-Suyuti 1972, 5). The storytellers recited to them
a hadith according to which God created Adam “in his own image.” How,
Ibn al-Hajj asked, could an uneducated listener hear such a thing without
misunderstanding it, and attributing human features to God? (Ibn al-Hajj
1929, 2: 147-153)
What Suyuti and other scholars perceived, I think, was a genuine prob-
lem. Muslims had defined religious authority in textual terms. Together
they formed a “text-centered community” like that described by Moshe
Halbertal. Having done so, however, they faced a very real conundrum in
limiting access to the text. How could they defend the integrity of the tex-
tual tradition when they lacked formal institutions of authority? What the
popular preachers and others exploited was the flexibility of the informal
mechanism of religious authority in medieval Islam. In doing so, they gave
heartburn to conservative scholars such as Ibn Taymiyya, Ibn al-Jawzi,
and others. But from another perspective they also reaffirmed the broad
and inclusive nature of the Islamic intellectual traditions – a lesson worth
learning in the present day.
Tex tual Aspects of Religious Authorit y in Premodern Isl am 65

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 What to Do with Ritual Texts
Islamic Fiqh Texts and the Study of Islamic Ritual

A. Kevin Reinhart

The study of Islamic ritual has suffered, in a sense, from either too much
contact with reality or not enough. This is a too summary way of saying that
the study of Islamic ritual has been hampered by estrangement between
observation-based studies of Islamic ritual as it actually occurs in the world,
and the text-based study of Islamic ritual as it has been prescribed, transmit-
ted, and imagined in works of Islamic law ( fiqh). The observation-based
studies have been for the most part particularist – a description of Islam
in “Fulanabad” which is juxtaposed to an imagined universal “Islam of
Everywhere” (or of the “scholars” or of “the theologians” or of “the orthodox”)
compared to which Fulanabad’s Islam is “unique.” Because of the ethnogra-
phers’ imagined dichotomy between the local and the hegemonic universal,
anthropologists have seldom studied the “universal practices” of Islam,
the so-called “Five Pillars” for example, but have focused on the demotic
forms of religion – saint veneration, healing practices, spirit propitiation
and exorcism, and the like.1
Textualists, for their part, have blithely imagined that the Islam of texts
is the Islam of practice, without considering what ritual texts actually
represent, what they do, what they effect. Either these texts are taken as
recipes for Islamic practice that self-substantively provide all there is to
know of Islamic rituals, or they are felt to require explanation, and for this,
Islamic scholars have turned to commentaries (tafsīr), mystical exegesis
(al-Ghazali’s Ihyaʾ ʿUlum al-Din is popular; Ibn ʿArabi gets some attention) or
the hadith works – without grasping that the hadith works are themselves
commentarial responses to the laconic texts of the Qurʾan and nascent
fiqh. The problem of ethnographers’ blindness to ṣalā, hajj, fasting, or other
text-related Islamic practices can be left for another discussion. For this
chapter it is the study of Islamic ritual texts that will occupy us.
In what follows I want to suggest that both of the textualist moves
described above – the recipe approach and the commentarial approach –
misunderstand ritual itself and Islamic ritual in particular. Islamic ritual
is, however, the perfect place to consider how textual ritual, and ritual

1 Observed by many, including Humphrey and Laidlaw (1994, 80-81).

68 A. Kevin Reinhart

texts, should be studied. Indeed, the terseness and discipline of fiqh texts
make them the perfect laboratory both to demonstrate certain features of
ritual in general, and to demonstrate how we may begin to study Islamic
rituals themselves.

1 A Ritual Text on the Fiqh of Bowing during Ritual Worship

(ṣalā)

So that we have an example of a ritual text throughout the rest of the chap-
ter, here is an example, taken from a medieval-style, modern compendium
of Islamic law (Jaziri 2009, 300-301).2

Bowing is agreed to be obligatory in all ritual prayer for those who are
capable of it, and the obligatory nature of this practice has been defini-
tively established. The only point on which the various schools differ in
this regard has to do with how much bending of the body is required in
order for one’s prayer to be valid.

According to the Hanaf is,3 the bowing required for someone who is
standing up consists in tilting one’s head toward the front and bending
one’s torso forward. This much is sufficient for one’s prayer to be valid. As
for a full bow, it involves bending at the hip until one’s head is level with
one’s buttocks. For those praying while seated, the required movement
involves bowing one’s head and leaning forward; this movement is not
considered complete unless one’s forehead is parallel with [the floor or
ground] in front of one’s knees.

According to the Hanbalis, the bow that suffices for someone standing
up is to bend forward to the point where a person with arms of ordinary
length can touch his knees with his hands. For someone whose arms are
unusually long or short, a sufficient bow consists in bending forward to
the point where, if his arms were any ordinary length, he would be able
to touch his knees with his hands. As for a complete bow, it involves
bending from the hip until one’s back is parallel with the ground and

2 Jaziri (2009, 300-301) corresponds to the Arabic version at al-Jaziri (n.d., 1-231). Henceforth
this source is cited as 4 Madhhabs (E[nglish]:300-301/A[rabic]:1:231).
3 The terms Hanafi, Hanbali, Maliki, and Shafiʿi refer to the four schools (madhāhib), or in
this case one might say “rites” of Sunni Islamic law ( fiqh).
What to Do with Ritual Tex ts 69

one’s head is on a level with one’s back. For someone sitting down, a
sufficient bow consists in leaning forward to the point where one’s face
is parallel to the ground or floor in front of his or her knees, whereas a
full bow involves bringing one’s face as close as possible to the floor or
ground in front of the knees.

According to the Shaf iʿis, the minimum bow one may perform from a
standing position is to bend forward to the point where a medium-sized
person can touch his hands to his knees without placing himself in an
awkward position – for example, by lowering the buttocks, raising the
head, bringing the chest forward, and the like. They also stipulate that
one’s intention must be, in fact, to bow. As for a full bow from a standing
position, it involves bending deeply enough that one’s back and neck
are in a straight line. For someone sitting down, the minimum bow
consists in bending forward to the point where one’s forehead is parallel
with the floor or ground in front of one’s knees, while a complete bow
involves bending forward to the point where one’s forehead is parallel
with the spot where one performs prostration, yet without actually
touching it.

According to the Malikis, the required bow consists of bending forward

until the hands of someone with medium-length arms are close to his
knees; in other words, if the person praying let his hands rest, they would
rest on the ends of the thighs closest to his knees. They also recommend
that one place one’s hands firmly on one’s knees with one’s back straight.

This text is taken from the front section on ʿibādāt (acts of bondsmanship;
approximately, “ritual”), which begins every fiqh work and confronts the
scholar with the how-to of ritual practices. Some texts provide more textual
justification – references to Qurʾan or hadith or other fiqh works. Some cite
rare positions or debate premises (“If it is said …,” “then say …”), but this
text is typical in its marmoreal timelessness, in its self-referentiality, in
its lack of “why.” The text seems conceptually such a smooth surface that
there is nothing really to get our historical pitons or symbolical climbing
boots into – and that seems to have daunted students of Islamic ritual
and driven them to study zars and zikrs, spirits and saints – primarily the
dialect and folk practices of Muslims – rather than the practices shared by
nearly all Muslims. What seems to be the conceptual simplicity of these
texts, joined with the numbing complexity of the emic descriptions, has led
scholars to leave the domain in which most Islamic rituals are prescribed
70 A. Kevin Reinhart

and described, and hence to ignore the rituals that most Muslims qua
Muslims perform.

2 Fiqh Books

Yet the primary and authoritative source for the study of Islamic religion
is the fiqh book. These texts of Islamic law, whether précises or vast com-
pendia, frustrate the traditional techniques used to study ritual. Just as
a Catholic breviary does not say, “and this part about sacrifice is derived
from Roman sacrificial rituals,” fiqh texts seldom suggest that a ritual was
pre-Islamic in origin, for instance. But unlike the Catholic ritual texts with
their explanatory rubrics and intertextual glosses, on which Religionswis-
senschaft scholars have been overly dependent, there really is nothing in
the Islamic ritual text that says “here’s what’s going on.” In addition, the
texts never locate its “real meaning” as elsewhere than in a purely Islamic
context – there is never a reference to a psychological or socio-political
dimension, for instance.
Text-oriented scholars have been likewise flummoxed, or perhaps just
uninterested, in the details of ritual law. Part of their lack of interest is no
doubt the modern and Christian prejudice that “the law killeth,” added to
the Enlightenment’s disdain for ritual (Douglas 1982, 1-18; Seligman 2009).
In an attempt to “explain” Islamic ritual, one move our forebears made –
consistent with nineteenth-century practices in other Wissenschaftlich
domains – was explanation by genetics. If we could identify what parts of
the ritual originated with the Jews, the Christians, the pre-Islamic Arabs,
the Zoroastrians, etc., then somehow the ritual, it was believed, had been
sufficiently understood and explained.
Despite the thinness and tendentiousness of our sources – all Arabic, all
post-dating the rise of Islam (that is from after the period in which Muslims
were writing Islam’s early history as a kind of Heilsgeschichte) – scholars like
Wensinck, Houtsma, and more recently Lazarus-Yafeh (2006) purported to
be able to discover the pre-Islamic fonts from which the ritual life of Islam
had flowed. The results are still to be found in the Encyclopaedia of Islam
(both first and second editions), under inter alia “Hadjdj,” “Makka,” “Saʿy,”
“Ṣalā” and other articles concerned with Islamic ritual.
In these articles and in other influential scholarship on ritual, an
interest in the pre-Islamic dominates the discussion of, for instance, the
hajj. Lazarus-Yafeh, an erudite Israeli scholar, seems to see a substrate of
Semitic ritual of which Judaism is the more ancient and articulated form,
What to Do with Ritual Tex ts 71

and pre-Islamic ritual is a pagan expression uncomplicated by the moral

and ethical complexities of Judaism, or later, derivatively, of Islam. She says,
regarding the hajj, that it is structured by an opposition between monothe-
ism and the pagan “survivals” which “[b]ecause of its ancient sources over
and over again has stirred the pagan longings and yearnings which are
obviously deeply rooted in the soul of every man” (Lazarus-Yafeh 2006, 19).
The ʿUmrah, she says, “corresponds to Passover and Pentecost and took place
in the Spring” (Lazarus-Yafeh 2006, 21). “Another festival corresponds to Suc-
coth and was, like it, called ‘the Festival’ … This festival was celebrated in the
autumn … and like Succoth was connected with the prayer for the cessation
of the heat of summer and for the first rain” (Lazarus-Yafeh 2006, 21). The
wuqūf at Arafat is a “reminiscence of an ancient water cult” (Lazarus-Yafeh
2006, 22). And the saʿy is “probably, a reminiscence of orgies that may have
been part of the pre-Islamic rituals of the Ḥadjdj and Saʿy” (Lazarus-Yafeh
2006, 22). Similarly, according to EI2 the stoning (rajm) “was originally
directed at the sun-demon.” The time at Muzdalifah was to placate the
thunder god, and this is known, she says, because of a perceived similarity
to the Genesis account of God’s appearance at Sinai (EI2: s.v. “Ḥadjdj”).
The most striking feature of these kinds of Islamic ritual studies is that,
when traced to their nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French,
Dutch, and German origins (scholars like Houtsma, Wensinck, Wellhausen,
and Gaudefroy-Demombynes), they turn out to be wildly speculative and
ungrounded in any real Arabic pre-Islamic or early sources. Instead they
are the sort of “this reminds me of a ritual in Babylonia” explanation-by-
association that has been discredited for fifty years in most fields of religious
studies. Yet, even if these accounts were grounded in trustworthy contem-
porary sources, how would this genetic account of a “formerly pagan” ritual
help us fruitfully to understand or appreciate the hajj – either as practiced
by Muslims in any period after 631 CE or according to the mythologically
timeless accounts of the fiqh books?
A subset of the hoary genetic approach to Islamic ritual has been “influ-
ence studies” of Islamic ritual. This too is a well-trodden path. To pick only
one example from the all-too-easily compiled bibliography, Vajda asserts
categorically that the Ramadan fast was “almost certainly an adaptation of
Lent.” “This does not mean that in instituting Ramadan Muhammad was
not still guided by certain ideas of Jewish origin” (Vajda 2006, 5 and n16).
But what do we really know about the pre-Islamic Christians or Jews who
might have “influenced” Muhammad and early Muslims? Only an essential-
ist would assume that all Christians and all Jews had the same practices
and beliefs, everywhere and always. Could or did the Jews of Mecca know
72 A. Kevin Reinhart

the Germara and the Midrashim? Is it likely that the Christians of Arabia
were perfectly aware of the subtleties of Christian liturgy? The Qurʾanic
references to a Trinity of Mary, Jesus, and the Father, or to Ezra as the son
of God make me doubtful (Qurʾan 9:30 and 5:116; McAuliffe 2001 v2, 155b
s.v. “Ezra” and v5, 369b-370a s.v. “Trinity”). This is the land of Lüling and
Luxenberg which I do not find at all congenial (Reynolds 2008).
Aside from the utterly unexamined and very problematic question of
what “influence” means in general, and what the historical process imagined
here might actually be, the fact remains that genetics is never an explana-
tion, nor is it “understanding.” If (and I doubt this) Muhammad “borrowed”
the idea of a month-long fast from Christians (which Christians? where?),
as one borrows sugar from a neighbour, surely it is obvious that its Islamic
significance, and in that sense its explanation, nevertheless lies within
the Islamic field of discourse. Even if Muhammad had been some kind of
crypto-Christian or crypto-Jew, subsequent Muslims were not. So Vajda and
his ilk give us, at best, another speculative and partial account of the origins
of Ramadan’s fast, but no account of its meaning, or how to think about it.
Both kinds of accounts, the speculative historical and the specula-
tive influence accounts, I think one has to agree, are also fanciful in the
extreme. And the tireless search for Semitic cognates by scholars like
Lazarus-Yafeh and Wensinck is also unpersuasive as an approach.<fn>In
addition to Lazarus-Yafeh (2006), see Wensinck (1954 [1908]).</fn> I think
there is no need to spend any more time on these methodologies, which
are old-fashioned and not much practiced these days.
The one exception that belongs to this genre and has recently excited
some fervour is the so-called “revisionist” approach, the technique of which
seems so self-evidently contradictory that I am puzzled at its existence. This
is a method in which scholars like G. Hawting and M. Cook who profess
profound scepticism of the value of early Islamic source-texts, nonetheless
rely upon Islamic accounts of pre- and early-Islamic religion to offer radi-
cally alternative theories of Islamic origins and the origins of various Islamic
practices (Cook 1985, 1986; Hawting 1980, 1984). I am sure these scholars,
most of them very accomplished, would say that they are “reading against
the grain,” and “using a hermeneutics of suspicion” to find the anomalous
bits that, because they do not fit the standard accounts of early Islamic
religion, must be trustworthy. Yet are we so confident we can grasp all the
eddies and currents of early Islamic controversy that we can determine
this account and not that one to be tendentious, and consequently that this
particular account of early Islamic or pre-Islamic religion ought therefore
be trusted? The process seems often to be arbitrary.
What to Do with Ritual Tex ts 73

3 Ritual as Communicative

More recent trends in Islamic ritual studies have been informed by the
great figures of anthropology and their approaches to ritual – Geertz, in
particular, but sometimes Freud. This quite common approach during the
last two decades draws from a century of literary and anthropological work
and views rituals as essentially communicative. Rituals have a “mean-
ing” and that meaning is often to be found in the deeper interpretation
of “symbols.” The rituals then, or parts of them, symbolise or represent
something else.
As long ago as 1975 Dan Sperber had called into question the “cryptologi-
cal” model of symbols (Sperber 1975, ch. 2). He showed quite convincingly
that the model of symbolism whereby item A stands for item or concept
B in a communicative way is vulnerable to criticism on the basis of what
he called

disproportion between the symbols and the representations they are

said to encode. … In the cryptological approach [a] restricted number
of explicit symbols is associated with certain representations in such a
ruleless manner that any object at all could as well have been symbolized.
(Sperber 1975, 47)

In the case of Islamic rituals, the exercise of finding symbols is usually

either an arbitrary exegesis or is supported by reference to texts external to
the genre of ritual prescription – to commentaries, mystical ruminations,
and the like. Moreover, there is almost always an essentialist assumption at
work, since the stability of Islamic ritual practices leads these symbologists
to the mistake of assuming symbolic meanings to be as stable as the ritual
practices themselves. But they demonstrably are not, as a small group of
ethnographers have shown, including Bowen and Mahmood for prayer
(Bowen 1989; Mahmood 2001; Mahmood 2005); and Charles Hirschkind,
the late Richard Antoun, and Patrick Gaffney for sermons (Antoun 1989;
Gaffney 1994; Hirschkind 2006).
As an example, the hajj, which now is seen to symbolise the brotherhood,
equality, and universality of Islam4 is, rather, a dress rehearsal for the Last
Judgement according to al-Ghazali (al-Ghazali 505/1111: 3: 488; § “Bayān

4 The classic site for this apologetic position is Malcolm X (1973, ch. 17), but it is present in
nearly all contemporary Muslim explanations of the hajj. In a forthcoming work (Lived Islam)
I suggest another way to read this chapter of Malcolm X’s Autobiography.
74 A. Kevin Reinhart

al-aʿmāl al-bāṭiniyya wa-wajh al-ikhlāṣ fī al-niyya …”),5 and a trial of one’s

property and one’s body, by al-Qaffal (al-Qaffal 365/975, 2007, 138),6 to cite
just two examples.
Moreover, any good textualist should ask: if actions or practices in ritual
were intended essentially to be symbols, then why is it that the ritual texts
themselves never provide the one key, the definitive lexicon of what the
rituals are supposed to symbolise? Why do the ritual texts themselves not
tell you what they mean?
All in all, it seems that Islamic rituals themselves and the genre of texts
most concerned with Islamic ritual give us scant reason to suppose that
those rituals are best or primarily understood as symbol codes. It is not
just that the ritual texts give us no keys, no tables of equivalence saying
that bowing symbolises the humility of the bondsman before the Creator,
or ablution restores Edenic purity, or the lack of ablution causes angels to
boycott the dwelling of the person whose purity has been lost. In addition,
the meanings these extrinsic texts provide are unstable, quite variable,
contested, and often contradictory. It is particularly striking that the
dynamic quality of the interpretation in the extra-fiqh texts is in marked
contrast to the seemingly invariant practice of the ritual itself. Though a
seventh-century Muslim might be surprised at the interpretations of ṣalā
offered in twenty-first-century apologetics, there is no reason to think
this person would be surprised at the twenty-f irst-century practice of
ṣalā.
If we are to take seriously the medium in which ritual is described and
prescribed, then we cannot link the ritual to a particular form of symbolic
representation or to specific communicative strategies. Instead we should
see the ritual first, as it is, and then ask what particular feature(s) of rituals
provoke not just anthropologists and students of religion, but Muslims
themselves to ascribe extrinsic meanings to those rituals. If Muslim rituals
cannot be decoded, cannot be explained by reference to extrinsic Muslim
texts or putative accounts of the formative period of Islamic ritual, then
can anything be said about Islamic ritual at all other than the merely
descriptive?
I will suggest that, yes, we can think about ritual in a useful way by think-
ing about ritual as an act and not a sign. A starting point is the observation
by Seligman et al. that “[s]ince the practice of ritual creates its own illusory
world, ritual must be understood as inherently non-discursive – semantic

5 This was first pointed out to me in conversation by Juan Campo.

6 In Lived Islam I suggest that this plasticity is not unique to the hajj, among the “Five Pillars.”
What to Do with Ritual Tex ts 75

content is far secondary to subjunctive creation” (Seligman et al. 2008, 26).7

“The meaning of ritual is the meaning produced through the ritual action
itself” (Seligman et al. 2008, 26).

4 Humphrey and Laidlaw: Ritual for Its Own Sake

It is here that the work of Humphrey and Laidlaw seems particularly useful
(Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994).8 Their account of ritual maps elegantly on
to what we see in Islamic ritual texts, and that gives it an a priori fittingness
for our project.
The key concept for us, and for Humphrey and Laidlaw, is “deferral of
intention.” Rituals for them are a unique species of act. In most acts our ac-
tions are motivated seriatim by our intentions – bodily movements, speech
acts, all are the result of our personal will. When I want to join two boards,
I decide the best way to do so is to nail them, so I place them together, place
a nail in the right place, and strike it repeatedly with a hammer. Even for
more habitual acts like driving to work, it is still my will that guides my
actions from the garage to the hunt for a parking place. It is my agency and
my intentionality that governs the act all the way through. This is how we
go through life – willing, and acting out the script our minds write for us, in
advance or on the fly. (Of course this is far from a complete account of the
relations between mind and act but it will serve for our purposes.)
Humphrey and Laidlaw’s insight is that ritual acts are not intentional
in the normal sense. Consider the Muslim act of worship, performed five
times daily, called ṣalā. When Ahmad decides to perform ṣalā, he makes
sure he is dressed appropriately, he cleans any dirt off of his garments, and,
if needed, he performs a ritual act of cleansing (Reinhart 1990 on rituals of
“purification”). This preparation is called taḥrīm, “sanctification,” but except
for the rituals of cleansing (which may or may not be needed), these acts
are all practical acts dictated by circumstance and performed by Ahmad as
needed. He decides what needs to be done, and he does it. Then he “intends”
(the Arabic verb is yanwī, the verbal noun is niyya) to perform the prayer;
then he performs it. Since Humphrey and Laidlaw’s argument rests on a
particular understanding of “intention,” it is useful here to consider the
Arabic concept translated as “intention.”

7 Christian Lange kindly drew my attention to this article.

8 See useful discussions in Brady (1999), Parmentier (1996), and Smith (1997).
76 A. Kevin Reinhart

In Islamic ritual theory, worship itself requires intention, but intention

is not part of the ritual itself, which is made up of a certain number of
cycles (rakʿa) of the ritual. Each cycle is composed of a takbīr, (saying Allāhu
akbar), recitation of two Qurʾanic passages, bending (as we saw above),
straightening, prostrating twice, and, at the end of every two cycles, recita-
tion of a creed; there are four cycles for noon, afternoon, and night prayers,
two for dawn and three for sunset. At the end of the last rakʿa assigned for
the particular worship time, one turns right, then left, each time saying
“Peace be upon you and the mercy of God.” So, while niyya is indispensible
for worship to the extent that some schools emphatically recommend an
oral statement of intentionality, niyya is not part of the ritual itself, which
rather is bounded by the takbīr of sanctification at the beginning and the
taslīm (greeting of peace) at the end.
It is our argument here that when he performs ṣalā, Ahmad’s intention
extends only to the point of intending to perform ṣalā, that is, to perform the
script for ṣalā, and, at that point, Ahmad’s act of intention is an intention
to defer his own intention to another’s.9 Someone else’s intentionality then
takes over. When the ritual commences, the intentionality of the act is,
as it were, handed over to the script, or to the “instigator” (shāriʿ) for ṣalā
performance.10 Ahmad bows as a result of someone else’s intention. In
Islamic ritual law niyya and statements of intentionality explicitly precede
the ritual. It does not intrude upon it: no one says halfway through ritual
worship, “I am still doing the noon prayer.” The intrusion of the actor’s will
into the ritual indeed invalidates the act as ritual:

If one intends breaking off (al-khurūj) from prayer or intends that he

will break off [in the future] or doubts whether he broke off or not, the
prayer is invalidated, because niyya [the displaced intention] is required
throughout the prayer, and he has already cut it off (qad qaṭaʿa) by so
doing and thus invalidated the prayer, as purity [is removed] if it is cut
off by minor impurity. (Powers 2006, 42, citing al-Shirazi, 1: 23711)

9 See Maurice Bloch (2004) on deferral in addition to the discussion in Humphrey and Laidlaw
(1994, ch. 4).
10 In fiqh discourse, shāriʿ is an intriguing word. There it means “the one making the rules,
the legislator,” but in use it is often ambiguous. Sometimes it surely means God, other times it
would seem to mean Muhammad.
11 The definitive account of intention in Islamic law is found in Powers (2006, chs. 2-3). There
he points out that while there are other terms for intention, niyya is associated with the domain
of ritual.
What to Do with Ritual Tex ts 77

Further,

If one enters into the noon prayer, then changes the niyya to the mid-
afternoon prayer, this invalidates the noon prayer, because it interrupts
(qaṭaʿa) the niyya, and the mid-afternoon prayer is not valid because he
did not intend this at the point of [entering] iḥrām. (Powers 2006, 42,
citing al-Shirazi, 1: 237)

The agency of the actor must be fully deferred. If he or she inserts agency, by
thinking about breaking off the prayer, or by actually breaking it off, or by
changing it from one prayer to another, then the “intention not to intend”
is broken, and this has imposed his own intentionally, reasserted it, which
invalidates the ritual.
The unnaturalness of ritual is recognised in various ways, most obviously
in the definition of ritual as that which serves no earthly purpose and is
prima facie irrational (see Reinhart 2014). We can also see a certain anxiety
about the intrusion of individual agency into acts that are not governed by
the actor’s will.
One has to work one’s way into the ritual. As we have seen, ṣalā is pre-
ceded in some cases, as circumstances require – according to the actor’s
assessment – by a number of acts, such as performing the ritual ablution,
cleansing the garment worn for prayer if it is dirty, cleaning the area of
prayer if it needs it, making sure one’s garment will cover the private parts
during prayer, and standing to begin the prayer (this is called qiyāma). This
process of examination of circumstances, of judging, and acting pragmati-
cally as circumstances require is called the taḥrīma, “sanctification.” After
the sanctification, acts that had been permissible become impermissible
(Al-Marghinani 2006, E:107n2).12 The act of intentionality (niyya) is the
demarcation point for the ritual, but the taḥrīma as transition into the
ritual may not be separated from the act of intention by any individual of
the will. As al-Marghinani says:

One forms the niyya for the prayer he is about to offer without separat-
ing the niyya from the taḥrīma with any [other act] … [This is because]
the commencement of prayer is by standing up for it, which is an act
that is shared between both normal movement and worship, and a

12 Al-Marghinani 2006 is the English translation of the Arabic original Al-Marghinani 593/1197.
Henceforth al-Marghinani is cited as Hidaya (E[nglish]/A[rabic]).
78 A. Kevin Reinhart

distinction cannot be made between them except through niyya. (Hidaya,

E:1:104/A:44-45)

Because of differences in intentionality, standing up in one case is just

standing up; with another intentionality it is a part of ṣalā. Even an ad
hoc request for God’s mercy invalidates the ritual prayer: if one begins a
ṣalā with Allāhuma ighfir lī (O God, forgive me) it is invalid because “his
statement is mixed up with his own needs, therefore it does not amount to
pure glorification” (Hidaya, E1:111/A:117-118; see also 4 Madhhabs, E1:387-388/
A1:387).13
As an aside, the preference for communal worship over solitary worship is
shared by all Islamic schools. If even two Muslims find themselves praying
together, one should go to the left and front and assume the position of
imam. The other (the maʾmūm) makes it part of his intention to follow his
fellow-worshipper. If the leader’s prayer is for some reason invalidated –
through gross error, or a failure to keep ritual purity, for instance – then the
prayer of those following him is invalidated. It is worth considering whether
this may be an expression of the idea that ritual is an act of deferral of the
will to another (See Hidaya, E1:135/A1:146; 4 Madhhabs, E1:544/A1:404; but
see Distinguished, E1:173/A1:190).
An act of ṣalā is not “ṣalā” because one intends to do ṣalā (even if a
formal statement of intention to do ṣalā is for several schools a part of
the ritual itself). One says, “I intend to do ṣalā,” and then one hands over
the intentionality to whoever stipulated the set of movements and state-
ments that constitute the ṣalā. At this point Ahmad performs those acts
collectively called “ṣalā,” as stipulated. Ṣalā exists outside the performer,
whereas Ahmad’s “buying milk” exists only in the presence of Ahmad, and
buying milk is not done in a stipulated way: he may throw down a five-dollar
bill or offer a debit card, he may use the self-service checkout, he may stand
in line and pay the cashier, he may chat with a clerk and so on. It becomes
“buying milk” because of the end that is accomplished, not because of the
way in which it is done.
But consider ṣalā: Ahmed does not bow in order to accomplish ṣalā, he
bows because bowing at the specified point constitutes ṣalā. Not to bow
at that point is to fail to perform ṣalā. Similarly, Ahmad cannot intend
to do ṣalā and then perform an idiosyncratic set of devotional acts and
statements and have that count as ṣalā. Ahmad goes from standing, to

13 The Arabic translated as “irrelevant” (ajnabī) can be “foreign [to ṣalā]” or “extrinsic [to
ṣalā].”
What to Do with Ritual Tex ts 79

bowing, to straightening up, to prostrating himself and so on, again not

according to his intention, not instrumentally, but according to the inten-
tionality of the external agent who “wrote the ritual script” that defines
ṣalā (Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994, 89).14 On the other hand, it is because
of this deferral of intention that this performance of a script is still ṣalā
whether Ahmad bows deeply or shallowly, whether he gabbles the Fātiḥa
or recites it slowly and meditatively, whether his Arabic accent is good or
not; whether he understands the Arabic or not, whether he is thinking
about the majesty of God or “what comes next” in the ritual. Though errors
in performance may be so gross as to invalidate ṣalā at some level, his
errors do not make these acts mere “bowing” or acknowledging applause,
or stretching his lower back. In this way a ritual differs from our normal
intentional acts. Ahmad “is in this case not the author of his own acts”
(Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994, 98). The act stands apart as a single chunk
of action, a bounded entity, independent of Ahmad, his volition, and his
interpretation of the act. The last point is as important as the deferral of
intentionality: the ritual performer comes to the ritual as one comes to
any other object. It pre-exists, it has its own history, and one enters into
the practice on its terms. Ṣalā is not his or her creation; it is a found object,
already constituted and waiting to be inhabited and re-appropriated. It is
impossible to imagine someone doing the bowing, the reciting, etc., and
when asked about ṣalā he or she says, “that’s not what I meant” (Humphrey
and Laidlaw 1994, 98).
The first benefit of Humphrey and Laidlaw’s approach then is this: they
give us an understanding of ritual that does not view the ritual either as a
reflexive act of borrowing, or as an inchoate act of expression, a structure
set, or a secret code for social values, gender hierarchy, cosmological struc-
tures, or anything else. That ṣalā is also any of these other things – at some
point, for some Muslims – is not ruled out, but Humphrey and Laidlaw’s
approach allows us to remain focused on the rituals and not have us looking
elsewhere to “understand” the ritual. It allows us to use the Islamic ritual
texts, unmediated, to talk about the ritual.
There is another advantage to Humphrey and Laidlaw’s account of ritual
and that is this: it also explains why, despite the fact that there can be no
single meaning for an act that the actor has not himself/herself enscripted,
there is nonetheless such an incessant urge on the part of the faithful to
define, to ascribe, to find, meaning in the ritual.

14 Bowing is part of what defines ṣalā. If any of its essential elements, ( farḍ or rukn) is missing,
then it is not ṣalā. See 4 Madhhabs (E1:271/A1:206).
80 A. Kevin Reinhart

Humphrey and Laidlaw suggest that, the ritual, because it is not “mine,”
has a kind of existence apart from me. It is a thing in the world, and so it can
have a history, can, as they say, be “re-assimilated” by the actor (Humphrey
and Laidlaw 1994, 89). While everyday acts are often characterised by un-
reflective intention, the different intentionality of the ritual act, the seeing
of the act as “given,” eliminates unreflective performance and provokes and
stimulates the assignment of meaning (Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994, 103).
The ritual actor can take this ritual thing and reflect upon it, interpret it
as a text, connect it to other ideas, and so on. Nonetheless – it is important
to repeat – those exegeses, though constrained by the act’s script, are not
inherent in the act nor are they a function of the act itself, and they are
still less an explanation for its origin or significance; they are a derivative
undertaking that allows the ritual actor to ascribe to the act meanings that
are individually or collectively significant.
In short, interpretation is the second-hand smoke of religious practice.
Just as in a Moroccan restaurant I may not be “smoking,” despite taking
tobacco smoke into my lungs with every breath, so too the multiplicity of
interpretations are not a part of the ritual itself. Yet the effects of second-
hand smoke, in both cases, is profound. This derivative quality of rituals’
interpretations also accounts for the frustrating ethnographic moment
when the ritual performer is asked why he or she does this act, what it
means and she or he replies with a shrug, “I don’t know” or “That’s just the
way we do it” (Seligman 2009, 1085-1086).
Two final points: Humphrey and Laidlaw’s approach does not rule out
writing the history of a ritual. The recipe books of ritual, even if historically
agnostic, provide material for such work. And second, this approach does
not preclude the study of meanings assigned to rituals. With the Qurʾan, for
instance, we easily distinguish between the exegesis and the text itself. We
know that the exegesis is not an intrinsic part of the text and does not flow
“naturally” or “unconsciously” from it. We must approach Islamic ritual the
same way. The hajj is not “really” about the Day of Reckoning, it is not “really”
a memorial to Abraham. The hajj is a set of prescribed actions. Muslims
have assigned meanings to the hajj. Some of those meanings might have
come from al-Shāriʿ, but who can be certain? Once we think of the hajj or
any other Islamic ritual this way, new interpretative doors are opened to us
and some old doors are refurbished and made once more a means of ingress.
There is much more to say about Humphrey and Laidlaw – on nearly
every page I find something fruitful for the study of Islamic ritual – but
first some general observations on the concept of “ritualisation” and Islamic
ritual.
What to Do with Ritual Tex ts 81

5 Ritualising “Absence”

The popular European depiction of Islam has been that it is a religion of

voluptuousness, indulgence, and emotional extravagance.15 Whether the
medieval fixation with polygyny and Muhammad’s wives, or contemporary
fixation on “suicide bombers” and houris, Islam has been othered as a religion
of intemperance and permissiveness. The signals of Islamic rituals themselves
are very much more in line with Weber’s account of religions characterised
by “this-worldly asceticism,” by personal restraint and forbearance (Weber
1963 [1922], 166-167). A brief reflection on this point will help us see how the
void, the “not-doing” is an important constituent of ritual and perhaps the
clearest example of ritualisation, the process by which a particular act comes
to belong to a different domain from our ordinary discursive life.
Aside from the activities of the body’s autonomic system – breathing,
digesting, secreting, and so forth – almost all human activities are oc-
casional rather than constant. By occasional, I mean they occur in response
to stimuli – hunger, or mealtime, for eating, for example; or in response to
other circumstances that cue the behaviour. In that sense not doing any
particular activity is the norm rather than the exception; it is unremarkable
and undistinguished. Much of the Islamic ritual system, however, is pre-
cisely about the ritualisation of not-doing, the construction of something by
not-doing something. The three most manifestly ritual of the “Five Pillars”
clearly illustrate this ritual building block’s “features.”
The Ramadan fast consists entirely of ritualised omission, of refraining
from occasional acts – eating, drinking, sexually arousing activity (Ibn
al-Naqib 1991, 284; §i.l 18-19). Additionally, and secondarily, I think, one is
to refrain from niggardliness, contentiousness, slander, sensual indulgence
(e.g. from the use of perfume or voluptuous smelling of flowers) during
this month (Ibn al-Naqib 1991, 288-289; §§i.l 24-27). As with all ritual acts,
the ritual fast (in contrast to the many times when one is not eating or
not drinking) is made ritual by the act of intention (niyya).16 Refraining

15 Weber himself described Islam as “a purely hedonist spirit, especially toward women,
luxuries, and property” (Turner 1974, 12); hence it could “not develop into an ascetic this-worldly
religion” (Turner 1974, 171). For a discussion of this, see Weber (1963 [1922], 263f.). For a substantial
critique of Weber’s understanding of Islam, see Huff and Schluchter (1999), especially the articles
by Peters and Levitzion.
16 Hanafis and Hanbalis assert that intention is not an indispensible constituent (rukn) of
fasting, but this means only that the “act of intending” may validly be performed even after
dawn if one has not otherwise infringed the conditions for a valid fast. 4 Madhhabs (E1:728/
A1:543).
82 A. Kevin Reinhart

from ingestion – the fasting part of Ramadan – is framed daily by a quasi-

obligatory act of eating/drinking immediately prior to and immediately
after the fast times specified by fiqh17 This mandatory ingestion frames
the mandatory abstention and in this way the perfectly ordinary “act” of
non-eating, etc., is ritualised and becomes “fasting.”
Similarly the quinate act of worship is preceded not just by intention to
perform the ritual worship but by a ritual consecration, the rituals of lustra-
tion and ablution. Those “undo” acts such as sexual intercourse, defecation,
and urination that preclude one from worship until the ritual of ablution or
lustration – as appropriate – is performed. Mere lapses of intent or attention
require only that the worship ritual be repeated; but passing gas, urination,
sexual incontinence, etc., require an entire re-consecration of the body
through the rituals of preparation, the ablution and lustration. Prayer, then,
is done in a state in which those acts are blocked and, in a ritual sense, they
have been obliterated.
As for the hajj, it too is preceded by an act of consecration called iḥrām.
Iḥrām is the point at which one’s status changes from visitor or tourist or
businesswoman, to pilgrim, one might say. Iḥrām is a sine qua non of the
hajj, a rukn – an indispensible constituent.18 Iḥrām proper is preceded by
preparatory steps that are themselves rituals or ritualist. One cleans oneself
(wuḍūʾ will suffice, but a bath, not the ritual ghusl, is strongly encouraged).
A man wraps two cloths around himself – one as a loincloth and one as a
chest and shoulder cover. It is desirable to put perfume on, which cannot be
done after the iḥrām has been formally entered into, i.e. putting on perfume
frames the abstention from perfume. The ḥājj or ḥājja prays two prayer
cycles and ritually states that he or she wishes to do the hajj and asks that
it be acceptable and easy. At that point the pilgrim has formally entered
into the state of iḥrām by reciting the talbiyya, the mantra, as it were, of
the hajj. He is now a participant in the hajj, he is consecrated, or tabooed,
and ritually qualified to perform the hajj rituals.
The consecrated state consists not only of things you do; there are things
you do not do. Some of the acts to avoid are acts one ought to avoid in
normal, non-ritual life: quarrelling, obscenity, wickedness. You ought to

17 According to the Hanafis and Hanbalis, it is undesirable to fast for two days immediately
prior to the beginning of Ramadan; as for the Malikis, they hold that it is not undesirable to fast
at this time, whereas according to the Shafiʿis it is forbidden to do so (4 Madhhabs E1:749/A1:558).
Fasting is invalid on the Day of Fast-breaking (4 Madhhabs E1:729/A1:544). “One should take the
fast-breaking meal without delay” (4 Madhhabs E1:772/A1:577). “One should take a pre-dawn
meal, however light, even if it consists of nothing but a sip of water” (4 Madhhabs E1:773/A1:577).
18 For Hanafis a sharṭ; see 4 Madhhabs (E1:863/A:638).
What to Do with Ritual Tex ts 83

avoid them in quotidian life but now they are ritually banned. Doing these
forbidden acts inserts another intentionality into the ritual environment
and risks voiding the ritual.
Unlike normal life, however, during the hajj, men are also forbidden to
wear stitched clothing, dyed clothing, especially if dyed with something
pleasant smelling, have sex or foreplay, cut the hair and nails, or apply per-
fume. It is not that “not cutting the hair” is a ritual, anymore than “not being
wicked” is a ritual. But volition is removed in both cases. If I am following the
hajj script, I am not cutting my hair because of the shāriʿ’s intention. I come
out of the iḥrām state by a ritual hair-cutting that frames its prohibition.
Then follows a series of acts that, unlike standing as the initial act of
prayer, are impossible to confuse with the quotidian: walking around a
strange building seven times, running along a corridor (no longer two hills,
due to Saudi “improvements”), going out into the middle of nowhere to
stand, walking to another otherwise insignificant place, throwing stones at
cairns, and so on. This ritual, in its unique acts, as well as its “re-purposed”
acts, is without doubt a surrender of volition and a deferral of intentionality.
Most of these acts have no normal-world equivalent and so it cannot be
normal intention, Ahmad’s intention, that effects their practice. For that
reason the hajj is so effective and so powerful.
I would suggest, then, that when we study Islamic rituals we ought to first
study not meanings Muslims have ascribed to them, or that we ourselves can
ascribe to these rituals. It is to note how the absence of intention allows the
blending of normal virtuous acts, normal insignificant acts – if not cutting
hair can be considered an act – and utterly distinctive acts like wearing
seamless garb into a distinctive, nameable, self-subsistent act to which I
subscribe if I go on the hajj.

6 Speculative Conclusion

Here I want to end on a somewhat speculative note. I think we do not

understand ritual if we see it as composed only of non-intentional actions,
with meanings extrinsically or secondarily attached. This may be a good
description of ritual but it is a fairly weak explanation of ritual. First, as we
mentioned earlier, rituals are not meanings, but by their deferred inten-
tionality they provoke the making of meanings. Rituals are objects with
which homo ritualis interacts, but the space provided by the deferral of the
work of intending invites him to fill the act with meanings. Reflection on
these meanings is, at the risk of redundancy, also a meaningful experience.
84 A. Kevin Reinhart

As a corollary to this feature, Humphrey and Laidlaw, citing Bell (Bell

1988), point out that those merely ascribed meanings may in turn affect
the performance, and certainly they will affect the experience of the ritu-
als. If sufficiently authoritative, the ascribed meanings can eventually be
invoked to alter the ritual practice itself. Hence the meanings attached to
ritual, while not intrinsic to the ritual itself, shape the experience of the
ritual performance. If one understands the hajj as a rehearsal for God’s
Judgement, it is in some sense a ritual different from an act of historical
commemoration or a National Brotherhood week with three million other
brothers and sisters.
A final point, and one I hope to explore in greater depth. Rituals also
generate, not meanings, but what Humphrey and Laidlaw call, rather lamely
I think, “emergent moods.” They observe that “emotions aroused [in ritual]
are [often] in everyday terms inappropriate to the action” (Humphrey and
Laidlaw 1994, 227). It may be that rituals create emotion, emergent moods,
states of mind that are (a) the results of the acts themselves but that are also
(b) heightened because of the space created, once again, by the displacement
of intention. The abnormality of these kinds of acts enhances the experience
itself and this may make ritual itself both attractive and effective.
Rituals of denial, especially denial for a stipulated time evoke many
things, but one of them is anticipation, and receptivity. Fasting, consciously
disciplining the self and the body, refraining from sex, evokes feelings
of receptivity and anticipation of release from constraint. Rituals done
communally – for what we now understand to be partly physiological
reasons – diminish sensations of autonomy and boundedness, and induce
conformity while reducing inhibition. Rituals, even in the most puritan
Wahhabi understanding of a ritual, are gestures that evoke moods. Is there
any culture or context in the world in which bowing or prostrating oneself
evokes sentiments of superiority and aggrandisement? The deferral of
intention may facilitate the lifting of constraints normally imposed on the
actors’ expression of their sentiments. This is the great field that remains
to be explored – the link between emotion and the physical disposition of
the body – facial gestures, posture, and so forth.
In short, while a complete understanding of rituals such as the hajj
requires the study of the meanings attached subsequently to these ritu-
als – as found in mystical works, exegeses, literature, oral interviews, and
so on, these are mostly post hoc and represent the ideation of the body as
opposed to the embodiment of ideas. The task of understanding Islamic
rituals also must principally investigate the acts the body performs in the
course of the rituals to grasp the moods emergent from these practices.
What to Do with Ritual Tex ts 85

These do not randomly arise. It is at the stoning pillars that emotions flow
most forcefully, not at the standing at ʿArafa or at the sacrifice, or the cutting
of hair when one emerges from iḥrām.
Once we have stopped looking for meanings that somehow reside in acts
themselves, we are free to recognise the richness of the meanings ascribed
to them by individuals or groups. Once we stop seeing rituals as expressions
of ideas, we are free to begin seeing them as conducive to sentiments. This
seems to me the way to go in the future study of Islamic ritual.

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 Textual Study of Gender
Marion Katz

The early 1990s saw a wave of new scholarship on the history of women
and gender in Islamic societies. Some of it reflected the new prominence of
politically and religiously engaged women scholars of Muslim and/or Arab
background. Some also reflected the increasing application of the methods
of gender studies to the relatively conservative fields of Islamic history
and law. Works such as Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam (1992),
Fatima Mernissi’s The Veil and the Male Elite (first published in English in
1991, translated from a 1987 French original), and Fedwa Malti-Douglas’s
Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word: Gender and Discourse in Arabo-Islamic Writ-
ing (1991) surveyed large swathes of Islamic history and thought, suggesting
structural connections between gendered religious discourses and the
social and political roles and rights of women over time.1 The work of this
period provided the impetus for a large volume of scholarship that, over the
following two decades, both expanded and elaborated the theses advanced
by these scholars, and ultimately critiqued and refined their approaches.
Both the exploitation of a wider source base and the development of more
nuanced interpretive frameworks (which, among other things, sometimes
questioned the existence of a monolithic “Islamic” gender discourse) have
characterised the field in more recent years. In the wake of the influential
large-scale syntheses of the early 1990s, more thoroughly documented
and contextually specific studies have explored social practices, religious
ideology, and the relationship between the two.
The initial problem facing textual scholars interested in the history of
gender in premodern Islamic societies is, of course, that of sources. Not
only are available sources comparatively sparse, but an overwhelming
proportion of them is literary and/or normative in nature. Not only do they
reflect ideals and agendas more closely than they do social patterns on the
ground, the ideals and agendas they express are usually those of a relatively
narrow sector of society. As Judith Tucker observed in a 1993 review article,

Government records, histories, biographical dictionaries, works of

jurisprudence, and literature … were almost exclusively authored by
members of a male elite of government officials and ʿulamaʾ … Many

1 Also notable is the collection Keddie and Baron (1991).

88 Marion K atz

of these accounts are essentially prescriptive in nature and detail the

normative gender system that existed in the minds of an urban male
educated elite, not the lived experiences of men as men and women as
women. In working with these sources, historians have grown increas-
ingly aware of the necessity to treat them with caution and handle them
as a form of discourse about gender that reveals vested interest rather
than records actual practice. (Tucker 1993, 38)

Among the major developments in the textual study of gender in Islamic

societies over the last two decades has been an increasing usage of sources
that were previously underutilised or unknown. These include some works
that are unusual or even unique, sometimes framed in comparatively in-
formal ways that offer new insights beyond the most public personas and
official agendas of their authors. For instance, although entries tend to be
telegraphically brief, the journals of Ibn Tawq (published by the French
Institute in Damascus in 2000) offer fascinating glimpses into the home life
of a Damascene man of the late fifteenth century CE, referring in passing to
his domestic affairs and to the activities of his wife and female neighbours
(as well as providing records of the many marriage contracts and divorces
that he witnessed) (Ibn Tawq 2000). A more eccentric and yet descriptively
richer account of Mamluk-era domestic life is provided by the hybrid diary/
chronicle Izhar al-ʿasr li-asrar ahl al-ʿasr of Ibn Tawq’s contemporary, the
Qurʾanic exegete Burhan al-Din al-Biqaʿi (d. 885/1480), analysed by Li Guo
in a 2005 article (Guo 2005). Although al-Biqaʿi’s contentious personality and
dysfunctional relationships with women were presumably unusual even in
an age of frequent divorce, as Guo observes, his account is striking and valu-
able for its “tell-all accounts of his own messy domestic life: failed marriages,
family feuds, harem melodrama, as well as childbirth, nursing, and infant
mortality” (Guo 2005, 102). Such formally and substantively unusual sources
offer unique insights into the practical reality and emotional texture of
phenomena, like slave concubinage and the “sleeping fetus” recognised
both in Avicennan medicine and in fiqh, that otherwise appear to us as
disembodied theoretical models. However, they still reflect the male, elite,
and urban perspective of more conventional literary sources; as yet, no
comparably extensive or revealing documents have come to light from the
pens of pre-Ottoman women.
Larger bodies of new or previously under-studied material have emerged
among archival documents. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the
growing literature drawing on various Ottoman archives, which (among
other things) has added vast amounts of new data to our understanding of
Tex tual Study of Gender 89

various aspects of marriage and divorce as well as (in the work of scholars
such as Leslie Peirce and Elyse Semerdjian) of the regulation of sexual
morality.2 Scholars have also analysed less extensive bodies of documents
originating prior to, or outside of, the Ottoman Empire; for instance, Maya
Shatzmiller’s study Her Day in Court provides invaluable details on mar-
riage, child custody, and property transactions based on documents from
fifteenth-century Granada (Shatzmiller 2007).
Recent scholarship has both illustrated the complex and problematic
relationships between normative discourses such as Islamic law and the
lived practices of historical societies, and demonstrated that documentary
sources are also far from fully transparent expressions of concrete realities.
In an area such as marriage and divorce, where the validity and enforce-
ability of the contract could depend on its compliance with the provisions
of Islamic law – and in turn could affect the social and economic interests
of the individuals and families involved – it might be assumed that legal
models would play a fundamental role in shaping actual transactions. Thus,
particularly in such areas, it might be assumed that documentary sources –
contracts, court records, and the like – would present unproblematic, factual
records of concrete transactions and conflicts, thus affording a limited but
clear window into the social realities of premodern Islamic societies.
In fact, however, recent studies suggest the extent to which documentary
as well as literary sources were shaped by conventions and agendas that
permeated them with many of the same normative and ideological concerns
as literary sources, while qualifying their status as direct reflections of
realities outside of the text. Marriage contracts are a good test case in this
respect, documenting not only negotiated conditions that might have
shaped the marital relationship but quantitative records of the financial
dimensions of the marriage transaction. However, Yossef Rapoport notes
with respect to the Mamluk period that “[d]espite the careful record of the
marriage gifts in the marriage contracts, the written obligations did not
usually correspond to real payments made by husbands” (Rapoport 2005,
54). The discrepancy between the sums recorded in the contracts and the
payments actually delivered to Mamluk brides reflects the role of the mar-
riage contract as a conveyor of social status, rather than simply as a record of
a legal transaction. Rapoport notes that fatwas by the Damascene jurists Ibn
al-Salah and Ibn Taymiyya reflect the fact that families were widely known
to inflate the sums stated in the marriage contract, often to twice the actual
amount. Marriage contracts also routinely and strategically misstated the

2 See, for instance, Sonbol (1996), Peirce (2003), and Semerdjian (2008).
90 Marion K atz

currency in which the payments were to be made; Rapoport notes that “[b]
ecause marriage gifts were signs of status, they were designated in gold
dinars, even by people who had never had the chance to hold a gold piece
in their hand” (Rapoport 2005, 54). In addition to the amount and currency,
the timing or even occurrence of the payments stated in the contract could
be conventional or fictitious.
While Rapoport’s material is drawn from Mamluk Syria and Egypt,
similar phenomena are noted elsewhere by other scholars. Amalia Zomeño
writes of contemporary Andalusia that “one Granadan fatwa issued by Ibn
Lubb reveals that it was the custom of the notaries to register the receipt of
the prompt payment even when the payment had in reality not been made.”
Zomeño concludes that “the law and the contract did line up” – unlike the
actual practice – “but only for avoiding the invalidation of the marriage
contract. What this fatwa clearly demonstrates is that, as historians, we
should not always rely solely on the written documents (i.e. the contracts).”
Similarly, “whatever terms were agreed to by the parties” – and recorded
in the contract – “payment of the deferred potion was in practice often
long delayed and paid only in the event of death … or upon repudiation”
(Zomeño 2008, 142).3 Shatzmiller likewise notes of the deferred ṣadāq in
fifteenth-century Granada that “[a]lthough a definite date for its payment
was entered into the marriage contract, no payment was made on this
date” (2007, 23).
In these cases, it is sometimes the fatwa – presumably closer to actual
practice than other legal genres, such as manuals of positive law, yet still
normative in nature – that alerts us to the fictive nature of the legal docu-
ment, rather than the other way around. The overall pattern revealed by
these studies suggests that the monetary entitlements established by the
law of marriage and divorce should be understood less as providing factual
information about actual transactions than as defining bargaining positions
for the parties involved. Very much like the anthropological studies of
Ziba Mir-Hosseini on modern Iran and Morocco and of Annelies Moors
on twentieth-century Palestine, these studies of premodern marriage and
divorce suggest that legal entitlement to a certain cash sum or piece of
real estate was often used to cultivate a relationship with one’s blood kin
or to affect the power balance of a troubled marriage, rather than actually
to collect the property in question (Mir-Hosseini 1993, especially 72-83;

3 See also p. 139: “A question posted to Ibn Lubb (d. 782/1381) in Granada … mentions that
although the custom of the notaries was to record the receipt of a certain marriage gift, this
gift was never exchanged by the parties at that time, but somewhat later.”
Tex tual Study of Gender 91

Moors 1995, especially 53-71, 146-148). For instance, Rapoport shows how the
recording of women’s deferred mahr as a due debt – theoretically claimable
at any time, conceivably resulting in the detention of a husband who was
unable to pay – was perceived by a scholar like Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya as
giving women undue power over their cowed husbands (Rapoport 2005, 57).
Much like the women in Mir-Hosseini’s study, whose husbands were often
unable to pay the mahr theoretically owed to their wives, to the extent that
Ibn al-Qayyim’s perception was factually based, fourteenth-century Syrian
women were less interested in collecting cash (something that was often in
any case impossible) than in negotiating desirable outcomes of other kinds.
Divergences between legal prescriptions and social practices were not
limited to discrepancies regarding the magnitude and timing of monetary
payments. Social and notarial practice departed from legal rulings in a
number of ways, some of them so significant as to affect the basic model of
marriage as a social and economic transaction. Rapoport has demonstrated
that “despite of the emphasis placed in Islamic law on the gifts of the groom,
Mamluk society was a dotal society, i.e. a society where the dowry brought
by the bride was the substantial gift at marriage” (Rapoport 2005, 13). Most
of his evidence for the magnitude and content of dowries is drawn from
biographical and annalistic works, with occasional references to marriage
contracts. Zomeño and Shatzmiller have similarly demonstrated the cen-
trality of the niḥla and the siyāqa, additional gifts conventionally made on
the occasion of marriage although not legally required, to the Granadan
marriage contract (Zomeño 2008, 143; see also Shatzmiller 2007, 47).
Although the discovery and study of more documentary and quasi-
documentary sources has greatly enriched the study of women and
gender in premodern Islamic societies, the sheer volume and richness of
the normative sources – as well as their centrality in the articulation of
Islamic values and mores – ensure their continuing centrality. Arguably, by
identifying and addressing social problems and institutions such sources
can contribute to the reconstruction of social history, as well as to our
understanding of Islamic models and ideals. As noted by Behnam Sadeghi,
while scholars have readily acknowledged that the norms established by
jurists may not have been applied in practice, they nevertheless widely
assume that such sources may provide evidence about the problems and
challenges that jurists perceived in the societies around them (or, as Sadeghi
puts it, “statements about how the world is, as opposed to how it ought to
be”) (Sadeghi 2013, 150). Sadeghi himself, however, has expressed a profound
scepticism about the utility of legal sources in providing information about
social practices and mores. Most strikingly, he examines the rationales
92 Marion K atz

developed by Hanafi scholars to justify their school’s growing limitations

on even elderly women’s attendance at public congregational prayers. These
justifications frequently appeal to the ostensibly changed social mores of
their own times. Most famously, al-Marghinani writes that “wrongdoers
(fussāq) spread out at noon [prayers] and afternoon [prayers] and on Fridays
[when Friday prayers are held]. But during dawn [prayers] and evening
[prayers, shortly after sunset] they sleep, and at sunset [prayers] they are
preoccupied with eating” (Sadeghi 2013, 114). Expressing justified scepti-
cism at what he calls “the remarkably regular and synchronised sleeping
and eating schedules of those who harassed women,” Sadeghi concludes
that “[j]udicious use of such information requires taking into account the
nature of legal argumentation and the function of such passages in that
process” (Sadeghi 2013, 150). He thus asserts that normative legal sources
are of minimal value for the reconstruction of social history.
My own work on the history of women’s mosque access (Katz 2014) sug-
gests, on the basis of a broader set of normative and non-normative sources,
that Sadeghi’s reservations are well-founded. While the severe and categori-
cal condemnations of women going to mosques in later (particularly, but
not exclusively Hanafi) sources may seem to suggest that women’s mosque
attendance must have been minimal or unknown in the times and places
where these texts originated, in fact in several cases it can be demonstrated
that the most passionate juristic denunciations of women’s frequentation
of mosques were produced by scholars who perceived women’s presence in
mosques to be ubiquitous and highly visible. While in such cases there is a
close relationship between legal discourse and social behaviour, it is roughly
the inverse of the model of scholarly prescription and lay obedience that is
sometimes assumed. Rather, such scholars apparently played a reactive role
with respect to the behaviour of women in their environment. Only careful
correlation of different kinds of sources – a task that is often difficult, given
that evidence from different genres is not always available for the same time
and place – allows us to reconstruct the dialectical relationship between
norms and practices in individual cases.
Nevertheless, the case of women’s mosque attendance may be atypi-
cal. Other scholars, working with materials from other areas of the law,
have held out more hope that the study of normative legal sources may
shed light on the actual practices and dynamics of Islamic societies in
the past. Sadeghi’s emphasis on the artificiality and negotiability of the
rationales adduced for legal rulings in the area of women’s public worship
(as compared with the stability and authority of the substantive rules)
contrasts in some ways with Wael Hallaq’s well-known work demonstrating
Tex tual Study of Gender 93

the responsiveness of legal discourses to social realities. By demonstrating

the social and historical relevance of fatāwā (even if these may ultimately
be denuded of their specificity in the process of compilation and canonisa-
tion) and the process by which fatāwā inform developments in the furū‛
(substantive law) literature, Hallaq’s work (like that of David S. Powers)
suggests that we should, in fact, be able – if only with great care – to exploit
legal sources as a source for social history.4 Both Hallaq and Powers present
powerful evidence that, at least in some cases, the social problems addressed
by jurists are not merely artefacts of their discursive practices.
Beyond their contested ability to contribute to our understanding of
the lived realities of premodern societies, normative Islamic sources are
of course central to the analysis of ideal gender norms. Thus, Leila Ahmed
speaks of an “ideology of gender” implicit in the Islamic discourses that
crystallised in the Abbasid period (Ahmed 1992, 69). However, the extent to
which a coherent and unitary “ideology of gender” can in fact be discerned
from the vast range of Islamic genres, disciplines, and debates over time
and space is itself subject to dispute. In the article cited above, Judith
Tucker expresses her own reservations, stating that “[i]t is far from clear …
whether we can actually speak of an Islamic gender system” (Tucker 1993,
38). Tucker’s own concerns seem to focus primarily on the gulf between
the prescriptions of religiously normative texts and the realities of historic
Islamic societies. More recent work has emphasised, as summarised by
Manuela Marín, that

Women were not an absolute category, permeating all social levels –

although Muslim authors gladly accepted this assumption. Against the
mere fact of being a woman …, historical research has to consider many
other factors. Differences among women, according to their social or
economic situation, their ethnic origins, their personal status – free or
slave, single or married – and their residential lifestyles – urban, peasant
or nomadic – have to be taken into account before making sweeping
generalisations. (Marín 2010, 355-356)

Although religious scholars did sometimes, as Marín writes, “gladly ac-

cept [the] assumption” that women were “an absolute category,” a number
of scholars have also explored the fact that gender was not a monolithic
category even within Islamic normative discourses. Several recent stud-
ies focus on the multivocality and richness of the normative traditions

4 See, for instance, Hallaq (2001) and Powers (2001).

94 Marion K atz

themselves. More recent scholarship has examined the degree to which we

can actually posit a self-consistent gender ideology that pervasively informs
the various Islamic religious disciplines. In addition to being a question of
historical concern, this issue has become salient among scholars working
at least in part from an engaged, faith-based point of view. Over the last
several decades Muslim scholars have differed in their assessments of the
degree to which the range of classical Islamic opinion on issues of gender
includes genuinely egalitarian or woman-friendly elements that can be
recuperated by progressive modern Muslims.5
In a 1997 article, Mohammad Fadel uses the specific case of women’s
testimony to argue that the methodologies of different classical Islamic
religious disciplines resulted in the development of substantially different
attitudes on questions of gender. He posits that “jurisprudence, precisely
because it takes a broader interpretive perspective, allows for the pos-
sibility of a gender-neutral interpretation of female participation in the
law to emerge. Exegesis, on the other hand – which was dominated by
the atomistic methodology of verse-by-verse interpretation – allowed the
misogynistic assumptions of the reader to dominate the text” (Fadel 1997,
186; compare Bauer 2010). However, while legal analysis arguably did encour-
age a more systematic approach to questions of gender (if only by offering
occasions for the analogical comparison of scenarios across different areas
of the law), legal discourses were not necessarily internally homogeneous.
Legal debates examining whether women’s legal competence to engage in
financial transactions implied a corresponding competence to contract
their own marriages (a point at issue between the Hanafis and the other
major Sunni schools of law) suggest the extent to which homologies among
different areas of the law were negotiable and subject to manipulation. Even
within a single school of law (and, indeed, within the work of a single jurist)
it is often possible to come upon apparently contrasting statements about,
for instance, the social or natural competencies of women.
Conversely, even among Qurʾanic exegetes distinctive ideas about gender
can inform interpretation beyond the atomistic framework of verse-by-verse
interpretation. In her study of premodern exegesis of a set of Qurʾanic verses
relating to gender relations, Karen Bauer demonstrates how scientific, theo-
logical, ethical, and other discourses pervasively inform classical scholars’
interpretations of the text (Bauer 2008, e.g. 44). For instance, she shows
how “scientific arguments were used in some exegeses in order to prove
that men’s nature is hot and dry, whereas women’s is cold and moist” (Bauer

5 For an example touching on both sides of this issue, see Ali (2006, 6-13).
Tex tual Study of Gender 95

2008, 6). Of course, Galenic medicine did not systematically shape Qurʾanic
interpretation on matters of gender any more than it did legal discourse; the
axioms of contemporary science, like other social and intellectual assump-
tions, made strategic and sometimes unpredictable appearances in various
normative genres and disciplines. As analysed by Bauer, the premodern
exegetical literature is homogeneous in the sense that it consistently as-
sumes some degree of gender hierarchy; however, she also demonstrates
that the substantive interpretations advanced and preferred by scholars
changed over time, as did the underlying rationales presented – including
ones addressing foundational issues about the nature of gender and of the
marital relationship.
In addition to suggesting ways in which premodern normative discourses
on gender were multivocal and negotiable, recent scholarship has shown
that gender intersected with other categories, thus integrating it into a
wider spectrum of identities and hierarchies. In her 1991 article “Gendering
the Ungendered Body: Hermaphrodites in Medieval Islamic Law,” Paula
Sanders argues that the biologically ambiguous body posed a challenge to
the dichotomous gender system of classical fiqh that required discursive
intervention. In this study, she emphasises that jurists recognised no inter-
mediate or hybrid status between men and women; they were convinced
that, however obscure or problematic the physical signs, “every person had a
true sex” that was either male or female (Sanders 1991, 77). Particularly in the
context of ritual law, the problem of the hermaphrodite was one of gender
hierarchy. By placing persons of ambiguous physique between men and
women in ritual contexts, they ensured that the ideal order of precedence
would be preserved; the hermaphrodite was either the hindmost man or
the foremost woman in the assemblage, and it mattered little if the true
alternative was known only to God.
Sanders recognises that, by structuring the question of gender identity at
least partially as one of hierarchy and precedence, jurists potentially placed
it in juxtaposition with other dualities. She notes that “[t]here were other,
equally fundamental boundaries in Islamic societies that also involved
hierarchies: Muslim and non-Muslim, free and slave.” However, she argues
that such pairings were fundamentally different from the male-female
dichotomy because they were contextual and changeable, unlike the bound-
ary between men and women, which was “impermeable” (Sanders 1991, 76).
However, even within Sanders’ study there is some indication that the
gender system of medieval fiqh was not simply composed of two monolithic
and impermeable genders. For instance, she points to the way in which
a female slave – legally not subject to the same rules of modesty as free
96 Marion K atz

women – could mediate between the genders in the case where strict gender
segregation would not allow the physical inspection of a hermaphrodite
(Sanders 1991, 84). More recent studies have pointed to the ways in which
classical Islamic discourses (including, but not limited to fiqh) constructed
some of these categories in ways that inform and intersect with their con-
struction of gender. As suggested by the example of the slave girl, perhaps
the most obvious pairing of this kind is the dichotomy between slave and
free.
In an influential 1996 article, Baber Johansen argues that Islamic law
establishes a realm of “social exchange” where, in contrast with the realm
of commercial exchange (where all sane adults are equal), admission “de-
pends on the individual’s or the family’s standing in the five major social
hierarchies, which are determined by religion, gender, kinship, generation
and the relation of free persons to slaves” (Johansen 1996, 72). Most funda-
mentally, “[t]he human body of the free person is circulated and valorised
according to the norms of social exchange” (Johansen 1996, 74), while that
of the slave is valued and exchanged according to commercial norms. In
this regard he points to the fundamental distinction between the “zones
of shame” of slave and free women (Johansen 1996, 75) – where, although
Johansen does not note this, the private parts of slave women parallel those
of men, rather than those of free women. In contrast, he argues that “the
Hanafite discussion clearly shows that for the jurists the importance of
the gender criterion outweighs that of the difference between free male
persons and male slaves” (Johansen 1996, 82). Thus, Johansen emphasises
that at least in some contexts gender is the overriding consideration and
is related by his sources directly to the sexual and reproductive capacities
unique to women. Nevertheless, his analysis demonstrates the complex
interrelation of his “five major social hierarchies,” giving particular salience
to slavery.
In an article in 1992, Leila Ahmed argued that it was the prevalence
of slavery – specifically, female concubinage – in early Abbasid society
that led to the conflation of the categories “slave” and “woman” and the
consequent degradation of women’s status in the Islamic discourses that
were beginning to crystallise in that period. She wrote that “[f]or elite
men, the vast majority of the women with whom they interacted, and in
particular those with whom they entered into sexual relationships, were
women whom they owned and related to as masters to slaves.” As a result,
“one meaning of woman in a very concrete, practical sense was ‘slave, object
purchasable for sexual use’” (Ahmed 1992, 84, 85). She concludes that “[t]he
mores of the elite and the realities of social life, and their implications for
Tex tual Study of Gender 97

the very idea and definition of the concept ‘woman,’ could not have failed
to inform the ideology of the day, thus determining how early Islamic texts
were heard and interpreted and how their broad principles were rendered
into law” (Ahmed 1992, 86). Writing more than a decade later about the
Ottoman period, Madeline Zilfi concurred:

The traffic in females and the place of women in marriage, or in society

generally, cannot be understood without reference to each other; to some
degree, the one gives the other shape and perhaps even makes the other
possible … [T]he pervasiveness of the secondary sex/service system – of
bought and sold human flesh – also had an impact on “free” marriage.
(Zilfi 2005, 134)

However, particularly in the context of Abbasid history, not all writers have
approached the institution of elite female slavery as a factor degrading
the symbolic and concrete status of women. In a popular treatment of the
subject first published in French in 1990, Fatima Mernissi represents the
elite slave women of the Abbasid era as exemplars of female self-realisation
within the context of medieval Arab culture. In her spirited depiction, their
intelligence, their cultivation, and their influence over their male admirers
(including the most powerful men of their time) appear as proud reminders
of the scope for female intellectual distinction and personal self-assertion
that existed at this relatively early point in Islamic history (Mernissi 1993,
37-67).
More recent work examines the accomplishments and power of Abbasid
harem women in a more sober mode; notably, Nadia El-Cheikh’s study of the
role of the qahramāna (stewardess) in the Abbasid household has provided
a less romanticised and more historically grounded image of the roles of
women in Abbasid royal harems, casting new light on their role as profes-
sional managers and bureaucrats rather than exclusively as sexualised
entertainers or concubines (El-Cheikh 2006). M.S. Gordon, in an analysis
of the career of ninth-century slave singer ʿArib al-Maʾmuniyya and her
royal fellow-artist ʿUlayya bint al-Mahdi emphasises that the slave woman’s
entrepreneurial deployment of her vocal skill, quick wit, and blunt character
allowed her to ascend to wealth and influence, ultimately (it would seem)
commanding an “entourage of servants and slave girls” of her own (Gordon
2004, 65-66). This study, and others examining related themes, suggest the
complex interrelation of factors including legal freedom, physical mobil-
ity, sexual availability, education, artistic talent, and practices of piety in
defining the avenues of opportunity and forms of constriction that were
98 Marion K atz

navigated by individual women.6 An interesting theme that emerges from

these studies is the role of women’s piety practices, forms of voluntary
self-constraint that were differentially available to different categories of
women, highly subject to personal fashioning (as well as to celebration or
rejection by outside – and often male – observers), and complexly related
to the women’s other social, sexual, and artistic roles.
Historical reconstruction aside, the image of the witty and manipulative
elite slave woman has been perpetuated as a cultural icon in such central
works as the tenth-century Kitab al-Aghani and the Thousand and One
Nights. However, the central focus of recent scholarship has been on the
issue raised two decades ago by Leila Ahmed, the role of female slavery in
the development of the early Islamic legal tradition, and thus of a model of
marital relations that still bears relevance to modern discussions of Islamic
marriage and divorce. In her 2010 book Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam,
Kecia Ali argues that in the early period

[t]he jurists showed no hesitation in making analogies between wives and

slaves or between marriage and commercial transactions. In fact, their
central notion about marriage was that the marriage contract granted
a husband, in exchange for payment of dower, a form of authority or
dominion (milk) over his wife’s sexual (and usually reproductive) capacity.
(Ali 2010, 6)

The relationship between the juristic models of marriage and slavery was
not limited to the shared concept of milk, however.

There was a vital relationship between enslavement and femaleness as

legal disabilities, and between slave ownership and marriage as legal
institutions. Slaves and women were overlapping categories of legally
inferior persons constructed against one another and in relation to one
another – sometimes identified, sometimes distinguished. (Ali 2010, 8)

By highlighting the ways in which a man’s legal authority over his wife
partially paralleled that over his bondsman (at least on the level of legal
discourse, if not on that of concrete practice), Ali suggests one way in which
the male-female and owner-slave dichotomies intersected each other within
legal structures of hierarchy and authority. Rather than being monolithic
or homogeneous, the categories “male” and “female” were riven by other

6 On this theme, see also al-Heitty (1990), Kilpatrick (1991), and al-Samarai (2001).
Tex tual Study of Gender 99

distinctions of legal and marital status, with which they stood in complex
relationships of parallelism and opposition.7
In her 2007 dissertation, Hina Azam presents the status of slavery as one
in a range of forms of valuation of the human person employed in classical
legal discourse (Azam 2007). Whereas some interpreters (including, at least
implicitly, Ali) have viewed the parallelism between purchase price and
mahr and between slavery and marriage as morally compromising, Azam –
looking specifically at juristic responses to the problem of rape – argues that
it is precisely the assignment of monetary value to the female body (either
in terms of bodily parts or of sexual capacity) that allowed some jurists to
conceptualise rape as an offense against a woman’s moral and economic
ownership rights over her own person, and thus to stipulate that the victim
is entitled to material compensation rather than merely exempted from the
canonical penalty for zinā (illegitimate intercourse). However, for Azam
the purchase price of a female slave does not parallel the bridal payment
(ṣadāq) delivered to a free woman, but contrasts with it; the ṣadāq “served
as a marker of legal personhood and sexual autonomy, for only the free
woman received a ṣadāq” (Azam 2007, 165). This was because ‘[a]s a free
woman, she was categorised not as property, but as property-owner” (Azam
2007, 163). Nevertheless, much like Ali, she emphasises that “Maliki legal
discourse regarding coercive zinā was based on the notion that sexuality
constituted a type of capital or commodity, potentially reducible to material
wealth” (Azam 2007, 175).
In addition to the distinction between slave and free, sexual categories
were intersected by distinctions of age. In some cases, membership in an age
cohort could be just as determinative for models of behavioural propriety
as gender. For instance, for early jurists writing about the legal advisability
of women’s going out to participate in public worship in the mosque, there
was no uniform standard that applied to women of all ages. Rather, they
unquestioningly assumed distinctions between women of different age
cohorts, applying restrictive standards to the secluded young virgin and
allowing more latitude to the older woman. Although their substantive
judgements varied – both with respect to the specif ic evaluations of
mosque attendance by young women and with respect to the definition

7 In “Men, Women and Slaves in Abbasid Society,” Julia Bray (2004, 136-137) argues that “[l]
egal theory, still developing at this time, recognised varying positions on the scale between free
male and free female and between freedom and slavehood. The positions of free women and of
slaves, male or female, are analogous in that both vary according to circumstance, whereas the
legal status of the free Muslim male is invariable.” I thank Maurice Pomerantz for the reference
to this article.
100 Marion K atz

of the categories, which in the case of older women could range from the
mature matron to the decrepit crone – they agreed across boundaries of
geography and legal school that not all women were subject to the same
behavioural norms.
Although the age distinctions of the early jurists were interpreted by
legal thinkers of a later age in terms of the rationale of fitna, or sexual
temptation, the early sources give little indication that this was their over-
riding concern. Rather, they appear to have believed that the social roles of
women – and the importance of seclusion practices in their cultivation of
religious virtue and social esteem – varied over the course of the life cycle.
The later systematic reinterpretation of these distinctions in terms of the
woman’s sexual allure served, on the one hand, as the basis for a more
essentialist and monolithic treatment of the problem of women’s public
mobility and visibility; increasingly, women at different stages of life were
grouped together as potential sexual threats to public order. Ironically,
however, the increasingly single-minded focus on fitna also cross-cut the
dichotomy between men and women. Later jurists were capable, on the
basis of the fitna criterion, of stating both that a very old woman was like
a man, and that a beardless youth was (for limited ritual purposes) like a
woman (Katz 2014).
Of course, the criterion of sexual attractiveness to adult men also inter-
sected lines of gender outside of the sphere of ritual law. Analysing a list
of sexual vices composed by the eleventh-century Iraqi judge al-Jurjani,
Everett Rowson writes that

al-Jurjānī clearly lived in a man’s world. Free adult men virtually defined
the public world, sharing it with subordinate adolescent boys, male slaves,
and, to a degree, female slaves … The public badge of a dominant male
was his beard. In sexual terms, he dominated as penetrator. Beardless
non-men – women and boys – were his natural sexual partners. (Rowson
1991, 65)

Just as men were distinguished into highly differentiated age categories

by the criterion of fitna, so were slave women. For instance, Ibn al-Qayyim
distinguishes between “slave girls used for work and service” (who, like men,
may expose significant portions of their bodies in public) and “concubines
(imā’ al-tasarrī), [for] whom it is customary to seclude and veil” (Ibn Qayyim
al-Jawziya 1417/1996, 2:47).
The interrelationship and mutual constitution of the categories of gender,
rank, and age discerned in recent studies raise questions about the degree
Tex tual Study of Gender 101

to which gender (or sex) can or should be analysed as a unitary category

to the exclusion of other, intersecting factors. At one end of the spectrum,
in a 2006 review article, Julie Scott Meisami argues that gender has been
artif icially isolated and overemphasised in the analysis of premodern
Arabic prose literature. She argues, for instance, that in the premodern
Islamic context “most historians treat women in the same way as they do
men” (Meisami 2006, 64); it is only the selectivity of contemporary secular
scholars that has made such texts appear to reflect a monolithic “gender
ideology” characteristic of classical Islam. She observes that “[i]f the outcome
of a woman’s actions … was negative, the old saw about women’s malign
influence might be trotted out, as if by rote,” whereas if a woman’s political
intervention was successful “the woman might be praised for her wisdom,
perspicacity, determination and so on” (Meisami 2006, 64). While she is
surely correct in pointing out the inconsistency (and opportunism) with
which restrictive views of women’s roles are invoked, it would be interesting
to examine the extent to which positive commentary on women’s public or
political involvement was couched in explicitly gendered terms, as negative
commentary often was.
Nevertheless, Meisami’s sharp critique certainly suggests the dangers of
assuming that gender is always the primary or most relevant category for
the interpretation of our data, even when they deal with women. An astute
example of the rejection of this assumption is Maribel Fierro’s analysis of the
medieval Andalusian debate over Mary’s status as a prophet in the Qurʾan.
In response to A.M. Turki’s contention that the controversy over this issue
reflected the comparatively high status of women in Islamic Spain, Fierro
convincingly argues that “the discussion about the nubuwwa of women
did not really arise from a concern about the position of women regarding
men, but, rather, from a preoccupation about the integrity of prophecy”
(Fierro 2002, 193). The assertion that Mary was not a prophet entailed that
the wonders God performed on her behalf in the Qurʾan paralleled the
miracles (karāmāt) controversially attributed to Sufis. If Mary were credited
with prophecy, on the other hand, the doctrine that God brought forth
miracles only on behalf of prophets could be preserved. Thus, although the
centrality to this debate of the only named female figure in the Qurʾan is
striking to the modern observer, the participants appear to have been less
concerned with enhancing or disputing the status of women than with
contesting the authority of Sufi saints, who were often (although of course
not exclusively) male.
Related to this question of the selection of frameworks is the issue, raised
in a contemporary context by Saba Mahmood, of implicitly privileging
102 Marion K atz

instances of “resistance” or of “self-directed action, unencumbered by

patriarchal norms or the will of others” (Mahmood 2005, 12). This bias (or,
more positively, this focus of interest) is discernible not only in studies of
contemporary women, but in studies of premodern societies. For instance,
in the introduction to the very useful 2002 volume Writing the Feminine:
Women in Arab Sources, Manuela Marín and Randi Deguilhem forthrightly
declare the collection’s interest in “gradations of autonomous behaviour and
opportunities for individuality and individuation of women,” “freedom of
personal activity,” and “freedom of intellectual and practical movement”
(Marín and Deguilhem 2002, xvi). These are valuable areas of concern, and
certainly ones that can be pursued with great benefit in the premodern
sources; examples of women’s autonomy and mobility are numerous and
notable. However, following Mahmood’s insights, we may also recognise that
women’s agency and self-realisation should not exclusively or uncritically be
identified with freedom, autonomy, and individuality in the sense of libera-
tion from constraining norms. For instance, in studying the gender norms
of classical fiqh it is notable that (at least on the level of ideal constructs) a
free woman is simultaneously more autonomous and more constrained (in
terms of dress, mobility, and spheres of activity) than a slave. These two facts
are not mutually contradictory, but functionally connected. As we can see
in fatwas that establish the limitations on personal conduct that must be
observed by a woman to be accorded the status of mukhaddara (secluded)
and to exercise certain privileges on that basis, such as immunity from the
requirement that she appear before a judge to give an oath, the relationship
between agency and freedom is often a complex one.8
One consequence of the tacit or explicit preference for evidence of
female autonomy is the possible overemphasis of women’s social and
religious activities that at least appear to be transgressive with respect
to (implicitly male-established) norms. For instance, it is not only the
descriptive liveliness of Ibn al-Hajj’s descriptions of non-canonical forms
of female piety in Mamluk Egypt that have made them so attractive to
modern scholars, but the degree to which they appear to represent a
female social and religious culture divergent from (and often oppositional
to) that of the male-dominated establishment. Overemphasis of such data,
however, risks reproducing Ibn al-Hajj’s overtly polemical representation
of contemporary life, which intentionally elides the degree to which such
behaviour was in fact endorsed and facilitated by many male scholars –
even as it was contested by a minority voice like Ibn al-Hajj – and, having

8 See Peirce (1999).

Tex tual Study of Gender 103

stigmatised it as deviant, polemically genders it feminine even when

males are clearly involved. For all of its perceptiveness and importance,
for instance, Huda Lutf i’s landmark article on Ibn al-Hajj’s treatment
of women tends to reproduce its pointed depiction of (in the words of
the article’s subtitle) “Female Anarchy versus Male Shar’i Order” (Lufti
1993). Work like Asma Sayeed’s study of two prominent female hadith
transmitters in Mamluk Damascus is increasingly contributing to our
understanding of women’s successful and celebrated participation in
religiously normative activities, rather than exclusively in those associ-
ated with “popular Islam” (Sayeed 2002). Emil Homerin’s study of the
Suf i poet ʿAʾisha al-Baʿuniyya (d. 1516) similarly documents a woman’s
strikingly successful career as a mystic and poet, noting in closing that
the accounts of medieval male scholars “are very much in line with her
own self-representation” (Homerin 2006, 397).9
It is now recognised that in some fields and historical periods, there
were few doctrinal or social barriers to women’s achievement of distinc-
tion; analysis of women’s participation need not always be dominated by
the assumption that such accomplishments were somehow transgres-
sive, that they violated or triumphed over implicit male norms. In the
spirit of Mahmood’s study, it would be useful to explore more overtly
the idea that mastery of norms, rather than exclusively their violation
or transcendence, can be a manifestation of women’s agency. However,
Omaima Abou-Bakr, who has done much to reconstruct the history of
women’s achievements in fields as diverse as asceticism and legal study,
cautions that the recognition of such achievements should not negate
awareness of the constraints within which they occurred. Writing of
“an eminent scholar shaykh” who commented that “my own research
disproved the fact that full rights of work have been denied to women in
Muslim societies,” she observes:

This is in fact a trap question, to be answered with yet another question:

if women have proved historically that they are capable of undertaking
the most demanding work on a par with men, and if there is no Islamic
prohibition against them working, then why did “official” exclusion take
place in these eras, and why do full working rights for Muslim women
– especially participation in the official religious sphere and positions
of leadership – continue to be an issue at the present time? (Abou-Bakr
2003, 327)

9 For a broader survey, see al-Saʿdi and Abou-Bakr (2001).

104 Marion K atz

On the one hand, it is now clear that women contributed to the transmis-
sion, the inculcation, and even the elaboration of Islamic norms, and in
many instances gained recognition for their outstanding mastery of these
norms (both intellectually and behaviourally); on the other, in many cases
they faced disproportionate restrictions, and sometimes took active steps
to circumvent (or ignore) them. It should not gratuitously be assumed that
women were a chaotic force in natural opposition to religious discourses;
however, we also should not downplay the importance of the many in-
stances when women clearly acted in ways that subverted restrictive norms
(or took advantage of those rules that worked in their favour).10 Recent
work provides clear and striking instances of women acting in solidarity
with other women to achieve desirable outcomes, such as the protection
and maximisation of female property ownership; in one case, Shatzmiller
documents “four generations of uninterrupted ownership of the family
home by its female members, each relying on Islamic female property rights
to ensure smooth passage from generation to generation” (Shatzmiller 2007,
61). At other times, however, women appear to be acting in their capacity as
members of lineages, as persons of economic or social status, as scholars or
as members of legal schools or Sufi orders. Recent work should not discour-
age us from the reconstruction of instances of female autonomy and of
women’s ability to manipulate potentially constricting norms; however, it
does draw our attention to the complexity of the construction of gender
and of the power structures within which people of both sexes operated,
and to the many frameworks within which women pursued their interests
and ideals.11

10 See, for instance, Powers (2003).

11 Of course, in addition to the complexity and permeability of the category of gender (and the
multiple frameworks and identities within which women acted), we should also recognise the
complexity and negotiability of the category “Islamic.” To the extent that we are dealing with
normative religious texts or with women engaging in activities (such as hadith transmission)
with explicit religious valences, the label seems unproblematic. It becomes more problematic
in areas, such as marriage and divorce or the transmission of property, where legal norms were
(at least in part) religiously derived, but where a wide set of other customs and motives are also
in play, some of which may eclipse possible religious elements.
Tex tual Study of Gender 105

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 Scholarship on Gender Politics in the
Muslim World
Some Critical Reflections

Dorothea E. Schulz

1 Introduction

What do we mean by “gender politics”? What is the political in “gender”

and in what ways are politics and policies “gendered”? How do these terms
relate to feminist politics? Whose feminist politics are we talking about, in
a contemporary era in which scholarly research and activism is conducted
through increasingly transnational networks? Can we still assume the
existence of a single, feminist project that guides research on gender politics
in the Muslim world?
As a first step towards addressing these questions, this essay traces
important developments in social science gender studies and feminist
scholarship that shaped debates among scholars located in the US and UK
academe. In a second step, I will reflect on how these different paradigms
of research on gender and gender politics have affected scholarship on and
from the Middle East. Next, I will offer some critical reflections on key
points and limitations of the debates raised by this scholarship in and on
the Middle East, by addressing them from “the margins,” that is, from the
vantage point of Africanist anthropological scholarship on gender. Drawing
on this perspective – and this is the fourth step – I will propose certain
perspectives that might benefit social science research on gender – both
with respect to the Middle East and to Muslim societies that have not been
granted similar canonical status in the literature.

2 Social Science Research on Gender Studies and Feminist

Theory: A Short Overview

Developments within gender studies and feminist theorising since, roughly,

the 1960s manifested themselves in several significant paradigm shifts.
These shifts need to be related not only to dominant trends within the social
sciences, but also to reconfigurations in the institutional arrangements of
110 Dorothea E. Schulz

higher education and academic research (see Vincent 1990; Kandiyoti 1996;
also see Guyer 2004).

2.1 Transcending the “Male Bias”: Women’s Studies

Early studies that applied a gender-specific perspective to the study of

society were informed by the effort to correct the “male bias” characteristic
of much classical scholarship in sociology and anthropology. Yet during this
early phase of gender-relevant theorising and empirical inquiry, the main
category of investigation was “woman,” rather than “gender.”
The historical context for the emergence of the women’s studies para-
digm were the (late) 1960s, when in the US and in Britain, a growing number
of women were gaining access to institutions of higher learning and were
granted the possibility to earn a graduate degree which prepared them for
a career as teacher or researcher. Along with the stronger representation
of women in different academic positions and functions emerged the call
to “give women back their voice,” which formed the primary rationale
of the emergence of women’s studies. As noted by key representatives
of this scholarly impetus, classical social science scholarship that was
based on empirical research had been characterised by a double male
bias. Scholarly research and writing had been conducted predominantly
by male scholars who, for purposes of data collection, had preferentially
worked with male informants and interview partners. As a result, the
collected data had necessarily been skewed. The questions posed by
male researchers reflected on their own idiosyncratic viewpoints and
presuppositions, and thereby in part anticipated the answers given. Male
scholars tended to collect information about realms of social, economic,
political, and legal life that very often corresponded to domains to which
scholars as men had privileged access in their societies of origin. Other
important aspects of social and political organisation, that is, those in
which women potentially played a prominent role, remained outside their
field of vision and were not accounted for. Second, the information offered
by male informants, although mirroring their own subjective viewpoints,
interests, and positionality, had been taken as disinterested and objective
representations of a society’s organisation and power relations. This “skew-
ing” of empirical research and data through the selection of interview
partners had momentous consequences, particularly in societies where
the segregation of women and men prevents male researchers from ap-
proaching women or from verifying the information they elicited from
conversations with men.
Schol arship on Gender Politics in the Muslim World 111

Against this backdrop, the first step in the development of gender studies
was marked by the effort on the part of female scholars to readjust this bias,
by exploring various domains of female practice and hence by accounting
for women’s historical agency. Yet as momentous as this adjustment was
in analytical and methodological terms, it also led to scholarly research
dominated by what was sometimes described as the “great women ap-
proach.” That is, the motivation to account for the important role and
agency of women, past and present, prompted some scholars to pay primary
attention to important women in history and politics (passing over the
everyday experience and practices of the majority of women) and to address
the situation of women as the outcome of abstract, macro-structures of
power, rather than of daily interactions and negotiations between men
and women.

2.2 Gender Studies: The Beginnings

Starting in the early 1970s, scholars amended the former focus on women by
directing attention to gender relations and the ways they were integrated
into and constitutive of patriarchal systems of power. The now-classical
collection of essays edited by Lamphere and Rosaldo addressed what they
considered the universal subordination of women, and presented different
explanatory frameworks to account for this universal “fact” (Rosaldo and
Lamphere 1974; Reiter 1979). Contributors to the volume located women’s
subjugation in the organisation of economic activities and in the sexual
division of labour. Others proposed to understand women’s subjugation
as the result of women’s and men’s relegation to different areas of social
life, exemplified in studies operating with the dichotomies public versus
private/domestic (e.g. Rosaldo 1974; Rogers 1975) and nature versus cul-
ture (e.g. Ortner 1974). Yet others located women’s subordination in their
emotional-psychological constitution that, as Chodorow (1974) surmised,
was closely related to women’s child-rearing activities. Common to these
approaches was the tendency to apply conceptual frameworks on which
culturally and historically determinate nature they did not adequately
reflect. An important departure from this a-historical perspective was
marked by scholars who addressed the subordination of women as a product
of concrete historical processes, such as the integration of local economies
into the colonial market economy (Etienne and Leacock 1980), the uneven
effects of “modernisation” (Boserup 1970) or, in the case of scholars working
with a Marxian framework, as part and parcel of a capitalist organisation
of the economy and family life (Von Werlhof et al. 1991).
112 Dorothea E. Schulz

Although proposing very discrepant conceptual and theoretical frame-

works for the study of gender relations, these authors shared a common
feminist agenda characterised by two main assumptions. They posited
firstly, the existence of a clearly defined female subject of politics; and
secondly, that patriarchy is the power system that needs to be overcome
by female empowerment.

2.3 Accounting for the Cultural Construction of Gender

A third phase in the development of gender-related research started in

the mid-1980s, prompted by a shift away from a scholarly preoccupation
with explaining “women’s subordination” and towards exploring culturally
specific constructions of “gender” roles (with a strong empirical bias towards
studying female gender roles). Studies informed by this paradigm called
for closer analysis of culturally variable constructions and evaluations
of gender roles (Strathern 1980; MacCormack and Strathern 1980) and for
the intertwining of these roles with other social identities (e.g. Collier and
Yanagisako 1987). Their work helped refute earlier, sweeping assumptions
about the universal subordination of women, by demonstrating that female
and male responsibilities and agencies vary substantially in the social,
political, economic, and religious domains. At the same time, by stressing
the variability of “gender” across cultures, these scholars took for granted
the distinction between on one side, gender as the constructed and therefore
malleable and changing part of individual identity, and, on the other, “sex”
as the biologically determined and therefore given and unchanging aspect
of women’s and men’s identities.

2.4 Probing the Category “Woman”: Challenging the Classical

Feminist Project

A fourth development of gender-related research, which occurred in the

1990s, was to problematise the assumption that “woman” constitutes a
uniform category of actors who share certain core characteristics. This de-
construction of woman as an analytical category implied that the political
project of feminism, defined by the shared concern to fight male oppression
as the dominant principle of power inequality, lost its basic reference point
and was thus called into question. This paradigm shift occurred against
the backdrop of important institutional transformations. More and more
women of different ethnic backgrounds (and later, sexual orientations [e.g.
De Lauretis 1994]) moved from a position of relative marginality to the higher
Schol arship on Gender Politics in the Muslim World 113

echelons of the academic hierarchy in research and teaching institutions in

(mainly) the US and UK. These women increasingly disputed the assertion
by (white middle class) women who so far had filled the ranks of academia
to speak in the name of “the women” (Mohanty 1988). The challenge these
women posed to established gender analysis and scholars was reinforced
by feminist appropriations of diverse strands of post-structuralist thought
represented by Foucault and Lacan, by Lyotard’s postmodernism, and by
Derrida’s deconstructionism. These post-structuralist critics similarly
aimed to deconstruct the category “woman” as the uniform category of
gender analysis and thereby reformulated the central purpose and terms
of feminist/gender analysis. Rather than taking for granted the markers of
womanhood, post-structuralist critics called for an analysis of the processes,
discourses, practices, and institutions through which the category woman
and notions of sexual difference become naturalised and subordination is
reproduced. Post-structural critique thus not only posed a major challenge
to key concepts of earlier feminist research and gender politics, such as
patriarchal oppression and sexual difference. The critique also generated
substantial controversy about the relationship between post-structuralism
and feminism, and about the political locations of those whose dismissal
of the earlier feminist project was informed by post-structuralist theory.
Another difficulty demonstrated by this controversy relates to the in-
determinate ways in which the notion of gender had been conventionally
used in feminist analysis. That is, in conventional analysis, gender had been
used in two different senses. Gender was used in contrast to sex to refer to
culturally and socially specific constructions of masculinity and femininity,
thereby implicitly positing that a person’s sex is an unalterable, biological
fact. At the same time, scholars increasingly used gender to refer to any so-
cial construction that rests on a male/female contrast. Used in this way, the
term gender incorporates social constructions in which “female” and “male”
bodily features serve as criteria of distinction. Here sex becomes an element
of gender, because constructions of the body are themselves the product of
social interpretation. Over time, the second, more inclusive use of gender as
an expression of difference that, based on perceived differences between
the sexes, is always embedded within a field of power relations (Kandiyoti
1996, 6; see Scott 1999) gradually established itself as the dominant one. This
development was reinforced by the concomitant emergence of compara-
tive masculinity studies as a distinct field of inquiry. Masculinity studies
generated considerable debate about the motivations and agendas of those
labouring to making men (once again, this time explicitly) the exclusive
object of empirical inquiry. Still, important proponents of masculinity
114 Dorothea E. Schulz

studies, most notably Cornell, also offered important new inspiration for
scholars of gender, by stressing the coexistence of different, hegemonic,
subordinate, and marginal masculinities (Cornell 1995; see Cornwall and
Lindisfarne 1994; Kandiyoti 1994) and by favouring an approach that related
gender as one specific construction of power relations to other mechanisms
and institutions of power inequality, such as capitalism and the state.

2.5 Using Gender as an Analytical Category

I want to conclude my historical outline of key developments in gender studies

with three suggestions. First, rather than explain gender inequalities and their
reproduction over time, we should favour investigations that address, from
a social science perspective, contextually specific formations of gender and
power inequalities (Nicholson 2004). The question of how gender operates as a
structure establishing and reproducing power relations needs to be addressed
both at the macro-sociological level and at the level of interpersonal relations.
Secondly, because of the proliferating, partly overlapping, or inconsistent
use of the term “gender” in the social science research on gender, scholars
of gender and gender politics in Muslim societies would be well advised
to specify what meanings and goals they associate with their individual
research projects. It seems to be of little heuristic value to reduce or collapse
the variety of these understandings of gender (in)to a single one. Still, it is
important to keep in mind that the different conceptualisations of gender
employed by and underlying the vast body of literature on gender in Muslim
societies are sometimes incompatible. Hence, while using gender as an
analytical category, one should be careful to reflect on the epistemological
and philosophical foundations.
Finally, for the sake of clarity, I propose a working definition of gender
that allows scholars to make gender a key category of social science research
on Muslim societies. Following Risman’s distinction between three different
dimensions of gender as a social structure, that is, between “gendered selves,
the normative expectations that help explain interactional patterns, and
institutional regulations” (Risman 2004, 433, 436), I propose to view gender
as a structure constitutive of different forms of inequality. The culturally and
historically specific working and effects of this structure can be explored by
studying the interconnection between these three dimensions of gender.1

1 Risman’s “gender structure theory” is strongly indebted to Giddens’ (1984) view of the
recursive (that is, mutually constitutive) relationship between action and structure. Risman
Schol arship on Gender Politics in the Muslim World 115

3 Gender Politics-Related Research on and in the Middle

East2

The research agendas that have shaped gender-related scholarship in and

on the Middle East since the turn of the twentieth century reveal particular
institutional, social, and historical circumstances within which this kind
of research could be effected. These circumstances were decisive for creat-
ing locally and regionally very specific conditions for the appropriation
of gender-related research paradigms that circulated, at some historical
moments more than in other times, at an increasingly global level. The
particular ways in which these research agendas were appropriated and
adapted to regional and national contexts of debate and research in the
Middle East demonstrate that it is impossible to clearly distinguish between
research paradigms that were produced in the Middle East on one side, and
those generated in academic institutions in Europe and North America.

3.1 Early Writings on “Women’s Position”

Early reflection and writings on the status of women and on gender relations
in Muslim societies in the Middle East were a by-product of the spirit of
modernisation and social reform that animated postcolonial state forma-
tion in Egypt, Iran, and Turkey in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Modernist thinkers reflected on the “woman question” as a
stepping stone and a main symbol of a modern, postcolonial society. As
several authors have pointed out, nationalist discourse was the dominant
idiom within which questions relating to the position of women, but also
other questions relating to the creation of a modern society and citizenry
were addressed (Kandiyoti 1996, 8; Abu-Lughod 1998, 22ff.; Göle 2002).
There thus existed, from the outset, a close connection between feminism
and a nationalist critique of Western cultural imperialism that tended to
foreclose a methodical and coherent analysis of the political and social
processes and structures constitutive of power relations and gender hierar-
chies in the societies under question. Nationalist discourse, in turn, rested
importantly on a strong association of notions of cultural authenticity
with Islam. So tightly interwoven were writings on women’s “status and

points out that authors coming from very different theoretical traditions have each tended to
privilege one of these different dimensions of gender in their studies. See also Nicholson (2004).
2 The following historical overview is indebted to Kandiyoti’s (1996) remarkable sketch of
the development of feminist scholarship on the Middle East.
116 Dorothea E. Schulz

role in society” with a nationalist discourse on one side, and with “Islam”
as the source of cultural authenticity on the other, that those aiming to
improve the situation of women could only choose one of two options for
action and theorising. The legacy of these two options is still evident in
contemporary scholarship on Muslim societies. On one side were – and
are – those who refuted the inherently oppressive character of Muslim
practices and Islamic normative prescriptions. Scholars who subscribed to
this view posited a contrast between the dignity of the protected Muslim
woman on one side, and the commodified and sexually exploited Western
woman on the other. These scholars sought to demonstrate that women
pursued meaningful and dignified lives “behind the apparent limitations
set by segregation” (Kandiyoti 1996, 9; see Abu-Lughod 1989). The second
position on the relationship between Islam and the position of women
was to argue that an original, non-discriminatory Islam that had granted
important rights to women in the early centuries of Islamic history had
been subsequently corrupted by discriminatory practices and institutions
and legal interpretation. Protagonists of this line of argument challenged
patriarchal interpretations of Islam by proposing alternative readings of the
Islamic written traditions.3 The two lines of argument, formulated early
on in the history of writings about the “woman question” in Middle Eastern
societies, re-emerged in the 1980s. The two approaches offer opposite ways
of conceiving of the relationship between Islam and women’s status, yet,
as Kandiyoti points out, they both occupy “the same discursive space”
(Kandiyoti 1996, 10).
Both perspectives were challenged by authors who instead proposed
to explore early writings about the “woman question” in Middle Eastern
societies as a project of modernity intricately tied to the colonial moment
and impetus of “modernising” its uncivilised subjects, and subsequently
to the postcolonial state-building project (see Abu-Lughod 1998). Still, an
important implication of these early attempts to think about the relation-
ship between Islam, the “woman question,” and the project of decolonisation
was that they prepared the grounds for articulating understandings of
feminism that claimed a relative autonomy from Western feminist agen-
das. Notably, these forerunners of (diverse) contemporary articulations of
Islamic feminisms challenged Western feminism with regard to its founda-
tional principles of (negative) liberty (defined by the actor’s freedom from

3 The re-emergence of these lines of reasoning in the 1980s was demonstrated forcefully by
Mernissi’s Women and Islam (1991) and Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam (1992), both
of them outstanding pieces of scholarship that have generated considerable scholarly debate.
Schol arship on Gender Politics in the Muslim World 117

constraints), agency, and gender equality (as opposed to a view of gender

complementarity promoted by certain Islamic feminists).

3.2 The Institutionalisation of Social Science Research:

“Developmentalist” Approaches

Along with the growing institutionalisation of social science research on

and in the Middle East, two paradigms emerged as dominant. The two
paradigms according to which scholars preferably addressed questions
of women’s status and position in society were modernisation theory and
Marxist approaches. These studies shared a tendency to equate Middle
Eastern societies with Muslim societies, and not to sufficiently take account
of the presence of non-Muslims in these societies. Moreover, most of these
studies rested on a slippage between “Muslim society” and “Middle Eastern
society”; they left out from their conceptual reflection the range of Muslim
societies located outside the Middle East.
Studies in the 1950s and 1960s, following the then dominant modernisa-
tion paradigm, explored gender-specific power inequalities in society and
within the family as a function of the extent to which the society under
study had undergone a modernisation process. Following the Parsonian
ideal type of a modern society, modernisation was envisaged to occur
through the transformation of a society founded principally on the rural,
traditional, and patriarchal family structure into a society organised mainly
around the urban, educated family and a modern version of a marital rela-
tionship. Because modernisation theory treated a wide range of societies
as “traditional” without paying attention to cultural variety and historical
variation, it failed to acknowledge, or treated as factors of secondary im-
portance, the historically and regionally specific modes of generating and
reproducing gender inequality. That is, modernisation scholars assumed
that gender-specific power inequalities were to lose their significance with
the gradual transformation of a “traditional” society into a modern, urban,
and socio-economically more developed society.
Marxist approaches to women’s position in society similarly treated
gender inequalities as epiphenomena and hence as a Marxian Neben-
widerspruch (secondary antinomy) produced by the capitalist mode of
production. They considered the establishment of greater gender equity to
be secondary in importance to the socio-economic development of society
and the creation of a more equitable political and economic order.
Starting in the 1970s, modernisation theory became the target of feminist
critique. Critics took particular issue with the tenet that the modernising
118 Dorothea E. Schulz

effects of development would trickle down to women. Based on empiri-

cal evidence that was often drawn from development aid projects, critics
demonstrated instead that in many cases, the “modernising” of social and
political structures of society led to a further disempowerment of women
because they were deprived of their traditional sources of wealth and influ-
ence within the family. The 1975 UN International Women’s Year provided
a turning point in this respect. However, because much of the criticism of
modernisation theory was addressed within the confined framework of
development policy and projects, it did not generate a systematic body of
comparative literature accounting for the diversity of situations and his-
torical data on regionally specific institutional and material conditions for
women’s livelihoods. As a result, the predominant tendency in international
scholarly debate was to lump together women of very diverse class, social
and cultural backgrounds by subsuming them under the label “Third World
Women” (Mohanty 1988).

3.3 New Debates on the Subject of Feminist Politics

A subsequent phase of social science research on gender in Middle East-

ern Muslim societies was characterised by a diversification of feminist
agendas. Depending on the institutional context in which these agendas
emerged, they entered into dialogue with each other or developed without
significant overlaps or mutual exchange. An important condition for this
emergent dialogue between different feminisms was the integration of
ideas of Western feminist scholarship into Middle Eastern scholarship,
an integration effected by Middle Eastern scholars located in the Western
academic system and in Middle Eastern institutions, and also by other
scholars working on the Middle East. The integration of concepts and
theoretical currents of scholarship produced at academic institutions
in the West into Middle Eastern scholarship was rather uneven because
some concepts and conceptual distinctions, more than others, resonated
with regional patterns of organising social and political life. For instance,
conceptual dichotomies introduced by early representatives of the
anthropology of gender/women, such as the private/public dichotomy
posited by Rosaldo in her 1974 hallmark essay, was broadly applied to
local investigations of gender-specific realms of social and political and
economic organisation.
As a corollary of the different feminist agendas and attendant analytical
perspectives, investigations of gender relations in Middle Eastern socie-
ties in that period came to very different conclusions about the nature
Schol arship on Gender Politics in the Muslim World 119

of gender-specific power inequalities in these societies. Whereas some

scholars tended to conceive of the situation of women in Middle Eastern
societies as one of oppression or patriarchal subjugation, others tended to
highlight the empowering effects of female kin and solidarity networks
that helped to overcome or bypass the restrictions imposed on women
in these patriarchal societies. The work of some Middle Eastern scholars
who were initially trained in Western academic institutions and were now
located in the Middle East, reflected the extent to which they felt account-
able to the concerns and preoccupations of local audiences. This sense of
accountability showed notably in their orientation towards producing
scholarship relevant to the improvement of living conditions for women.
Another group of scholars who worked at institutions in the Middle East
produced scholarship that, written mainly in the national languages,
showed relatively little interest in integrating new concepts and debates
developed by feminist scholars at Western academic institutions. These
scholars continued to highlight in their studies issues of women’s rights
and nationalism in the context of societies shaped by Islamic normative
traditions.
In the different regions of the Middle East, two broad currents of Western-
inspired feminist projects informed empirical research and theorising on
gender and gender relations. On one side were scholars who, informed by
a liberal, “revisionist” agenda, were concerned with removing what they
considered to be obstacles to gender equality. Their work thus focused
on the question of how to improve the situation of women, through legal
change and through improved access to education and employment, and by
fostering reforms to overcome sexual prejudices and institutionalised forms
of sex discrimination. The “revisionist” agenda of feminist scholarship in the
Middle East was characteristic of the modernisation paradigm-informed
studies of the 1960s and 1970s, and the later studies that geared towards
“women and development”-related issues, also focused on the question of
how to close the gender gap in education, legal status, and in the access
to material resources. The agenda is still evident in macro-sociological
research on gender relations conducted since the 1990s (e.g. Moghadam
2003).
Scholars whose work can be subsumed under the second main current
of feminist scholarship in the Middle East were inspired by a Marxian
agenda. Whether working within the framework of world systems theory,
dependency theory, or other neo-Marxist approaches to issues of develop-
ment and underdevelopment, these authors’ distinctive contribution
was to foreground a Marxist analytical terminology and perspective.
120 Dorothea E. Schulz

Due to this scholarship, concepts of production, reproduction, class,

and patriarchy became important elements of a mainstream analytical
framework. 4
Scholarly analyses affected by European multiculturalist debates and by
different post-structuralist approaches also made their inroads into gender-
related research on and in the Middle East. Also strongly represented was
post-Orientalist scholarship that, drawing on Said’s and Foucault’s work,
provided trenchant, mostly textual analysis-based critiques of exoticising
representations of “the Oriental woman.” Although this work marked an
important step in probing the epistemological foundations of classical
Orientalist scholarship, this post-Orientalist work attributed exclusive dis-
cursive agency to “the West.” It also reproduced some of its key dichotomies,
such as the distinction between Orient and Occident, between Western
Self vs Native Other, and between Islam and Christianity, thereby blurring
the messy social and cultural realities, and substantial (ethnic, religious)
heterogeneity of Middle Eastern societies.5

3.4 Gender Politics-Related Research: New Directions

Since the mid-1980s, gender-related scholarship on the Middle East has

been characterised by four important trends. Firstly, a vast array of studies
addressed the different institutional realms through which gender differ-
ences are reproduced. They demonstrated different institutions, such as
educational institutions, law, market, state, and the military as key sites for
the making and remaking of gender as structure of social difference. This
work reveals that social institutions in Middle Eastern societies should not

4 Other strands of gender-related theorising formulated at Western academic institutions,

such as those informed by psychoanalysis, did not f ind much resonance in gender-related
research on and in the Middle East. Some scholars located at Middle Eastern institutions
categorically denied the applicability of Western feminist theory to Middle Eastern societies,
denouncing it as a culturally alien project at variance with what they identified as the core values
and principles of social organisation in Middle Eastern societies, such as a stronger collective
orientation. This argument bears strong resonances with critiques of the global applicability of
Western feminist thought that have been formulated by representatives of other world regions,
such as by African feminist scholars. Yet, as Kandiyoti points out, this critique is based on a
distorted representation and conflation of the different strands of feminist theory produced at
Western academic institutions (Kandiyoti 1996, 15).
5 The problematic implications of these dichotomous depictions are illustrated by recent
Islamist writings that draw on this post-Orientalist work and contrast the imperial project of
post-Enlightenment thought to an Islamic universalism based on principles of an immutable
divine order (Kandiyoti 1996, 16).
Schol arship on Gender Politics in the Muslim World 121

be seen as products of one coherent patriarchal logic; rather, they constitute

sites of power relations and processes through which gender relations are
constituted and challenged, and that result in complex, partly contradictory
cultural constructions of gender. These studies also illustrated the need
to further explore how key institutions for the production of gender and
gender difference, such as the family and different household types change
over time, as they are increasingly integrated into transnational fields of
influence and change.
A second development in gender-related research on Middle Eastern
societies has been effected by studies on the micro-politics of gender rela-
tions that moved away from the conventional patriarchy paradigm that
frames gender relations in terms of male domination and female subordina-
tion. Notable examples of this approach are Kandiyoti’s reflections on the
validity and limitations of the notion of “patriarchal bargain” (1988) and
Abu-Lughod’s (1990) reflections on the concept of “resistance” as a way to
analyse the specific workings of social power.
A third body of scholarship has addressed the historical specificity of
gender relations by relating them to the history of colonial and postcolonial
state-building projects (e.g. Kandiyoti 1991b). Authors working in this frame-
work explored the changing position of women against the backdrop of the
different political projects of nation-states and their respective historical
trajectories, colonial experiences, nationalist struggles, class politics, and
ideological uses of an Islamic idiom (Kandiyoti 1991a; Moghadam 1994a,
b). Particularly insightful have been studies that related state-orchestrated
family law reforms (and the reform of “women’s rights”) to the efforts by
the state, or by elites closely associated with the state-building project, to
break up the autonomy of local kin groups for the purpose of labour force
mobilisation or other political projects.
Another line of research was pursued by political economy-oriented
studies of the changing position of women in Middle Eastern societies.
These studies did not signal a new strand of research on gender rela-
tions and gender politics in the Middle East, but rather a refinement of
earlier approaches. Yet very often, the legacies of modernisation theory
and of “revisionist” liberal approaches are still notable in these studies,
especially in those that relate the improvement of women’s situation to
their stronger integration into the educational sector and wage labour
market (e.g. Moghadam’s 2003). Regardless of whether one subscribes
to the understanding of female empowerment and status enhancement
that these studies promote, they should prompt scholars to critically
reflect on whether women’s access to and integration into state education
122 Dorothea E. Schulz

may initiate “new coercive norms” and subject women to “new forms of
control and discipline” (Abu-Lughod 1998, 25), even if they simultaneously
undermine other forms of patriarchy.
Another important development in gender-related scholarship on
Middle Eastern societies has been signalled by the growing body of
literature on Islamic revivalist trends and on women’s participation in
these movements.
Nilüfer Göle detected parallels between women’s active and self-
assertive participation in Islamist movements and the similarly central
role attributed to women in the state-orchestrated modernisation projects
in Iran, Egypt, and Turkey in the early twentieth century. She addressed
the highly visible public prominence of a feminised symbolics of Islamic
piety as a matter of articulating “alternative modernities” and as a form of
identity politics (e.g. Göle 1996, 2002; see also Navaro-Yashin 2002). Saba
Mahmood, in contrast, highlighted the analytical and challenges posed by
these movements and their – if judged from a Western feminist perspec-
tive – conservative gender ideologies as a way to reflect on the normative
presuppositions and limitations of Western liberal political thought and
on the contradictions (dilemmas) deriving from the “dual character of
feminism both as an analytical and a political project” (Mahmood 2001,
201). According to this line of reasoning, scholars need to address these
movements from within particular Islamic traditions (e.g. Mahmood
2005; see Deeb 2006) and to foreground women’s subjective experiences
and personal motivations to support these movements. Both perspectives
offered significant advantages over earlier studies on political Islam and
on women in nationalist projects or other forms of community making,
studies that, if they addressed women’s implications in these movements
at all, had tended to offer little insight into the personal motivations and
understandings articulated by individual actors and participants. Still,
both approaches to Islamic revival, by portraying women’s participation in
Islamist movements either by focusing on the context of identity politics,
or by studying how individual projects of ethical self-making, relate to
specific appropriations of particular religious traditions, created a certain
socio-economic (and political) “limbo.” That is, they often did not clarify
how subjective concerns and attempts of ethical reform related to these
actors’ everyday struggles and negotiations, and their differential positions
in a socio-economic field on one side; and to the dynamics taking place
in the surrounding religious and political fields, where competing groups
of Muslims (and their different visions of “proper Muslimhood”) confront,
engage and interact with state institutions and representatives, on the
Schol arship on Gender Politics in the Muslim World 123

other. The challenge is therefore to think both perspectives together, that

is, to account for both the subjective meanings of Islamic moral renewal for
individual female activists and the broader political and social ramifica-
tions of their activism (Schulz 2011). Other scholars continue to dismiss
Islamist movements as patriarchal and repressive for women; they are
thus unable to account for the leading roles women often assume in these
movements.
Taken together, these different scholarly perspectives on female Mus-
lim reform activism have reignited but also reframed earlier controversies
about the normative presuppositions of Western feminist thought, and
about whether these religious revivalist endeavours can be understood as
“political” projects if they do not endorse the liberating and emancipatory
goals formulated by liberal Western feminist thought. This controversy
has reiterated the divide between, on one side, those who seek to for-
mulate a joint feminist project of improving women’s status and living
conditions; and, on the other side, those who emphasise that the plurality
of women’s viewpoints and positionalities undercuts a joint feminist,
political project.
These issues and positions became evident in responses to Mahmood’s
critique of Western liberal understandings of agency and religion, and of
the preoccupation with resistance and subordination in social science
scholarship on women and gender.6 Mahmood’s critique has in turn gener-
ated debate about the implicit model of mind and self on which her own
understanding of agency is based. Still, Mahmood’s intervention marked
an important step towards recognising the variety and complexity of no-
tions of agency, and the normative liberal understandings of agency that
animate many feminist projects. Yet, whereas the debate over the normative
presuppositions of notions of “agency” prompted by Mahmood’s critique was
waged with particular force in academic institutions in Europe and North
America, Mahmood’s critique of Western liberal thought and secularism
seems to have gained less salience among scholars who engage in gender-
related political struggles from their locations at academic institutions in
the MENA region.
Ultimately, the debate triggered by Mahmood put into relief conflict-
ing and by times incompatible conceptions of “politics.” Mahmood and
like-minded scholars draw on a Foucauldian notion of subjectivation and

6 Mahmood critiqued the normative liberal assumptions about freedom and agency, yet also
stressed that Judith Butler’s (1990) Foucauldian view of agency as the capacity to subvert norms
revealed a culturally and historically specific understanding of “agency.”
124 Dorothea E. Schulz

conceive of the “politics of piety” as a project of personal self-making – one

that is less interested in studying either micro-politics or macro-politics,
but the individual subject as the product of power and self-disciplinary
practices. Other authors (exemplified by Kandiyoti), while not necessar-
ily drawing on the notion of agency, study gender relations and power
inequalities by combining a consideration of political economic processes
with an attention to the socially (culturally) and historically specif ic
parameters set by state institutions and policies. These authors were
less interested in subject formation as an instantiation of the productive
effects of power and discourse, but explored “power” dynamics between
men and women at the interpersonal level or the macro-sociological and
institutional level.
Several insights emerge from this sketch of the different trajectories of
integration of gender-related and feminist scholarly research into studies on
Middle Eastern societies. The first is the partial and selective way in which
gender theory and analytical frameworks produced at Western academic
institutions have been integrated into gender-related studies on the Middle
East. This process of uneven integration reflects the agendas of specific
groups of scholars and the particular concerns and preoccupations of local
audiences whom they addressed with their scholarship.
Secondly, the selective integration and adaption of feminist analysis
in/to scholarship on the Middle East helps us move beyond the debate
on the cultural and epistemological foundations of feminist theory and
on its validity for non-Western societies. We can conceive feminism as a
project that originated in specific, Western ideas about politics, law, rights,
personhood, and community that are – to quote Abu-Lughod – “part of a
modernity that is both related to Europe and developed in particular ways
in the Middle East” (1998, 22). To explore feminist scholarship on and in
the Middle East from this perspective implies that we critically examine
the different political and scholarly projects that centre on women’s is-
sues and on gender-related reforms, by recognising their intricate ties to
colonial projects of civilising or modernising societies and to postcolonial
state-building projects.
Thirdly, even if feminism always relates to historically and socially spe-
cific contexts, we should be careful not to celebrate any political struggle
around women as an instance of a “local feminism.” Rather, and this is my
fourth point, what is needed are micro-sociological analyses and explana-
tory frameworks that provide the basis for methodological and conceptual
critique and refinement, within but also beyond scholarship on Middle
Eastern societies.
Schol arship on Gender Politics in the Muslim World 125

4 Gender Politics in Muslim Societies: Towards a Trans-

Regional Perspective

What are the challenges of social science research on gender politics, in the
Middle East and with regard to other Muslim societies? Rather than offer
a comprehensive answer, let me outline a few points that invite further
critical reflection.
Firstly, studies on gender as a structure of social difference in Muslim
societies are still concentrated on the Middle East; and within the Middle
East, there has been a strong concentration of scholarly studies on certain
countries, such as Egypt, leading to an internal “skewing” of ethnographic
accounts of “typical” features of social life that draw strongly on specific
societies and regions (Bodman 1998, 2-4).
Secondly, the fact that a range of societies fall into the rubric of “Muslim
societies,” raises questions as to the presumed unity and coherence of the
“Muslim world” that expressions such as “gender relations in the Muslim
world” presuppose. Scholars should pay sustained attention to the different
processes, institutions, and traditions that shape the ways in which gender
operates as a structure of difference in various Muslim societies; these
factors include, but are not limited to, Islam as a religious tradition. We may
even question whether or when it makes sense to frame our exploration as
one that focuses on “gender (politics) in Muslim societies.” Although being
a Muslim certainly confers some sense of unity on the women (and men)
whose lifeworlds we explore, the unity does not hold in view of the highly
divergent material, social conditions and histories that shape Muslims’ daily
experiences and struggles. Conducting gender-related research in Muslim
societies therefore calls for a closer attention to Muslims’ diverse social and
economic life circumstances, across and within societies.
I suggest that such an exploration could benefit enormously from a
heightened dialogue between scholars who work on different regions of the
Muslim world. Their trans-regional exchange would bridge the boundaries
currently drawn and reproduced by area studies-oriented research conven-
tions and institutions. I shall substantiate this point with regard to scholarly
research on gender and Islam in Africa. Addressing my earlier questions
from the vantage point of the “margins” (see Das and Poole 2004) prom-
ises new insights into how the study of gender may refine our conceptual
framework for an exploration of Muslim societies, politics, and gender
politics in particular. I understand Africa’s “marginality” in scholarship
on Islam in an at once geographical and theoretical sense. Geographical,
because of the persistent tendency to treat Muslim social and religious
126 Dorothea E. Schulz

life in Africa as “peripheral” within the Muslim world; and theoretically

marginal because Islam in Africa has occupied a fairly marginal position
within anthropological and sociological scholarship on Islam.

4.1 Gender and Gender Relations in Muslim Societies in Africa

Paradigms that dominated social science research on gender have informed

scholarship on Muslim societies in Africa in ways that contrast with those
adopted by scholars working on and in the Middle East.
Anthropological and sociological studies of Muslim societies in Sub-
Saharan Africa had to engage a legacy of colonial thought that, in spite of
certain commonalities, differed substantially from the text- and language-
oriented, Orientalist paradigm from which social scientists working on
the Middle East struggled to disengage. Whereas, in the words of political
scientist Chaudry (1994, quoted in Guyer 2004, 516-517), “Middle East
studies charted a Spartan path from the Orientalism of the 1960s to the
postmodernism of the 1990s,” with the result that political economy ap-
proaches were “deconstructed before taking shape,” African studies were
to rid themselves from a different legacy: from the colonial category of race
and related categories.
The principal way of countering the image of Africa as the “dark con-
tinent,” as a place without history and civilisation, and the alter ego of
Western modernity, was to bring in “history” – and to rewrite “history”
as global history. Starting in the 1980s, Africanist scholarship sought to
show the deep relationality of Africa, both as a “discursive construct” and
a complex material reality, by demonstrating the implication of African
economies and societies in the making of Western modernity.
At the same time, Africanist anthropology played an important role for
scholarly understandings of intra-family dynamics through the study of kin-
ship, and political and social organisation was important for cross-cultural
and comparative theorising in economic, legal, and political anthropology.
Because of this comparatively well-established “tradition” of political
economic analysis, it was easier to integrate an analytics of the changing
political and moral economy of gender relations into Africanist scholar-
ship, when, in the course of the 1980s, “gender” was established as a viable
subject of social science investigation. This trend was supported by studies
that placed the analysis of religious practice in the context of the colonial
“encounter.” Many of these studies favoured practice- and actor-oriented
approaches to the study of religion and of gender relations, with all the
room this perspective created for the contingency of practices, norms,
Schol arship on Gender Politics in the Muslim World 127

concepts, and power relations. There thus existed a new potential to study
the politics of gender relations through an analytical framework that
departed from a focus on “veiling” and other practices that supposedly
illustrate the subordination of women in Muslim societies. Yet, notably, the
anthropological study of Islam and of Muslim societies in Africa does not
have a strong tradition in Africanist scholarship. While numerous studies
were conducted in Muslim societies, these were only sometimes framed
as studies on a Muslim society. Scholarly studies also revealed a certain
penchant for paradigms and concepts such as patriarchy, men’s dominance,
and women’s resistance that dominated Middle Eastern scholarship at that
time (e.g. Callaway and Creevey 1994).
Studies with an explicit focus on Islam paid primary, if not exclusive,
attention to the leaders of “brotherhoods” and Muslim movements, and their
texts and doctrinal disputes. If women were mentioned at all, they were
mostly women who played a role in the social and religious practices associ-
ated with the mystical traditions of Islam. Variations in the organisation of
gender and gender relations, within one country or across socio-economic
divides, did not receive sustained scholarly attention.
Scholars working on gender in African Muslim societies face yet another
dilemma, especially when they study domains of social and ritual life in
which women play a dominant role: they run the risk of contributing to a
tendency to classify – and dismiss – women’s religious practices as repre-
sentative of a “popular,” syncretistic, unorthodox Islam.
Although anthropological studies on similar domains of female religios-
ity in the Middle East face the same danger, I would argue that, in the
case of scholarship on African Islam, there is a double marginalisation at
work: women are not only represented as marginal because they engage in
“marginal” practice. They are also marginal in the sense of being Muslims
who are Africans and live in Africa. I will return to this point below, when
I reflect on the marginal position of Africanist scholarship within the
broader anthropological literature on Muslim societies. This is illustrated
by Africanist scholarship on spirit possession in Muslim societies which has
made a substantial contribution to theorising spirit possession in relation
to its gender-specific dimensions and its articulations with processes and
institutions of global modernity. At the same time, the scholarship has
tended to reinforce a common view, articulated in the popular press, yet
also shared by many scholars, of African Islam as not fully belonging to the
realm of “Islam proper.”
At stake, here, is an othering of “African Islam” performed through
the double othering of Muslim women: they are considered “others” first,
128 Dorothea E. Schulz

because their practices – allegedly – diverge from the (purportedly)

orthodox (and male) standards of proper Muslim religious practice; and
second, because they practice an African Islam that, by definition, is hybrid
and syncretistic.7 The tendency to consider African Muslim women as the
“other” of “Islam proper” is further compounded by the lopsided way in
which social science scholarly research and debate on Muslim societies is
conducted. While the – comparatively few – scholars working on gender
in Muslim societies in Sub-Saharan Africa need to draw strongly on the
ethnographic and theoretical literature on the Middle East and, though
to varying extents, on other areas of the Muslim world, the reverse is less
often the case. The perception still seems to be strong and alive that Muslim
practices and debates in Sub-Saharan Africa are not quite so relevant or
representative of developments in and beyond the Muslim world; and that
the “core” discursive traditions of Islam are located somewhere else, for
instance, in the Middle East, Turkey, or Iran.
Among the consequences of these multiply layered, colonial and postco-
lonial, legacies for the study of gender in African Muslim societies, I want to
single out three. The first result is the relatively limited number of nuanced
studies of Muslim societies in Africa that address issues of “gender” beyond
the all-too-popular focus on Muslim women who “resist” the “dominant”
patriarchal order, or, for that matter, who “liberate” themselves from the
yoke of “conservative” gender ideologies articulated by Islamic revivalist
groups.
Second, important insights from recent theoretical debates on gender and
feminism have not been integrated sufficiently into mainstream Africanist
scholarship on Islam. As a consequence, contributions that claim to address
gender most often content themselves with what one could call the “cake
mix version” of gender studies: add women to conventional analyses of Islam
and stir. Typical of the “cake mix” approach is that it treats gender as being
reducible to “women,” and therefore fails to engage gender analytically as
a mode of generating and reflecting social inequality.
Third, and closely related to the “cake mix” approach to the study of gen-
der, notions of “the political” remain under-theorised in existing Africanist
scholarship on Islam. Most studies of “politics” in Muslim societies content
themselves with demonstrating that “Islam” does not necessarily chal-
lenge the secular order, but engages it in historically and regionally diverse

7 This view of African Islam, and of Muslim women as the epitomy of its marginal, non-
representative nature, reiterates the colonial paradigm of framing “African Islam” as the opposite
of “true” (if radical) “Arab Islam” (e.g. Harrison 1988; Brenner 2001).
Schol arship on Gender Politics in the Muslim World 129

ways (e.g. Soares and Otayek 2007). This scholarship would benefit from
an analytical framework that links a macro-sociological study of politics
to accounts of the micro-politics of gender and changing intergenerational
relations (e.g. Schulz 2011).

5 Outlook

How can we move beyond these trends of conceptual and geographical

compartimentalisation in scholarship on gender in Muslim societies? What
could be gained from a closer dialogue across conventional area studies
boundaries? And could a sustained, cross-regional dialogue look like one
that could benefit scholarship on societies in the Middle East, Sub-Saharan
Africa, or in another core region of the Muslim world?
As a preliminary response, I highlight two lines of inquiry that pro-
ductively complicate conventional research preoccupations, agendas, and
concepts that have shaped gender-related research on Muslim societies.
Studies that take “gender” as one point of entry to address power relations in
Muslim societies would benefit considerably if they integrated more consist-
ently accounts of changing notions, norms, and social practices of masculinity.
Drawing on insights from the “new men’s studies,” we should pay attention to
the existence of heterogeneous, coexisting and changing “masculinities” – and
study them in their interlocking with shifting notions and politics of feminin-
ity. Closer investigation of the field of coexistent, dominant, submerged, and
subaltern ideals of masculinity and femininity allows us to understand them
in their mutually constitutive, malleable, and dynamic relationship – and to
avoid any form of “add and stir” version of “gender” that, ultimately, results in
an impoverished form of “women’s” or “men’s” studies.
Another way of “refining” gender as a conceptual framework for the
study of interpersonal politics is to pay attention to the ways “gender” is
complicated by “generation.” Attention to differences in age and status may
substantially enlarge our understandings of how competing masculinities
and femininities rest on, and, in turn, define power differentials within the
family and the society at large. Here, new insights gained by recent scholar-
ship on youth in Muslim societies (e.g. Herrera and Bayat 2010) could be
significantly expanded if similar attention was paid to cultures of aging and
death – and to the ambivalences and commonalities emerging from women’s
and men’s advanced age status. So far, very little empirically grounded re-
search has been done on these issues and on the changing relations between
generations; although they have gained in salience in the contemporary era
130 Dorothea E. Schulz

of increased violent confrontations, rising HIV infection rates, and various

forms of socio-ecological disasters that affect Muslims worldwide.
The second perspective I propose concerns the ways scholars study and
conceive of the points of articulation between changing interpersonal
relations and broader societal transformations. This focus would enhance
scholarly understanding of the powerful religious movements and idioms
that presently inhabit the field of politics and social life throughout the
Muslim world (e.g. Masquelier 2009; McIntosh 2009). Zoning in on the
points of articulation between the micro-politics of gender and generation
and broader social and political processes would allow scholars to move
beyond a focus on personal understandings and ethical projects, and on
interpersonal dynamics, while simultaneously avoiding interpretations
that reduce personal motivation to a function of a politics of recognition.
Here again, “gender” needs to be used in an analytical way to show
how religious renewal and attendant politics of recognition play out at
the macro-political level, and feed back into interpersonal relations. This
perspective thus sheds light, firstly, on the complex intertwining of revival-
ist actors and idioms with state politics and institutions, and, secondly, on
the changing moral economies of gender relations on which these idioms
of Islamic reform or renewal reflect.
One area in which this combined perspective has already been produc-
tively engaged is the domain of law and gender. Recent scholarship in this
domain shows that the dynamics and struggles around family draft laws
can only be understood by addressing the interface between interpersonal
and broader political and social processes and struggles (e.g. Molyneux
1991; Moors 1996, 2003; Buskens 2003; Schulz 2003; also see Hirsch 1998).
These analyses call out for more cross-regional dialogue and reception
of scholarship to live up to the demands imposed by a world of intense
transnational connections and interrelatedness and of an increasingly
global regime of human rights advocacy and activism.

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 Power, Orthodoxy, and Salvation in
Classical Islamic Theology 1
Christian Lange

1 The Study of Classical Islamic Theology at the Dawn of the

Twenty-first Century

To attempt, as I do in the pages that follow, a sketch of the state-of-the-art in

the academic study of classical Islamic theology at the dawn of the twenty-
first century is a daunting task. Although in Western contexts, it remains
the conclave of a rather small number of researchers, the field has grown to
remarkable proportions. Specialists are armed to the teeth with technical
and historical particulars. Therefore any survey, including the present one,
must by definition be selective and incomplete. However, I believe that if
scholars of Islam want to overcome what has recently been characterised as
their “ghettoized” position within the broader field of the study of religion
(Elias 2010a, 2), they ought to welcome meta-critical reflections on the
genealogy and current configuration of the discipline within which they
operate. It is in this spirit that I offer the following thoughts, building upon
my own recent readings in scholarship on classical Islamic theology.
At the beginning, a brief reflection on the terms of the debate. In the
area of Islamic theology, the use of the term “classical” tends to delegitimise
theological activity in what Marshal Hodgson called “the Later Middle
Period” of Islamic history (1258 to ca. 1500), as well as theological develop-
ments that occurred during the time of the so-called “gunpowder empires”
of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. Before these centuries of intense
theological activity are better understood and thus a bridge has been built
between the early centuries and modern times, synthetic definitions of
what counts as “classical” (i.e. definitive) theology in Islam ought best be
avoided. One should note, however, that scholars of Islamic theology are
beginning to fill the gaps in our knowledge about the intellectual history
of these later centuries.

1 The author wishes to acknowledge the support of the European Research Council (Project
no. 263308: “The Here and the Hereafter in Islamic Traditions”) during the research for and
writing of this chapter.
136  Christian L ange

The very notion of “Islamic theology” is fraught with difficulties, and we

may legitimately ask whether the signifier “theology” as we commonly apply
it to the Islamic tradition adequately captures its signified. The first axe
that one has to grind in this regard is that scholarship on Islamic theology
has traditionally focused on, and continues to emphasise, the study of the
internal dynamics and development of Islamic theological doctrines. In fact,
it may be averred that much of this scholarship is marked by an affinity to
the “history of ideas” approach connected with the name of the American
philosopher Arthur Lovejoy. Lovejoy, who is commonly seen as the founder
of this school of thought, proposed to study “unit-ideas” – these correspond,
roughly, to overarching “concepts,” or “themes” of human thought – that
is, how they develop over time and enter into changing relationships with
other “unit-ideas” (Lovejoy 1965 [1936], 3-23).
His detractors argue that Lovejoy treats these “unit-ideas” as if they oper-
ate outside of the minds of the people who debate them, as if they exist in
a parallel, eternal and unadulterated universe. In Lovejoy’s perspective,
as Quentin Skinner puts it, “ideas get up to do battle on their own behalf”
(Skinner 2002, 62). However, as Skinner emphasises, “we’re not dealing with
‘perennial’ debates but with particularistic, ideological speech-acts” (83-84).
The “history of ideas” approach, in other words, downplays the importance
of context, it fails to grasp what ideas mean for actual people in real-life
situations. “The only history of ideas to be written,” writes Skinner, “are
histories of their uses in argument” (86).
The Hegelian-Marxian controversy that underlies the debate between
Lovejoy and Skinner continues to pose a challenge for students of classical
Islamic theology until today. Recent decades have witnessed vigorous efforts
to reconceptualise the academic study of religion by critically examining its
alleged “Protestant bias,” that is, by freeing it from its nostalgic insistence on
the primacy of mind over body, ideal essences over actual things, text over
context, and individual inwards religiosity over communal outwards forms
of the religious life (McCutcheon 1997; Molendijk and Pels 1998; Hart 1999).
Robert Orsi has claimed that the lingering scholarly commitment to such
“Protestant” ideas about what constitutes “true” or “good” religion results in
a situation where “all the complex dynamism of religion is stripped away, its
boundary-blurring and border-crossing propensities eliminated” (Orsi 1998,
209-210). If students and scholars of Islam want to remain in conversation
with colleagues studying other religious traditions, they are well advised
to take the call for a less text-immanent and more deeply contextualised
reading of the classical sources seriously. This is not to deny the importance
of textual studies, but rather to stress the need for analysis that proceeds
Power, Orthodox y, and Salvation in Cl assical Isl amic Theology 137

in a text-cum-context mode, and that, in addition, is willing to question

assumptions about what kind of texts deserve to be studied.
It would be unfair, however, to accuse the Western study of Islamic
theology as a whole of detached idealism. Calls for more contextualised
approaches have been both plentiful and vigorous. Mohamed Arkoun, for
example, has repeatedly pointed out that there is no pure unadulterated
intellectual history in Islam. Rather, as Arkoun maintains, writers are
always the product of their age (Arkoun 1970, 59). The divine is always
communicated through the lens of a specific spatial-temporal environment:
“There is no way to find the absolute outside the social, political condition of
human beings and the medium of language” (Arkoun 1988, 81). As far as the
study of classical Islamic theology is concerned, however, there may still be
some lessons to be learned from colleagues who write about contemporary
Islamic theology, and who often do so with a keen eye for the political and
social embeddedness of theological expressions.
The lack of contextualisation is not the only thing that strikes one as
problematic with regard to what continues to be the dominant paradigm
in the study of Islamic theology. The field on the whole privileges a par-
ticular conception of which ideas are worthy of study, namely, those ideas
that fall under the rubric of kalām. However, in order for us to develop
an understanding of the full gamut of theological expressions in Islam, I
believe we must not only give attention to systematic and formalist reason-
ing about God and His relation to creation, the traditional province of
kalām, but include areas such as religious mythology, apocalypticism, and
eschatological thought, in short, the religious imagination in Islam. The
Islamic tradition is often seen as impoverished when it comes to mythology
or the religious imagination. However, it is difficult to decide whether this
assessment has resulted from the partial blindness of Western observers
or from any actual lack of such fields of religious expression in Islamic
traditions. Islamic theology, in my view, is far richer than the traditional
focus on kalām allows us to see.
How broadly, then, should we conceive the term “Islamic theology”?
When one hears Islam debated in public one sometimes gets the impression
that Islamic theology is simply everything in Islam that has to do with God,
including, notably, the area of shariʿa law. Never mind that scholars continue
to dispute whether shariʿa is better understood as a “divine law” or a “jurists’
law” resulting from the human endeavour, known as fiqh, to interpret and
develop a limited set of basic legal norms. Fear of Muslim “theocracies,” as
it turns out, is really a fear of “fiqhocracy,” a fear that drowns out the crucial
distinction between divine perfection and human fallibility in interpreting
138  Christian L ange

the divine. The broad meaning of “Islamic theology” that underlies such
perceptions is arguably far too vague to be of much use.
A more promising way of approaching a definition is to look at the
terminology used by classical Muslim thinkers themselves. Immediately,
this serves to demonstrate some of the limitations of the kalām-centred ap-
proach. The literal meaning of ʿilm al-kalām is not “theology” but “knowledge
of rational-dialectic speech.” Kalām might be described as speculative,
argumentative discourse about God and His relationship to the universe
from the moment of its creation to the end of time. Influenced as it was by
Hellenistic thought, in particular logic, kalām suffered a number of debilitat-
ing blows during its history. The first was dealt by the rise of Ashʿarism
in the tenth century, the school of thought that came to dominate kalām
but which in fact did much to circumscribe and limit its scope; the second
by Sunni-Jamaʿi traditionalism, which rejected kalām altogether, instead
emphasising the need to rely on revealed rather than speculative knowledge.
In consequence, kalām never came to occupy as central a position in Islamic
higher learning as the theological disciplines did in the university curricula
of premodern Europe. In Islam, this spot in the limelight was awarded to the
legal sciences. Kalām, by comparison, remained a marginal discipline. This is
also reflected by how it has been studied in the West. For much of its history,
the Western study of classical Islamic theology, in the sense of kalām, was
the province of lone giants cutting paths through a jungle thicket.
ʿIlm al-kalām, however, is not the only area of Islamic religious thought
that deserves to be measured against the term “theology.” Al-Ghazali’s
Ihyaʾ ʿUlum al-Din (The revivification of the sciences of religiosity) heralds
a shift in, and broadening of, how Muslim thinking about God and His
relation to the universe was conceived in classical times. The word dīn,
for al-Ghazali, indicates the inwards dimension of faith (Rahman 1979,
106) – “religiosity,” as we might say nowadays. This understanding of dīn
predates al-Ghazali: for the Muʿtazili mutakallim ʿAbd al-Jabbar (d. 1025), dīn
did not have to do with works, but with “the subjective religious behaviour
… with which man accepts works and the need to perform them” (Van Ess
2011a, 1267). However, al-Ghazali may be credited for foregrounding dīn as
the key concept in religious knowledge. The “sciences of religiosity” (ʿulūm
al-dīn), for al-Ghazali, include more than the knowledge about God sub
specie aeternitatis. While the forty volumes of the “Revivification of the
Sciences of Religiosity” do feature kalām-style discussions in several places,
their scope is much broader, covering aspects of religious practice, politi-
cal and social ideals, personal piety, and spirituality. Also mythology and
eschatology play important roles. The fortieth and last volume is devoted
Power, Orthodox y, and Salvation in Cl assical Isl amic Theology 139

entirely to the afterlife and is filled with a plethora of traditions that engage
the religious imagination. It seems to me that this broader understanding
of “Islamic theology” as the “sciences of religiosity,” rather than the narrow
identification with kalām, should guide scholars in defining the contours of
the field they study, particularly if they want to do justice to the centuries
that intervened between al-Ghazali and the advent of “modern” Islamic
theology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In the following, I shall try to outline how, in my view, scholars of clas-
sical Islamic theology writing in recent decades have probed and, in some
instances, expanded the contours of their field. I do this with the aim of
bringing to light some of the issues that drive the study of Islamic classical
theology in particular, but also Islamic studies more generally speaking.
I shall not proceed along epistemological (rationalism-traditionalism),
historical (formative-classical-modern), or school lines (Sunni-Shiʿi-Ibadi or
Muʿtazili-Ashʿari-Maturidi-Imami, etc.), as survey works of Islamic theology
usually do. Instead, I zoom in on three themes: power, community, and
salvation. In choosing these themes, I take my clue from the recent rise of a
literature devoted to meta-critical reflection about the analytical categories
that scholars in cultural studies invoke in their work, a phenomenon that
appears to have spilled over from literary studies and anthropology to the
study of religion, and most recently, to Islamic studies (Lentricchia and
McLaughlin 1990; Taylor 1998; Elias 2010b).
The three themes chosen here also offer the advantage of a natural
progression through three concentric circles, circles that stake out a fairly
comprehensive bird eye’s view of the field (see figure 1). In the context of

Figure 1 Thematic approach to Islamic theology

the power/
Muslim disempow-
individual erment
the
Muslim orthodoxy/
community heterodoxy
the
Muslim salvation/
“Other” damnation
140  Christian L ange

the notion of power I will discuss how scholars have evaluated the degree to
which Islamic theology preserves individual agency as against the power of
God and of the state, thereby defending the notion of free and independent
thought and action. In the context of the notion of community I will focus
on how scholars have reflected on the formation of the Muslim umma,
in particular in regard to the question of orthodoxy and heterodoxy in
Islamic theology. Finally, in the context of the notion of salvation, I shall
discuss how scholars have viewed Islamic theology’s attitude towards the
non-Muslim “Other” of Islam.

2 God’s Power and Individual Empowerment

In order to evaluate the margin of individual freedom and power offered

by Muslim theology, one must examine how it pictures the individual in
relation to both God and to (divinely sanctioned) government (see figure 2).
Here I propose to look at this triangle of powers through the lens of
al-Ghazali, the famous Iraqi jurist-cum-theologian-cum-mystic who died in
1111. The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen a veritable flurry
of studies devoted to al-Ghazali, even if scholarship on al-Ghazali was
copious in the 1990s and indeed before. Al-Ghazali is as good a yardstick
as any to measure the current “state of the art” in the field of classical
Islamic theology. The year 2011 marked the 900th anniversary of al-Ghazali’s
death, and his unabated popularity found expression in numerous scholarly
meetings devoted to his legacy.

Figure 2 Triangle of powers

individual

government God
Power, Orthodox y, and Salvation in Cl assical Isl amic Theology 141

As early as the nineteenth century, Western Orientalists identified al-

Ghazali as the linchpin on which hinged a whole spectrum of promises and
threats inherent in Islamic thought, whether real or imagined. On the one
hand, al-Ghazali was, and continues to be, a tremendously popular figure,
a source of enduring fascination. His biography is dramatically cut in half
by an existential epistemological crisis, much in the vein of Augustine and
Descartes, suffered at the height of a brilliant academic career as a professor
in Baghdad, the old capital of Islam. This crisis captured the imagination
of generations of Western students of Islam. Although not the first one
to do so in the history of Islam (cf. Massignon 1954 [1922], 246), the fact
that al-Ghazali wrote an autobiography, al-Munqidh min al-Dalal (The
rescuer from error), seemed to many to offer a unique opportunity to grasp
classical Islam through the lens of an outstanding individual, an iconoclast
and virtuoso in all the major branches of Islamic knowledge, a synthetic
thinker who created a new orthodoxy: tout court, as in the title of William
Montgomery Watt’s still definitive study, Muslim Intellectual (1963).
On the other hand, scholars thought for a long time that al-Ghazali
had severely undermined philosophical inquiry in Islam by writing an
influential refutation of the Persian philosopher Avicenna (d. 1037), the
Tahafut al-Falasifa (The incoherence of the philosophers), in which he
declared the philosophers heretics for their three views that (1) the world
is eternal, not created by God in time; (2) there is no physical resurrection
of bodies; and (3) God knows only universals and not particulars. With
the Tahafut, generations of students of Islam in the West were taught,
al-Ghazali single-handedly dealt a coup de grâce to the spirit of free inquiry
and the belief in natural laws in Islam. This view was not held by Western
Orientalists alone. The Pakistani scholar of Islam Fazlur Rahman, for
example, called al-Ghazali’s perceived denial of causality a “folly,” going so
far as to blame Islam’s problems with modernity on this doctrine (Rahman
1982, 27, 152).
These hackneyed perceptions of al-Ghazali as a maverick luminary and
as the angel of the death of philosophical inquiry in Islam are revisited in
a number of studies that have appeared over the last ten years or so. In the
1990s, Richard Franck argued that al-Ghazali did in fact accept natural
causes, that his cosmology was, in other words, philosophical or Avicennian,
rather than traditionally Islamic (Franck 1994). Michael Marmura, on the
other hand, has insisted on al-Ghazali’s conformity to Islamic “orthodoxy,”
that is, Ashʿarism, the dominant theological school in al-Ghazali’s time.
Ashʿarism’s tenets included occasionalism, the belief that the all-powerful
God creates every event and every human action in a process of creatio
142  Christian L ange

continua. Like the other Ashʿarites, al-Ghazali would have denied secondary
or natural causes (Marmura 1995, 2002).
In a study of al-Ghazali’s cosmology, published in 2009, Frank Griffel has
reopened this debate and proposed a new solution. Griffel’s view is that al-
Ghazali philosophised the Ashʿarite doctrine of causality while remaining
faithful to its basic premises. Earlier Ashʿarites held an ambiguous view
of the human capacity to act, a view that is epitomised by the theory of
“acquisition” or “appropriation” (kasb/iktisāb). According to this theory,
God creates human actions but gives humans a temporary “power-to-act”
(qudra muḥdatha) by virtue of which they “acquire” or “appropriate” an
action. Al-Ghazali, according to Griffel, does not simply follow this line
of reasoning, but moves God’s influence one level back. For al-Ghazali,
suggests Griffel, God is not a puppetmaster who “plays” the individual
who, in consequence, remains largely passive and predetermined in his
or her actions. Rather, God acts as the teacher of the puppetmaster, while
the puppetmaster himself is the individual’s accumulated knowledge and
desire (Griffel 2009, 216-219). This does not make it unthinkable that at a
certain moment, the puppetmaster’s teacher will take the strings of the
puppet into his own hands. However, as Griffel emphasises, in al-Ghazali’s
view God has never done so, and he never will (276). In this way, a world
in which secondary, natural causes are fully operational is safeguarded.
According to Griffel, al-Ghazali does not eliminate philosophical inquiry
from Islamic thought; to the contrary, he fully naturalises it.
It has been suggested that Griffel is somewhat “over-emphatic” in his
reading of al-Ghazali (Janos 2010, 120), and that there remains an unresolv-
able tension between belief in an all-powerful God and in human autonomy
in al-Ghazali’s cosmology. Overall, Griffel seems rather keen to stress that
al-Ghazali was a perfectly consistent thinker. In other words, according to
Griffel, al-Ghazali does not hover between philosophy and theology because
he does not want to commit himself. Rather, we simply must dig deep
enough to uncover the underlying unity of al-Ghazali’s thought. Griffel
suggests that failure to discover this unity is more likely to stem from a
failure to properly understand al-Ghazali’s writings rather than from an
inconsistency in his system (Griffel 2009, 286).
Other scholars of al-Ghazali have preferred to draw attention to the
different registers of al-Ghazali’s thought rather than to stress that the
various strands of reasoning that run through his work are ultimately
reconcilable in a harmonious whole. This is the approach taken by Martin
Whittingham’s 2007 study of al-Ghazali’s theory of scriptural interpreta-
tion. Whittingham examines al-Ghazali’s understanding of “allegorical”
Power, Orthodox y, and Salvation in Cl assical Isl amic Theology 143

or “non-literal” interpretation of scripture (taʾwīl). This is relevant in the

context of the discussion about individual empowerment in relation to
God, because non-literal interpretation widens the margin for individual
opinion about scriptural meaning.
Whittingham identifies at least three different positions, scattered over
his writings, that al-Ghazali takes in regard to the issue of taʾwīl. In Faysal
al-Tafriqa (The decisive criterion), a work surveying the confessional varie-
ties in Islam, al-Ghazali recommends tolerance vis-à-vis taʾwīl, but he also
erects clear boundaries: taʾwīl is only permitted if the impossibility of a
literal understanding is logically proven (Whittingham 2007, 27). However,
in al-Ghazali’s legal works, this tolerance is less obvious, and al-Ghazali’s
concern to seal off the law against the more interpretively inclined schools
of law takes precedence (36). Finally, in al-Ghazali’s esoteric works, taʾwīl
emerges as a parallel method of deriving meaning from scripture, a method
which stands on par with the literalist approach: texts have both exoteric
and esoteric meanings (64). Whittingham makes only a limited effort to
account for the difference of positions adopted by al-Ghazali; he maintains
that, despite all the differences, “a core of genuine views is identifiable” (25).
Averroes, one of al-Ghazali’s earliest critics, quipped that al-Ghazali
was “an Ashʿari with the Ashʿarites, a Sufi with the Sufis, and a philosopher
with the philosophers.” In light of the many testimonies to this effect,
Griffel’s outright denial of inconsistency in al-Ghazali’s work seems rather
surprising. Whittingham on the other hand acknowledges al-Ghazali’s
split-personality syndrome but largely refuses to pass judgement on it. This
is markedly different from the position taken by Ebrahim Moosa, who is
the author of what must count as the most imaginative interpretation of
al-Ghazali to have appeared since the turn of the millennium.
Moosa’s Ghazālī and the Poetics of Imagination (2005) proposes to investi-
gate the possible contribution that al-Ghazali can make to the contemporary
Muslim understanding of “subjectivity and citizenship” (Moosa 2005, 25).
Moosa’s work is therefore not purely a historical study but self-consciously
agenda-driven, as opposed to the other authors discussed so far. Predictably,
reviewers have taken issue with this (Knysh 2007, 295). For Moosa, al-Ghazali
can serve as an “exemplar” for Muslims today to overcome what Moosa sees
as their greatest contemporary predicament, namely, “authoritarianism.” In
al-Ghazali’s tendency to straddle discourses and change registers, Moosa
sees the sure signs of a genius; it is al-Ghazali’s “signature” that he is torn
over the “in between-ness of being” in a “poly-centric world” (Moosa 2005,
30). Moosa’s book is the first full-fledged postmodern reading of al-Ghazali,
a reading in which al-Ghazali emerges as a figure haunted by the experience
144  Christian L ange

of de-centralisation, but ultimately successful in creating a dynamic, crea-

tive, and empowered subjectivity.

3 The Individual and Government

However, other readings of al-Ghazali’s hybridity, to use a term dear to

postmodernist theory, remain possible. For example, Omid Safi, in a book
published in 2006, steers a different course, although he is admittedly more
interested in al-Ghazali’s political than in his theological writings. Safi
examines the question of how al-Ghazali analysed the individual’s position
vis-à-vis the government. In Safi’s account, al-Ghazali appears as an op-
portunist and careerist, as someone willing to adjust his views in function of
changing political circumstances. Before his crisis, Safi suggests, al-Ghazali
upheld justice and spirituality as a general requirement for rulers. In his
later political writings, however, he would have caved in to the view that
also unjust or even brutal rulers were justified in their actions as long as they
managed to maintain order and see to it that the shariʿa was implemented.
As Safi points out, al-Ghazali states that the sultan, that is, the ruler who
rules on the strength of power not of virtue or piety, is “God’s shadow on
earth.” In a particularly sinister twist, the sultan must enact punishments
and spread fear lest people rise against him and social unrest ensues (Safi
2006, 105-124).
In fact, upon closer examination, al-Ghazali’s view of the ruling powers
of his day is in some respects similar to how he conceives of the ultimate
power, that is, God. In the “Revivification of the Sciences of Religiosity,” his
celebrated opus magnum, al-Ghazali laments the moral corruption of his
day, one syndrome of which is that the Muslim umma is divided into many
sects. In this kind of situation, he avers, the prospect of God’s punishment
in the hereafter has a more significant function to fulfil than hope in His
mercy. Al-Ghazali states that “the dominance of fear [of hell over hope of
paradise] is the higher good, because disobedience and self-deceit are the
more dominant over the creature” (al-Ghazali 1962, 45). In consequence,
he warns his readers that “your coming unto it [hell] is certain, while your
salvation therefrom is no more than conjecture,” and he urges his reader
to “fill up your heart … with the dread of that destination” (al-Ghazali
1989, 220). Al-Ghazali, in the passages just quoted, instrumentalises fear.
For al-Ghazali, the spectre of God’s violent retribution in the hereafter is a
good thing because it functions to maintain social harmony and cohesion
in this world.
Power, Orthodox y, and Salvation in Cl assical Isl amic Theology 145

This, in a nutshell, is also how al-Ghazali justified the ruler’s exercise of

violence. In a situation of moral laxity and social strife, the ruler is com-
mended for inspiring terror through acts of violence. In fact, according to
al-Ghazali, it is a crucial requirement for a good government to spread fear.
The structure of al-Ghazali’s argument about God’s justice and punish-
ment, in other words, is analogous to his argument about the need for
a strong government (Lange 2011, 148). This is one of the more worrying
legacies of al-Ghazali, a legacy in which the individual appears as largely
disempowered, and which does not sit well with the interpretations offered
by either Griffel or Moosa.
It is possible to disagree with Safi’s interpretation. There are questions
surrounding the authenticity of certain of al-Ghazali’s political writings, and
when one disputes this authenticity, his political thought appears in a differ-
ent light (Crone 1987; Hillenbrand 1988). Our knowledge about al-Ghazali’s
own involvement with rulers has grown with the increasingly detailed in-
formation that scholars have collected to reconstruct his biography. Griffel’s
appears to be the most comprehensive account to date. Though Griffel does
not dwell on the possibility that al-Ghazali was complicit in legitimising the
despotic absolutism of the rulers of his time, what is clear, in the biography
that Griffel traces, is that al-Ghazali tried, for a time, to disentangle himself
from the institutions of worldly power. He even took a solemn vow following
his crisis that he would never again let himself be paid by the government
or go to see the sultan. He broke both vows later on in his life, but whether
this happened by coercion or not remains a matter of debate.
So, in sum, to what extent was al-Ghazali an “independent” thinker, and
to what extent did he defend individual agency and freedom of thought and
action against the powers-that-be? How anti-authoritarian is his thought?
Different answers to these questions, I would suggest, remain possible,
as the recent literature on al-Ghazali demonstrates. There are, no doubt,
anti-authoritarian strands in his thought. Modern-day Salafis tend not to
like al-Ghazali, if only because al-Ghazali was not exactly keen on hadith.
Al-Ghazali probably would have disliked the modern-day finger-wagging
“hadith-hurlers,” as Khaled Abou El Fadl has called them (Abou El Fadl
2001, xi). Al-Ghazali also rejected interpretations of scripture that were,
according to his standard, too literal. At the same time, al-Ghazali was elitist
(and thus in no way atypical in his time), allowing a free interpretation of
scripture only to the very few, and only within strictly defined boundaries.
His political theology was ambiguous, to say the least.
One strength of recent studies of al-Ghazali is that they tend to be
based on a broad selection of his writings, and therefore achieve a more
146  Christian L ange

comprehensive vision of the man. Rather than seeing al-Ghazali’s cosmol-

ogy or his political thought in isolation, scholars are working towards a
situation where the above-sketched triangle of powers moves into sight.
However, to fit all strands of al-Ghazali’s thought into one coherent picture
seems almost an impossible task, and it does not matter whether one sug-
gests that al-Ghazali was a peripatetic philosopher dressed up as a Muslim
or that he was a postmodern bricoleur. As historians, we may have to live
with al-Ghazali’s elusiveness, and content ourselves with pointing a finger
to the promises and problems that this elusiveness entails.

4 Community and Orthodoxy

Moving on from conceptualisations of the autonomy of the individual, let us

take a look at recent scholarship on “classical” definitions of the religiously
constituted community of Muslims, the umma. Who, according to these
definitions, was “in” and who was “out”? How strictly or how flexibly did
Muslim theologians draw the line between these two groups? What did
they consider Islamically acceptable, or “orthodox,” and what, for them,
was “heresy” and “unbelief”?
One problem with such questions is that they tend to seduce scholars of
Islam to take sides and subscribe to one particular definition of orthodoxy.
However, the adequacy of the term “orthodoxy” in the academic study of
Islam has been vigorously contested. This discussion is hardly a dead horse;
there seems to be no general agreement among scholars that “orthodoxy”
is a term that fits Islam awkwardly and that should therefore better be
avoided. Scholars of Islamic law, for example, continue to use the term
quite liberally. In the latest, third edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam
(henceforth EI3), for example, one reads about the opposition of “orthodox
ʿulamāʾ” to the ʿaqīqa, the rituals associated with welcoming a newborn
into the community, including the shaving of hair, application of ointments,
and other related practices. Here, the term “orthodoxy” seems to refer to
the teachings of the four established (Sunni) schools of law as opposed to
local custom, or ʿurf (EI3: s.v. ʿAqīqa).
However, also in entries dealing with aspects of Islamic theology, EI3
authors regularly use the term, and they generally do so without offering
further explanation. For example, a governor of the ʿAbbasids in Khurasan,
in the ninth century, is said to have uphold “Sunnī orthodoxy” (EI3: s.v.
ʿAbdallāh b. Ṭāhir); al-Ashʿari (d. 935) is labelled an “orthodox theologian”
(EI3: s.v. Agnosticism); the Mughal emperor Babur (d. 1530), one learns,
Power, Orthodox y, and Salvation in Cl assical Isl amic Theology 147

was raised “an orthodox Sunnī Muslim” (EI3: s.v. Bābur). More examples
could be given. There is, as far as I can see, only one instance in which
the term “orthodox” is used in inverted commas: the Sufi ʿAyn al-Qudat
al-Hamadhani (d. 1131), the EI3 tells us, positioned himself at a distance
from the “‘orthodox’ establishment” (EI3: s.v. ʿAyn al-Qudāt). While such
use of inverted commas indicates a more complex picture, it gestures to
the problems inherent in the term but does little to solve them.
This comes as a bit of a surprise. After all, the awareness among Western
scholars of Islam that “orthodoxy” is a term that can only be applied to
Islam with difficulty can be traced several decades back. In Bernard Lewis’
classical formulation (Lewis 1953, 58), published more than half a century
ago, he writes:

In the absence of an apostolic tradition and of a supreme pontiff, ortho-

doxy and heterodoxy in Islam could at first sight be determined only
by making the teachings of one school the touchstone for the rejection
of the others. The difficulties and absurdities of such a standard are
well summarised by Ghazali. Is Baqillani a heretic for disagreeing with
Ashʿari, or Ashʿari for disagreeing with Baqillani? Why should truth be the
prerogative of one rather than the other? Does truth go by precedence?
Then do not the Muʿtazilites take precedence of Ashʿari? Because of
greater virtue and knowledge? In what scales and with what measures
shall the degrees of virtue be measured, so that the superiority of one or
another theologian may be established?

Despite such critical remarks, the label “orthodoxy” continued to be invoked

by scholars of Islam in the 1950s and 1960s. This was often done with a
negative connotation, pitching it against the “free-spirited” philosophical
movement in Islam (Rahman 1979, 120). In the 1970s, both William Mont-
gomery Watt and Marshal Hodgson again raised a flag and warned against
the use of the term “orthodoxy” in the study of Islamic theology (Watt 1973,
5-6; Hodgson 1974, 67). However, the first full-blown attack on the adequacy
of the terms “orthodoxy” and its antonym, “heresy,” for the study of Islam
was formulated by Alexander Knysh in 1993, perhaps in reaction to the
continued use of the term, and particularly of the dichotomy between
Islamic philosophy and “orthodoxy” (Bello 1989).
Knysh begins by noting that Western historians of Islam have often
pitched what they perceived to be “orthodox” Islam against “heterodox ten-
dencies.” But neither of these terms is easily attributed to only one particular
Muslim theological school or movement. Ashʿarism is often considered the
148  Christian L ange

“orthodox” version of Islamic theology; but for many centuries, it had many
passionate detractors, especially those ʿulamaʾ who found it too speculative,
too tainted with kalām-style argumentation based on Greek logic. As the
story has it, Al-Ashʿari once boasted to the Hanbali preacher and scholar
Al-Barbahari (d. 941) that he had refuted the Muʿtazila, the Zoroastrians,
and the Christians. Reportedly, Al-Barbahari retorted that he did not know
what these groups taught: he only knew what Ahmad b. Hanbal had taught
(Knysh 1993, 61). Knysh also points out that there are examples of Ashʿarites
who, in their spiritual life, were Sufis.
Knysh further notes that some have identified the movement of the ahl
al-ḥadīth, the “hadith folk,” as constituting an orthodox stream within Sunni
Islam. Western scholars refer to this group sometimes as “traditionists,”
because of the value it gave to “traditions,” that is, hadiths. From here it is per-
haps not far-fetched to see in the members of this group Islamic “orthodoxy.”
But Marshal Hodgson pointed out that the label “traditionists” is unfortunate:
it suggests that the hadith folk were somehow naturally aligned with tradi-
tion in the general sense of the word, more so than, say, the Ashʿarites or the
Muʿtazila. However, one might just as well insist that theological dispute,
logic and ijtihād was, from the earliest times, part of the tradition of Islam.
The hadith folk can hardly claim a monopoly on the term. What is more,
many of their theological positions were rejected as too extreme. Take as an
example their tendency to accept anthropomorphism, a stance that their
detractors called tajsīm, “bestowing a body [onto God].” Ibn Taymiyya (d.
1328), in the view of many a paragon of Islamic “orthodoxy,” advocated that
God descends to the lowest heaven, as is stated in the canonical hadith, in
the same way in which Ibn Taymiyya, as he once demonstrated during a
sermon, stepped down from the pulpit, the minbar. In consequence, he was
viewed by his less anthropomorphically-minded contemporaries as a man
“with a kink in his head”; people wondered, as Donald Little put it flippantly
in a well-known study, “Did Ibn Taymiyya Have a Screw Loose?” (1975).
In sum, according to Knysh, instead of “orthodoxy,” what we have in
medieval Islam is “a perpetual collision of individual opinions over an
invariant set of theological problems that eventually leads to a transient
consensus that already contains the seed of future disagreement” (Knysh
1993, 57). Knysh suggests that the superimposition on medieval Islam of
the concepts of “orthodoxy” and “heterodoxy” inevitably leads to a loss
of nuance; internal divisions are glossed over rather than given full ap-
preciation. As he warns his readers, “Eurocentric interpretive categories,
when uncritically superimposed on Islamic realities, may produce serious
distortions” (62).
Power, Orthodox y, and Salvation in Cl assical Isl amic Theology 149

What we must do instead is to seek to understand Muslim theologians “on

their own terms.” Here, Knysh gives the two examples of Al-Shahrastani (d.
1153) and of Ibn al-ʿArabi (d. 1240), the former a famous heresiographer, the
latter arguably the most influential Sufi theorist of the later Islamic Middle
Ages. Both Al-Shahrastani and Ibn ʿArabi wrote about the many different
schools of thought in Islamic theology, and both had a remarkably inclusive
view of who could claim to be a Muslim, who was in, and who was out. Knysh
accepts that it is possible to speak of limited or, as he puts it, “spontaneous
orthodoxies,” orthodoxies that arise in particular periods and regions of the
Islamic world as a particular “blend of ‘orthodox’ ideas” (65). Remarkably,
although he succeeds in showing the conceptual problems and pitfalls of
the term “orthodoxy,” Knysh does not recommend that scholars should stop
using it altogether. The reason he provides for this is that it would “seriously
complicate the Western discourse on Muslim societies” (66).
Picking up on Knysh’s lead but pushing his conclusions to their logical
conclusion, Brett Wilson has recently attempted to put the term “orthodoxy”
to rest once and for all. He notes that, ironically, scholars inspired by the
work of Talal Asad have contributed to resuscitating the term in the study
of Islam. This, he avers, is a reaction against the relativistic positions of
anthropologists who tend to accord all local expressions of Islam the same
level of “correctness” and thus end up speaking of several “islams” instead
of one Islam, or one “orthodoxy” in Islam. To counterbalance such views,
Asad describes Islam as a “discursive tradition,” a concept that hinges on
the notion that the Islamic tradition, though continuously reworked and
renegotiated, has a common bedrock on which it rests, namely, the Qurʾan
and sunna. Orthodoxy, for Asad, is a “(re)ordering of knowledge that governs
the ‘correct’ form of Islamic practices” (Asad 1993, 201). As such – this distin-
guishes Asad’s approach from earlier, more reified definitions – orthodoxy
in Islam must not be seen as a fixed set of beliefs, nor is it embedded in
particular institutions of power; rather, it is continuously (re)produced in
a dynamic process of teaching on all levels of society, in an ongoing process
of relating oneself to the foundational texts and practices of Islam.
Asad’s fluid and dynamic concept of orthodoxy, Wilson argues, avoids
some of the earlier essentialist mistakes of Orientalist scholars wishing to
pin down Islamic orthodoxy. At the same time, avers Wilson, it is doubtful
whether such “further ‘loading’ of a semantically overladen term” is useful
(Wilson 2007, 185). Wilson insists that the term “orthodoxy” has run its
course and that scholars should discard it, because the “theological and
righteous connotations” of the term are too numerous. These connota-
tions “complicate [the term’s] viability” even “as a purely sociological or
150  Christian L ange

anthropological term” (186). In sum, the concept of “orthodoxy” in Islam has

become “more of a stumbling block than a launching pad in our vocabulary,
one which instigates more conflicts than it resolves” (185).
The term “orthodoxy” and its viability for the scholarly study of classical
Islamic theology is also one of the topics dealt with in Josef van Ess’ recent
history of the genre of heresiography in Islam, Der Eine und das andere:
Beobachtungen an islamischen häresiographischen Texten (The one and
the other: Observations in Islamic heresiographical texts), a towering work
of some 1,500 densely argued pages. Van Ess broadly confirms the picture
drawn by Knysh. He takes him by the word that we must understand Muslim
debates about orthodoxy on Muslim terms. Indeed, in the third and final
part of Der Eine und das Andere, Van Ess goes through a list of terms such as
firqa, madhhab, ṭāʾifa, fiʾa, ṣinf, milla, ahl al-sunna, ahl al-sunna wa-l-jamāʿa,
and takfīr, all of which belong to the vocabulary of “who is in, who is out,”
showing in each instance where these terms originate and who uses them
for what purpose.
Van Ess begins his book, however, with an analysis of the well-known,
though non-canonical hadith about the seventy-three groups ( firaq) in Is-
lam, of which only one is saved, namely the “saved group” (al-firqa al-nājiya),
while the seventy-two others go to hellfire. On sixty gripping pages Van Ess
shows how different groups in the history of early Islamic theology claimed
the one “saved group” for their own purposes. They did this by adding an
explanatory ending to the hadith or rewording it in suggestive ways (Van
Ess 2011a, 7-64). Towards the end of the Umayyad period, scholars close to
the Umayyad caliphs rephrased the hadith to: “This community consists
of 73 firaq; 72 are lost, they all hate the ruler; saved is the one that is on the
side of the ruler.” Under the early ʿAbbasids, the Hanafi-Murjiʾa broadened
the “saved group” to the extreme, by suggesting that it includes all those
who believe, that is, the “overwhelming majority” (al-sawād al-aʿẓam).
This lenient position rubbed many the wrong way, among them the hadith
folk. Ibn Hanbal (d. 855) reportedly said that the “saved group” were, of
course, no other than the hadith folk themselves; and to get back at the
Hanafis, a version of the hadith was circulated that reads: “My community
will split into some 70 groups, but the greatest danger will arise from those
among them who judge things according to their own free reasoning [raʾy]”
– the word raʾy being a nod to the Hanafis, who were known as the “people
of free reasoning” (ahl al-raʾy). Some, more pessimistic voices, held that the
“saved group” were the Companions of the Prophet, and that therefore all
following generations were in principle doomed. Van Ess states that this is
until today “the most popular solution” (39). But this pessimism could be
Power, Orthodox y, and Salvation in Cl assical Isl amic Theology 151

mitigated if one interpreted the hadith to mean that the “saved group” goes
to paradise directly, while all others first have to go through the fire of the
Day of Judgement. The Shiʿites, later also the Ismaʿiliyya, claimed to be the
“saved group.” Last but not least, there is also an inverted version of the
hadith stating that seventy-two firaq are saved while only one is doomed.
This is a version that, on the surface, looks more tolerant, but it could become
a powerful weapon to persecute one particular group. The hadith folk, for
example, wanted to recognise the Muʿtazilites in this solitary “doomed”
group. For al-Ghazali in “The Decisive Criterion,” it was the philosophers (55).
Many interesting conclusions result from Van Ess’ analysis of this hadith.
For example, he demonstrates that the nostalgic vision of a saved group of
Companions of the Prophet is a historically grown position that emerged
rather late, no earlier than the late ninth century, and in reaction to the
various disappointments suffered by the early Muslim community. Van Ess
shows the fluid state of affairs in the early centuries, in which no version of
the hadith could impose itself as the authoritative one. Muslim specialists
of hadith criticism could do little to change this. As van Ess writes, “the
censorship of the expert … had little impact in medieval Islam; after all,
there were no institutions which gave it power; and scholarship’s influence
in those days was, as ever, limited” (55).
The second part of Van Ess’ book deals with all the major contributions
to the genre of Islamic heresiography: the works of Al-Ashʿari, Al-Baghdadi,
Al-Shahrastani, Ibn Hazm, but also of scores of other, less well-known
authors. Van Ess notes that the classical works on the variety of theological
positions in Islam are not properly “heresiographical.” Like Al-Ashʿari’s
Maqalat al-Islamiyyin (The doctrines of those who follow Islam) or Al-
Shahrastani’s al-Milal wa-l-Nihal “Confessions and sections), they do not
anathematise groups, that is, they do not practice takfīr. In most cases, they
also ignore the hadith about the seventy-two “doomed” sects. The genre is,
in other words, doxographical rather than heresiographical: it records the
tenets and teachings of various groups without passing judgement about
whether they are “in” or “out” of Islam (1201-1206). Van Ess therefore also
proposes to replace the term “heresy” in Islam with that of “denomination,”
and “heresiography” with “denominationalism” (the German Konfession-
skunde). The heresiographers’ preferred term for these groups is milla (pl.
milal), which tends to get translated as “sect,” even though a less value-laden
translation as “section” would be more appropriate. As Van Ess points out,
milla is a very generous term, and he suggests that “for a long time milla
was the most neutral designation for ‘religion’ that existed in any language
of the world” (1264).
152  Christian L ange

In the third and final part of his book, Van Ess returns to more synthetic
observations. Among other things, he revisits the notion of “orthodoxy” in
Islam. He concludes that the term is “perhaps” useful if used in the value-
neutral sociological meaning, but only as a “metaphor,” to indicate the
“dominant opinion” in a specific spatial-temporal context, a temporary
“mainstream position.” Such “orthodoxies” (Van Ess uses the plural repeat-
edly) usually come with an expiry date; dogmas in Islam did not have the
longevity of dogmas promulgated by the Christian Church. As Van Ess puts
it, dogmas in Islamic history “occasionally had their great moment; but then
they receded quickly behind the scenes of history” (1299).
Whether contemporary orthodoxies will have a longer life, Van Ess does
not discuss. He contents himself with noting that the scripturalism of the
Egyptian reformers Muhammad ʿAbduh (d. 1905) and Rashid Rida (d. 1935),
both of whom called for a return to the original words of revelation, is such
a “modern” orthodoxy (1302). However, in an interview given in 2011, Van Ess
is a bit more forthcoming. He points out that “with the help of the media
it is much easier to convey to people a definitive image of Islam and assert
it by supporting it financially,” suggesting that “this reversal began among
the late-nineteenth-century reformers we hold in such high regard, such
as Muhammad Abduh” (Van Ess 2011b).
These words chime with Norman Calder’s analysis in an article on “The
Limits of Islamic Orthodoxy,” first published in 2000. Calder diagnoses that
twentieth-century Islam has witnessed the triumph of a narrowly conceived
scripturalist “orthodoxy,” which rejects the traditional Muslim tolerance
of the concepts of community-based reasoning, gnosis, but also (albeit to
a lesser degree) of reason and charisma, “a massive, complex, sophisticated
heritage, a generous profusion of modes of religious fulfilment” (Calder
2007, 235). However, Van Ess’ evaluation of the contemporary situation, as
opposed to that of Calder, is fairly optimistic. He states that “essentially, I’m
not worried … I’m sure that the fundamentalists too will fail to establish
an orthodoxy,” adding that the concept of orthodoxy “[i]s simply not there
in the religion” (Van Ess 2011b).

5 Islam and the Fate of “Others”

Moving from the discussion of the place of the individual in Islamic classical
theology to reviewing recent scholarship on how classical Islamic theology
defines the boundary of the Muslim community or umma, let us move into
the last of the three concentric circles and examine the issue of how classical
Power, Orthodox y, and Salvation in Cl assical Isl amic Theology 153

Islamic theology views the issue of salvation, particularly with regard to

non-Muslims, or the Islamic “Other.”
First of all, let me note with Van Ess that in the history of Islamic theol-
ogy, critiques against Muslim heretics and apostates have usually been
more severe than against practitioners of other faiths. Takfīr, the process
of declaring someone has left Islam and become an unbeliever, is tradition-
ally the arena of the most bitter theological disputes in Islam (Van Ess
2011a, 1284-1298). By contrast, those who are brought up as non-Muslims
are already unbelievers, and so they cannot suffer takfīr. In consequence,
they tend to fall under the radar of Muslim theological reasoning. This is
not to deny, however, that the eternal damnation of the unbelievers in hell
is usually taken for granted in classical Islamic theology. Or is it?
A recent study by Mohammad Khalil (2012) has tried to cast doubt
upon this piece of received wisdom. For a long time, both non-Muslim
and Muslim scholars of Islam have been telling us that according to the
majority of classical Muslim theologians, Christianity, to give one example,
is not a way to salvation. Soteriological pluralism, the idea that members of
diverse religious traditions are all equally destined for paradise, according
to this view is fundamentally alien to Islam (see, e.g. McAuliffe 1991, 290).
Given the foregoing discussion about how difficult it is to establish what
may count as Islamic orthodoxy, whether on this particular point or on
any other, it comes as no surprise that the classical tradition does in fact
include voices that speculate about the eventual salvation of unbelievers.
In his study, Khalil comes to the conclusion that the matter remained
“ultimately unresolved,” despite the fact that numerous theologians
claimed there was a broad consensus, or ijmāʿ, on the issue (Khalil 2012,
13-14, 22). He observes that it was particularly some of the most prominent
and influential theologians in Islamic history, such as al-Ghazali and Ibn
Taymiyya, who argued against the idea that all non-Muslims suffer in hell
eternally, thereby opposing narrow exclusivism, or “damnationism,” as
Khalil labels it (Khalil 2012, 19).
To return to al-Ghazali, in “The Decisive Criterion” he makes a distinc-
tion between four different types of unbelievers. Two of these groups are
doomed in his view, but two will receive God’s mercy and be admitted into
paradise (cf. al-Ghazali 2002, 126). The former two groups are, first, those
who commit blasphemy, that is, those who insult the God of Islam and His
Prophet Muhammad; second, those who, despite a full understanding of
the Islamic message refuse to be convinced of it, out of stubbornness or
intellectual laziness. The other two groups, those that will receive God’s
mercy, are, first, those who never even heard the name Muhammad and had
154  Christian L ange

no opportunity whatsoever to learn about Islam. The second saved group of

unbelievers is formed by those who deny Islam because they have not been
provided “with enough incentive” which would have “compelled them to
investigate” the issue. That is, they may have some notion about Islam, but
in the final analysis, they do not know much about it.
Now, in Khalil’s reading of al-Ghazali, when people in this last group
are provided an incentive to learn more about Islam, when they do start to
investigate the issue, and then still deny its message, they are still considered
saved. As long as they engage in discussion and in all respects behave like
“sincere truth-seekers,” they will be the recipients of God’s mercy (Khalil
2012, 37). One should add here, however, that this is a generous reading of
al-Ghazali and that his typology of the four classes of unbelievers, though
not as exclusive as other classical Muslim views of the non-Muslim “other,” is
still a far shot from modern sensibilities regarding tolerance and pluralism.
However, it does open up a certain space for discussion. At the very least, it
corrects the hackneyed idea that according to Islam, non-Muslims are by
definition doomed to eternal suffering in hell.
A different angle on the topic was taken by Ibn Taymiyya and his stu-
dent Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, both of whom wrote in the first half of the
fourteenth century in Syria, and both of whom are widely hailed as the intel-
lectual forefathers of modern-day Salafism. Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim
discuss the question of the duration of hell. Both reject the consensus of
the scholars of their time that hellfire is eternal. They suggest that hell
will, at some point in the eschatological future, have fulfilled its purpose
of cleansing sinners from their sins, including the sin of unbelief. Then hell
will disappear, so that only paradise remains. This idea is referred to as
fanāʾ al-nār, the “passing away of the fire.” This means that all unbelievers,
indeed all sinners will eventually, after a more or less extended period of
suffering in hell, be admitted to paradise. In the recent scholarly literature,
this position has been described, rather optimistically, as a form of “Islamic
universalism,” akin to the soteriological pluralism that Khalil ascribes to
al-Ghazali (Hoover 2009, 181-201).
Whether or not “universalism” is the correct term to be used, here is
another bit of evidence that the question of salvation of unbelievers in classi-
cal Islamic theology is not as one-sided and easily decided as meets the eye.
This is also confirmed by a look at the other side of the coin, the question
whether Muslims can go to hell: If the unbelievers are not necessarily in
hell, can Muslims know for sure that they will go to paradise? Here, too, we
are dealing with certain preconceived ideas. Christian polemicists of the
Middle Ages liked to justify what they perceived as the ethical superiority
Power, Orthodox y, and Salvation in Cl assical Isl amic Theology 155

of Christianity over Islam by pointing out that Islam offers an easy way
to salvation. Western researchers of Islamic theology, including Ignaz
Goldziher in the early twentieth century but also more recent contribu-
tors to the debate, have referred to the seemingly “limitless optimism” of
“orthodox” Sunni Islam in regard to the salvation prospect of Muslims
(Goldziher 1920, 160; Smith and Haddad 2002, 81). The Islamic “straight
path” (al-ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm), many may have felt justified to conclude, was
exceedingly broad, the requirements for being a Muslim minimal, and hence
moral laxity widespread. In Christianity, on the other hand, salvation was
difficult, it had to be earned: as one reads in Matthew 7:13, Christians are
to “enter through the narrow gate; for the gate and the road that leads to
destruction is wide, and there are many who take it.”
Recent scholarship on Islamic soteriology has suggested that the issue
needs more nuanced inspection than has been hitherto assumed. In the
same way in which scholars of Islamic theology have begun to unearth
strands of universalist thought, the Muslim hell is moving into focus as a
place not just for the unbelievers, but also for Muslims, or rather, for Muslim
sinners. The Qurʾan threatens sinners in general, not just unbelievers, with
punishment in hell. In the early centuries of Islam, the question of the
certainty of salvation for Muslim sinners was discussed controversially, first
in the milieu of the Basran ascetics, who denied such certainty and stressed
individual accountability (Van Ess 2001, 104-108), then by the theological
school of the Muʿtazila, who insisted that people would be judged by their
actions, not just by the outwards profession of faith. They argued that it is
not only possible but indeed necessary for God to punish sinners; otherwise
He could not be considered just. The ethical rigourism of the Muʿtazila
survived in other schools and in other forms, for example, in Maturidi
theology. In contrast to the Ashʿarites, Maturidite theologians came to
emphasise that punishment of the grave sinner in hell was rather likely
and, in the greater scheme of things, even necessary (Lange 2014, 160-167).
This punishment may have been conceived of as temporary and purgative,
preparing the sinners for their eventual redemption in paradise. But it was
a formidable prospect nonetheless, psychologically speaking.
In sum, there are “universalist” trends in classical Islamic theology that
appear to push non-Muslims in the direction of salvation, and there are
other trends that seem to push Muslims towards ethical rigourism and
accountability for sinful actions in hell. As Khalil notes, “discussions of
salvation in Islam have generally been plagued with oversimplifications”
(Khalil 2012, 13), but in recent scholarship on classical Islamic theology, a
more nuanced picture of Muslim soteriology seems to emerge.
156  Christian L ange

6 Conclusion: Islamic Theology and the Muslim Religious

Imagination

By way of conclusion, let me come back to one of the terms I brought up

at the beginning of my discussion: the religious imagination, conceived
as an integral part of Islamic theology. In the area of Muslim ideas about
salvation and the afterlife, scholarship has largely ignored this dimension
of Islamic theology. As indicated above, a good deal of attention has been
devoted to the works of the mutakallimūn, the proponents of kalām. When
it comes to the afterlife, to eschatology, or “knowledge of the last things,”
the mutakallimūn have things to say about the big questions: who is saved
and who is not, whether hell is eternal or not, and how real the afterlife is,
that is, whether its reality is like that experienced in this world, or whether
it is a different reality altogether. What the mutakallimūn are less interested
in is the topography of the hereafter, the particulars of paradise and hell,
the rewards and punishments therein, the many detailed descriptions of
their flora, fauna, and inhabitants, sometimes excessive and often quite
wonderful, in sum: the Muslim eschatological imagination. The modern
study of Islamic theology likewise has largely turned a blind eye to this
body of ideas and images. And yet, there is a whole other world waiting to
be charted and analysed. At least two approaches to this universe of images
and ideas can be conceived.
Firstly, the Islamic literature about the afterlife offers rich insights into
Islamic theological ethics. The inhabitants of paradise and hell are regularly
identified by their virtues and their sins. Some classical manuals in which
stories about paradise and hell are collected in fact appear like catechisms of
sins and virtues. Examples include the anonymous Qurrat al-ʿUyun and the
Risalat al-Talkhis of the Spaniard Ibn Hazm in the eleventh century (Lange
2013). Also the various versions of the Prophet Muhammad’s night journey
(isrāʾ), not unlike Dante’s Divine Comedy, abound with moral teachings
(Vucovic 2005).
Secondly, the Islamic literature of the afterlife should be taken seriously
as a genre that plays with notions of the fantastic and the marvellous, and
that therefore deserves to be analysed and evaluated by using the methods
and criteria we apply to similar works in other areas of human literary
productivity. It might be objected that by this shift of focus one leaves the
arena of Islamic theology. However, scholars of Christian theology will not
hesitate to apply the tools and insights developed in literary studies to, say,
the Gospel, or to Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Process, and it is not obvious why
scholars of Islam should not do the same. Aziz al-Azmeh (1995) and Kamal
Power, Orthodox y, and Salvation in Cl assical Isl amic Theology 157

Abu-Deeb (2007) are pioneers in this area of investigation. More such studies
remain a desideratum, for making Islamic eschatology comprehensible as
literature will, I think, help us see in it not only a symbolic expression of
doctrinal tenets, that is, statements about ontology and soteriology, but
rather, an expression of the Muslim religious imagination, of a creativity and
playfulness that engages this-worldly concerns in addition to transcendent
ones.
To broaden the study of classical Islamic theology to include such
multifaceted uses and functions of Muslim “religiosity” is to develop and
support an appreciation for the historical diversity of Muslim opinions about
how God relates to the world and how Muslims relate to God, and thus to
resist the temptation to see Islam as a monolithic system that provides
clear-cut answers to perennial questions. In this way, as one might hope,
the scholarly study of Islamic theology will be able to contribute to preserv-
ing the memory of diversity in Islamic theological reasoning. As Norman
Calder wrote, “[c]ontemporary Muslims are … offered by their tradition a
massive, complex, sophisticated heritage, a generous profusion of religious
fulfilment, and any step towards making that heritage smaller must be a
bad thing” (Calder 2007, 235).

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 Dialectical Theology in the Search for
Modern Islam
Abdulkader Tayob

Studies on Islam and modernity have grappled with what has happened
to Islam in the modern world. As a tradition, culture, or religion, what has
become of Islam since the transformation of the globe through industrialisa-
tion, capitalism, and colonialism? Has Islam taken on a new form, or does it
continue earlier forms and traditions in essential ways? What are the values
promoted by Islam and Muslims in the modern world? Most recent studies
on these questions find the focus on Islam and modernity too broad and
generalised. Preferring local and contextual studies, Islam in modernity in
its most general sense has been moved to the background, or into the public
sphere. However, terms referring to the broader interaction between Islam
and modernity have not been given up. Terms such as “Islamic modernity,”
“Islamic modernism,” “modernist Islam,” or simply “modern Islam” have not
disappeared completely. To these may be added the plural forms of Islams
and modernities, producing a bewildering variety of representations. They
still appear repeatedly in the literature, begging for clarification or filling
an un-fillable space.
The questions and formulations of modern Islam have been depend-
ent on the use and meaning of “modern” and “Islam.” Both these terms
are used extensively, and unavoidably, to identify the particular turn of
modern Islam. The use of “modern” ranges from the Marxist, to the liberal,
to Weberian, and also to postcolonial and postmodern definitions and
inclinations. The Weberian definition and assumptions of modernity have
dominated literature on modern Islam, and occupy pride of place. Like the
term “modern,” the reference to Islam cannot be taken for granted. The
unified and obvious reference to a single tradition breaks down upon closer
scrutiny. In his magisterial study of Islam, Hodgson offered a set of terms
(Islam, Islamic, Islamicate and Islamdom) that privileged religious founda-
tions, while giving space to cultural and other historical developments. His
suggestions have not found great favour among scholars of Islam, least of
all among those who work in the study of modern Islam. But the search for
a proper term for Islam has continued into the twenty-first century. One
persistent suggestion since the 1970s has been the use of “Islams” to reflect
the multiplicity of interpretations and cultural formations that constitute
162 Abdulk ader Tayob

religious experiences (El-Zein 1977). Varisco argued for “Islams” in anthro-

pology to stand for “how Islam is lived in a unique social setting” (Varisco
2005, 140). This contextual focus has become the preferred approach among
scholars generally suspicious about the viability of any generalisation that
can be made on Islam and modernity. But the use of “modern” and “Islam”
persists in the literature, including in the use of the plural. And this usage
begs clearer explanation, on how “Islam” or “Islams” in local context are
related to each other.
In the following, I propose that these questions on modernity and Islam
be placed in the framework of the much longer history of kalām (dialectical
theology). Scholars in the modern academy, usually focused on variations
of a Weberian framework, were addressing questions that were uncannily
similar to those asked by Muslim theologians within kalām in the past.
Kalām questions were first posed during political disputes among Muslims
after the demise of the Prophet, and then refined further in the encounter
of Muslim intellectuals with the Greek Hellenic heritage. The consequent
theological disputes turned around questions such as “What is the nature of
God?,” “Who is a Muslim?,” “What is Islam and faith?,” and “What are values?”
Under the impact of Max Weber’s sociology of religion, scholars have asked
similar questions with regard to modernity. Explicitly or implicitly, they
often asked if Islam and Muslims were modern, modernisable, or modernis-
ing. Their questions too could be summarised as “What is Islam?” and “Who
are the Muslims?”
This chapter focuses on modern studies on Islam and examines their
theses and perspectives in the framework of kalām. It argues that modern
studies on Islam were adding new dimensions to the identity of Muslims
and the meaning of Islam. If kalām was an exercise in identifying the true
believer, modern studies were separating modern from traditional Muslims.
The binary opposition between the modern and traditional became the basis
of a new sectarianism, constructed and debated in the same way as earlier
sects ( firaq) were debated by kalām scholars in the past. Similarly, under
the impact of Hellenism, and new intellectual and cultural changes, kalām
scholars had defined Islam in relation to custom (sunna), to a mythological
past, or to rationality (ʿaql). In modern Islam, Islam was identified as a
tradition as opposed to modernity, and later as text and as discourse. Fol-
lowing leads in the social sciences, such perspectives added new meanings
to Islam. Modern “Weberian” scholars were admittedly merely describing
Muslims in the modern world. From a kalām perspective, however, they
will be shown to frame the meaning of being Muslim in the modern world.
I pursue this identification and framing, and conclude that justification
Dialectical Theology in the Search for Modern Isl am 163

and representation were the major pre-occupations of studies of modern

Islam. Modern Islam, firstly, was a justification of Islam in the shadow
of a Western trajectory of modernisation. Secondly, it was a difficult and
eventually failed attempt to represent Islam and Muslims.

1 Working with Modernity and Kalām

Weber is not always quoted at great length in the literature on Islam and
modernity, but the questions that he asked of traditions and their relation
to the emergence of the modern West abound in the literature on modern
Islam. Weber closely examined the theologies and ethics of emerging Prot-
estant cults and sects and their impact on social and economic behaviour. In
Max Weber’s sociology, a constellation of theologies, ethics, and economic
conditions gave rise to modernity (Weber 1958). In a similar way, he also
examined the sociology of other religions, including Islam, and suggested
how and why they did not lead to modernisation. Masud and Salvatore
have correctly identified this Weberian trend in the literature on Islam
and modernity (Masud and Salvatore 2009). They suggested that scholars
have investigated the nature of Islam, the values it promotes, the societies
it generates, and the identities it upholds. In addition, they proposed that
the Weberian framework could be updated and modified to escape Weber’s
European bias of the nineteenth century. Islam in the modern world could
be examined from the perspective of its impact on social relations (Turner
1974; Eickelman 1981, 269; Salvatore 1997; Stauth 1998).
In this chapter, I consider the Weberian questions from a different
perspective. I ask if these Weberian questions may be matched with what
Muslims have done in an identifiable, discursive tradition in the past and the
present. The Weberian questions may be placed alongside similar questions
that Muslims have asked in kalām (dialectical theology) when it emerged
as a scholarly discipline on the meaning of Islamic beliefs, practices, and
values. How have these Weberian studies framed Muslim identities, and
religious objectives and goals? To which identities of Muslims, and which
aspects of Islam, have they directed our attention?
Kalām emerged as a discipline in response to political disputes among
Muslims, and then later in response to the impact of Hellenistic philosophy
and the expansion of the Islamic Empire into territories previously domi-
nated and occupied by the Sassanian and Byzantine Empires. Thus, one of
the first and persistent questions challenging the Islamic community was
the status of a believer who committed grave sins. Does such a person remain
164 Abdulk ader Tayob

a Muslim? Was a Muslim, thus, definable in relation to his or her works?

The eponymous founder of the Hanafi legal school, Abu Hanifa (d. 148/767)
is reported to have favoured the view that belief and works were distinct,
and that the final judgement should be left to God. This became known as
a murjiʿa position, literally meaning “bringing hope” (in the mercy of God).
It implied that God would forgive a believer on the Day of Judgement, in
spite of his or her misdeeds. Abu Hanifa was opposed to the position that
declared that belief and works (especially grave sins) may not be separated
(Rahman 1979, 85). This was the position taken by the early radical Kharijite
groups who opposed what they regarded as iniquitous rulers that assumed
authority in the Islamic state. Their iniquity rendered them disbelievers, the
Kharijites claimed, and thus unfit to govern. Such political questions were
developed into comprehensive theologies that progressively incorporated
questions of free will, predestination and everything to do with human
agency. These queries may be said to be deliberations and intense debates
on the nature and identity of a Muslim: what makes a Muslim? What makes
a heretic? What distinguished a true Muslim from another?
Another set of questions emerged from thinking about human obligations
in a changing environment. The expansion of political authority outside
Arabia created new conditions, and thus new questions for the early Islamic
state and society. They included questions on what to do with spoils of
war, but also how to manage social relations, trade agreements, and ritual
obligations. In response to these questions, schools (madhāhib) developed
in the important towns such as Medina, Mecca, Damascus, Basra, and
Kufah (Schacht 1959). Al-Shafiʿi (d. 204/820), the eponymous founder of
another important juridical school, attempted to limit the use of independ-
ent reason, and subject all decisions to the Qurʾan and the hadith of the
Prophet Muhammad. In particular, he circumscribed the application of
qiyās (analogy) and ijtihād (juristic reasoning) used by his contemporaries
and predecessors (Al-Shafiʿi 1940, 1961; Calder 1983). Other scholars took
a different stand, proposing that revelation and reason were compatible
with each other. In their view, the opinion (raʾy) of a believer need not only
be controlled by devotion to tradition. It could also be disciplined by the
exercise of reason. Such a view was held by the Muʿtazilites of Iraq, the earli-
est theologians in Islam, who developed an elaborate theology based on the
equivalence of revelation and reason. Many of them held that the exercise
of reason constituted the first duty of a Muslim. The nature of God and his
attributes, the meaning of good and evil, and the obligations of a believer
should and could be developed from revelation on the basis of rational
reflection (Watt 1962, 47). These debates on the merits of texts, traditions,
Dialectical Theology in the Search for Modern Isl am 165

and rationality became the foundation of a discursive tradition on the

fundamental meaning of Islam, and the absolute necessity of key beliefs
that should be adopted by all Muslims. This was the discourse of kalām
that was eventually also shared with Christian and Jewish theologians in
the Middle Ages.
Modern scholars have offered interesting perspectives on the purpose
and objectives of these questions and debates among kalām scholars. Gardet
suggested that kalām was “a defensive apologia, the function of which [was]
firmly to establish religious beliefs by producing proofs, and to cast aside
doubts” (Gardet 1995, 592). Moreover, reason (ʿaql) was used to “purify the
idea of God from all anthropomorphism,” the aim being to “justify it against
the enticements of Greek thought and the attacks of the zanādiqa (free
thinkers)” (Gardet 1995, 592). Kalām, then, was a discourse that defined
Islam (God, values) and Muslims. Hodgson offers a more expansive and
comparative perspective of kalām as a vision of religious experience. Kalām,
he says, rejected the vision of timelessness offered by Platonic philosophy at
the time, and offered a religiosity that embraced the historically significant
events of revelation (Hodgson 1974, 437-442). Martin, more radically, does
not see kalām as an alternative vision of religion, but a practice that stood
in place of one. Whereas Islam meant peace, the opposite (pathos) was war
and violence. The disputation of kalām, according to Martin, took its place
between Islam and pathos: “a powerful mode of discourse for constructing
and maintaining those sectarian and political boundaries that would ideally
have to be overcome for Muslims to realise their eschatological vision of
world order and peace” (Martin 1988, 111). Kalām for Martin, then, was
not itself a spiritual engagement, but an important means of overcoming
obstacles towards one. In the medieval world, schisms and sectarian divi-
sions stood in the way of this vision. Some of the essays in Tim Winter,
ed., The Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology (2008) follow
a similar but more direct analysis. The history and success of kalām was
a long and necessary path to return Muslims to the essential message of
revelation (Mayer 2008; Michot 2008). Notwithstanding the finer points
of detail, it is clear that kalām became a discursive tradition pursuing the
answer to two major questions: “Who is a Muslim?” and “What is Islam?”
Coming from two very distinctive traditions, dialectical theologians and
Weberian scholars asked these overlapping questions. I present a map of
studies on modern Islam, as they documented and analysed the meaning
and role of Islam in modern societies. I identify their unique approaches
to modernity, and also their approach and understanding of culture and
religion. I show that they were progressively applying new ideas in the
166 Abdulk ader Tayob

social sciences to identify Islam and Muslims. At each stage, I analyse this
identification from a kalām perspective.

2 Modern Islam: The Field of Study

I divide the literature into three approaches in terms of their approach to

modernity. Firstly, earlier twentieth-century scholars worked with standard
modernisation theories where Enlightenment values and European social
and political formations were accepted as normative, and in turn confronted
and challenged traditional ideas and societies. In this first framework, Islam
as tradition was bound to disappear in the face of modernity (Lerner 1958).
Later historians like John Voll focused on the encounter between Islam and
the modern West. This second approach was open to the possibility of a
transformed tradition in the modern world, similar to what had happened
in the past between Islam and the Greek intellectual tradition, or Islam and
the Persian Empire. A third group challenged the Weberian conception of
modernity, proposing constructivist approaches to modernities in different
cultural contexts (Taylor 1993; Eisenstadt 2000; Salvatore 2009). In this third
group, we may speak of Islamic modernity or modernities.

2.1 Modernity Confronts Islam: The Impossibility of Islamic

Modernism

Hamilton Gibb, W.C. Smith, Kenneth Cragg, and Gustave von Grunebaum
regarded Islam as a culture and civilisation that reached a high level of
maturity in the past, but was challenged and threatened by the values and
systems of Western modernity. In their work, modernisation was associated
with both Western culture and Western political and economic power.
Islam and Muslims were identified as traditional, the antithesis of modern,
and sometimes even non-modernisable. Some suggested that Muslims could
modernise if they adopted some features of modern Western culture. Others
were less hopeful, and advocated that Muslims ought to fundamentally
redefine Islam for a modern world.
Ignaz Goldziher, William Montgomery Watt, and Kenneth Cragg were
among those aware of the attempts by contemporary Muslims to produce
new interpretations of Islam, and they give us a glimpse of the possibili-
ties available. Goldziher’s book Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law
presents a strong argument for the ability of Islam’s adaptation to new
ideas and institutions. Taking a long historical view, he shows that Islamic
Dialectical Theology in the Search for Modern Isl am 167

theology systematically opposed new ideas but then incorporated them

in its expansive embrace through consensus (ijmāʿ). Historical examples
of these included the celebration of the birthday of the Prophet (mawlid),
dialectical theology, and the cults of saints. In modern times, he suggested,
the same process was at work. Muslims, for example, at f irst resisted
government bonds and printing presses, but then accepted them through
consensus (ijmāʿ). Goldziher does not forget to remind his readers, though,
that there was a strong and persistent tendency to resist change in Islam.
This tendency was symbolised most clearly by the Hanbali school of law and
its followers who regularly invoked a return to the example of the Prophet
(Goldziher 1981). Such a tendency committed Muslims to the past, and thus
posed an obstacle to their modernisation.
Watt and Cragg accepted the main outline of Goldziher’s model, but
pointed to some new approaches developed by Muslims. While Goldziher
referred to the mechanism of consensus (ijmāʿ) that almost imperceptibly
accommodated Muslims to new developments, they pointed to attempts to
create indigenous Islamic modernisms. Watt admired Iqbal for his imagina-
tive approach, but for which “the time was not ripe for further theological
speculation” (Watt 1962, 162). Cragg also reviewed a large number of Muslim
modernists grappling with modernity and modernisation – presenting
a synopsis of developments since the nineteenth century. In conclusion,
though, he suggested that Muslims might follow the example of Christianity
in responding to the philosophical challenge of modernity. As Christians
had adopted the cross as a key symbol, Muslims may similarly focus on the
compassionate God in the Qurʾan (Cragg 1967, 193).
Von Grunebaum and Gibb were even less hopeful for an Islamic moder-
nity than Goldziher, Watt, and Cragg. Von Grunebaum certainly recognised
Islam’s adaptation to new contexts, but argued that the ideal itself was a
problem. For Von Grunebaum, it was an immutable ideal that fixed the
gaze of Muslims on the past (Von Grunebaum 1962, 209). Gibb presented
a history of Islam as a pendulum swing between transcendentalism and
immanentism. At times, Muslims focused on God as transcendent, and
they developed attitudes, values, and practices accordingly. At other times,
God as immanent produced tendencies towards inwardness and personal
orientations. In the modern period, transcendent Islam was dominant and,
according to Gibb, incompatible with the immanentist mood of modernity
(Gibb 1947, ch. 2). Gibb seemed to give Islam the benefit of the doubt, but
his general prognosis was sombre, and it emerged clearly in three essays
published in 1970 and 1971 on the “Heritage of Islam in the Modern World.”
In these essays, Gibb focused on the modern nation-state as the greatest
168 Abdulk ader Tayob

challenge to Islam. The latter was held together, according to Gibb, by a

“sense of community and community values [that] always have been the
strongest motive force in the internal history of Islam.” This sense of com-
munity, Watt went on, was “largely responsible for the remarkable degree
of success which it achieved … as a socio-religious system” (Gibb 1970a, 4).
However, it was now challenged by the nation-state and nationalism, against
which it had no real response. All the achievements of the past were helpless
against the tide of nationalism (Gibb 1970a, b, 1971).
These studies did not all explicitly follow Max Weber. They hardly ever
presented a detailed or general study of the ethics, economics, and values of
Muslims during this period. However, the studies were directly concerned
with Islam’s contribution to the development of modern societies. There was
some hope for modern Islam if Muslims maintained a judicious adaptation
of the legacy, against the example of the Prophet. Alternatively, they could
re-examine the sources to find something valuable, akin to the history of
modern Christianity (Cragg and Watt). The sub-text is a clear sense of the
difficulty or impossibility of Islam’s experience in the modern world.
These reflections and propositions of modern Islam take on an interesting
meaning from the perspective of kalām. Two aspects of the kalām question
“What is Islam?” are worth noting. Islam was located within a dominant
binary logic of the time. In this view, Islam was clearly part of tradition, as
opposed to the modernity of the West. Most of the scholars examined, in
fact, do not define modernity or tradition very explicitly. They work with the
presumption of an obvious modernity represented by Europe. Modernity
implied change, progressive development, and the status quo. Tradition
was its opposite, and it was associated with negative qualities. Islam was
clearly defined as traditional. Whereas Muslims previously had answered
this question by presenting a list of duties or beliefs, or argued the rationality
of God’s essences and attributes, these studies place Islam in the world of
tradition. This binary opposition added a new dimension to the meaning of
Islam. Henceforth, questions pertaining to Islam were not limited to reason,
justification, and belief, but to its modern or tradition-like characteristics.
One direct consequence of this reflection on the modernisation of Islam
was the splitting of Islam between its ideal and reality. From Goldziher to
Gibb, we were reminded that Islam could be separated between its ideal
and reality. Islam was more clearly identified with its ideal in the past, best
represented by the community of Muhammad. This perspective reflects the
approach of Muslim intellectuals in the nineteenth century who claimed
to go back to the pious ancestors (al-salaf ), reflecting a familiar historical
reference to the past (Moosa and Tareen 2012). They turned away from the
Dialectical Theology in the Search for Modern Isl am 169

existing “traditions” of Islam to the original model of Islam. In the perspec-

tive of these studies, however, the future of a modernised Islam did not lie
with this ideal. Muslims would and should adopt contemporary traditions
and turn away from this ideal. Historical Islam’s redeeming feature had
been its tendency to adapt to local circumstances, away from this fixed,
complete, and unchangeable ideal (Von Grunebaum). For Goldziher, also,
modernist Islam might be successful if it was not too faithful to the ideals of
the past. For modernist Islam, thus, the ideal past should be an anti-vision.
Unlike European modernity, which found its visions in Greece, Muslims
will modernise by adopting and adapting Western models. The origin of
Islam, unlike Athens, did not offer a recipe for modernisation.
The literature on Islam and modernity divided Muslims into modernists
and traditionalists. Religious scholars are repeatedly identified as those
who most resist change, while modernisers receive the most attention as
they represent a promising future. In general, though, the binary division of
modernists and traditionalists replaces the sectarian divisions of Islam. In
the literature, they constitute a new sectarianism for Islam in the modern
world.

2.2 Islam Meets Modernity: Modern Islams

Voll, Hoebink, and Lapidus offered a very different approach to Islam and
modernity (Voll 1982; Hoebink 1998; Lapidus 1997). They did not see a one-
sided meeting of Islam and modernity, leading to an inevitable end. They
focused on a productive encounter, producing multiple responses. Draw-
ing on the longer durée of Islamic history, they also compared the Islamic
encounter of modernity with early experiences. These earlier encounters
did not lead to the destruction of Islam, but were, in fact, productive and
fertile for dynamic change.
Voll’s study, first published in 1982, presented a general overview of Islam
and its encounters. For Voll, there was a stable core around which Muslims
responded to modernity and similar challenges in the past. For Voll, “Islam
is not just religion, it is a total way of life” and “to be a Muslim is not simply a
matter of individual belief; it means participating in the effort to implement
God’s will on earth” (Voll 1982, 4, 8). It is this vision that faced modernity,
as it had faced earlier challenges. The first challenge, according to Voll, was
the death of the Prophet, who had to be replaced with someone to lead the
community. This was followed by the building of an empire, new cultural
and intellectual encounters with Hellenism, and challenging political and
social conditions (Voll 1982, 17-21). In each case, Muslims adapted and
170 Abdulk ader Tayob

developed the original vision of Islam as a “way of life.” In the first, for
example, Muslims were preoccupied with identifying the kind of leaders
that should replace the Prophet. Out of this experience emerged new ideas
of charismatic succession (Shiʿite imams, Sufi teachers) and communal
boundaries and instruments (salaf, jamāʿa, ijmāʿ). Such developments grew
out of the original vision of Islam meeting new conditions. Voll’s framework
offers a constantly changing and developing vision of Islam as a “way of life.”
The other significant aspect of Voll’s study is his identification of Muslims
in these encounters. He divided Muslims in terms of their response to these
encounters: “the pragmatic adapters, the conservatives, the fundamental-
ists, and those who emphasize personal charisma” (Voll 1982, 12). Voll called
these “basic styles” and “forms of Islam.” Pragmatic adaptors were those
who were willing to reinterpret the original message, finding elements
that had not been seen there before. On the other extreme, fundamental-
ists resisted change and put up a defence for a primordial Islamic way of
life. Conservatives were in the majority, who adapted more slowly and
often imperceptibly. Those who emphasised personal charisma focused on
inspired and guided individuals who were regarded as the carriers of the
“way of life” in their persons.
According to Voll, modernity was a complex set of changes and institu-
tions that dominated the world over the last few centuries. It included
capitalism, the modern state, and general Western influences on a global
scale. Muslims were divided in their responses to these developments, and
they drew on the above-mentioned styles of action. Voll does not define
modern Islam any further than pointing to the diversity of responses. The
vision of “implementing the will of God” was kept alive, in different forms
by diverse groups.
Michel Hoebink also adopted the framework of an encounter, but was
more specific on the cultural challenge of modernity posed to Islam and
Muslims. Working with the hermeneutical strategies of contemporary Arab
thinkers, he identified the face of modernity as secularisation according to
Western models, and the nature of the modern state. These were the key
issues that Arab thinkers were grappling with in their works. Emerging from
the Enlightenment, modernity was closely associated with secularism, the
modern state, and a generally a-religious or anti-religious view of life. The
hermeneutics of Islam was founded on diametrically opposed foundations,
and Arab thinkers were finding a way to resolve or resist such changes.
Hoebink, however, did not regard Western modernity as unique and distinc-
tive, and did not think that this was the first hermeneutical challenge
faced by Muslims. Modernisation, according to Hoebink, was “a cultural
Dialectical Theology in the Search for Modern Isl am 171

adaptation to social change – a process which occurs continuously and in

all cultures” (Hoebink 1998, 30). In this perspective, Muslims encountered
“modernisation” in the past. In response to such challenges, Muslims dif-
fered among themselves on their willingness to interpret the essential
message of the Qurʾan: modernists adopted continuous interpretation;
fundamentalists opposed interpretation in principle; while conservatives
supported change to a limited extent. With contemporary modernity, a
similar process was under way. Muslims in the modern context were finding
appropriate responses to the challenges of secularism and the modern state.
Both Voll and Hoebink offered an approach that did not lead to the
capitulation of Islam to modernisation. The encounter between Islam
and modernity was not as inevitable as it seemed to someone like Von
Grunebaum or Gibb. They did not assume the superiority of the modern
West, and certainly did not portray the dire consequences for a tradition
that failed to respond adequately to these challenges. Nevertheless, mo-
dernity challenged the vision of Islam (Voll) or the meaning of its sacred
text (Hoebink). Muslims responded to these challenges as they had done in
the past. Modernity, in this framework, was domesticated to Islam’s longer
history. It was merely the latest of the challenges that first began with the
death of the Prophet Muhammad. The resources of history were employed
to respond to modernity.
Voll and Hoebink stress different aspects of modernity, elucidating differ-
ent aspects of modern Islam. Focusing on general historical changes brought
along by capitalism and globalisation, Voll focuses on how the community
(umma) met these challenges. Unlike Gibb, who saw only the threat of
nationalism to the umma, Voll stressed that Muslims were producing new
ways of thinking of the original vision (“implementing the will of God
on earth”). Hoebink focused on the threat of secularisation to Islam, and
similarly showed how Muslims responded with hermeneutical inventions.
Modern Islam, according to Hoebink, was an intense grappling with the
production of or resistance to a new hermeneutic.
Voll and Hoebink offered new answers to the kalām question “What is Is-
lam?” Islam was a unified symbol, more clearly specified. For Voll, Islam was
a community seeking to implement the Will of God on earth. For Hoebink,
Islam represented a hermeneutical engagement with revelation. This speci-
ficity relating to “a vision” or “a hermeneutic” replaced a general reference to
Islam in the work of their predecessors as a grand civilisation or a religion.
From both Voll and Hoebink, however, the vision and the hermeneutic were
in a state of continuous change, periodically adapting and modernising
themselves. In fact, Muslims were by definition re-inventing the vision
172 Abdulk ader Tayob

and hermeneutic in history. Islam re-invented itself as a new hermeneutic

(Hoebink) or a new vision of implementing the will of God (Voll). “What is
Islam?” gained more specificity, but it was by definition changing.
The frameworks proposed by Voll and Hoebink also offered new answers
to the question “Who is a Muslim?” Voll and Hoebink split the dichotomous
modernist-traditionalist binary pair, and pointed to multiple responses of
Muslims. In response to change, Muslims were conservatives, traditional-
ists, adaptationists and focused on personal models. Voll and Hoebink
suggested new foundations for modern Muslim identities. Moreover, all
such responses were modern by definition. Adaptationists, conservatives,
and fundamentalists were constituted in their encounter with modernity.
They were all modern, even if their responses appeared to be tradition-like.
A Muslim was still identified through the encounter, but her identity had
been fully absorbed into modernity.

2.3 Constructing Islamic Modernities

More recent reflections have developed Voll and Hoebink’s approaches.

Drawing on a postcolonial mood that emphasised multiple and constructed
modernities, they have asked how Muslims produced modernity or moder-
nities. They have taken one further step from modernity as defined and
normalised by the West, whilst still engaged with it. Richard Martin and
Armando Salvatore provide two contrasting approaches to this engagement.
Martin worked with the implications of modern hermeneutics on the study
of Islam. Salvatore turned to the “Axial Age” of Jaspers, predating both Islam
and the modern West, to focus on how Muslims created discourses. If Voll
and Hoebink’s work can be seen as turning around Muslim responses to
challenges, Martin and Salvatore worked with Muslim engagements. The
difference between the two lies in the elevation of Muslims as agents, and
the disappearance of the West as principal actor.
Richard Martin has promoted the study of Islam within the compara-
tive study of religions. In two key essays, he put forwards a proposal for
the study of Islam in modern contexts that elucidates his model (Martin
1982, 1984). He built his proposal on the work of the anthropologist Clifford
Geertz who defined religion as a system of symbols that negotiated the
gap that inevitably arose between a world view and ethos. World view was
a society and community’s conceptual map that was passed down over
time, and ethos represented the particular historical conditions in which
world view was actualised. Symbols in general, and religious symbols in
particular, created a semblance of reality through synthesising “a people’s
Dialectical Theology in the Search for Modern Isl am 173

ethos … and their world view” (Geertz 1966, 3). Martin suggested that this
symbolic system from anthropology could be applied to the comparative
study of religions. Geertz himself was not overly concerned with the history
of the Islamic cultural system in general. He was more focused on the
difference between cultural systems in Morocco and Indonesia. For Martin,
the historical legacy of Islam could not be ignored in the study of Islam in
context. The historical legacy of texts, theologies, and rituals was inherited
through a variety of formal and informal ways, and it impacted upon local
contexts. In the Geertzian model, the world view of Muslims was the sum
total of Islam inherited over time. This was the ideal, the moral vision and
the tool of interpretation that were identified respectively by Goldziher,
Voll, and Hoebink, among others. Martin asked scholars of Islam to pay
attention to how this world view was used, appropriated, and translated
in modern local contexts.
Martin went one step further, and reminded his readers that Husserl and
Heidegger offered two ways of reading the legacy of Islam. With Husserl,
scholars of Islam retrieved the legacy as a model and world view with suf-
ficient bracketing and empathy. Geertz followed this line of interpretation.
However, with Heidegger, scholars might also reproduce the legacy in every
new reading. Whether one preferred Husserl or Heidegger, the inherited
world view was read and re-read in modern contexts. Martin asked that
scholars of Islam take into consideration these hermeneutical strategies of
reading an inherited world view. Working with the example of the Qurʾan,
he argued that the ritual could be read as an attempt to connect Qurʾan
recitation to its performance, exegesis, and meaning to the past, the present,
and the future. This history impacted upon a particular reading in a new
context – negotiating between the past and the present. In this case, Martin
also suggested that reading the Qurʾan in new contexts was a re-enactment
of the Qurʾan recited first by the Prophet Muhammad in the presence
of Gabriel (Martin 1982, 384). Martin was offering a phenomenological
perspective of a modern recitation of the Qurʾan, one that mirrored the
first recitation between Muhammad and Gabriel. Modern Islam, then,
would be a re-construction of primordial experiences of Prophetic times.
Martin was asking scholars of Islam to recognise this phenomenology. It
seems that Martin was not specifically asking academic colleagues to pay
attention to how modern Muslims were reading this inherited world view
from texts and practices as hermeneutical exercises. He was focused on the
theoretical models available to academic scholarship.
Martin did not particularly focus on the uniqueness of modernity. He
assumed a radical alterity of each experience, however, and his application
174 Abdulk ader Tayob

of Geertz’s model suggests a construction of an Islamic experience in the

modern world. Following different approaches and different fields, other
scholars have traced the production of modern Islam in similar ways. Aziz
al-Azmeh’s widely read book, Islams and Modernities, identifies Muslim
responses to modernity as a form of Romanticism (Al-Azmeh 1993, ch. 2).
Examining Islamist criticism of the West, Euben argues that they were
producing critiques of modernity that should be compared with similar
Western critiques (Euben 1997). Working with political formations, Schulze
recognised familiar political ideologies in Arab societies since the nine-
teenth century, pointing to the modernity of these formations (Schulze
2000).
Salvatore has taken a very different approach to Islamic modernity, one
that shies away from the phenomenological direction of Martin’s work, and
also the critical readings of others that I have mentioned above. Working
with a structural approach to modernity, he has followed two distinctive
but related paths. In the first, he worked with the ideas of Max Weber and
pushed the limits of his theoretical application to the history of Islam. In
the second, he has worked with Dale Eickelman on the idea of the public
sphere. Both converge around the discursive construction of alternative
Islamic modernities. With regard to the first, Salvatore joined other scholars
of Islam who proposed an updated Weberian approach, one that expunged
the latter’s limited or prejudicial understanding of Islam. According to
Salvatore, Weber offered a dynamic approach to culture and religion, within
which the history of modern Islam may be reconstructed. Salvatore engages
in a rich theoretical engagement with Weber, showing how an Islamic
modernity may be imagined. He begins, however, with Jasper’s theory of
the “Axial Age” that began 5,000 years earlier. The key transformative ideas
of the “Axial Age” were the absolute separation between the human and
divine, and the pursuit of happiness (salvation) in an otherworldly imagined
realm. Salvatore argued for an Islamic engagement with these foundational
ideas, producing two distinctive features for society. In theology, philoso-
phy, and mysticism, he suggested, the individual believer and his or her
engagement with salvation was placed above everything else. Moreover,
the Islamic legacy was marked by diversity and the pursuit of consensus
through discourse. Salvatore focuses on the history of Islam as a continuing
contribution to deep cultural changes inaugurated before Muhammad
(Salvatore 2009). He appeals to scholars to recognise Islam’s engagement
with these ideas. He sees modern Islam, in turn, as a continuing engagement
with the “Axial” ideas within new contexts and new possibilities. Muslims
were producing a unique modernity with these ideas, as Europe too had
Dialectical Theology in the Search for Modern Isl am 175

done. Both were continuing engagements with key ideas inaugurated in

the “Axial Age.”
With specific respect to the modern period, Salvatore worked closely
with Dale Eickelman to apply the theory of Jürgen Habermas for Islam in
the public sphere. They brought a number of scholars together to reflect
and write on what they call “public Islam” and “Muslim publics.” Public
Islam referred to

highly diverse invocations of Islam as ideas and practices that religious

scholars, self-ascribed religious authorities, secular intellectuals, Sufi
orders, mothers, students, workers, engineers, and many others make
to civic debate and public life. In this “public” capacity, “Islam” makes a
difference in configuring the politics and social life of large parts of the
globe, and not just for self-ascribed religious authorities. (Salvatore and
Eickelman 2004b, xii)

“Public Islam” referred to articulations on Islam within public spaces.

These voices and gestures produced new possibilities of both agreement
and disagreement, but most importantly contributed to the production
and maintenance of discursive worlds (Salvatore and Eickelman 2004a,
16). The net effect of “public Islam” was the production of “Muslim publics,”
which by definition were discursive spaces within cities, regions, nations,
and the global cyber-world. In any one place and time, multiple publics
were deliberating on notions of the common good on various issues. Two
features stand out in the production, as reflected in the work of Salvatore,
Eickelman, and their collaborators. The role of new media was crucial,
beginning with print and continuing in the era of virtual worlds. Modern
media made religious texts more widely available, provided access to
present one’s views, and increased the possibility of sharing such ideas
with others across space. Secondly, non-specialists joined in the production
of “public Islam” and the constitution of “Muslim publics.” Participation
in “public Islam” was not limited to those who studied Islamic sciences
over many years. Anyone with access to media could and did participate
in the production. Participation in “Muslim publics” was not even limited
to Muslims. In an early book, Salvatore had suggested how an open and
cumulative discursive engagement between Arab and European observers
and social scientists had produced “political Islam” for the public sphere
(Salvatore 1997). Salvatore was suggesting that modern technology pro-
vided another step in the path of Islam’s engagement with “Axial” values.
Its earlier focus on the individual believer was further consolidated by
176 Abdulk ader Tayob

technology’s ability to extend access to each and every participant in the

discourse.
Taking the two lines of argument together, we can see Salvatore drawing
on the theory of the “Axial Age” to locate the intellectual history of Islam. He
then employed the idea of the public sphere to indicate how modern Islam
was being produced as publics. New political structures and technologi-
cal innovations were presenting opportunities for the elaboration of this
longue durée of Islamic engagement. Modern Islam was thus presented as
an alternative modernity, the modernisation of Europe being one particular
instance of this engagement.
In different ways, Martin and Salvatore approached modern Islam as a
language game in the Wittgensteinian sense of the term. Martin developed
Geertz’s approach for a religious tradition with a long history, with a focus
on the role of symbols. His model suggested that Muslims worked with
symbols, and modern experiences should be appreciated for this symbolic
work. Similarly, Salvatore proposed that Islam was a discursive tradition
that engaged with “Axial” values, and was now re-imagining those values
in an age with different experiences and technological possibilities. For
both Martin and Salvatore, one aspect of the question “What is Islam?” was
answered: Islam is a language. It is a specific application of the proposal by
Talal Asad to regard Islam as a discursive system. Asad had been critical of
Geertz and others who regarded Islam as a closed and distinctive cultural
system, and argued for a discourse that managed and produced selves,
communities, and values (Asad 1986). With Islam as language and discourse,
Martin and Salvatore put Muslims at the centre of modern Islam. Muslims
read and wrote Islam.
While the meaning of Islam was clearly identified as language, it lost
any specific substance, however. By definition, Islam was what its language
participants made it to be. Martin reminded us about the complexities of
reading a language and texts that others have produced. The hermeneutical
reflections of Husserl and Heidegger made it hazardous to guess what Islam
was at any one particular time. In the essays studied, Martin’s approach
focused on the re-enactment of the Prophetic period that gave modern Islam
a focus. He was following a Husserlian approach to the phenomenology of
recitation. However, his general model did not prevent a scholar of Islam
from taking a Heideggerian approach to reading the legacy of Islam. Modern
Islam potentially becomes a hermeneutical exercise that does not simply
repeat the approaches of the past (as Hoebink seems to suggest). Salvatore’s
discursive approach was equally centrifugal around core “Axial” values. The
public sphere prepared opportunities for multiple values and discourses that
Dialectical Theology in the Search for Modern Isl am 177

were not bound and limited to the legacy of Islam. No longer controlled by
religious leaders or even by Muslims, the discourse of Islam was thrown
wide open. In both Martin and Salvatore, “What is Islam?” lost its centre
in Islam, as it revolved around the meaning of Islam that each participant
brought to the language and discourse at play.
No special group of Muslims or even believers were privileged in these
models of engaging in the language of modern Islam. The question “Who is
a Muslim?” was not directly connected with modernity or modernisation.
Yet, each participant was engaged personally and directly in constructing
a modern religious experience. The modernists, the traditionalists, and
the groups in between have been dropped in the models. Both Martin and
Salvatore want to pay attention to the engaged participant. The public
sphere dimension of “public Islam” and “Muslim publics” does not even limit
the engagement to Muslims. “Who is a Muslim?” has lost any specificity
apart from a presumed interest or experience.

3 Discussion and Conclusion

Studies on modern Islam have offered fascinating insights into what has
become of Islam in the modern world. I have tracked their journey that
began with a search for an Islamic modernism, to the pursuit of personal
engagements in discourse. At each stage, new perspectives were offered
on questions that were first formulated by Max Weber about the history
of religious traditions. The binary opposition of modernity and tradition
was used by earlier twentieth-century scholars, but then progressively
replaced with more sophisticated and nuanced approaches to change and
modernisation. Similarly, earlier Western assumptions of modernity were
moved from the centre to the periphery, and Islam and Western modernity
were placed in a rubric that went beyond them both. The literature, from
one perspective, may be seen as a progressive grappling with modernity
and its meaning in relation to Islam. And this chapter has shown how more
nuanced models of modernity were used implicitly and explicitly to define
and identify Islam in the modern world.
My main purpose, however, has been to put these Weberian reflections
under the framework of kalām questions. From the perspective of kalām,
what was the search for modern Islam telling us about the identity of Muslims
(“Who is a Muslim?”) and the meaning of Islam (“What is Islam?”)? I propose
that two main preoccupations are present in the literature. The first was
a form of justification that behoves any good theological discourse. While
178 Abdulk ader Tayob

earlier kalām was concerned with justifying revelation against reason, the
study of modern Islam could not escape justification against modernity.
Secondly, the study of modern Islam has been a search for representation
that has become progressively more difficult. The representation of Islam
suffered the fate of all representations in the social sciences and humani-
ties in the twentieth century. For Islam in the modern world, the story of
representation has been a progressive and perpetual postponement of being
Muslim, and of Islam itself.
The justificatory preoccupation of the literature of modern Islam is most
clearly evident among the first group of scholars mentioned above. From
Goldziher to Gibb, modern Islam was justified against the successes and
achievements of modern, Western Europe. As in the past, when Muslims
found a rational basis for belief, scholars of modern Islam were examining
the possibility of an Islamic theology or interpretation of modernity that
would be similar or compatible with modern Europe. Most invariably found
that Muslims, even modernist Muslims, failed in this endeavour. There were,
however, some who believed that a truly modernist Islam was available and
within reach. As Muslims had produced arguments for the rational basis of
Islamic beliefs and values in the past, a similar exercise might be possible
for Islam in the modern world.
This explicit justification of modern Islam was avoided by those who used
different models of modernity and of religion/culture. Voll and Hoebink
took the first step to relativise Western modernity. From the perspective
of Muslim responses, they referred to other “modernities” in the past that
had prepared Muslims for the present. Salvatore took a bigger step, as he
proposed an alternative Weberian model for Islam and Europe that reached
into the “Axial Age.” These attempts to move beyond the shadow of the West
reflected a change in world politics, and also a change in social sciences and
the humanities. Europe and the West were no longer the models against
which developments were measured in the rest of the world. And these
studies in modern Islam were clearly successful in their endeavour to show
this new mood. However, Western experience was not completely displaced.
Voll and Hoebink avoided an obvious comparison between the West and
modern Islam, but Western experience and history loomed large against
which Muslims responded. Salvatore, too, did not go beyond the impact of
the West as a parallel model that preceded the history of modern Islam.
Modern Muslims as such were responding to major changes and challenges
emanating from the West. There is more than a hint of justification that
continued to pervade the discourse. Modern Islam, as pursued in the litera-
ture, was by definition tied to the coat-tails of a Western experience. Just as
Dialectical Theology in the Search for Modern Isl am 179

reason could not be shrugged off in kalām in the past, the West cannot be
ignored or avoided in the definition of modern Islam and modern Muslims.
If the search for justification was clearly uneasy, another preoccupation
was more widely shared. The search for modern Islam was a quest or desire
to find the most adequate representation of Islam in the modern world. This
was the self-evident task of scholars of Islam such as historians, philologists,
and social scientists. From a kalām perspective, however, this preoccupation
takes on some revealing dimensions. The quest began with great clarity,
but concluded with an almost total obliteration of Islam and Muslims. The
answers to “What is Islam?” and “Who are Muslims?” became progressively
impossible.
For those working with modernity as a normative model of the West,
Islam was represented as tradition. In this perspective, Muslims were
classified according to their willingness and readiness to modernise. For
those who placed an emphasis on Muslims responding to the challenges
of modernity, however, the definition of Islam became opaque. Islam was
a perpetual adaptation to successive challenges that had first emerged
with the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Modernity was only the latest
challenge to which Muslims were responding, adapting, and resisting.
They adopted different styles of action (Voll) or hermeneutical strategies
(Hoebink). The third group of scholars, applying a constructive perspective
to modernity, also contributed to this opaqueness. As language, text, and
discourse, Islam lost any specific meaning with regard to belief, ritual,
or value. Islam had been emptied of all contents. What started as a clear
definition of Islam in the binary logic of modernity and tradition ended with
elimination of any recognisable feature, ritual, or practice. Focus shifted
from the “thingness” of Islam, to responses and engagements.
Similarly, the representations of Muslim identities (“Who is a Muslim?”)
ended the same way. Goldziher and others replaced the earlier sectarian
divisions among Muslims, and between Muslims and other religious groups,
with identities determined by Western modernity. In this perspective, mod-
ernists and traditionalists replaced Sunnis, Shiʿis, Alawis, apostates, and
heretics. Voll and Hoebink broke the stranglehold of the binary logic, and
focused on multiple responses to modernity. Where Muslims were previ-
ously divided between modernists and traditionalists, they were henceforth
respondents, and all modernists. They were perpetually modern and always
responding to challenges. The Muslim had lost his and her centre of identity.
Salvatore turned to the “Axial Age” to search for an Islamic engagement
that ran parallel to the West’s engagement with the same tradition. Such
a parallel modernity defined a particular Muslim and Islamic engagement
180 Abdulk ader Tayob

in public spheres. Modern technology made it possible for an increasing

number of individuals to participate in these discourses (Salvatore). The
Muslim public became invocations of Islam. The Muslim was emptied of
fundamental notions of modernity, but also of any tangible belief and of
action. Identity moved from the person to the “invocations of Islam” in
the public sphere. In Salvatore’s model, the Muslim also disappeared. Like
Islam, the meaning of being a Muslim also lost any tangible reference.
Muslims were defined by their engaging and reading discourses and texts
respectively. The centre had fallen through.
Together with justification, then, representation occupied a central role
in the quest to identify modern Islam. Islam and Muslims had been placed
in the twilight shadow of Western modernity. The shadow was lifted, but
enough to mark an outline. More critically, as the quest for representation
had come under the challenge of Foucault in general, and Edward Said on
the study of Islam in particular (Foucault 1980; Said 1995), representation
became impossible. The meaning of Islam and Muslims became responses
and engagements around activities and beliefs. From the perspective of
kalām, such “representations” emptied Islam and Muslims of any clear
and tangible centre. There was no belief, or ritual, or narrative that held
Islam or Muslims together. The meaning of Islam, and of being Muslim,
dissolved from any specific belief, act, or value. All was language, deferred
progressively and perpetually. The meaning of modern Islam and Muslims
were subject to the fate of all postmodernist definitions of terms.

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 “Classical” Islamic Legal Theory as
Ideology
Nasr Abu Zayd’s Study of al-Shafiʿi’s al-Risala

Muhammad Khalid Masud

1 Introduction

Joseph Schacht opened his classical work on Islamic law in 1950 with the
following statement:

The classical theory of Muhammadan law, as developed by the Mu-

hammadan jurisprudents, traces the whole of the legal system to four
principles or sources: the Koran, the sunna of the Prophet, that is, his
model behaviour, the consensus of the orthodox community, and the
method of analogy. The essentials of this theory were created by Shāfi‘ī
… [H]e carried it to a degree of competence and mastery which had not
been achieved before and was hardly equalled and never surpassed after
him. (Schacht 1959, 1)

Obviously, classical theory to Schacht meant Muhammad b. Idris al-Shafiʿi’s

(d. 820) theory about the system of four sources, due to his basic interest in
the history of legal hadith. He considered it classical, apparently, because
to him this theory is unequalled and unsurpassable in mastery and compe-
tence. Before exploring whether the central point in al-Shafiʿi’s theory was
defining the four sources, let me first consider the significance of Schacht’s
characterisation of al-Shafiʿi’s theory as “classical.” It is pertinent to note
that the term “classical” generally refers to Greek and Roman traditions
alluding with admiration to perfection, completeness, and beauty in these
cultures. Lately, it has also been used to distinguish between modern and
ancient cultures and civilisations; antiquity is not necessarily used in a
negative sense. However, one is not sure whether Schacht uses the term in
the sense of admiration, because in an article about Islamic law written
almost within a decade of the book cited above, he employed the term “clas-
sicism” as a synonym for fossilisation, decline, and immobility (Schacht 1957,
141). Furthermore, with reference to Islamic law, the attribute “classical” in
modern settings may also mean that it is not adaptable to modern needs
184 Muhammad Khalid Masud

because in this theory Islamic law is religious and sacred in its source. This
perception of classical was probably born in the wake of colonial modernism
that defined non-Western cultures, especially legal traditions, in terms of
decadence.1 Those cultures were declining and could not be reformed; they
could only be replaced with modern and more advanced legal systems.
Ironically, this approach was more agreeable to Muslim conservatives
who romanticised Islamic law as perfect and ideal and hence not in need
of reform. Western discourse generally ignored or did not value the voices
of reformist Muslims who were critical of the conservative narrative of
Islamic law and argued that Islamic law as such is not a revealed law but
changeable as a human product and adaptable to the needs of time. Most
Western scholarship regarded these voices as defensive and apologetic
(Masud and Salvatore 2009, 36-56).
The second significance of Schacht’s statement is the pivotal place that
he gave to theory, preferring it to substantive law, which he considered
“practice.” Even though substantive Islamic law attracted the attention
of Western scholars first and was the topic of their studies in numerous
volumes, their observations about the nature and history of Islamic law
were later dismissed as relating to mere “practice” in their studies of Islamic
legal theory, especially on al-Shafiʿi, who was often regarded as the master
architect of classical Islamic legal theory.
The crucial point of reference in the studies of Islamic legal theories
has been al-Shafiʿi’s epistle. Arguably the first treatise that defined the
Qurʾan as the primary text, al-Risala links other sources to this revealed
book. Studies on the history, nature, and adaptability of Islamic law have
largely relied on this epistle. Since then an increasing number of scholars
have offered more critical studies of Islamic legal theory, underscoring the
need for further explorations into the subject.
The third significance of Schacht’s statement is that it continues to pro-
vide a framework for studies on Islamic law. Recent studies are challenging
Schacht’s conclusions but continue to analyse al-Shafiʿi’s contribution from
the perspective of four sources.2 Bernard Weiss’ “Alta Discussion” with
contemporary experts on Islamic jurisprudence in his recent publication
on Islamic legal theory underlines Schacht’s continuing influence on the
framework of inquiry (Weiss 2002, 385-429). Joseph Lowry suggests that
al-Shafiʿi’s al-Risala deserves to be studied “with a wider lens, to do justice to
its aspiration to provide a general account of Islamic law, in which Prophetic

1 For an analysis of classical Western scholarship on this point, see Masud (1995, 1-26).
2 See for instance, Hallaq (1993) and Powers (2010).
“Cl assical” Isl amic Legal Theory as Ideology 185

authority is only one element” (Lowry 2007, 11). Yet he does not feel the need
to challenge Schacht’s conclusion about al-Shafiʿi’s place in the evolution of a
concept of prophetic authority. This is probably because al-Shafiʿi’s al-Risala
is still considered essentially a work on Islamic legal theory. Some Muslim
scholars have suggested different approaches to studying this epistle – rhe-
torically, hermeneutically, and historically. Due to a lack of communication
between different academic communities in Islamic studies, particularly
between Western and Arab scholarship, other perspectives on al-Shafiʿi’s
works have not attracted due attention.
Commenting on Lowry’s scholarly study of al-Shafiʿi’s epistle (Lowry
2007), Ahmed el Shamsy observes a widening gap between Arab and West-
ern scholarship. Despite the fact that Lowry takes note of six studies on the
epistle in Arabic, he does not include them in his discussion (El Shamsy
2008). El Shamsy is also disappointed about the absence of Nasr Abu Zayd’s
“highly intelligent study” of al-Shafiʿi’s al-Risala (Al-Imam al-Shafiʿi wa taʾsis
al-idiyilojiyya al-wasatiyya) in Lowry’s analysis of this epistle (Abu Zayd
1992, henceforth Taʾsis3). It is particularly significant that Lowry mentions
Abu Zayd’s study of al-Risala merely in a footnote and in connection with
the four-source theory. 4 El Shamsy’s remarks about the neglect of Arabic
literature on the subject deserve serious attention in order to understand
the broader scope of al-Shafiʿi’s epistle.
Nasr Abu Zayd studied al-Risala from the perspective of discourse
analysis, as he was more interested in the hermeneutical issues of “religious
discourse” and “textual authority” than in the problem of the “four sources.”
The present essay is a focused study of Abu Zayd’s monograph on al-Shafiʿi’s
al-Risala.

2 Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (1943-2010)

Naṣr Abū Zayd was an Egyptian Islamic scholar and an expert on Qurʾanic
hermeneutics. He is well-known for his two books that became controver-
sial: his 1992 Al-Imam al-Shafiʿi wa taʾsis al-idiyilojiyya al-wasatiyya (Imam
al-Shafiʿi and the foundation of the ideology of synthesis) and his 1995 Naqd

3 I used the second edition which was revised by the author and published by Madbuli in
1996. The first edition was published in 1992; other authors usually refer to this specific edition.
Henceforth, Taʾsis in the text of my essay refers to the 1996 edition.
4 Lowry (2002) mentions Abu Zayd’s work in a footnote (pp. 26-27, n14) but only as a “sample
of modern scholars who have expressly followed the four-sources theory.”
186 Muhammad Khalid Masud

al-khitab al-dini (Critique of religious discourse). These books challenged the

mainstream Muslim views on al-Shafiʿi, uṣūl al-fiqh and Islamic tradition,
and stirred the controversy that subsequently led to his exile.
Born in a village near Ṭanṭā, Abu Zayd came to Cairo and joined Cairo
University in 1968. He submitted his master’s thesis on Metaphor in the
Qurʾan: A Study of the Muʿtazila in 1973. He completed his PhD dissertation
on A Study of the Exegesis of the Qurʾan in Ibn ʿArabī and joined the faculty of
the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at Cairo University as an
assistant professor in 1982. He was promoted to associate professor in 1987.5
In 1992 his application for promotion to the position of full professor
was refused. One of the committee members accused Abu Zayd of “clear
affronts to the Islamic faith,” and opposed the proposal for his promotion.
Despite two reports in his favour, the Cairo University Council refused the
promotion, ruling that his works did not justify it.
In 1993, he was eventually promoted to the rank of full professor by
Cairo University, recognising his scholarly achievements. This appointment
escalated the religious controversy. His opponents took the controversy to
the ḥisba court and presented his books as evidence. The court declared
him apostate and cancelled his appointment as professor. In 1995, the Cairo
Appeals Court declared Abu Zayd’s marriage also null and void, a deci-
sion which was confirmed by the Egyptian Supreme Court. These court
judgements forced Abu Zayd and his wife to go into exile in Europe. They
eventually settled in the Netherlands. First, he taught at Leiden University.
Later, he held the Ibn Rushd Chair of Humanism and Islam at the University
of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands, while supervising MA
and PhD students at Leiden University as well. He also participated in a
research project on “Jewish and Islamic Hermeneutics as Cultural Critique”
in the “Working Group on Islam and Modernity” at the Institute of Advanced
Studies of Berlin. In 2005, he received the Ibn Rushd Prize for Freedom of
Thought. He died on 5 July 2010 in Cairo as a result of an unidentified virus
infection and was buried in his birthplace, on the same day.
Abu Zayd’s life story, especially the controversy over his writings and
consequent difficulties, shows that critical study of Islamic legal theory
is not simply an academic activity. Criticising mainstream views proved
to be a matter of life and death. Abu Zayd’s research work was very close
to the lived realities. In an interview published in al-Ahrām on the day
he was declared apostate from Islam and placed under house arrest, he
explained how he related his writings to the events in his life. Recalling

5 Information about Abu Zayd’s life is taken from Anis and Howeidy (1995).
“Cl assical” Isl amic Legal Theory as Ideology 187

his writings on religious discourse he remembered how the mainstream

religious discourse shifted with the changing political perspectives in Egypt
between the 1960s and 1970s:

My own experience encompasses divergent interpretations of Islam from

the 1960s and 70s. In the 60s the dominant religious discourse was that
Islam is the religion of socialism and social justice, and that it urges
us to f ight imperialism and Zionism. In the 70s, with the open door
policy and peace with Israel, “Islam became the religion that guarded
private property and urged us to make peace with the Israelis.” (Anis
and Howeidy 2010)

Explaining the impact of the context of his writings on the concept of

the text, he recalled his anxiety about the chaos to which an uninformed
interpretation could lead:

This resulted in the book, The Concept of the Text: A Study in the Quranic
Fields of Knowledge. My premise was that before dealing with questions
of interpretation of the text, one must first define the text, examining
the laws that govern the study of that text, because we cannot leave the
door open for any and every interpretation. It was at this point that I
began to make use of developments in hermeneutics.

The study of hermeneutics revealed to me the dangers involved in leaving

a religious text prey to interpretation by anybody. Religious texts pro-
foundly influence social and cultural life: if we place them at the mercy
of the ideology of the interpreter without defining the extent to which
the text lends itself to exegesis and the limits of the meaning it offers,
then we are in deep trouble. Any text is a historical phenomenon and has
a specific context. It is from this premise that I proceed to examine the
context in which the Quran has been studied within various schools. And
I discovered that the understanding of context was always partial. It had
to be expanded to include pre-Islamic society, its values and traditions,
to comprehend the development of the text within society. (Ibid.)

Explaining the context of his book Critique of Religious Discourse, he was

reminded of his dissertations on the Muʿtazila and Ibn ʿArabī. Mainstream
scholars accuse the Muʿtazila and Ibn ʿArabī of using the Qurʾan for their
political purpose. How, then, is the contemporary religious discourse free
from political discourse?
188 Muhammad Khalid Masud

In this context, I am convinced that if the Mutazilites and the Sufis used
the Quran to serve political ends, then this applies equally to contem-
porary political religious discourse. I am a man who dreams of a better
future for his country, his countrymen and his students and these are
the concerns that lay behind the intellectual effort which resulted in my
book Critique of Religious Discourse. (Ibid.)

He explained how his opponents shifted the emphasis and changed the
context to distort his views to serve their political objectives, namely refus-
ing him the position of professor:

But it was sections of this book, along with parts of my book on Al-Imam
Al-Shafie, and a paper on ‘the distortion of context in the interpretations
of the religious discourse’, that provoked these accusations of apostasy,
accusations that are based on a distortion of my ideas. For example when
I spoke of the Ḥadīth being secondary to the main text, that is the Quran,
it was said that I had trivialised the value of the Ḥadīth. (Ibid.)

Abu Zayd’s story is one of several other events that reveal the impact of al-
Shafiʿi’s legal theory on Muslim thinking until today. Academic studies often
tend not to include related personal stories in order to avoid subjectivism. In
my view such events in fact reveal the inner reason and the true importance
of al-Shafiʿi’s theory and explain why it continues to be relevant today when
the legal and political contexts have changed. It is for this purpose that this
chapter focuses on Abu Zayd’s analysis of al-Shafiʿi’s al-Risala as an ideology.

3 Islamic Legal Theory as an Ideology

From the perspective of this chapter it is significant to note that Abu Zayd’s
colleagues mainly read his Al-Imam al-Shafi’i wa ta’sis al-idiyilojiyya al-
wasatiyya as a book on Islamic jurisprudence. When they questioned the
author’s competence on the subject,6 Abu Zayd insisted that al-Shafiʿi’s
al-Risala was not essentially a treatise on jurisprudence, fiqh or uṣūl al-fiqh;
its subject was epistemology. The question of competence was raised in the
context of his application for promotion but Abu Zayd responded to it as an
issue of sociology of knowledge in a broader sense. In order to understand

6 See Muhammad Baltaji’s statement in Al-Shaʿb, 16 April 1992, cited in Taʾsis (1996, 6).
“Cl assical” Isl amic Legal Theory as Ideology 189

this debate, it is appropriate to first briefly introduce al-Shafiʿi and his

epistle.

3.1 Abu ʿAbd Allah Muhammad b. Idris al-Imam al-Shafiʿi

(777- 820)

Born in Mecca into a noble family of the Quraysh, al-Shafiʿi studied hadith
and fiqh with the masters of two prominent schools, with Mālikīs in Medina
from 787 until 802, and with Ḥanafīs in Baghdad between 803 and 806.
This was an extremely critical period both in a political and intellectual
sense. Different groups contested for supremacy: the ahl al-ḥadīth and ahl
al-raʾy contested for the authentic approach to legal reasoning; the Arabs
were apprehensive of Persian cultural influences; and the Abbasids and
Hashimites contended for the caliphate. Al-Shafiʿi was in contact with all
these groups and was apparently deeply concerned with the dominance
of Persian culture, with Muʿtazili theology, and with the neglect of hadith
by most jurists. He left Baghdad for Yemen and came back to Baghdad but
could not stay long. He finally moved to Egypt in 814. There his conflict with
the Mālikī jurists led him to reconsider his views. Most of his biographers
mention his revised views as qawl jadīd (new statements) compared to his
previous positions as qawl qadīm (old statements). Al-Risala, written earlier
in Baghdad, was also revised.7 In the later years of his life he was attacked
and injured by some of his Mālikī opponents. He died in Egypt in 820.
In brief, al-Shafiʿi lived in a period in which several political, cultural,
intellectual, and religious groups contested for supremacy and various
traditions of religious knowledge were developing into disciplines – a
context which clearly influenced al-Shafiʿi’s ideology. He studied these
conflicting trends and tried to clarify the differences. Abu Zuhra describes
the following as al-Shafiʿi’s major achievements: he was the first scholar to
formulate uṣūl al-fiqh (legal theory); he compiled and collected Maliki and
Hanafi jurisprudence; he regulated the method of raʾy (jurists’ opinions)
by formulating rules for analogical reasoning; he standardised the sunna;
he devised methods of interpreting the Qurʾan and sunna; and he was the
first to clarify the notion of abrogation (Abu Zuhra 1948, 11).

7 According to Abu Zuhra (1948, 143), al-Shafiʿi’s intellectual development could be divided
into three phases: in the Meccan period he was Maliki; during his stay in Baghdad he tried a
synthesis of Maliki and Hanafi jurisprudence; in Egypt he departed from both and adopted a
new approach to fiqh.
190 Muhammad Khalid Masud

3.2 Al-Shafiʿi’s al-Risala

Al-Shafiʿi’s al-Risala has been a point of debate not only among his con-
temporaries and jurists in the premodern period but also among modern
scholars of Islamic law. Several commentaries on this treatise were writ-
ten in the premodern period to relate it to the development within the
existing legal schools. It has also engaged the attention of scholars in the
modern period with reference to Islamic legal theory. One finds at least two
modern strands of scholarly traditions that generated debates on al-Shafiʿi’s
treatise. Muhammad Shakir, Abu Zuhra, Ridwan Sayyid, Fazlur Rahman,
George Makdisi, and Nasr Abu Zayd are a few examples of the tradition
that studies al-Shafiʿi in a broader framework of Islamic literary culture.
Ignaz Goldziher, Joseph Schacht, Majid Khadduri, Wael Hallaq, and Joseph
Lowry are examples of the second tradition that focuses on al-Shafiʿi’s
contribution to legal theory.
The writings of the second strand have greatly influenced modern
scholarship on Islamic law and have kept the debate alive in Muslim
societies as well. The differences in the approaches of these traditions are
wider than can be classified neatly. For example, Shākir, whose diligently
edited version of the text and scholarly notes earned the respect of many
scholars, regarded the work focused on rhetoric (bayān) and divided the
text of al-Risala into four parts: an introduction and three parts on bayān.
Majid Khadduri, whose English translation of al-Risala with comprehensive
notes and introduction has been well received among scholars, divided the
content into fifteen parts dealing with subjects of jurisprudence. Since
the latter’s table of contents is more detailed, it is useful to reproduce it
here in order to have an idea of the scope of discussions in Khadduri’s
translation. It is important to mention that the following headings are
not from the Arabic text; Khadduri added them for the convenience of the
reader (Khadduri 1987):

I [Introduction]
II [On al-Bayān (Perspicuous Declaration)]
III [On Legal Knowledge]
IV [On the Book of God]
V [On the Obligation of Man to Accept the Authority of the Prophet]
VI [On the Abrogation of Divine Legislation]
VII [On Duties]
VIII [On the Nature of God’s Order of Prohibition and the Prophet’s
Orders of Prohibition]
“Cl assical” Isl amic Legal Theory as Ideology 191

IX [On Traditions]
X [On Single-Individual Traditions]
XI [On Consensus (Ijmāʿ)]
XII [On Analogy (Qiyās)]
XIII [On Personal Reasoning (Ijtihād)]
XIV [On Juristic Preference (Istiḥsān)]
XV [On Disagreement (Ikhtilāf )]

4 Nasr Abu Zayd’s Analysis

Nasr Abu Zayd structured his analysis and discussion of al-Shaf iʿi’s
treatise in five sections. In his long introduction he provided the context
and background of his study and explained how his critics insisted that
al-Shafiʿi’s al-Risala was a book on uṣūl al-fiqh and that he, as a specialist
in Arabic language and literature, was not qualified to write on uṣūl al-fiqh.
The remaining four chapters discuss al-Shafiʿi’s views respectively on the
Qurʾan, sunna, ijmāʿ, and qiyās/ijtihād. His scheme of chapters corresponds
to the hierarchical description of four sources but, as I will discuss, Abu
Zayd arranged them in this manner to argue how al-Shafiʿi related not only
the sunna but also the consensus and products of legal reasoning to the
revealed text. This scheme established comprehensiveness of the revealed
law (sharʿ) and the authority of the text.
In his introduction Abu Zayd gave a summary of the debates between
him and his critics who eventually accused him of apostasy. He argued
that al-Shafiʿi’s focus was not on developing a theory of four sources but to
establish the authority of the text, which he felt was threatened by various
political, social, and juridical developments in the period.

4.1 Ideology

Abu Zayd reads al-Shafiʿi’s discussion of jurisprudence as an ideology of

power. It was quite instrumental in the establishment of the authority of
the jurists and their schools. Ijtihād and Ijmāʿ in these new meanings of
the Qurʾan and sunna aimed at discouraging the growth of independent
opinion (raʾy). Abu Zayd raised the following questions about freedom
and independent opinion that his critics denied in religious discourse: (1)
Does analysing the thought of an imam constitute an attack on religious
discourse? (2) Does the religious discourse restrict ijtihād to the limits
defined by the elders? (3) Is the criticism on al-Shafiʿi’s ideas denied in
192 Muhammad Khalid Masud

order to defend the intellectual trends in the second century of Islam, or is

it to protect today’s taqlīd of al-Shafiʿi’s thought? Abu Zayd answered that
Islamic renaissance and renewal in the modern context are not possible
without a critical study of the tradition (Taʾsis, 5-6).
Abu Zayd opened his analytical study with a discussion on how taqlīd
influences epistemology. He referred to the above-mentioned debate about
the compartmentalisation of knowledge. His colleagues contended that Abu
Zayd was not qualified to study al-Shafiʿi’s al-Risala because this book was
on the subject of uṣūl al-fiqh, which was not Abu Zayd’s specialty (Baltaji
1993, 2). Abu Zayd clarified that al-Shafiʿi’s al-Risala was essentially a trea-
tise on epistemology, not on fiqh or uṣūl al-fiqh as such. Al-Shafiʿi defined
the theory of knowledge as providing the tools, concepts, and methods of
legal reasoning. Abu Zayd explained that epistemology does not belong to
one field exclusively; it cannot be separated from other fields of knowledge.
They are all part of a culture. For instance, Arabic grammar, lexicology, and
rhetoric are all part of Arabic culture.
Similarly, no intellectual activity can be isolated from social issues.
Al-Shafiʿi’s thought was not operating in a vacuum. One must understand
why al-Shafiʿi defended the Arabic ambiance of the Qurʾan and the sunna.
These are not questions of jurisprudence; they are cultural queries. Abu
Zayd clarified that an idea is not determined to be correct or incorrect
by itself; it is judged from the perspective of the world view of a certain
individual or the group to which he or she belongs. People support diverse
world views even within one culture. Regarding Islam, Muslims in general
share collective and universal views but different groups differ in their
world views in detail.
In early Islam, the Muʿtazila, the Ashʿarite and the Shiʿa held diverse
world views. Abu Zayd suggested that today we use the term “ideology”
to mean “world view.” He placed al-Shafiʿi’s thought in the middle of other
contending ideologies of his period (Taʾsis, 9-10).
Abu Zayd offered a detailed analysis of the term “ideology” which in his
view was based on a very comprehensive view of knowledge. It includes
political, economic, social, intellectual, literary, aesthetic, and many other
aspects. Ideology gains significance because it defines the standards of right
and wrong which are socially rooted, and not religiously. They are neither
natural and inevitable, nor final and unchangeable. They are meant to
regulate social organisation.
Ideology consists of meanings and concepts; it does not necessarily
correspond with reality. It is particularly significant that in Islamic his-
tory social conflicts, particularly political and economic differences, are
“Cl assical” Isl amic Legal Theory as Ideology 193

expressed in religious terms. These differences, therefore, are expressed

as interpretations of the sacred texts. Consequently, the contestation is
framed as a dispute about who owns the text or has the right to interpret it.
The Muslim intellectual history is thus essentially a socio-political
history. The Muʿtazila was not simply an intellectual community of theo-
logians; they gained political influence and tried to impose their views with
the help of the Abbasid caliphs, Maʾmun (re. 813-833) and his successors.
Opposition to this group was also political. The caliph al-Mutawakkil Biʾllah
(re. 847-861) promoted Ahl al-Sunna wa-l Jamāʿa and supported the school
of Imam Ahmad b. Hanbal (d. 855).
Ideology is closely related to authority, power, and hegemony. Abu Zayd
explained that even though a certain trend of thought is in a position of
hegemony for a period of time, this does not mean that other trends in that
period are invalid or heretical. In fact, the people in power use such terms
as weapons to silence their opposition. Hegemonic ideologies are neither
eternal nor incontestable. In an ideology the constants and variables are
defined by the tradition and practice.

4.2 Text

In addition to Islamic law, discourse analysis and semiotics also use the
expression “text” (naṣṣ) as a technical term. This usage has revealed its
broad meaning that includes non-linguistic expressions as well. The term
“text” also applies to rituals, festivals, and assemblies, in addition to other
expressions in audio and visual arts. However, with reference to discourse
analysis only language and symbols of communication count as text. It is
nevertheless significant to note that discourse as a science is part of the
whole discipline constituted by the two sciences of semiotics and discourse
analysis.
In discourse analysis, “text” has two levels of indication: principal and
secondary. In Islamic tradition the Qurʾan and sunna, for instance, are
respectively principal and secondary texts. The opinions of the jurists
based on legal reasoning are subordinate texts as they are subsidiary to
the secondary text. It is in Islamic cultural history that secondary texts
were elevated to the level of principal text. Gradually the opinions of the
leading jurists in the sciences of fiqh and tafsīr (Qurʾanic exegesis) came to
be recognised as principal texts.
Memory played a very decisive role in the cultural continuity during the
second century of Islam. It is the period of documentation and recording.
With regard to an individual, memory means remembering and repeating, but
194 Muhammad Khalid Masud

as a cultural phenomenon it refers to a process of cultural transmission and

recurring practice among a special group. It also refers to a stage in the history
of a people when they move from an oral to a literate community. In Islamic
history, the second and third centuries were the period of defining the basic
principles, epistemological perceptions, and fundamentals of the tradition.
Imam al-Shafiʿi belonged to that period. He found diverse intellectual
trends contesting for defining epistemological principles. In this period the
following were some of the major debated issues: reason and revelation,
raʾy and hadith, sciences of the ancients, and Arab literary heritage. The
following books from that period reveal these ongoing debates: Mālik b.
Anas’s (d. 712) al-Muwattaʾ, Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s (d. 756) Al-Siyasa wa-l Adab,
ʿAmar b. ʿUthman Sibawayh’s (d. 797) al-Kitab, al-Shafiʿi ’s (d. 820) al-Risala
and Kitab al-Umm, Abu Zakariyya Yahya b. Ziyad al-Farraʾ’s (d. 820) Maʿani
al-Qurʾan, and Abu ʿUbayda
Muʿammar b. al-Muthanna’s (d. 825) Majaz al-Qurʾan. The third century
was truly a period of literary blossoming. Ibn al-Nadim’s (d. 998) Kitab
Al-Fihrist reflects the growth of this tradition as it preserves the titles and
names of the authors of several writings in different sciences which have
been lost (Taʾsis, 14).
Abu Zayd clarified that the debate on the cultural thought of that period
was not about the exclusive finality of ideas, nor was the discourse about
whether, for instance, reason and revelation were mutually contradictory so
that only one would be the conclusive source. The debate was about priority
and supremacy. Those who regarded revelation prior to reason supported
tradition (naql) and gave the letter or the text priority. They expanded the
scope of the meaning of the text and stressed its comprehensive nature.
This emphasis provided grounds for the belief in the authority of the text.

4.3 The Authority of the Text

Abu Zayd distinguished between “text” and “authority of the text.” The
“text” by itself is not authoritative; its authority comes from an epistemol-
ogy of authority. It requires a community that formulates the authority of
the text by transforming it into a socio-cultural hegemony. It defines text
as the source of authority. Normally authority belongs to human reason.
Authority of the text is absolute, comprehensive, and final. Freedom from
the authority of the text does not mean freedom from the text; it rather
means freedom from the authority that claims power by stripping the text
from its context of time, space, and circumstances. It deprives the text from
rational and scientific interpretation.
“Cl assical” Isl amic Legal Theory as Ideology 195

The community behind the authority of the text accuses its opponents of
denial of the text. It denies disagreement by claiming a conflict between text
and reason. In fact, humans only have the faculty of reason to understand
the text. By denying the right to use this faculty the community behind the
authority of the text claims unrestricted political power.
Abu Zayd argued that the conflict is not between “text” and “reason”;
it is rather between reason and the authority of the text. The issue is not
religious in origin; it has a historical context. The question arose during the
first civil war in Islam between Ali (r. 656-661) and Muʿawiya (r. 661-680).
Muʿawiya’s armies raised the Qurʾan on their lances during the Battle of
Ṣiffīn (657) and invited Ali and his armies to accept the Qurʾan as arbiter.
They raised the slogan “sovereignty to God alone.” Ali replied, “The Qurʾan
does not speak, it is humans who speak” (Taʾsis, 16). One group of people
in Ali’s camp accepted that invitation. However, when ʿAmr b. ʿAs and Abu
Musa Ashʿari were appointed as arbitrators representing Muʿawiya and Ali
respectively, Ali’s followers rejected arbitration. They argued that it was
human arbitration, not arbitration by the Qurʾan.
Abu Zayd found a recent example of this claim of “sovereignty of God”
(ḥākimiyyat-i ilāhiyya) propounded by Mawlana Mawdudi in Pakistan. It
was adopted by Sayyid Qutb in Egypt and several others in the Muslim
world. “Sovereignty of God” was presented as the foundational principle
of the Islamic state. It called for supremacy of shariʿa and authority of the
ʿulamaʾ who alone could interpret it.
Abu Zayd illustrated the claim for the authority of the text with reference
to his contemporary scholar Muhammad Baltaji. In his article on “Kitāb al-
Imām Al-Shafiʿi,” Baltaji referred to the Qurʾanic verses 33:36, 4:65, 5:3, and
16:89 to establish the authority of the text (Baltaji 1993). These verses declare
that believers have no choice once God and his Prophet had pronounced
a judgement. They are not believers until they accept the Prophet as the
judge in their disputes. God has completed the religion. God revealed “the
Book” that explains everything. Citing these verses, Baltaji concludes, “It is
evident that belief in Islam, rather, belief in any religion, calls for absolute
obedience. The literal meanings of the terms ʿibāda and Islam in the Arabic
language are respectively as follows: obedience and surrender. One who
does not faithfully abide by these sacred texts crosses the boundary of
faith” (Taʾ sis, 18).
Abu Zayd questioned this way of arguing. First, these verses refer to
specific events in the life of the Prophet. Baltaji arranges these verses in a
particular sequence to delink them from their historical context in order
to make them eternal. In the next step he turns his own interpretation into
196 Muhammad Khalid Masud

the sacred text. Abu Zayd traced this method of invoking the authority of
the text to al-Shafiʿi (Abu Zayd 1993), who formulated the principle in the
following words: “There is no new event for which the Qurʾan does not have a
clear ruling (ḥukm).” While al-Shafiʿi referred to “the text” collectively in the
form of “the Book,” Baltaji refers to specific verses and their literal meaning.

4.4 Al-Shafiʿi’s Ideology

Abu Zayd found the contemporary religious discourse similar to al-Shafiʿi’s

because of the strong relationship between world view and religious dis-
course. Like al-Shafiʿi, the contemporary religious discourse considers “the
text” and its literal interpretation equal in their authority. Abu Zayd pointed
out that the ideology of authority defines the relationship between God and
man in terms of master and slave; it is based on submission and obedience.
To Abu Zayd, the Qurʾanic teachings describe this relationship in terms of
freedom and choice because God gives humans choice and that is why he
holds them responsible for their deeds.
Abu Zayd illustrated his point with the example of al-Shafiʿi’s analysis of
istiḥsān. Great jurists like Mālik and Abū Ḥanīfa relied on this method but
al-Shafiʿi rejected it because he feared that it would add to differences and
would increase the number of arbitrary opinions. “In that case every judge
and mufti in a city would say what he likes. Consequently, they will issue
multiple judgements and fatwas even in one case” (Taʾsis, 31). Al-Shafiʿi cited
Qurʾanic verses condemning conflicts and concludes: “Whoever employs the
method of istiḥsān in fact defies revelation” (Taʾsis, 31). Al-Shafiʿi described
this attitude of free expression as sudā (a person not accountable to anyone
for anything) referring to the following Qurʾanic verse: “Does man think
that he is left to be aimless?” (Qurʾan 75:36). In other words, practicing
istiḥsān means rejecting accountability. He interpreted the verse by stating
that nobody except the Prophet has the right to give an opinion without
presenting the evidence.
According to Abu Zayd, al-Shafiʿi wanted to establish the position of
sunna as a source of law. The very fact that he was arguing in that direction
means that this position was not yet established. Abu Zayd concluded that it
is not a matter of faith that should not be questioned. It is a historical state-
ment that could be examined and verified. Al-Shafiʿi formulated his view
on sunna by adding three meanings to the concept: infallibility of sunna,
sunna’s linkage with the Qurʾan, and extending the concept of revelation to
the sunna. Al-Shafiʿi interpreted the verse “He does not speak from desire;
it is not but a revelation from God (Qurʾan 53:3-4)” to mean that hadith was
“Cl assical” Isl amic Legal Theory as Ideology 197

revelation. These were al-Shafiʿi’s personal views and did not constitute a
unanimously agreed position. Commenting on the above verse, Al-Tabari,
for instance, reported that the pronoun “it” in the verse does not refer to the
Prophet’s statement. It clearly refers to the Qurʾan. The historical context of
the verse refers to the Meccan opponents who raised doubts about whether
the Qurʾan was the revealed word of God. God clarifies that these were not
Prophet Muhammad’s own words; they were certainly revealed by God
(Al-Tabari 2000, 22:498).
Arguing that al-Shafiʿi’s al-Risala is a discourse on ideology, Abu Zayd
began his analysis by raising two questions. Why did al-Shafiʿi raise the
question about the Arabic language of the Qurʾan and defended it as a
language of the Quraysh? Second, why did he limit his discussion on sunna
to the debates between the ahl al-ḥadīth and the ahl al-raʾy? He disagreed
with those who regard al-Shafiʿi’s defence of Arabic language as a simple
statement about the language in which the Qurʾan was revealed. To Abu
Zayd, it has a much deeper meaning. He found it closely connected with the
cultural and political context that affected the conception of knowledge
and authority. Abu Zayd clarified that in order to appreciate al-Shafiʿi’s
thought it is necessary to place it in the political, theological, cultural,
socio-economic, and juridical dimensions of the context of that debate.
According to Abu Zayd, the ideological context of al-Risala is related
to the issue of Quraysh’s political and cultural supremacy. The issue came
to prominence quite early in Islam, at the time of the election of the first
caliph. Reference to Quraysh’s position of authority was raised in Saqifat
Bani Saʿida when the Anṣār of Medina claimed their right to the caliphate.
The Battles of Ridda (633), Jamal (656), and Ṣiffīn were also fought to set-
tle the supremacy of the Quraysh. Al-Shafiʿi was a great supporter of the
Quraysh; his companion Rabiʿ b. Sulayman (d. 870) presented him with
a pure and noble Qurayshi descent. Al-Shafiʿi was respected among the
Quraysh who helped him at times of crisis in his life, and got his appoint-
ment in Najaran under a governor in Yemen who was a Muṭṭalibī Quraysh.
He moved from Baghdad to Egypt where a Hashimite ruled as the governor,
and he dedicated a full chapter to the merits of the Quraysh in volume six
of his Kitab al-Umm (Taʾsis, 35-43).
Abu Zayd also clarified that al-Shafiʿi is often presented as a supporter
of the Alawis and is sometimes alleged to have supported the Shiʿa or
Rawāfiḍ. This attribution may have been a political propaganda against
him. Al-Shafiʿi supported the Alawis because they were Quraysh but he
did not support the Abbasids’ cultural association with the Persian cultural
influences.
198 Muhammad Khalid Masud

Political opposition to the Abbasids also came from imams Abu Hanifa
(d. 767), Malik b. Anas (d. 795), and Ibn Hanbal, but it is difficult to assert
whether they did so for the supremacy of the Quraysh. Imam Malik’s fatwa
that an oath of allegiance under duress is not valid, as divorce under duress
is not valid either, was considered equally applicable to oaths of allegiance
to both the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs. Abu Hanifa considered divorce
under duress valid but he refused to cooperate with the Abbasids – even
to serve as qadi. Malik and Ibn Hanbal both defied the Abbasid imposition
of the Muʿtazila. Al-Shafiʿi, on the other hand, did serve under the Abbasid
caliph even though it was for a short period. He was bitterly against the
Muʿtazila because to him they represented the influence of foreign thought
and culture. He would not associate himself with the Abbasids because
they accepted the intellectual supremacy of foreign cultural influences
from Greece and Persia.
In the juridical context, al-Shafiʿi’s views also illustrate his apprehension
of foreign influences. Contrary to the ahl al-ḥadīth, the ahl al-raʾy seemed
to have accepted the non-Arab ways of thought and practice. His discussion
of the sources must be studied in the above-mentioned context.

5 The Quraysh and the Arabic Language

Al-Shafiʿi regarded Arabic as the most comprehensive language; it had a

more extensive vocabulary than any other language. He even linked its
comprehensive nature to the Prophet and revelation; only a prophet could
have extensive knowledge of this language. He also explained that this
linkage between Arabic and the Quraysh went back to pre-Islamic period,
and that made the Quraysh extremely important.
The significance of the Arabic language is also the point where al-Shafiʿi
differs from the Hanafis as to whether one can say one’s prayers in a lan-
guage other than in Arabic. Hanafis allowed it but al-Shafiʿi did not; he even
did not consider a contract of marriage valid if the acceptance and offer
were not expressed in Arabic. Likewise he insisted that a marriage could
only be validly repudiated in Arabic.
Al-Shafiʿi considered it necessary to defend the Qurʾan as purely Arabic.
This position was related to the debate at that time about parts of the
Qurʾanic vocabulary which was not Arabic by origin. Al-Shafiʿi vehemently
denied the existence of any foreign vocabulary in the Qurʾan. His defence
was not directed to this particular vocabulary in the Qurʾan; he was de-
fending the pure and comprehensive nature of Arabic language and the
“Cl assical” Isl amic Legal Theory as Ideology 199

comprehensibility of the Qurʾan. Admission of foreign vocabulary would

mean that some among the Arabs would not know these words and their
meaning.
Al-Shafiʿi developed his defence on four sets of arguments. One expounds
the idea that Arabic is the most comprehensive among the languages; its
vocabulary is sufficient to express all meanings and concepts. Secondly, he
argued that this language is so comprehensive that it was only a prophet who
could master it completely. One may understand this statement as to mean
that the Arabic language is not an ordinary language; its origin is divine.
His third argument was that all Arabs understand the Qurʾan; nothing is
foreign to them. Fourthly, he argued that the Arabic language has several
dialects; the Qurʾan was revealed in the dialect of the Quraysh. This last
argument, according to Abu Zayd, transformed his defence of the Arabic
language and the comprehension of the Qurʾan into an ideology.
As mentioned already, contrary to the ahl al-raʾy Ḥanafīs, al-Shafiʿi did
not allow the use of Persian or any language other than Arabic in rituals and
contract settlements. His opposition to the ahl al-raʾy is also evident in his posi-
tion about the discussion on whether a word is general (ʿāmm) or particular
(khāṣṣ) in its meaning. In other words: with regard to the question whether
meanings of a word apply to all the referents of a word or denote only certain
particular referents, al-Shafiʿi held that a word could be used in its general
and/or particular meaning. Only the Arabs understood the proper usage.
Abu Zayd approached al-Shafiʿi’s views from the perspective of discourse
analysis. He explained that al-Shafiʿi was not the first or the only one to
hold this view. It was a common view among al-Shafiʿi’s contemporaries to
reject the primary role of human reason; it was a dependent role that only
served as a tool for understanding and interpreting “the text.” “The text”
conveyed its meaning in diverse ways of connotation. To al-Shafiʿi, the word
“all” (kull) in the verse “God is the creator of all things” is general and even
includes human actions.
The second type of general statement is when both meanings, general and
particular, are denoted without deleting the general meaning. For instance,
the Qurʾanic verse 9:120 demands the people in and around Medina not to
stay behind when the Prophet Muhammad went out for jihad and not to
prefer their personal interests over those of the Prophet. The verse is both
general in its meaning as far as giving preference to the Prophet is required.
It is particular in the sense that only those who have the capacity to fight
were required to go along with the Prophet.
The third is the type of generality that is apparent in its meaning whereas
its denotation of the non-apparent meaning lies in the particular sense.
200 Muhammad Khalid Masud

The example is the Qurʾanic verse 3:173: “Those unto whom men said: Lo!
The people have gathered against you, therefore fear them. But [the threat
of danger] increased their faith and they cried: Allah is Sufficient for us!
Most Excellent is He in whom we trust!” In this verse the general meaning
is quite apparent; however, “the people” are not specified yet they do not
include all the people.
In sum, al-Shafiʿi argued that only the Arabs – particularly the Quraysh –
would understand where the general and particular meanings apply. Among
them the Prophet was best qualified to understand the Arabic text. That is
the reason why the Qurʾan and sunna are closely connected. Al-Shafiʿi did
not choose between the ahl al-ḥadīth and the ahl al-raʾy; he was essentially
saying that only the hadith of the Prophet can explain what the Qurʾan
means. In that sense the sunna of the Prophet has authority similar to the
Qurʾan, because the Prophet’s source of knowledge was divine revelation.
Al-Shafiʿi’s discussion of the Qurʾan, sunna, ijmāʿ, and qiyās is not only
a discussion about the sources and epistemology but also about an ideol-
ogy that connects them as interdependent and mutually connected to the
divine revelation. As such, the four sources are part of “the text” or, rather,
together constitute “the text.” Collectively they become “the conclusive
texts.” He considers sunna definitive, even if it is a hadith reported by a
solitary narrator. Similarly he regards consensus, opinion, and ijtihād based
on qiyās as definitive.
Abu Zayd further observed that al-Shafiʿi defined ijmāʿ from two per-
spectives of his ideology. First he aimed to extend the scope of “text,” and
second, he wanted to restrict the scope of diversity of opinion (ikhtilāf ) by
consensus. Consequently he distinguished between the consensus on the
transmission of the reports about sunna and the consensus as a product of
legal reasoning. He included continuity or continuous practice (tawātur)
in the meaning of ijmāʿ.
It is the same argument that al-Shafiʿi developed about the Arabic lan-
guage of the Qurʾan. He argued that the existence of certain non-Arabic
words and the ignorance of some Arabs about their meaning do not disprove
the comprehensiveness and comprehensibility as essential characteristics of
the Arabic language. Similarly, he argued with reference to solitary reports
of hadith (akhbār aḥād) that even though some scholars may not know a
particular sunna, the fact that they are known to the scholars in general is
sufficient to prove their authenticity. He concluded that it is inevitable that
the consensus of the Muslim community is based on “a text” even though
only a few scholars know about “the text.” If the community as a whole has
knowledge about the general meaning of “the text,” it is regarded a valid
“Cl assical” Isl amic Legal Theory as Ideology 201

consensus. In other words, the disagreement of some about the text and
their different opinions could be dismissed. It is dismissing history as a fact
and ignoring the historicity of divergent opinions. As a result, the consensus
is transformed into a religious text that is conclusive in its meaning and
connotation.

6 Knowledge of the Specialists

Al-Shafiʿi described five types of authentic knowledge: (1) mutawātir, the

information that is continuously transmitted from one generation to the
other. The authenticity of this type of knowledge comes from continuity
(tawātur), or, in other words, agreement between the specialists. (2) Taʾwīl,
the knowledge derived through interpretation of the text. Since taʾwīl is
more than relying on apparent meaning, it is only the agreement between
the experts that validates the transfer of meaning of “a text” from apparent
to other connotations. “The text” retains its apparent meaning if there is no
such consensus. (3) Ijmāʿ, which itself is the source of authentic knowledge.
Unanimous opinion, even if not based on the specific text of the Qurʾan
or sunna, constitutes valid knowledge. Raʾy or arbitrary opinion cannot
produce ijmāʿ because it implies that there was disagreement. Ijmāʿ, on the
contrary, expresses an agreement between the experts and assumes the
knowledge of the Qurʾan and sunna. (4) Khabar wāḥid, hadith or knowledge
transmitted by one or few reporters, is also authentic knowledge because
it is knowledge of the special people or community. (5) Ijtihād/qiyās, the
fifth type of authentic knowledge, is derived from reasoning. It is authentic
because it is based on a Qurʾanic injunction. More importantly, it is authen-
tic because it is restricted to the method of deduction; it must be derived
from seeking similarity in “the text” that applies to the case in question.
According to al-Shafiʿi, qiyās is restricted to discovering a rule that actu-
ally already exists in the religious texts, even if it is hidden. This definition
is based on the belief in the comprehensive nature of the religious text; it
has answers to all the questions. This definition restricts the role of hu-
man reasoning to a framework of reasons and indications in the religious
texts for the outside facts in the world of existence. Qiyās is thus based on
presuming the existence of similarities between the texts and the world of
facts. Consequently, for al-Shafiʿi all knowledge in addition to the Qurʾan
and sunna is discoverable by qiyās. By restricting qiyās to text al-Shafiʿi
aimed at eliminating disagreement and raʾy. Istiḥsān belongs to raʾy and
hence cannot produce valid knowledge.
202 Muhammad Khalid Masud

Al-Shafiʿi also discussed another classification of knowledge from the

perspective of specialisation. General knowledge about obligation and du-
ties is common knowledge, and specialist knowledge pertains to details of
these obligations. The latter type of knowledge is specialist knowledge. It
may be understood as the need for a separate discipline or the need for a
distinct community of specialists devoted to details unlike the common
people who have basic and general knowledge about religion.
To conclude, Abu Zayd read al-Risala from a different perspective than
others. His discourse analysis approach allowed him to look into al-Risala
not simply as a discourse on jurisprudence and theology, but as a “text” that
reflects a much more complex context. It reveals not only the contemporary
debates but also the direction and role that al-Shafiʿi intended for jurispru-
dence to take. Abu Zayd explained his approach saying:

Truly speaking, discourse analysis is a science to discover explicit and

hidden meanings in a discourse, as well as the unspoken and assumed
connotations because discourse as such employs separate tools of expres-
sion to convey the intended conclusions. Discourse, unlike language
communication, connects communication with the intended results.
(Taʾsis, 44-45)

7 Concluding Remarks

The term “Islamic law” is used to describe shariʿa (divine or revealed laws
assumed to be preserved in the Qurʾan and sunna) and fiqh (interpreta-
tions, opinions, and doctrines of the jurists), two important concepts in the
Islamic legal tradition, understandable to a modern student of law. It has,
however, problematised the conception and history of law in Islam from
a modern perspective and has raised critical questions not only about its
nature, origins, and evolution, but also about its jurisdiction, legislation,
reform, and procedure. Islamic law has been further characterised as “clas-
sical,” “religious,” and “jurists’” law. Consequently, the modern student of
Islamic law is confronted with an extremely complex legal tradition. It has
a continued history of more than a thousand years and its rich literature
abounds in thousands of volumes, a large number of which are still in
manuscript form. In practice, it has a parallel existence with a number of
other legal systems regulated by the kings, police, fiscal administration, and
several different types of courts. Its application has relied more on fatwa
(jurists’ opinions) and madhhab (schools of fiqh) institutions than on qadi
“Cl assical” Isl amic Legal Theory as Ideology 203

(judges appointed by Muslim rulers) courts. It has gradually developed into

a very intricate science of jurisprudence. Some of the present approaches
which focus on al-Shafiʿi’s al-Risala as a classical legal theory have raised
more questions and have even compelled to critique and revise this thesis.
They have reaffirmed the complexity of the Islamic legal tradition.
In view of these complexities, a general overview of fiqh/shariʿa doc-
trines, schools, and their evolution is not helpful. Nasr Abu Zayd’s analysis
of al-Shafiʿi’s al-Risala provides significant insights into the development
of fiqh in the third century of Islam. It suggests new perspectives to study
this development as the emergence of a community of specialists. Al-Risala
provides not only the need and justification for such a community. It also
def ines the framework of fiqh as a discipline that ensures continuity
with the earlier generation of scholars and warrants its authenticity by
preventing the influence of foreign cultures that were contributing to
conflicts and differences and thus threatened the unity and consensus
in the community.

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 Islamic Law in the Modern World
States, Laws, and Constitutions

Knut S. Vikør

One of the main characteristics of “modernity” in the view of modernisation

theorists, is the separation of the world into differentiated spheres like
religion, economy, politics, and aesthetics, while the “traditional” world
view was holistic, linking these fields so that what is “good” in religion is
also “good” or “beautiful” in the other systems (cf. e.g. Kwark 2004, 128-129).
The term “Islamic law” would in itself be an example of such a holistic
merging of two spheres, conflating a person’s faith with his rights, or even
three, if “law” is seen as a natural aspect of state politics that in a modern
differentiated system should not be separated from religion, in its institu-
tions and its rules.
There are two possible problems with such an approach. One would
be, is it true that the “traditional” (premodern) world did not differentiate
between these systems? Or is it only an assumption that the modernity
sociologists make by constructing “the traditional” as the conceptual op-
posite of their “modern”? And, following from that, did “modernity” really
make such a total and earth-shattering transformation in how Islamic law
was practiced in actual reality? Did “modernity” triumph, and what is the
relation between religion, the state, and rights today in the Muslim world?
The two topics are thus related: we cannot establish how the “modern
transformation” was a break with the past without knowing what that
past was. In the practical world of premodern law, there is no doubt that
there was a differentiation between the “political institution” – the state,
caliph, or sultan – and the “religious institution,” which in Islam was not so
much an institution as a category of independent scholars who formulated
and discussed the shariʿa rules (Vikør 2005). There were of course areas of
contact between the scholars and rulers; many ʿulamaʾ took the sultan’s
money to perform functions for him, be it as his advisor or to sit on his
council. Indeed the function of qadi was a “state function” – the judge
was appointed by the sultan or his representative, and could be fired by
him. But in order to become a qadi, a candidate first had to get a scholarly
education and be recognised as a learned man, and this did not come from
a public appointment, but from his relation to the “civil society” of religious
scholarship, the ʿulamaʾ.
206 Knut S. Vikør

Even more so, the law itself that the state, sultan, and court should
practice was developed by these independent scholars over the centuries,
scholars who were not bound to one particular state or country. Thus, the
law transcended the state borders, nor should it change when one sultan
conquered or inherited a state from another. There were of course divisions,
primarily between the schools of law, madhāhib, but also regional differ-
ences within the schools (cf. e.g. Johansen 1999a). However, these did not
coincide with the political borders, but followed the distribution of scholars.
In the main centres of learning where many scholars gathered – Cairo,
Damascus, and others – there were also a plurality of madhāhib.
It must be added that this ideal model of division between a “civil society”
formulation of law and “state” implementation of it was never complete, and
did not last. From the beginning, the caliphs and later sultans made moves
to strengthen their influence not only over the courts, but also over the
law (Vikør 2005, 185-205). Independent muftis were drawn into the sultan’s
circles and some became dependent on his largesse, while others refused
money that, since it came from a sultan’s purse, could only be tainted with
blood and oppression. The Ottomans took major steps towards drawing
the law under the state’s authority, partly by appointing a “state mufti,”
the shaykh al-islām, and giving him supreme authority over interpretation
of the law, and specifically by formulating legal rules on the authority of
the sultan himself, the kanun (Imber 1997; Jennings 1979). Relevant only
in certain fields of law, and often conforming to what the traditional fiqh
jurisprudence stated, it was still a major step towards giving the sultan
authority over the legal field (Gerber 1994).
This did not mean that the sultan in this way gained control over “re-
ligion” in a holistic way; that was still under the ʿulamaʾ and the shaykh
al-islām did not have any authority in matters of theology. It was rather a
shift of power, part of a general process during which the Ottoman state
strengthened its authority and bureaucratised elements of social life that
earlier rulers and states did not control. Islamic law was on the move to
become state law. Again, we can find traces of this process of “statification”
of the law all the way back to Islam’s earliest history in the caliphate. There
had always been courts or councils where the state authority had greater
influence than in the shariʿa courts proper; the Ottomans only continued
this established premodern trend.
There were of course still links between law and religion, in particular
in terms of legitimacy: the sultan would refer to the Qurʾan’s exhortation
to “obey those charged with authority” (Qurʾan 4:59), that is, themselves,
and later Ottoman sultans claimed a fragment of religious legitimacy by
Isl amic L aw in the Modern World 207

proclaiming themselves to be caliphs and thus having the right to obedi-

ence from all Muslims. The kanun was to be based on the shariʿa, and the
shariʿa was the practical embodiment of God’s will as expressed in the divine
revelation. Certainly, all creation came from God and was in this way one
“holistic” whole. The rights of man came not from man’s innate nature, but
from God because man was created by God. But as long as the scholars
recognised that God’s will could not be understood except through the fal-
lible interpretations of men, present in the world through a field of “religious
knowledge,” ʿilm, that was the arena of the scholars, and that the practical
matters of government were given to a separate and differentiated sultanic
state, then the “holistic” concept refers only to the transcendental God, not
to the actual matters of this world. Thus, the term ḥuqūq Allāh, “the rights of
God” (over men) could in Islamic thought be used not to shore up the state
and ruler’s control over its subjects through any divine authority, but the
opposite: it was a way to limit the sultan’s power and subject him to the law
that he could not control (Weiss 1998, 182-184; Johansen 1999b, 210-218). God
was higher than the sultan, so the sultan himself was subject to ḥuqūq Allāh,
which, in as far as they were expressed in shariʿa laws, were determined on
earth by the differentiated “institution” of religious scholarship.

1 Colonialism and Modernity

The influence of European thought and politics in the Muslim world in the
nineteenth century evidently brought great changes also to the field of law.
But in many ways these changes only continued the process of transfor-
mation or shift in balance that had already been underway for centuries.
In Europe, “law” as practiced in the courts had by this time been largely
divorced from the religious or church (canon) law, even though religious
conceptions still influenced what was considered “right” and “proper” in
many areas of life. As European conceptions came to have an impact on
the Middle East, it thus reinforced the already existing tendency to see
the legal field as under the control of the state rather than the religious
scholars. But the duality between a “religiously sanctioned court system,”
the qadi courts, and the “politically sanctioned court system,” the “civil” or
state courts, already in place in the medieval period, continued to be the
way this relation between the state and law was practiced in most Muslim
countries throughout the century.1

1 For criminal law, see Peters (1997).

208 Knut S. Vikør

The most definite change from the earlier period was the issue of le-
gitimacy. While the kanun law acquired its authority from the political
power of the sultan, its legitimacy was that it was supposedly a practical
implementation of the siyāsa sharʿiyya, “shariʿa politics,” the ruler’s best
way to implement the morality and underlying tenets of the shariʿa in our
imperfect world (Vikør 2005, 208). The fiqh lawyers’ elaboration of the true
rules of the shariʿa remained the ideal solution for any question, but the
realities of our imperfect world meant that these rules could not always be
implemented, or they would, if taken to the letter, impose hardships that
were at variance with the general tenet that the law should promote the
welfare of man. Thus, the sultan could and should instead seek in his own
way to promote the shariʿa’s principles, even if he thus had to change and
even contravene the letter of that law, which the qadi could not. This may
have seemed to be merely a justification for the sultan to impose his own
will, but it was without doubt the support that the sultan sought and marked
a link between his siyāsa decisions and the divine revelation.
That link was broken in many of the new laws that were enacted from the
middle of the nineteenth century. The penal, administrative or economic
laws were increasingly based on European laws and practices which of
course had few or no shariʿa references. It was not a sudden change; most of
the nineteenth century constituted rather a transitional period. Thus, the
celebrated Ottoman Mecelle laws (for economic and administrative matters
mostly) were largely based on Hanafi Islamic law, but restructured and
systematised in such a way as to be practical in the new political and social
environment that increasingly took its cue from Europe (Starr 1992, 33-36;
Findley 1960-2005, vi, 972). From the 1880s, European powers also came to
control many Muslim countries directly, and had even less compunction
with imposing European-inspired laws, certainly in cases where their own
citizens in the Middle East were involved.
But both they and the Ottoman and other Muslim rulers left some areas
of law largely untouched, in particular family law and laws of personal
status. These thus became more of a “reservation” for shariʿa law, based
on fiqh rules, and often administered by separate qadi courts that had lost
their competence in all other areas of law. There may be several reasons
why these fields of law were so much more resistant to “modernisation”
or Europeanisation. It may be that the Europeans were more interested
in changing laws that directly affected themselves or the state authorities
they now controlled, and found it easier to let Muslim families comport
themselves as they wished internally. More important was probably the
necessity that laws are accepted by those touched by them. Not only do
Isl amic L aw in the Modern World 209

family laws relate to the most intimate and personal matters of each
individual – everyone is affected by issues of paternity, marriage, and
inheritance, while fewer are concerned with crime, administration, and
political systems. Issues of family matters also concern deeply held ideas
of morality, honour, and “family values.” While an individual may accept
that a distant and powerful state could meddle in how he should write a
contract or register land ownership, he would be far less willing to accept
that the state decides whom he should marry and how he should share his
wealth with his family. Thus, a fundamental change in family laws in a
“European” direction would neither have been understood nor accepted by
the subjects. The authorities, European as well as modern Muslim, found it
acceptable not to rock that boat too rapidly.
Even so, the twentieth century saw the beginning of change even within
Muslim family laws. Virtually every Muslim country introduced some, and
successive, changes to their rules for marriage and divorce, some more
than others, although only Turkey separated itself completely from the
legacy of the shariʿa. The basis for this change and the possibility for the
state to intervene and influence these fiqh-based laws point to perhaps
the more important change in legal development in the twentieth century
and “modernisation,” although still foreshadowed by the sultan’s kanun:
the process of codification.
Codif ication refers to the form that a law takes: rather than being
expressed in a shared understanding of “existing custom” (in customary
law) or in the legal precedence found in records of previous lawsuits (in
common law systems), the law is fixed in a written code of law (Bogdan
1994). Such a law code is structured and systematic and should ideally be
so principled that it would cover every possible case, past or future. This
code is formulated and fixed by someone; it has a known author, a clearly
defined legal authority. This authority could be a parliament, a legislative
assembly, or a single autarch or dictator; the central point is that there is an
agent behind the law, and the authority of the law is based on acceptance
of the legal authority of this agent.
The existence of a codified law system is not a sign of modernity in
itself; the Roman law of antiquity was a model for codification, and even
the laws of Hammurabi constitute a rudimentary codified law. But in the
Muslim world it coincided with the advent of the European models, and it
signalled the final decisive transfer of legal authority from the independent
class of ʿulamaʾ to the state itself. Now the agent of codification, the body
that formulated the law codes, was always the state. This was evidently the
case for the new Europeanised laws that came to prevail in economic and
210 Knut S. Vikør

penal law, but also in the one area that was left as a “reserve” for the shariʿa,
family and personal law.
It was only in the twentieth century that the process of codification
of family law really took hold, perhaps with the Ottoman family law of
1917 as a decisive turning point. Although the Ottoman Empire collapsed
soon after and modern Turkey soon abandoned this Ottoman law for a
European imported law, it remained influential in the earlier Ottoman
provinces of the Arab world, and it can still be seen to underpin the
modern family laws of many of the republics that followed from the
mandate era.2
Most Muslim countries followed up by introducing smaller or greater
changes in their family laws, such as establishing a minimum age for mar-
riage, posing conditions on polygamy, improving the wife’s access to judicial
divorce, or limiting the husband’s ability to unilaterally divorce his wife
(ṭalāq), and similar measures.3 The legislators in these cases seldom directly
banned practices such as ṭalāq or polygamy that had a clear religious basis.
Instead, they circumscribed the husband’s rights with conditions to make it
more onerous to practice them, adding conditions such that he must have
the permission of the first wife in order to contract a second marriage, or
that by doing so, he automatically grants his first wife the right to khulʿ,
consensual divorce.
Preserving the rights supported in religion, such as ṭalāq and polygamy,
could of course be argued to show a remnant of a “holistic” approach by
merging the fields of religion and law. However, for that to be the case, it
must be the religious basis itself that is the reason they exist. Given the
modifications that were made to them, many of which must be said to
contradict or at least manipulate the ʿulamaʾ’s classical fiqh, that is perhaps
not the best understanding. If it was religion, then the legislator would have
had to conform to the religion as defined by the religious authority, the
scholars, which they did not. 4 It may be better to see this as the function of
public perception of what is proper. That must always limit any lawmaker
that has less than absolute totalitarian power. The modern lawmakers would
thus rather work under the assumption that the public (or the legislators

2 This can be seen, for example, in the surveys in An-Na’im (2002). In fact, the Ottoman
family law is still the prevailing law in what may be called the last legal remnant of the Ottoman
Empire: the Muslim minority population in Greece, under the unchanged agreements following
the Greek-Turkish War of 1919 (Rohe 2004).
3 An-Naʾim (2002), also Vikør (1995, 321-325). See also Otto (2010).
4 Rather the opposite: the qadis more or less half-heartedly accepted the modifications of
the state because they were dependent on the state (see Shaham 1997).
Isl amic L aw in the Modern World 211

themselves) would not have accepted a law that broke too directly with
what they considered “right and wrong” in their established norms and
customs, which they identified in turn with religion.
In this sense, the process of legal reform of family matters in the last
century is not a partial and imperfect implementation of the global transi-
tion from “tradition” to “modernity,” but the result of a general truism, that
laws have to reflect in some way the subjects’ normative system, and that
these normative systems are ever changing. But there is also a different
tendency that appears clearly from the family law reforms of the twentieth
century, again one not related to a “modernist break,” but a continuity
of the trend we saw from the medieval period onwards: the inexorable
advance of the state in the legal field. Superficially, the family law reforms
seem to strengthen the position of women: access to divorce, limitation of
polygamy, and so on. But in practical matters, it is not so much the women’s
position that is strengthened, but that of the court (the state). Access to
judicial divorce was improved, but what the wife was now allowed was to
petition the court for divorce (cf. Carroll 1996). Particularly in Hanafi law,
the judge had very limited, or no, possibility to hear divorce cases initiated
by women. By various means, such as borrowing from Maliki law, far more
liberal in this respect, the court now accorded itself greater rights to decide
on a wife’s plea. Also, all the restrictions put on the husband’s right to ṭalāq
went in the direction of giving the courts the right to decide the framework
surrounding the divorce, and similarly with most other reforms. In other
words, the reforms tended very clearly to take family matters that had been
deemed to be “private” and make them “public,” under state authority. Thus
it continued the process of “statification” of legal matters. This is certainly
a clear marker of change, but the continuation of one that began in the
eighth century.

2 Islam in the Egyptian Constitution

An important element of codification and the accompanying systematisa-

tion of laws was the idea that a state should have a basic constitutional law
that regulates the political system of the country and is the foundation for
its other laws. The first constitution in the Arab world was established in
Tunisia in 1861 but was soon repealed after France, already a serious influ-
ence in Tunisian affairs, came to believe that it could be used to counter
their interests in the country (Perkins 2004, 24-30). As the new nation-
states were created around and after World War I, however, most Middle
212 Knut S. Vikør

Eastern countries passed constitutional laws. In theory, of course, this

contravened at least one common conception of the shariʿa, which was that
either the shariʿa itself or the Qurʾan, was the only possible “constitution,”
the mundane state laws passed by parliaments or presidents only at best
being siyāsa, practical implementations of the shariʿa ideal according to
the best efforts of the sultan, the ruler in place.
These constitutions were thus faced with the question of how to relate the
actual laws of the land to the concept of the shariʿa. A common form was to
introduce classical fiqh as one of several sources for jurisprudence. Typically,
the constitution could specify that if there was a rule in the codified law that
could be applied, then the judge should use that. If he could not find such
a relevant rule, he could search in the established fiqh rules of a specified
madhhab. Thus the United Arab Emirates gives Maliki and Hanbali fiqh
precedence, so the judge should first go there, and if no answer could be
found there either, then to the Shafiʿi and Hanafi madhāhib. Custom could
then also be added at the end, if the case could not be satisfactorily answered
by either codified law or the established madhāhib. Other countries rank
the madhāhib differently, according to the position of each madhhab there
(Ballantyne 1990; Vikør 2005, 251).
Here, then, the codified law has precedence, but a space is left open for
uncodified fiqh.5 More controversial is to let codified laws be subservient
to the shariʿa in that a body of fiqh specialists are given the competence to
vet and strike down codified laws introduced by the legislative assembly.
This is the case in post-revolutionary Iran, where this led to considerable
problems as the religiously trained scholars of the Guardian Council were
not at all able to keep up with the pace of legislation, and the system had
to be modified to reduce their ability to create bottlenecks (Schirazi 1997).
Similar review bodies have also been suggested elsewhere (Hussain 1994, 62).
One of the most controversial attempts to bring references to the shariʿa
into the constitution, and probably one that also had most effect on the
legislation of other Middle Eastern countries, was that of Egypt. The earli-
est constitutions from 1923 on did not have any particular phraseology
about Egypt’s religious identity, except to establish freedom of worship.
It seems that it was in the post-Nasser constitution of 1956 that we first
get this sentence (then §3), which has remained in this form ever since:
“Al-Islām dīn al-dawla, wa-l-lugha al-ʿarabiyya lughatuhā al-rasmiyya”

5 Saudi Arabia is an exception, with its principled opinion that only shariʿa is “real law” and
the rules established by the state (the king) are no more than “ordinances.” For how this works
in practice, see Vogel (2000).
Isl amic L aw in the Modern World 213

(Islam is the religion of the state, and the Arabic language is its official
language).6
The paragraph remained in this form until Sadat came to power fol-
lowing Nasser’s death in 1970. His main political rival in his first year was
the socialist left wing, and to counteract their influence, he opened up a
space for Islamic tendencies. As a part of this, he added a sentence to the
paragraph (now moved to be §2) in the revised constitution of 1971: “wa-
Mabādiʾ al-sharīʿa al-islāmiyya maṣdar raʾīsī li-l-tashrīʿ” (and the principles
of the Islamic shariʿa is a main source for the legislation).
This was a reasonably vague formulation, giving rise to three questions:
What was to be understood by “the principles” of the shariʿa?, What did it
mean to be “a main source”?, and, of immediate concern, What effect should
this new law have for already existing laws – should they now be vetted
against the “principles of the shariʿa” and changed if they did not conform
to them? There were views in favour of such a review, and towards the end
of Sadat’s rule, plans were made to review existing legislation and “Islamise”
a wider set of laws (Lombardi 2006, 129-140). However, when Mubarak came
to power after Sadat’s murder in 1981, the policy changed, and nothing
came from these plans. The issue was brought before the new Supreme
Constitutional Court, which established that the paragraph introduced in
1971 did not have a retroactive effect, so it only applied to new laws passed
thereafter.
The Islamisation drive of the late 1970s did, however, have one lasting
effect, in that an amendment was made to §2 in 1980, adding a small but
crucial element. Where the 1971 text had “maṣdar raʾīsī” (a major source),
the revision read “al-maṣdar al-raʾīsī” (the major source), thus taking care
of the second issue above: the shariʿa principles should now be paramount
over any other possible source for legislation. As long as it was not to be
applied retroactively, it still did not have any immediate effect, but after
time some issues were brought to the Constitutional Court for review to
see if they contravened §2. In dealing with them, the court developed a
methodology of its own, which basically equated the “principles” of the
shariʿa to be its general intentions, maṣlaḥa or social welfare, which the
court deemed to include contemporary principles of general human rights.
Thus, only if a law contravened the principles of social welfare could it be
in contravention with §2. In almost all cases under consideration, the court

6 All the Arabic texts of the constitutions have been retrieved from the Egyptian government
website (http://www.sis.gov.eg/Ar/LastPage.aspx?Category_ID=2128).
214 Knut S. Vikør

decided that the law did not do so.7 Thus, the controversial paragraph §2
had little actual effect on Egyptian legislation.
Nevertheless the paragraph, innocuous as it may have been in actual legal
practice, generated a heated public debate in Egypt and abroad, and was seen
as a possible back door to Islamise Egypt’s mainly secular laws, if the court
or any other legislative body were to change their conception of “principles.”
Abroad, many English-language sources also inadvertently made the text
of the paragraph stronger than it was. It was commonly presented in the
English translation provided by the Egyptian government, which had slipped
on the word pair “principle” and “principal.” The paragraph is here rendered
in English as: “Arabic is its official language, and the principal source of
legislation is Islamic Jurisprudence (Sharia),” (thus still on their website8). Ap-
parently, “principal” here covers both the Arabic original mabādiʾ (principles)
and raʾīsī (main, or principal). This caused some confusion when the Salafis,
as we shall see below, attacked the word mabādiʾ which had disappeared in
this shortened English translation most Western newspapers used.

2.1 The Debates of 2012

After the 2011 revolution, it was clear that the old constitution would have to
be revised, and after the very strong showing of the Islamist parties in the
first parliamentary elections of January 2012,9 the question of what role the
shariʿa should have became very controversial. The political situation was
fairly chaotic, with the parliamentary election being set aside by the Supreme
Constitutional Court and the new president elected in June, Muhammad
Mursi from the Muslim Brotherhood, unsuccessfully trying to overturn
that decision. However, parliament was able to appoint a Constitutional
Assembly where the two Islamist parties held fifty out of a hundred seats,
but in reality came to dominate the proceedings. The issue of the shariʿa and
§2 of course also dominated the public debate surrounding the constitution.

7 The exceptions seem to concern matters of economy and property; the court has been
consistently liberal on issues of family law (Lombardi 2006, 201-258).
8 Egypt Constitution, part 1 “The State”, article 2, available in English on Egypt’s Government
Services Portal website, http://www.egypt.gov.eg/english/laws/constitution/chp_one/part_one.
aspx. It is however rendered correctly in an “unofficial” translation by Adli Mansour entitled
“Constitution of The Arab Republic of Egypt 2014” (dated 18 January 2014) available at the
“State Information Service. Your Gateway to Egypt” website at http://www.sis.gov.eg/Newvr/
Dustor-en001.pdf.
9 In which the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party received 37 percent and the
Salafis, dominated by the new al-Nour Party, 28 percent of the vote, but took respectively 45
and 25 percent of the seats.
Isl amic L aw in the Modern World 215

Viewpoints changed and were sometimes contradictory, but some

general tendencies could be discerned. On the “liberal” side of politics,
a small secularist tendency arose that wanted to remove all or as much
of the religious references as possible from the constitution, and thus an
outright suppression of §2. Some Coptic voices also supported this view so
as to establish an equality between Muslims and Copts. Other Copts, and
apparently also the fairly cautious Coptic Church authorities, did not go
so far, and accepted §2 as it stood, but wanted instead an addition to the
paragraph that established the rights of the “traditional” or historic role of
the Coptic community in the national fabric of Egypt. The shariʿa for the
Muslims; Christian law for the Copts. Most centrist groups also accepted
the status quo as the best way not to rock the boat, with the retention of
§2 in an unchanged manner. This was also the view of the Brotherhood,
according to statements they repeatedly issued (Brown 2012).
The new political force on the Islamist side, however, the Salafis, pushed
hard for changes in the law to impose the shariʿa. Various Salafi politicians
and polemicists suggested many possible forms for this, such as to simply
declare the shariʿa to be the constitution. However, the most concrete
proposal to carry some weight was to replace the word mabādiʾ, principles,
with aḥkām, rules: the rules of the shariʿa are the main source of legislation.
This would mean that the actual fiqh jurisprudence, not the vague maṣlaḥa
(welfare) was to be the measure that any law was to be compared to.
The original cooperation between liberals and Islamists, such as it was,
broke down with most of the liberal parties and forces, including the Coptic
Church, withdrawing from the Constitutional Assembly. The final draft
that was put forwards and was quickly passed in a referendum in December
2012, was thus mainly the work of the Brotherhood with the remaining other
Islamist forces, both Salafis and some liberal Islamist parties that remained
in the commission. The overly rapid passing of this law, only a couple of
weeks after its text had been made known, caused an upheaval of political
life in Egypt, and was a major factor in the social unrest that followed in
the ensuing weeks. The main charge was that the Brotherhood and Salafis
had implemented a coup and forced the shariʿa onto the revolution. This
was also how it was perceived abroad: Egypt has now introduced the shariʿa
into the constitution. Also the Salafi and partly also Brotherhood voices
triumphantly presented the law in the same vein: now we have passed our
shariʿa, go out and defend it! Given Egypt’s central position in the Muslim
world, such a change would indeed have been a very significant event for
our analysis of the “modern role of the shariʿa.” It may therefore be useful
to look closer at the text of the 2012 Egyptian constitution to see what kind
216 Knut S. Vikør

of overtly Islamic or shariʿa elements could be found in it, compared to the

one it replaced.

2.2 The Law in Paragraphs

As expected, the major point of contention earlier, §2, remained unchanged

from its 1980 version:

Islam is the religion of the state, the Arabic language is its official lan-
guage, and the principles of the Islamic Sharīʿa is the main source for
the legislation.10

§3: Christians and Jews

Instead of the Copts’ request for a particular mention in §2, a separate and
new §3 was added:

The legal principles [mabādiʾ sharāʿī] of the Egyptian Christians and Jews
are the main sources for the legislation concerning their laws of personal
status, religious matters and the election of the spiritual leaders.

This of course largely reflects the actual situation today, but thus received
a constitutional basis.

$4: Al-Azhar
However, the following paragraph, also new, was much more controversial,
although it may also be considered open-ended. It concerned the question
who were to decide what the “principles of the shariʿa” are. So far, this had
been decided by the Supreme Constitutional Court that was set up in 1980.
But §4 seemed to remove this central right from the legal establishment,
and arguably from state authority, and placed it in the hands of the major
independent religious establishment of the country, Al-Azhar University:

Al-Azhar is an overarching and independent Islamic institution, which

governs its own affairs, with the task of spreading knowledge and science
about Islam and the Arabic language in Egypt and the world [beyond].
The views of the Collegium of high scholars at Al-Azhar shall be taken
into account in matters related to the Islamic shariʿa [Yuʾkhadh raʾy

10 “Constitution of the Arab Republic of Egypt 2014”, available in Arabic on the “State Information
Service. Your Gateway to Egypt” website at http://www.sis.gov.eg/Newvr/consttt%202014.pdf.
Isl amic L aw in the Modern World 217

hayʾat kubbār al-ʿulamāʾ bi-l-Azhar al-sharīf fī al-shuʿūn al-mutaʿallaqa

bi-l-sharīʿa al-islāmiyya].

This was originally suggested by the Salafi parties, who are normally not
well-received at Al-Azhar, but they may hope to achieve greater impact once
Al-Azhar gains more real independence from the state. Thus the paragraph
continued, after asserting that the state should fund the university,

Al-Azhar’s Grand Shaykh is independent and cannot be deposed. The law

for the method of his election from among the members of the Collegium
is to be determined.

The text of this paragraph can thus, in a benevolent perspective, be read

to mean no more than that Al-Azhar scholars are allowed to express an
opinion on matters relating to §2, but also that they are the final arbiter of
all laws, depending how “taken into account” is interpreted.

§219: The Role of Fiqh

However, this issue was clearly a matter of discussion and negotiation in the
Constitutional Assembly, and they ended up adding a paragraph at the end
of the constitution, §219, which should establish more clearly what is meant
by “principles of the shariʿa” and how they were to be established. Possibly
because of the committee work, or because the paragraph is more imbued
with religious than with legal thought, it hardly clarified the matter, and
the various translations that were made of it into English were not always
very helpful to penetrate what it says. The Arabic text is:

Mabādiʾ al-sharīʿa al-islāmiyya tashmal adillatahā al-kulliyya, wa-

qawāʿidahā al-uṣūliyya wa-l-fiqhiyya, wa-maṣādirahā al-muʿtabara fī
madhāhib ahl al-sunna wa-l-jamāʿa.

An English translation published in the daily Al-Masry Al-Youm provided this

text: “The principles of Islamic Sharia include general evidence, foundational
rules, rules of jurisprudence, and credible sources accepted in Sunni doctrines
and by the larger community.”11 Again, the exact meaning is not crystal clear.
A probable interpretation could perhaps understand the terms in this way:
adilla, plural of dalīl (indications or evidence for an interpretation), is often

11 Nariman Youssef, “Egypt’s draft constitution translated,” Egypt Independent, 12 February 2012,
available at http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/egypt-s-draft-constitution-translated.
218 Knut S. Vikør

used for arguments found in the revealed texts, the Qurʾan and sunna. With
kullī (total or general), this indicates the first part of the process required to
establish “principles”: “The principles of the Islamic shariʿa include the gen-
eral rule texts [on the issue in the Qurʾan and shariʿa].” Qawāʿid (foundations)
is in law normally used for the abstract principles that fiqh scholars have
formulated as underpinning the shariʿa, along these lines: “an act is measured
by its intention” (Heinrichs 2002, 368-369; Vikør 2005, 165). Although uṣūlī is
here paired with fiqhī rather than the more common furūʿī, it is reasonable
to read the two words as the conventional pair of “methodology” and “legal
content,” thus: “its methodological and legal basic rules.”
This may still be open to broad interpretation, so it is probably the last ele-
ment which is most important, “and its legal sources as they are recognised
in the schools of law of the ‘people of the Sunna and Community,’” that is
the Sunni madhāhib. Shiʿism is thus ruled out, but the four Sunni madhāhib
are given equal authority.
Read in this way, it shows how any new law taken under review of §2
should be processed. It should first be tested if it contradicts a rule in the
Qurʾan and sunna; then against the general qawāʿid and basic fiqh rules,
and finally the established rules that are recognised in the four schools.
The paragraph does not rank the madhāhib, so arguably a law that could
be supported in one of the four schools should still stand. But the term
“recognised” does not seem to allow much leeway beyond that; it leaves
it to the specialists of the schools to close the door on interpretations
that, however well they may be argued to follow the “general principles,”
including the uṣūl and furūʿ, are not considered by Al-Azhar scholars to be
“recognised” by the schools.

§§10-11, 44: The Family and Religious Freedoms

A few other paragraphs also refer to religion. §10 reads, “The family is the
foundation for the society and is based on religion, morality, and patriotism.”
Following it, §11 states: “The state should promote a high level of education
in religious and patriotic virtues, scientific thought, Arabic culture and the
historical and cultural heritage of the people.” Both of these stem from the
1971 constitution, which also contained a paragraph on religious education
which has been removed.
There was a heated debate about a paragraph on women’s rights which
included the wording, “as long as it does not contradict the shariʿa.” This was
however also taken from the 1971 constitution. In any case the paragraph
was removed completely, both women’s rights (covered more briefly in
another paragraph) and the shariʿa reservation.
Isl amic L aw in the Modern World 219

§§43-46 are concerned with freedoms of belief, thought, opinions, infor-

mation, and creative work. To this group was added a new §44: “To insult
or denigrate all religious messengers and prophets is forbidden.” The ban
on blasphemy was thus taken into the constitution. As expected, only the
three Abrahamic (sawāmī) religions were awarded protection.

2.3 Religion and State in the 2012 Constitution

What does this mean in relation to the discussion on modernity and Islamic
law? As we mentioned, the main elements that appeared with the modern
period were codification of laws, restriction of the shariʿa’s domain to family
and personal status law, and moderate changes to the contents of those laws.
The 2012 constitution touched upon all of those elements.
Egypt’s laws were of course still to be enacted in a codified form by a
legislative assembly such as parliament as before. However, the constitution
allowed a non-legal body, the scholars of Al-Azhar, the possibility to vet and
potentially overturn laws they found to be contrary to the shariʿa. Previ-
ously the Supreme Constitutional Court had that same right, but moving
the deciding authority out of the legal system and to the body of religious
scholars can certainly be considered a step away from what is the core of
the codification process: that legal authority lies with the state (including
the judiciary), and not with anybody independent of state authority, such
as Al-Azhar is here explicitly said to be. We do not know, of course, how
Al-Azhar would have exercised this right, or what their view being “taken
into account” was to mean. Were they to be the final authority de facto or
de jure, or were they only allowed to voice an opinion which a different
deciding body – presumably the Constitutional Court itself – could overturn
at will. The constitution cannot be said to be clear on this issue.
As for limiting the shariʿa influence to family and personal law, this
was of course still the case as substantive law was not changed in any
significant manner. But the review process outlined in §2, §4, and §219
made no distinction here. Laws in all fields could be vetted in this process,
and this was already the case for some laws considered under §2 by the
Constitutional Court, some of which concerned economic matters. The 2012
constitution does not specify whether the review process only concerns
new laws, such as was decided after the 1980 revision, although that may
perhaps be implied; but that was in any case only a postponement as new
laws will have to be enacted continuously. In other words this was not a
change from existing practice, but could have had a greater impact than
the zero effect §2 actually had made during its first forty years.
220 Knut S. Vikør

As for Al-Azhar’s practical role in any changes to the contents of the laws,
the constitution was ambiguous; §219 did not mention the word aḥkām
(actual legal rules), only the maṣādir al-madhāhib (sources of the schools
of law). It could thus mean only “sources” at the same abstract levels of
principles as before, but the language would also allow for an interpretation
where a law actually has to conform to, or at least not directly contradicts,
the fiqh of the matter in the four schools.
These processes would of course be constrained by the political environ-
ment. Major changes to Egypt’s laws in line with the traditional shariʿa
could not have been possible without major political confrontations, and
it is not obvious that Al-Azhar, known mostly for its closeness to what is
politically correct at any moment, would have been in the forefront of such
a challenge to society. The 2012 constitution can thus be said, in the most
dramatic reading, to try to open the way for a reversal of the modernisation
process Egypt and most Muslim countries have taken over the last century,
but it would probably take a more thorough Islamist revolution than the
political power surge of 2011-2012 to make that a reality.

2.4 An Islamist Project Aborted

As it turned out, this Islamist revolution did not take pace, and the 2012
constitution had only a brief and tumultuous life. It was one of the major
themes in the widespread popular protests that eventually led to the re-
moval of president Morsi from office on 3 July 2013. The 2012 constitution,
implemented only seven months earlier, was immediately frozen. The new
regime quickly set down a commission to revise the constitution. While
the Salafist al-Nour Party, which supported the coup, attempted to argue
for the preservation of some of the paragraphs introduced in February, the
revised constitution reversed most of the contentious changes.12
The text of §2 remained as it had been, while the new §3 on Christians’
and Jews’ rights was retained.13 However, the uncertainty of who was to
define the “principles” was removed. The independence of Al-Azhar was still
stated in what is now §7, but its task is now that “it is the fundamental arbiter
[al-marjaʿ al-asāsī] on the sciences of religion and Islamic matters,” with no

12 2014 constitution, available in Arabic on Egypt’s Government Services Portal website,

http://www.egypt.gov.eg/arabic/laws/download/Constitution_2014.pdf. See also an unofficial
English translation by Adli Mansour available at the “State Information Service. Your Gateway
to Egypte” website at http://www.sis.gov.eg/Newvr/Dustor-en001.pdf.
13 A new § 235 requires the new parliament to pass a law regulating the construction and
renovating of churches, in a manner respecting Christians’ rights.
Isl amic L aw in the Modern World 221

particular reference to the shariʿa, while the preamble to the constitution

says that the interpretation of the principles of the shariʿa lies in the previous
rulings of the Supreme Constitutional Court. The controversial §219 was
thus completely suppressed.14
This revised constitution was then put to a referendum, with as brief and
unconvincing public discussion as in the previous year, and was passed with
an overwhelming majority.
The 2012 constitution was thus not to become the framework of politics
in Egypt. However, its paragraphs and the debates surrounding it can still
give us useful perspectives on how the Muslim Brotherhood, with its allies
in the constitutional process, envisaged the integration of Islamist politics
and existing constitutional law in practice, and thus the legal role of the
“Islamic state.”
The issue of Egypt’s Brotherhood-inspired constitution does not conform
to a conception of a sharp break between “tradition” and “modernity.”
Modernisation theorists may, of course, say that this reflects an imperfect
modernisation, or a reversal from “modernity” to traditional values, rep-
resented by the Islamists and Al-Azhar. If so, it would rather indicate the
possibility of a hybridity between the “modern” and the “traditional,” mean-
ing that there is no absolute break. However, given how this process plays
out in “modern” institutions such as constitutional debates, parliamentary
elections, and codifications of the legal process, it seems more fruitful to
consider them different; contemporary political and cultural viewpoints
and trends with the conceptual dichotomy of “modern” and “traditional”
or “classical” are of less explanatory value.

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Sharīʿa Courts, 1900-1955. Leiden: Brill.
Starr, June. 1992. Law as Metaphor: From Islamic Courts to the Palace of Justice. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
Vikør, Knut S. 2005. Between God and the Sultan: A History of Islamic Law. London: C. Hurst & Co.
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Weiss, Bernard G. 1998. The Spirit of Islamic Law. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
 Vernacular Cosmopolitanism as an
Ethical Disposition
Sufi Networks, Hospitality, and Translocal Inclusivity

Pnina Werbner

1 Introduction

In Regulating Aversion, the philosopher Wendy Brown makes the point that
“[t]olerance as a political practice is always conferred by the dominant, it
is always a certain expression of domination even as it offers protection
or incorporation to the less powerful” (Brown 2008, 178). Those who are
perceived to be intolerant are defined by tolerant Westerners as barbarians,
she proposes, and as such a legitimate target of aggression. The result is that
tolerance, in marking what is “civilised,” confers superiority on the West,
even in such cases when Western liberals concede that “the other” too may
be “tolerant.” The discursive act of labelling establishes the relationship of
dominance (see Brown 2008, 176-258).
If we accept Brown’s position, this creates a dilemma for students of
Islamic societies, similar to dilemmas raised in the past by the questioning
of ethnographic authority in anthropological writing. If cosmopolitanism is
defined at least in part by an ethics of tolerance or “openness,” a willingness
to reach out to a cultural “other” or stranger, may we conclude, with Brown,
that cosmopolitanism is necessarily Western, secular-liberal, and elitist – a
discursive strategy that disguises and depoliticises relations of dominance?
And, if so, what room is there for ethnographers of Muslim societies to
attempt to describe their research subjects as “cosmopolitan,” or to theorise
a non-elitist, demotic, vernacular cosmopolitanism that is nevertheless
tolerant, moral, and ethical? Can it be that the people anthropologists
study beyond the West, including Muslims, are incapable of being “truly”
cosmopolitan in their own right?
Against Brown’s view, I want to propose here that non-Western socie-
ties may be equally tolerant and cosmopolitan in their own, locally and
culturally embedded, vernacular cosmopolitan ways. By vernacular cos-
mopolitanism I refer here to alternative, particularly non-Western, forms of
cosmopolitan ethics, defined broadly as an openness to difference, whether
to other ethnic groups, cultures, religions, or nations. One path towards
224  Pnina Werbner

recovering the cosmopolitanism of societies beyond the West, I suggest, is

to make more explicit the indigenous, vernacular terms used by them to
express their cosmopolitan ethical outlook or ideology.
Against the notion of a Muslim cosmopolitanism, Muslims are often
defined by the media and politicians as narrow, intolerant, repressive, and
unwilling to recognise and respect non-Muslims; in other words, as anti- or
counter-cosmopolitan. But is this really so? And is it so for all Muslims?
Among Muslim streams and movements, many scholars have stressed the
open, inclusive aspects of Sufism in particular as a major Islamic tendency
that is peace-loving and tolerant of difference. In this essay I present first
an example of Sufi tolerance and vernacular cosmopolitanism from my
research on a Sufi saint in Pakistan. Second, I propose that a Sufi ideology
of peace and tolerance is related to the kind of networks across boundaries
that Sufi saints foster. I want to begin, however, by exploring some Pakistani
or Urdu notions that refer to what might be construed as cosmopolitan.

2 Pakistani and Sufi Ethical “Cosmopolitanism”

It is possible to map out, I suggest, a semantic field of Urdu notions that

between them speak to different aspects of cosmopolitanism. A key term in
Urdu, often invoked, is the notion of “humanity” (insaniyat), which combines
several ethical notions at the heart of cosmopolitanism: equality, compas-
sion, and urbanity. According to Platts’ Urdu-English dictionary, insaniyat
means “human nature, humanity, human kindness, affability, politeness,
urbanity” (Platts 1884). A parallel term, admiyat, means “human nature, hu-
manity, benevolence, compassion, sympathy, civility, urbanity, politeness,
good breeding, rationality, reason, judgement, civilised.” In one sense, then,
these two terms contain the idea that all people everywhere are equally
human and that this humanity must be recognised and respected. Islam
as a universal religion regards all human beings as potentially equal before
God; indeed, unknown to them, they were born Muslims and therefore
when they convert to Islam they are, in fact, “reverting” to Islam. Sufi saints
like Zindapir, the saint I studied, recognise this inclusiveness before God,
as I show below.
Perhaps even more striking is the fact that the same terms, insaniyat and
admiyat, also imply urbanity, civility, good manners, kindness, reason and
judgement. These are the central traits of cosmopolitans as colloquially
understood in English, too. Muslim and South Asian cities have long been
sites of multiethnic and multireligious commerce in goods and ideas, while
Vernacul ar Cosmopolitanism as an Ethical Disposition 225

Muslims have been nomadic and long-distance traders for millennia. One
would expect such societies to combine ideas of urbanity, civility, and
universal humanity. As in ancient Greece, the word in Urdu for “citizen,”
shahri, means “of or belonging to a city, a citizen.” Historically, the vast
spread of Islam, the medieval and modern European colonial conquests
and re-conquests of Muslim-populated lands and, from quite early on,
the emergence of ungodly usurpers and lay dynastic rulers in the Muslim
world, all made the injunction to migrate to a Muslim land virtually un-
achievable. As Shadid and Van Koningsveld have argued, with Muslims
living permanently in non-Muslim lands, Muslim scholars began adapting
a third category between the so-called “Land of Islam” and the “Land of War”
(dar-el harb) – this was dar-el aman or dar al-ahd, the “Land of Security” or
“Treaty,” concepts originally formulated as a guideline for Muslim travellers
or traders who were living temporarily in lands friendly to Islam – to other
circumstances (Shahid and Van Koningsveld 1996; Lewis 1994). The condi-
tion for remaining in such lands was that Muslims should be allowed to
practise their religion openly and freely. The ethical notion implied by dar-el
aman is close to the cosmopolitan Kantian idea of temporary sojourning in
peace. Aman pasand is a peace-loving person in Urdu. Sufi saints’ lodges,
which often serve as places of refuge, are described as being places of peace
or serenity, sukun or sakina, dwelling in peace. This is also the word for Sufi

Figure 3 Doves over the shaykh’s room at Ghamkol Sharif

226  Pnina Werbner

inner peace in contemplation. Peace is symbolised by the doves at a saint’s

lodge (see figure 3).
Generally speaking, bardasht means “tolerance” in Urdu, but the most apt
description in Urdu of openness to “the other” in a cosmopolitan sense is
wasi un-nazr, literally a “vast vision,” referring to a person of open horizons,
an open-minded, liberal person. This is the opposite of mutasib (prejudiced).
There are many other related terms: farakh dil (open-hearted or generous),
khula damajh (open-minded), mehman nawaz (hospitable), and sakhi
(generous).
I asked a Pakistani friend if there was a term for “world citizen” in
Urdu, someone who believes they belong to the whole world, not just one
country. She responded, “this is what we believe in Islam.” She quoted a
saying from the poet Muhammad Iqbal, “Muslim hey, ham wathan hey,
sara jehan hamara” (as Muslims our homeland is the whole world). “We
believe that Allah is the God of all people,” she added. Literally “world
citizen” translates as aalmi shahri, but this expression is seldom used, I
was told.
We see, then, that there is a complex vocabulary in Urdu, and no doubt
in Arabic, too, referring to notions of tolerance, open-mindedness, and a
shared humanity.
An apocryphal tale told to me about Shaikh Ahmed Sirhindi, a renowned
seventeenth-century Sufi Naqshbandi, by a khalifa (deputy) of Zindapir, the
Sufi saint I studied in Pakistan, exemplifies this sense of world belonging.
The tale was intended to explain why true Sufi saints like Zindapir always
remain in their lodges. Babaji – one of Zindapir’s khalifas – began his story
by telling me that once, when Ahmed Sirhindi was standing in the company
of his disciples, they saw the shaykh take a step forward, then withdraw his
foot; he then took a step in the opposite direction and once again, withdrew
his foot. This happened a third and fourth time. Wondering at this strange
behaviour, his disciples finally asked him: “Your Honour, what is the matter,
why do you keep stepping forwards and withdrawing your foot?” Sirhindi
replied that there are three types of ranked faqir (mendicants): first, the
person of karamat who can cross the earth in two-and-a-half steps. He
moves from place to place, visiting his murids; second, the person of high
rank (maqamat) who can cross the earth in a step-and-a-half. He only
visits select places. And finally, the faqir who has achieved the rank of utter
steadfastness (istiqamat). If this faqir lifts his foot, there is no place on earth
for him to put it down; he can cross the earth in half a step and so he has
no need to go anywhere. He remains fixed in one place. This is the place
where he sits and this is the place where he is buried.
Vernacul ar Cosmopolitanism as an Ethical Disposition 227

The tale is clearly one of global Sufi reach. Through it the khalifa, Babaji,
connects himself both to Sirhindi and to his pir, Zindapir, of the same Naqsh-
bandi silsila (chain of preceptors and disciples). Zindapir was famous for
never leaving his lodge except to go to Mecca on hajj once a year. By contrast,
many Muslims, including Sufis, have been world travellers. Muhammad
Zaman reports on Ibn Batutta who travelled in the fourteenth century
from Morocco to Delhi, where he was appointed a judge, before travelling
further to China. This was possible because across this vast region, Muslim
scholars shared the same language of scholarly interpretation (Zaman 2005).
This is a kind of elite vernacular Muslim cosmopolitanism in which a single
language may be shared across many regions and countries, enabling easy
travel and communication.
As a devout Muslim, Zindapir, whose lodge was in an isolated val-
ley in the North West Frontier Province, cannot be said to have been
a cosmopolitan in either the elite or the secular sense of the term. But
he was, in many respects, nevertheless a cosmopolitan. For a start, like
other founding saints who created their own order or regional cult, he
had a stake in peaceful coexistence and tranquillity. This enabled him
to expand his Sufi order or cult network across regions within Pakistan
and even countries beyond it, in the Gulf, Great Britain, South Africa,

Figure 4 Arriving for the ʿurs at Ghamkol Sharif

228  Pnina Werbner

and elsewhere, and thus also to reach different ethnic and religious
populations. The very inclusiveness of the cult or order’s membership
and its pragmatic accommodation to different political regimes militated
against violence. Throughout the year, supplicants seeking healing and
blessing arrived, and continue to arrive, at the lodge. During the annual
ʿurs celebration at the lodge tens of thousands of pilgrims and disciples
gather together in peaceful amity from across Pakistan and even beyond
it (see figure 4).
A further element relates to the spiritual authority of the saint, which
transcends that of worldly rulers. If his authority is above that of temporal
rulers, it follows also that it recognises no temporal political, ethnic, or
religious boundaries. His tolerance towards members of other religions is
stressed in many of the morality tales he tells. He repeatedly told me that

Figure 5 A Christian convert who is khalifa of Zindapir

Vernacul ar Cosmopolitanism as an Ethical Disposition 229

the “true” Islam does not discriminate between men of different creeds
and faiths. It was the Sufis, not the ʿulamaʾ (the learned scholars), who had
brought Islam to the subcontinent. Paralleling his claimed domination
of the natural world was his love and dominion over the human world,
including men and women of all faiths, from the poorest beggar to the
most elevated politician or the most respected of learned scholars (see
figure 5).
Saiyed (1989) echoes other South Asian scholars when he contends that
it is through Sufi shrines that “the subcontinent saw the best part of Hindu-
Muslim integration,” and that it was “the personal and spiritual influence
of various saints that … allowed for the peaceful coexistence of the two
communities for several centuries on the Indian subcontinent” (Saiyed
1989, 242). Although Van der Veer has argued that current antagonisms
between Hindus and Muslims in contemporary India have diminished and
politicised the spirit of Hindu-Muslim fraternity at Sufi saints’ shrines (Van
der Veer 1994), there are places in India and Pakistan where even today
Hindus and Muslims participate harmoniously in joint celebration, as at
the ʿurs of the saint of Nagore-e Sharif in Tamil Nadu (Saheb 1998).1 Among
Zindapir’s disciples were Afghani refugees, Pathans, Punjabis, Sindhis and
Kashmiris, peasants and urbanites, rich and poor. Against the puritanical
strictures of the Deobandis, Zindapir’s reform Sufism espoused a spirit of
openness and generosity, which encouraged followers to aspire to worldly
success and prosperity, while envisioning a utopian world of nurture,
tranquillity, and selfless giving (see Werbner 2003).
During my evening meetings with the shaykh, he continuously stressed
that he expected no reciprocity from me for the generous hospitality he had
extended to me. He will never be a guest in my house, he assured me. He
treats me this way because I am a human being, insan, I am God’s creature,
for the sake of Allah, irrespective of whether I am a Muslim, a Christian,
or a Jew.
The trope of unilateral hospitality is key to vernacular forms of ethical
cosmopolitanism. When I commented to a Pakistani friend during one of
my stays in Pakistan that I would never be able to reciprocate the generosity
his family had shown me, he responded that there was no expectation of
reciprocity. They believe, he explained, that the stranger they welcome to
their home was sent to them by Allah, affording them the opportunity to
be generous hosts for the sake of Allah.

1 For other examples in South Asia, see Basu (1998), Liebeskind (1998), Rehman (2007), Bigelow
(2010), and Frembgen (2011).
230  Pnina Werbner

3 Hospitality, Honour, and Generosity towards Strangers

While anthropologists have not written explicitly about the ethics of

vernacular cosmopolitanism, anthropological theorising on indigenous
notions of hospitality as signalling an openness to “the other,” to stran-
gers and unknown travellers, parallels in many ways my discussion
of vernacular cosmopolitanism here. As Selwyn argues, “[h]ospitality
converts: strangers into familiars, enemies into friends, friends into better
friends, outsiders into insiders, non-kin into kin” (2000, 18-19). Writing
about Jordanian Bedouin, Shryock tells us that the Arabic word karām
denotes “generosity, hospitality, nobility, grace and refinement.” But it also
conveys, at the same time, a sense of “hazard” (Shryock 2004, 36). This is
because the magnitude of generosity towards a guest is potentially almost
infinite, and yet to be judged ungenerous is to risk one’s reputation and
honour. A host depends on a guest to sing his praises when he leaves. More
subtly, “hospitality creates a momentary overlap of the inner and outer
dimensions of a ‘house’ (a bayt or dār)” (ibid.). In crossing the threshold, a
guest ambiguously becomes an intimate insider while remaining a social
and cultural outsider.
A delightful tale is told by Emrys Peters about his encounter with Cyre-
naican Bedouin hospitality. In the first camp where he and his wife pitched
their tent, they were welcomed generously with the slaughter of a sheep.
While the animal was being prepared they engaged in a long series of formal
ceremonial greetings as they reclined on carpets. The meal, when it arrived,
was eaten in silence, “without conversing.” It was only when the tea was
brought in that for the next two hours the guests were “plied with questions
about our origin, our families, our marriage, our history, our country and
our travels; and the Bedouin freely gave similar details about themselves
… their origin, their relation to other groups, and their wells, pastures and
ploughland” (Peters 1990, 138). The denouement of the tale came the fol-
lowing day, when the anthropologist guests discovered that their spoons
and forks had been borrowed for another guest, without permission, on the
grounds that “we are now exactly equal together” (ibid., 139).
We see here the move from strangerhood to intimacy and mutual
knowledge learnt after hospitality has been generously given though, as
Shryock reports, among the Bedouin of Jordan there was a sacred age-old
Arab tradition of offering hospitality for “three and one-third days without
asking about the identity of the guest” (2004, 44), a custom respected by
Zindapir who boasted that he never asked supplicants their names. But as
the incidence of the fork-borrowing highlights, there is always a measure
Vernacul ar Cosmopolitanism as an Ethical Disposition 231

of ambiguity in true hospitality. As Selwyn argues, citing Heal, “while the

essence of hospitality lies in sharing (food, lodging, entertainment), the very
process of sharing may involve dominating too … [This is because hospital-
ity is] concerned with such values as honour and status, the quasi-sacred
character of both guest and host” (Selwyn 2000, 27).
The similarity between hospitality and vernacular cosmopolitanism lies
in the fact that in hospitality as in cosmopolitanism there is no intention
of a guest or interlocutor being assimilated or fully incorporated into the
house. S/he is accepted as a stranger and outsider and yet welcomed and
enveloped in generosity as an insider. So, too, cosmopolitanism does not
depend on cultural homogenisation or assimilation but on an acceptance:
it is, simultaneously, both a relationship and a continuing otherness; a
welcoming encounter with difference. A further similarity lies in the ethical
voluntarism inherent in the act of hospitality, which, at the same time, is
felt by hosts to be compelling and inescapable. So too with cosmopolitan-
ism: cosmopolitanism is not a legal requirement but a voluntary gesture of
acceptance and tolerance of a cultural other, which is yet necessary; it is the
voluntary creation of nearness and familiarity with and despite stranger-
hood. In both hospitality and cosmopolitanism, “acceptance is bestowed
in a context of vulnerability” (Shryock 2004, 37).
In a later paper, Shryock draws attention to the parallels between
Bedouin thinking about hospitality and the thinking of metropolitan
philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Immanuel Kant (Shryock 2008).
Kant regarded gestures of hospitality between nations, the injunction to
afford the right to sojourn, as guarantors of “perpetual peace,” of cosmo-
politan non-violence between nations. Derrida, Shryock tells us (2008,
409), argued that

the host must be prepared to receive the guest without expecting the
guest, without acting out of duty yet feeling obliged to feed and cover the
guest: “If I welcome only what I welcome, what l am ready to welcome,
and that I recognise in advance because I expect the coming of the hote
(guest) as invited, there is no hospitality.”

True hospitality, in other words, is for the unexpected guest, not the familiar
one, for the unknown stranger who turns up at your door. This is the very
opposite of the unwelcoming attitude French hosts have displayed towards
Maghrebian migrants in France.
Often, hospitality is given without an expectation of return, but it can
also be an opening move in forging a long-term relationship of gift exchange
232  Pnina Werbner

Figure 6 Hospitality for the anthropologist at Ghamkol Sharif

and debt (Peters 1990, 139). Despite the idealisation of the ethics of hospital-
ity as spontaneous and without calculation, in reality hospitality is at the
same time also often highly instrumental for survival, as in the case of
Afghan long-distance traders. Marsden shows that among such traders
the hospitality they depend on or extend may, and often does, go wrong
(Marsden 2012). Guests are a necessary risk and particularly so when it
comes to movement across dangerous borders. Nevertheless, hospitality is
essential to the lives of these traders.
For Sufi saints like Zindapir who remain permanently seated in their
central lodges, hospitality is constructed as a pure ethical gesture, unilater-
ally extended without expectation of return (see figure 6). Like other hosts,
however, such saints also must guard against accusations of hypocrisy and
greed – the view that donations and offerings at the lodge “in the name of
God” are in reality ways of enriching the shrine’s keepers. In this sense,
hospitality at a Sufi lodge may also be interpreted in ethically ambiguous
terms. Zindapir, in being an ascetic, a world renouncer, attempted to allay
such suspicions. In his moral narratives he stressed his inclusive accept-
ance of everyone, his willingness to engage with strangers and foreigners,
irrespective of religion, culture, and nationality, all of whom are treated as
sacred guests hosted under the canopy of God above.
Vernacul ar Cosmopolitanism as an Ethical Disposition 233

4 The Sufi Saint as Extender of Hospitality to Foreigners and

Strangers

What is a faqir? Zindapir asked me, rhetorically. A faqir is a friend of Allah.

He does things only for Allah. If he is given the choice between 100,000
rupees, or eat nothing for God’s sake, he would choose to stay hungry. If
a faqir loves the people, he only loves them for the sake of Allah, not for
himself. It is like the fan in my room. Once an Englishman came from the
British High Commission in Islamabad. He said: “I have a nice house in
Islamabad, full of comforts, yet I feel so peaceful when I come here. Why is
that?” The shaykh replied: “The fan is blowing cool air for me, but if someone
is sitting in the room with me, he too will feel the cool breeze. So too Allah
is here for me and you share in his light. Allah says that if you want to find
me, you must first find my friend, you must find mera banda [my man, my
servant, the person who does bandagi, prayer].”
The shaykh said that usually women sit behind the barrier where they
cannot touch him. He never shakes their hand. Why not? Because it is guna,
sin. But once a white female doctor came from Islamabad and he shook her
hand because she is a Christian (for her it is not a sin).
The shaykh’s tolerance was repeated in many of the morality tales he
tells. He explained: “I respect all people whatever their religion because
they are human beings. In fact, once a Christian came here and he was
given food before the Muslims so that he would not think they regarded
him as inferior.”
An American came to see him, he told me, and asked why Pakistan
helped the Afghan refugees. The shaykh replied that Pakistanis and Afghans
believed in the same God, and so too did Christians, but the Russians (i.e.
the Communists) did not believe in God. Once, a team of doctors from the
United Nations working with Afghan refugees in Kohat (the nearby canton-
ment town) came to visit him. The leader was a Christian doctor, himself
not a believer, yet later he asked if he could bring another doctor friend. All
are welcome at the darbar, the shaykh said, irrespective of religion, and he
treats them all the same: “I gave the visitors food even though it was Ramzan
and I myself was fasting. I said they should eat. I fast, but every person who
comes here, rich or poor, gets something to eat.”
My own visit was an occasion to prove once again his universal accept-
ance and tolerance, irrespective of faith or creed. On the last day of my visit
to the darbar in 1991, he called me to him and said: “You have stayed with
us for three weeks and during this time you have slept on a bed, in comfort.
We know that you are Jewish. While you have been here you have seen
234  Pnina Werbner

many Muslims come and all have slept on the ground. Would you get such
good treatment even from your own husband? And where else in the world
would you find such peace? Nowhere!” On my departure, I was showered
with gifts, including wild honey, perfume, suits of traditional clothing in the
most exquisite fabrics, and gifts for my husband. As in the case of important
politicians and civil servants, the gifts objectified the shaykh’s ultimate
transcendence and the miracle of his generosity.
Zindapir stressed repeatedly that what he does, he does for the love of
God and God alone. Some time ago a Japanese team came to the darbar,
headed by a Mr. Hiroshima, a famous climber who had conquered K2 in
the Karakoram range of the Hindu Kush, the second highest mountain
in the world after Mount Everest. The team consisted of scholars from a
Japanese institute with an interest in Sufism. They asked the shaykh: “What
is the significance of the dome on the graves of pirs?” The shaykh replied
that the dome is only for auliya, friends of God, not for generals, heads of
state, or kings. It is a sign (nishani) of a man of God, a friend of Allah. On
the occasion of this visit, Hajji Ibrahim, a devoted disciple of the shaykh,
invited the visitors for tea, Japanese style, and spoke to them in Japanese.
He had worked for a Japanese firm in the Gulf and he utilised his experience
to entertain the guests in a fitting way. Thus each guest to the darbar is
honoured according to his customs – an English visitor is provided with a
bed, the Japanese with the appropriate kind of tea.
Once, the shaykh recalled, three young Englishmen came to the darbar.
Two had already converted to Islam and one was converted in the darbar by
the shaykh. When they met the shaykh on hajj, one of them put the question
to him: “Should I stay with my mother who is still a Christian, or leave her?”
The pir said that he should keep on living with his mother and should serve
her and take care of her. “You should treat her with the respect due to her
as a mother.” The Prophet, he said, told a man who had converted to Islam
and whose father was an old man and a devout Christian: “You should take
your father to the church door, wait for him outside while he prays, and then
accompany him back home.”
On the last day of my stay in the darbar, following the ʿurs in 1991, I went
to bid goodbye to the shaykh. He looked particularly ethereal, thin and pale,
his eyes darkened, and he smiled a sweet, innocent smile. He stressed once
more that all he did was for the love of God alone and no one else. He knew I
was a Jew (yahudi). If a Jewish and a Muslim woman came before a Muslim
judge to be judged, and he put the Muslim woman in the shade, then the
judge was not a Muslim. Muslims, Christians, and Jews have the same God,
but he, Zindapir, does not like the Russian Communists (in Afghanistan)
Vernacul ar Cosmopolitanism as an Ethical Disposition 235

because they do not believe in God. During zikr people mention only one
name – the name of Allah. By appealing to God, Zindapir transcends
Islam to reach out to all people of faith. In doing so, he underlines his own
transcendence, the reach of his dominion. He also asserts the difference
between the mystic’s knowledge of the inner truth of Islam with its broad,
tolerant, universal message, and that of the narrow-minded ʿulamaʾ.
Lest it be thought that Zindapir was in some sense exceptional, a recent
article on a Sufi khalifa in Mauritania exemplifies some of the same traits.
Hill reports that his place of residence had become a cosmopolitan site for
students from all over Europe, North and West Africa, Indonesia, South
America, the US, and Canada (2012, 63). Hajj, the Sufi leader and his col-
leagues, he tells us, “avidly study their guests’ customs in order to offer
appropriate hospitality” (ibid., 65). Hill tells us that

Just as Hajj teaches Mauritanian disciples to build on common ground

with fellow Muslims, he teaches them not to alienate non-Muslims … [W]
henever Hajj heard someone (usually a visitor) ask about my beliefs, he
quickly changed the subject, quipping that no one knows God’s judgments
and that there is “no compulsion in religion” (Qurʾan 2:256). (Ibid., 77)2

Writing about efforts towards intercommunal peace and networking across

different ethnic and religious communities, at Ajmer Sharif, the burial site of
the founder of the Chishti order in India, Muʾin al-Din Chishti, and perhaps
the most sacred shrine in the whole of South Asia, Kelly Pemberton tells
us that in the face of violence and communal strife, keepers of the shrine
in Rajasthan make continuous efforts to reach out across Muslim, Hindu,
Sikh, and Christian communities in interfaith activism. In doing so they
draw upon elements in the saint’s life that “promote a vision of a community
in shared faith of the divine, particularly [the saint’s] universal message of
love without compulsion.” They thus mobilise, she tells us, “the symbolic
and cultural capitals of ‘idioms’ of Sufism” (Pemberton 2012, 270), while they
also reach out to the local multifaith community and to other networks of
anti-communalist activists.
The intercultural atmosphere of tolerance evident at Sufi annual festivals
in South Asia can be found elsewhere in the Muslim world, too. In a recent
paper on mulids in Egypt, Samuli Schielke describes the carnivalesque
atmosphere at annual mūlid festivals in Egypt. Such festivals are marked,

2 Hill uses the unfortunate notion of “cosmopolitan hybridity” rather than vernacular
cosmopolitanism.
236  Pnina Werbner

he tells us, by an ethos of joyful inclusiveness. Differences between Islamic

religious tendencies, gender, or class are erased so that a “famous actress can
eat next to a beggar, and there is no difference between them” (2008, 55). At-
tempts by Islamic reformists in the Egyptian administration to control what
they regard as the disorderly dimensions of the these festivals with their
crowds, music, transgressive alcohol drinking, gambling, and spontaneous
mingling between the sexes in intercultural amity, seem to be, in the long
run, doomed to failure, however.

5 Sufi Orders as Trans/regional Cults

If traditions of hospitality towards strangers permeate the vernacular eth-

ics of Muslims in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa, Sufi saints like
Zindapir appear to represent the outer extreme of unilateral giving and
hospitality. This may be due, I want to suggest, to the counter-structural
features of Sufi orders, seen as organisations that transcend structural
and administrative boundaries. Hence, the mediation of cross-ethnic,
inter-caste and cross-regional divisions in South Asia is a central feature
of South Asian Sufi orders, regarded as regional and transregional cults
focused on a single central place, which followers visit periodically. Such
cults are not bounded territories. Instead, they interpenetrate with one
another, leapfrogging across major political and ethnic boundaries and
creating their own sacred topographies and flows of goods and people.
These override, rather than being congruent with, the political boundaries
and subdivisions of nations, ethnic groups, or provinces (Werbner 1977,
xi).
Seen as networked spaces Suf i cults are creative and expansionary
organisations. True, the bonds of spirit between disciples of a single Sufi
saint often consolidate and mediate biradari (clan), affinal, lineal or village
ties; but they may also form the basis for new friendships forged away from
home, in the absence of family or neighbourhood during labour migration,
and they may introduce parochial villagers to the glories of shrines located
well beyond their district and even province. In such cases, being a disciple
comes to acquire many new and complex meanings. This was true for the
devotees of the living saint I studied, Zindapir, and his regional cult. The
genesis of the cult’s vast catchment area could be found in relations between
soldiers, labour migrants and, city dwellers living away from their village
homes, and their continued ties to their rural communities. It was thus the
intersection between labour migration and village or urban roots which
Vernacul ar Cosmopolitanism as an Ethical Disposition 237

explained the spatial patterning of the shaykh’s sacred dominion and the
reach of his cult.
Zindapir was during his lifetime, above all, an army saint. His career
started as a tailor-contractor in the army where his early circle of compan-
ions was forged. Sufi Sahib, who created his own regional cult centred in
Birmingham, was one of these companions. Rab Nawaz, one of his trusted
khalifas, told me that until white hairs appeared in the shaykh’s beard,
he and all the khulafa, the deputies or messengers, wore khaki. It was
only when his beard turned white that they began to wear white gowns.
Even after becoming a practising faqir, Zindapir spent time in Abbotabad
not far from the army base where he had worked, and he continued to
recruit army followers to be his disciples. Ghamkol Sharif, the lodge he
founded when he left Abbotabad, is located only a few miles from Kohat,
a large British garrison town or cantonment which was taken over by the
Pakistan army at independence. The lodge’s reputation as a place of local
beauty attracts a constant stream of curious visitors. Many of his murids,
disciples, told me how they first visited the lodge while stationed in Kohat.
On seeing the lodge, they were overwhelmed by its gloriousness and the
spirituality (ruhaniyat) of its shaykh. Later they became his disciples
(see figure 7).

Figure 7 Ghamkol Sharif lodge, nestled in the valley

238  Pnina Werbner

The story told to me by one murid exemplifies this intersection between

army, labour migration, and village roots:

I took the vow of baiʿat in 1969. I come from near Tarbela Dam in the
Frontier. Many people had told me about the shaikh and a friend sug-
gested that I take baiʿat. Since then I have brought many murids here,
and I come here for the ʿurs with three or four lorries every year. I am a
qafila (convoy or caravan) leader, the leader on the Tarbela side. When I
did baiʿat I was in the army. Now I am a pensioner, I retired in 1976. Today
I am a farmer. I have performed the hajj five times, because after I retired
from the army I went to Dubai with Ibrahim [another murid] and then to
Saudi Arabia [as a labour migrant]. My name is Hajji Ghulam Muhammad
and I am a stonemason. I am the person who built the perimeter wall
around the Darbar.

It needs to be remembered that while many of Zindapir’s disciples were

soldiers, it was as civilians that they joined his cult. The moment they
entered the space of the lodge, they shed their military persona. Even in
army barracks, when they performed zikr they created an ethical space
set apart. Nevertheless, the fact that they were pir-bhai, saintly brothers,
as well as comrades in arms served to deepen relations of amity between
them. The camaraderie they forged in one context spilled over into the
other to create multiplex relations of enduring obligation and trust. It
countered formal relations of hierarchy in bureaucratic and military
settings.
Before concluding this chapter I want to spell out the relationship
between the way that Suf i cults are mapped in space and managed as
viable organisations, and the more experiential dimensions of Sufism as
espousing peace and tolerance. The experience of communitas at a pilgrim-
age centre, the sense of ethical voluntarism, and the bonds of friendship
between disciples of different ethnic, caste, and occupational origins,
forged by a shared devotion to particular places located away from the
centres of temporal power, as well as their shared love for the saint, are
all made possible by the complex organisation of Sufi orders as regional
cults. Their sense of love and camaraderie comes from membership of a
specific but deterritorialised organisation in which the saint’s lodge is a
hub, drawing pilgrims and offerings, and sending out deputies to found
new branches well beyond the centre, as well as redistributing gifts of
caps, shawls, cloaks, and sometimes money to disciples living scattered
across a vast area.
Vernacul ar Cosmopolitanism as an Ethical Disposition 239

6 Conclusion

I have argued in this essay for a need to recognise the ethical dimensions
of vernacular forms of cosmopolitanism as exemplified by Sufi saints and
others in the Muslim world, and with it the need to analyse not simply
cosmopolitan practice and performance but the way that ethical ideas and
concepts are formulated in local, vernacular terms. In this sense, our depic-
tion of the people we study as “cosmopolitan” may escape the accusation of
an imposed attribute implying the superiority and dominance of the West
over a so-called cosmopolitan “other.”
More broadly, cosmopolitanism as an ethical outlook enables us
to explore ideas and values that spread beyond national boundaries or
little communities, and to recognise the qualities of tolerance and open-
mindedness that people beyond the West foster in their own terms. So,
too, by examining Sufi networks as they extend across boundaries, we can
also begin to understand the social underpinnings of Sufism as an ethos
of coexistence in peace.

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 Middle Eastern Studies and Islam
Oscillations and Tensions in an Old Relationship1

Léon Buskens

1 Introduction

In Middle Eastern studies Islam and Muslims have become the dominant
concern, almost obscuring many other aspects of societies and cultures
in the past and the present. The current situation is yet another stage
in a long historical development of a scholarly tradition which seems to
be structured by oscillations, or Gellnerian pendulum swings, between
interest in Middle Eastern languages and literature on the one hand and
Islam on the other. Although Middle Eastern studies and Islamic studies
are different fields of inquiry, with their own traditions, they are so closely
related that next to cooperation and cross-fertilisation, tensions and trouble
seem unavoidable.
First I will briefly discuss ideas about the Middle East as an area and the
history of Islam as an object of research, and the intertwining of these two
categories. I will limit myself to some indications of the historical roots
of the present debate. Then I focus on major transformations during the
last forty years in subjects and approaches, resulting in a new dominant
model produced in the United States and reproduced in English worldwide.
I will conclude with some critical notes about the merits and weaknesses
of the current ways to study Islam and the Middle East, including some
observations on the use of the concepts “religion” and “culture.”
Many of the standard references are unavoidable. But I deliberately
mention less mainstream materials as well, in order to show that the
tradition is much richer and more diverse than the hegemonic model.
Alas, limitations of space, and my lack of knowledge of languages and
publications that are difficult to access, do not allow me to be as inclusive
as I would like to be.

1 A fellowship at the Zentrum Moderner Orient enabled me to rethink and rewrite this
contribution in an idyllic setting in Berlin. I thank its director, Ulrike Freitag, for her generous
invitation, and Silke Nagel for all her kind help, which made my stay even more pleasant. I am
also grateful to Annemarie van Sandwijk for her editing and critical comments.
242 Léon Buskens

2 The Middle East as an Area

As a category, the Middle East is a European image, as are many other areas
(cf. Lockman 2010). Through the centuries the ideas associated with the
region have been vital for Europe to imagine itself. Although the peoples
of the Middle East have a long history of thinking and writing about them-
selves in many languages and scripts, for example, using notions in Arabic
such as jazirat al-ʿarab, al-mashriq, al-maghrib, umma, and dar al-islam, the
notion of the Middle East has become natural to them in the meantime,
as the name of the Saudi-backed newspaper Asharq al-Awsat shows, for
example. The term originated as a geopolitical category, connecting Europe
to Britain’s colony in India (cf. Eickelman 2002, 1-19). However, the complex
of images itself has a much longer history among Europeans, with many
connotations, ranging from luxury, refinement, religiosity, and sensuality,
to menace, debauchery, and violence. The history of European taste and
fashion offers many examples of positive evaluations of the Middle East,
varying from the cultural critique phrased by an Oriental in Montesquieu’s
Lettres persanes (1721), Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan (1819), and music alla
Turca, to Egyptomania and fashionable clothes and dishes.
The area now known as the Middle East has also been a shifting frontier
between empires and other forms of political and social organisation, in
which Persians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Berbers,
Turks, Kurds, Spaniards, Portuguese, French, and Italians all played their
roles. The power balances between these empires and groups kept shifting.
The Mediterranean and the Balkans were connections as well as borders,
witnessing battles and various more peaceful and profitable forms of trade
and exchange. Some empires united both sides, such as the Roman Empire,
the Almoravids, the Almohads, the Ottomans, and the French. Others of-
fered division and strife. Present-day history is dominated by memories of
the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the colonisation by Europe,
mainly from the nineteenth century onwards. Ideals of pan-Islamism and
pan-Arabism have not had much unifying force.
Current Western images of the relations between Europe and the Middle
East are dominated by issues of immigration and security, connecting the
region again with problems that Europeans feel they should deal with. The
many similarities, connections, and exchanges receive less attention than
the differences. The Middle East is a category “good to think with” about
the specificity of Europe. Apart from the ambivalence and the problematic
character, another element is its “intemporality.” The Middle East has be-
come a world of another era, where time has stood still. In the past visitors
Middle Eastern Studies and Isl am 243

sometimes travelled to the times of their Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, to
the polis or cité of Antiquity, or to the Middle Ages, but hardly ever to their
own times, unless they themselves were forcing this modernity upon parts
of the country by modernising and settling in metropolises such as Algiers.
In general, the Middle East was a world of stagnation and of backwardness,
forgotten by the Enlightenment and lacking a modern political system,
sorely in need of civilising by colonisation. These themes echo a general
pattern that the anthropologist Johannes Fabian analysed in his book Time
and the Other (1983).
The borders of the region are as fluid as its essence: North Africa is part
of it, but it also fades away into West Africa, while Africa started in Spain
in the nineteenth century. The Balkans was difficult to separate from West
Asia, which was again connected to the Caucasus and Central Asia. The
Arabian Peninsula connected West Asia and North Africa, but also East
Africa and South Asia.
The omnipresence of connections of Middle Eastern societies with the
rest of the world, from the ancient Silk Route to Indian Ocean trade networks,
and the fluidity of the borders can be linked to the considerable linguistic,
ethnic, and socio-cultural diversity of the region. Past anthropologists such
as the American Carlton S. Coon, famous for his fieldwork in the Moroccan
Rif, presented the Middle East as a kaleidoscope. Major languages such as
Arabic, Turkish, and Persian overshadow important minority languages
such as Berber and Kurdish. At various times in history Arabic and Persian
became important linguae francae, enabling communication between
people from as faraway places as present-day Morocco and Maluku. For
many centuries, until well into the twentieth century, the Arabic script was
an instrument to write local languages in many parts of Africa and Asia,
ranging from Berber, Hausa, Afrikaans, and Swahili, to Malay and Javanese
(cf. Mumin and Versteegh 2014; Ricci 2011).

3 Islam as an Essence

During the last forty years the Middle East has again increasingly been
conflated with Islam. In current political, societal, cultural, and scholarly
discourse Islam appears to be the essence of the Middle East, dominating
or even obscuring all other phenomena. Samuel Huntington has been
influential in bringing about this change with his 1993 article on the
“clash of civilizations” (subsequently expanded into a 1996 book), being an
expression of strong political currents formulating identities and frontiers
244 Léon Buskens

in religious terms. In current discourse, Islam can explain most things that
“Others,” identified as Muslims, who also increasingly identify themselves
as Muslims, do. At the same time Islam is a problem that needs to be solved
(cf. Bowen 2012b). The view of Islam as a problem has deep roots, both in
politics and in scholarship, from the Ottoman menace to Vienna, through
the anti-colonial pan-Islamist jihad movements, to the present global terror.
Islam as an object and a category of analysis in Western scholarship has
a history, which is partly related to the perceived general use of knowledge
thus produced. This genealogy should also take into account the religious
concerns of its Christian and Jewish practitioners, and at present the debates
in which researchers with a Muslim background are interested. At the
beginning of the academic study of the Middle East, in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, scholars were mainly interested in learning languages
and studying classical texts, as a tool to better understand the Bible and
to access knowledge about science and history. Islam became a legitimate
object of study with the colonial turn in Western imperialism. Academics
stressed the usefulness of their work for the colonial administrations of
the countries of which they were citizens in order to justify their scholarly
pursuits. After decolonisation scholars changed their minds again: Islam
seemed to be of far less interest than literature and history. From the late
1980s Islam returned as a scholarly field, and as a category of analysis.
Nowadays this focus has become so dominant that scholars in other fields
complain about their marginality or even see themselves forced to give in
to the illusions of the day.
The present dominance of Islam as an object and as a category in
academia is related to a number of important developments in Western
societies. First, there is the continuing reliance of Western economies on
oil produced to a large extent in Muslim states, notably in the Middle East.
Several developments have shown the importance of Islam for people living
in these states. According to a prominent analyst the 1967 defeat of the Arab
states by Israel inaugurated “the return of Islam.” The Iranian revolution of
1979 was understood in a similar vein as primarily an Islamic event.
The immigration of considerable numbers of workers from the Middle
East to Europe, and to a lesser extent to North America, constituted a second
important stimulus. These immigrants, and even more so their children and
grandchildren, increasingly identified themselves as Muslims, and were
also categorised as such by policymakers and politicians. From the 1990s
onwards opinion makers in Western Europe started to identify “Islam” as a
major social problem, in need of solutions, and hence of research (cf. Beck
2013; Sunier 2014).
Middle Eastern Studies and Isl am 245

A third series of developments can be understood as a sequel to the

previous two and was sparked off by the terrorist attacks of 11 September
2001 in New York. American interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan and the
“global war on terror” strengthened the conviction that more knowledge
on Islam and Muslims was necessary, although not necessarily of the kind
that academics had been producing thus far. The Middle East is nowadays
viewed as a locus for the production of terror, spreading across the rest of
the world. The West has a civilising mission to bring democracy and rule
of law, for example, to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, for which secularism
is considered an essential condition. The upheavals that spread in the Arab
world from the beginning of 2011 and have become known as the “Arab
spring” increased the visibility of Islamist activists in several countries,
which contributed to continued support for studies on Islam.
This perceived public relevance has led to generous subsidies for Islamic
studies, but also to close scrutiny. Time and again opinion makers and
scholars link academic analysis with political positions. Edward Said gave
a major impetus to the moralisation of the debate on scholarship when
he published Orientalism in 1978, with further sequels on the media in
Covering Islam (1981) and on literature in Culture and Imperialism (1993).
Since the inception of “the war on terror,” radical criticism of the “political
correctness” of scholarship on the Muslim world by right-wing activists
has become fashionable, which can take extreme forms of monitoring
and blaming, as the activities of Campus Watch in the United States show
(cf. Doumani 2006). Serious scholars are regularly attacked as “friends of
Muslims” who belittle their dangerous nature, allegations which echo the
very essentialist approach that Said criticised.
The renewed political dimensions of research on the Middle East and
the Muslim world at large have had internal consequences for scholar-
ship which could provocatively be summed up as too strong a focus on
Islam (cf. Zubaida 2011). For many outsiders, and also many activists in
the region itself, the relationship between Islam and the Middle East, and
hence between Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, is self-evident. In this
contribution I argue that the present too strong identification between these
two fields is obscuring the richness and complexity of the phenomena we
would like to understand and is thus profoundly misleading.
In the Netherlands, as in some other European countries, the reduction
of the Middle East to Islam is manifested in the reduction of Arabic as a
tool for Islamic studies and the transformation of the chairs for Arabic into
chairs for Islamic studies, to which in several cases a reference to the study
of Islam in Europe is added. These chairs have also been transferred from
246 Léon Buskens

faculties of arts to faculties or departments of religious studies, thereby

confirming the religious nature of the object of study.
The reduction of the Middle East to Islam underlines the supposed
uniqueness of the area: it is “still” dominated by religion, unlike its neigh-
bour, the enlightened, secular, modern West. This religious essentialism
is a variant of culturalism, an attempt to explain the area with reference
to a cultural or religious essence. Islam is unique, essentially different
from Christianity. A closer look at the categories of explanation shows that
Islam is one part of an almost invisible pair, in which Christianity is often
replaced by modernity and secularism (cf. Asad 1993, 2003; Hafez 2011). A
temporal difference, already signalled earlier when discussing the category
“Middle East,” separates these worlds: the Muslim World is stuck in the
Middle Ages when religion determined everything, whereas in Europe
(and its American heir) the Enlightenment has transformed Christianity
into secularism and modernity. This opposition is especially prominent in
three domains: politics, gender relations, and relations between Muslims,
Christians, and Jews. These three domains receive particular attention in
research, as they are considered typical for the Muslim Middle East, and in
need of social change. Questions whether Islam and democracy, or Islam
and gender equality are compatible abound. A certain understanding of
history, viewing the Middle East as an area of “stagnation,” serves to explain
“what went wrong” in the Middle East, how the “emergence of modern
Turkey” took place successfully, and how to understand the “return of Islam,”
to borrow the wording from the titles of some of Bernard Lewis’ books.
This essentialist and ahistorical view of the Middle East has met with
extensive criticism, which became very strong from the 1990s onwards. Talal
Asad has been vocal in radically deconstructing the particular conceptions
of religion and secularism that underlie theses analyses, and his work has
become very influential (Asad 1986, 1993, 2003; Scott and Hirschkind 2006).
Part of the critique has taken the shape of a clash between an older philologi-
cal approach, which in extreme cases favoured an ahistorical culturalism,
and an anthropological and historical current which has been nourished
by a reflexive postcolonial turn from the 1970s onwards.

4 Transformations, New Subjects, and New Approaches

From the 1970s onwards two generations of scholars have profoundly

changed the study of the Middle East, Islam, and Muslim societies in
Western academia, bringing it from philology and intellectual history to the
Middle Eastern Studies and Isl am 247

social sciences, including social history. These intellectual and disciplinary

shifts resulted in a new intellectual model and new academic centres, basi-
cally leading to a dominance of the United States. Although scholars hardly
referred to them as sources of inspiration, this approach linked up again
with a particular strand in the nineteenth-century Orientalist tradition in
which ancestors such as Edward William Lane, William Robertson Smith,
Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, Edouard Michaux-Bellaire, and Edmond
Doutté fruitfully combined philology and ethnography. In the first decades
after the Second World War the ground for bringing the social sciences
back again to the study of Islam and the Middle East was well prepared
by, for example, Gustave von Grunebaum at the University of California in
Los Angeles and Edward Evans-Pritchard at Oxford. Decolonisation and
other political developments made anthropologists come part way home,
as John Cole called it (1977), rediscovering both the European shores of the
Mediterranean, which had been important for the armchair anthropologists
of the nineteenth century, and also its southern parts as a fertile field for
anthropological study.
In 1968 Clifford Geertz published Islam Observed, a comparison of Islam
in Indonesia and Morocco, mainly based on historical sources in European
languages, which reconstituted Islam as an object of an anthropological
study. Ten years later Edward Said would present his work as a viable
alternative to Bernard Lewis’ antiquated philological essentialism. The
anthropological approach was further strengthened in Britain by Ernest
Gellner’s Saints of the Atlas (1969) and Michael Gilsenan’s Saint and Sufi in
Modern Egypt (1973), and in France by Jacques Berque’s idiosyncratic fusion
of philology, history, and sociology, and the development of a historical
anthropology of Islam in the Annales by Lucette Valensi (cf. Pouillon 2002).
The rise of the social sciences in the study of the Middle East, for example,
manifested in the profound transformation that historical scholarship
underwent with the shift towards social history and the history of mentali-
ties, was not simply caused by a strong critique of philology, or the result of
its demise, although both trends had kindred social roots. Anthropology and
social history became fashionable subjects for the vastly growing number
of students in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in a context of strong political
and cultural critique of Western society and a dominance of leftist ideolo-
gies. At that time a social science approach seemed to serve these critical
purposes much better than the perceived elitist study of canonical texts
by philological means. It directed attention to popular culture and a view
from below, to people who often had not left any direct written traces. In
legal studies similar changes took place supplementing the study of positive
248 Léon Buskens

law with all forms of non-state or “folk” law (cf. Buskens and Kommers
2002). The influx of large numbers of American Peace Corps volunteers
in (at that time) accessible countries in the Middle East such as Morocco,
Yemen, Turkey, and Iran, and the need felt in Europe to know more about
the countries of origin of their immigrant workers, further encouraged the
flourishing of studies on Islam as a social practice.2
Until the 1980s “orthodox” Islamic rituals such as prayer, fasting during
the month Ramadan, and sacrifice hardly received any attention from
anthropologists who assumed that these rituals were uninteresting because
everywhere identical “according to the Book.” Gradually they realised that
the varieties in the manners in which Muslims shaped these rituals and
their connections were important subjects for fieldwork, as, for example,
ethnographies on fasting in Morocco (Buitelaar 1994), or sacrifice in Mo-
rocco (Rachik 1990) or Tanzania (Van de Bruinhorst 2007) demonstrate.
Islamic law was one of the central subjects in the creation of Islamic
studies in the nineteenth century, but waned when it lost its usefulness after
decolonisation (Buskens and Dupret 2014). Since the 1990s it has started to
flourish again. On the one hand several studies on the theory of Islamic law
appeared, which occasionally combined a traditional intellectual history
approach with contemporary debates among Muslim intellectuals (e.g.
Masud 1995). On the other hand social history and anthropology strongly
manifested themselves, with studies in which legal texts and documents
were used as sources for social and economic history (e.g. Udovitch 1970;
Peirce 2003), or as social practices in themselves (e.g. Bowen 2003; Dupret
2011; Zomeño 2000). The studies of textual practices in Muslim societies,
as pursued by, for example, anthropologist Brinkley Messick (1993) and
historians Jonathan Berkey (1992) and Ghislaine Lydon (Krätli and Lydon
2011), are important contributions to anthropology and history in general,
which go beyond their regional focus.
History has remained important as a field and as a discipline, but has
become more of a social science, with, for example, extensive interest in
gender relations, and in popular culture. For previous generations the past,
and preferably the formative and classical periods, were the prime fields
of scholarship. They often considered the study of contemporary issues
at best as something to pursue in the margin of more serious historical
work. Present concerns could best be understood through the past, often
through the study of “essential” classical texts. During the last decades the

2 For overviews, see Lindholm (1996), Eickelman (2002), Varisco (2005), Marranci (2008),
Bowen (2012a), Kreinath (2012), and Hafez and Slyomovics (2013).
Middle Eastern Studies and Isl am 249

present has gained respectability, and has become the primary concern for
the production of useful knowledge, degrading history as a luxury pursuit.
Historians have made good use of the debates about how to study Middle
Eastern societies in order to renew their discipline. This has led to a flourish-
ing of several forms of social and economic history, such as the study of
cities, peasants, gender, and popular culture, but also of a renewal in more
traditional fields such as politics, intellectual history, and “ulamalogy” (cf.
Humphreys 1991; Gallagher 1994; Zaman 2002).
The new preference for the present manifested itself first of all in an
abundant production of anthropological monographs and articles by
scholars from many different countries (cf. Strijp 1992, 1997). During the
last years anthropologists have increasingly given attention to Islam and
politics, abundantly using notions as “public sphere” and “civil society” (cf.
Osella and Soares 2010). Since the late 1970s anthropology has been enjoying
the status of the dominant approach, especially among historians. However,
it looks as if its appeal is on the wane, with political science increasingly
taking the place of anthropology as the dominant discipline in the field.
Developments in the Muslim world such as the strong presence of politi-
cal parties with an Islamist ideology, and the accompanying framing in
the West of Islam as a threat have resulted in an abundance of studies on
jihad, Islamist political movements, their texts and thinkers, and Islam and
politics in general. The anthropologist Eickelman and political scientist
Piscatori published an overview and introductory textbook with Muslim
Politics in 1996. During the last decade the political dimensions of life in
Muslim societies have been the major focus of scholars, with radicalism,
activism, and terrorism as key terms (cf. Brown 2000), while for some
international relations and security studies seem to offer the best way
to understand these concerns of our times. The equation of Islam with a
peculiar “premodern,” “religious” approach to politics has been extensively
criticised by turning to “post-Islamism,” for example, by sociologist Asef
Bayat (2007, 2013). By studying urban forms of action from a general “social
movements” perspective, and by focusing on other actors such as “youth,”
Bayat goes beyond the “exceptionalist” perspective on the Middle East. He
analyses social events taking place in the Middle East without any reference
to specific cultural traits peculiar to the Middle East or Islam, considering
Muslims as ordinary as any other people anywhere else in the world.
Since the 1970s many scholars, especially female, have worked on gender
issues. In the Middle East and Muslim world this has become one of the
main issues of research, resulting in numerous historical and ethnographic
studies, and edited volumes, of which Women in the Muslim World (1978),
250 Léon Buskens

edited by Lois Beck and Nikki R. Keddie, was a landmark. Many of the
issues already mentioned earlier come together in this domain. Much
important work has been done by using legal sources and by studying the
intricate relations between Islamic normativity and the social positions of
women, both in past and present, as, for example, the publications of Judith
Tucker (2008) and Lynn Welchman (2007) show. Recently “masculinities”
and sexual minorities have also begun to receive scholarly attention, as in
Joseph A. Massad’s Desiring Arabs (2007), which has aroused much appraisal
and controversy. In the background, at least, are always the big normative
questions and suspicions that “Islam oppresses women,” which authors
somehow have to deny, confirm, or avoid. Together with politics and the
relations between Muslims and their non-Muslim neighbours, these are
the big contemporary concerns, which are understood as an expression of
the fundamental cultural difference separating Muslims from Westerners.
Historians and social scientists are trying to deconstruct this misleading
essentialism by turning these issues into analytical questions (cf. Kandiyoti
1996).
The big debates in Western society come together in the key notions of
“modernity,” “secularism,” and “secularity” (cf. Krämer 1999; Asad 2003;
Hafez 2011), which as many other concepts, are both indigenous “emic”
categories in Western societies for normative thinking about the self and
others, and tools for social research. As mentioned above, in the popular
imagination, and also in the writings of some scholars, Muslims and Is-
lam are understood in a unilinear evolutionist perspective as belonging
to a different, earlier era, often labelled as “medieval” (cf. Buskens 2007).
Historians and anthropologists have undertaken serious criticisms of the
problematic, but also difficult to avoid, notion of modernity by introducing
concepts such as “multiple” and “alternative” modernities (cf. Hefner 1998;
Eisenstadt 2000; Gaonkar 2001). Despite deconstructions of the notion,
it often proves enlightening to insist on the modern character of Islamic
political movements and puritanist readings of Islamic texts, such as of
the Salafis’ hero Ibn Taymiyya, instead of presenting it as a “return” to the
Middle Ages. Many of the debates have been summed up in a volume edited
by Masud, Salvatore, and Van Bruinessen (2009).
The modernity of many contemporary forms of Islam also manifests
itself in the use of new media (cf. Eickelman and Anderson 2003), inter-
national networks, and transnationalism (cf. Cooke and Lawrence 2005).
The interest in performance is partly linked to the use of new media, for
example, in studies on new forms of piety (cf. Van Nieuwkerk 2013). Islam
has received considerable attention in the study of transnational networks,
Middle Eastern Studies and Isl am 251

for example, in the worldwide connections which Salafis maintain with

each other (e.g. Pall 2014), and in the influence that governments and other
actors in the countries of origin try to exert over migrants in Europe (e.g.
Sunier and Landman 2014). Another possible focus is the networks of Sufi’s,
who not only practice individual piety, but are also active in transnational
mystic orders. Again, their international connections have a long history,
going back to premodern times. Both the history of these networks and
the intellectual renewal of this classical subject in Islamic studies, with
firm roots in colonial concerns about effective administration of Muslim
subjects and organised Islamic resistance, make it into an ideal topic to
study trends and continuities in area studies and Islam (cf. Van Bruinessen
and Howell 2007).
Attention to la longue durée strengthens our understanding of the Middle
East as a region that connects different parts of the world through travel-
ling, trade, and the circulation of ideas and texts. A flourishing branch of
scholarship is the study of the Hadrami diaspora from South Arabia all over
the Indian Ocean, with settlements in East Africa, India, Southeast Asia,
and China (cf. Manger 2010). The Hadramis have played an important role
in spreading goods and ideas, also about Islam, following ancient trade
routes. Researchers in this field have developed important insights on
interconnections, exchanges, translocality, and cosmopolitanism (e.g.
Freitag 2003, 2010, 2013; Freitag and Von Oppen 2010; Ho 2004, 2006; Ernst
and Martin 2010). Similar networks of movement and exchange, not only
of goods but also of ideas and practices, have connected other parts of the
Middle East to other regions, such as the trans-Saharan trails (Lydon 2012;
Scheele 2015), the Silk Road, the Arabian Peninsula to East Africa and South
Asia, recently manifesting itself in migration labour into the Gulf countries,
and since the 1960s the migration of considerable numbers of Muslims
to Europe, first as migrant workers from the Mediterranean, and later as
refugees from the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Sub-Saharan
Africa. Recently, historians have started to study the longer history of the
presence of Middle Easterners in European societies (e.g. Valensi 2012). Some
of these studies make the serious mistake to anachronistically view their
past experiences through the lens of current concerns, presenting these
earlier communities as examples of a “Muslim” presence, hence serving all
kinds of current ideological aims.
The long history of interconnections and exchanges is well documented
by an impressive corpus of older and newer studies on commerce, travel-
lers, and pilgrimages, but also the history of geography (cf. Eickelman
and Piscatori 1990; Touati 2000; Kaiser 2014; Udovitch 1970). Goitein’s
252 Léon Buskens

magnum opus on the relations which the Jewish community of medieval

Cairo maintained with the rest of the world, based on the Geniza records,
shows how religious ties created networks, but were no impediment to
contacts with members of other religious communities. These networks
could be very useful in times of crisis, for example, when the Spanish
monarchy expelled Muslims and Jews who then had to find other places
to live (e.g. Wiegers 2010). Some remarkable travellers who crossed many
borders, such as the Tangerine judge Ibn Battuta, or even changed religion,
such as the Andalusi al-Hasan al-Wazzan, better known as Leo Africanus,
who received ample attention in monographs (e.g. Waines 2010; Davis
2006; Pouillon 2009). Institutions rooted in Islamic law facilitated these
exchanges and movements, as did widespread languages such as Arabic,
which enabled people to communicate with each other in writing and
in speaking (cf. Dakhlia 2008). One of the most impressive studies on
exchanges, research, travel, and commerce in the Mediterranean is the
monograph on the Jewish “broker” Mardochée Naggiar by Lucette Valensi
(2008), in which she beautifully describes how worlds, lives, and ideas
were intertwined and mixed thanks to means of transport and cultural
codes.
A focus on connections implies attention for exchanges, mixing, and
hybridity as important social phenomena. It makes researchers conscious
of the historicity of languages, ideas, practices, and objects, which are
not expressions of a “pure,” “authentic,” “original” culture, but products
of exchange in various contexts of power formations. This perspective is
not only productive in scholarly terms, but can also serve as a critical tool
in both Western and Middle Eastern societies, by questioning ideological
representations of authenticity and purity, both of European and Islamic
traditions.
I wonder to what extent Talal Asad’s (1986) at present still dominant per-
spective on Islam as a discursive tradition unwillingly confirms the trend
to focus on Islam at the expense of other aspects of culture, even though he
advocates an anthropological and historical approach which stresses the
importance of context. He defends the idea of the unity of Islam, against
radical pluralist approaches such as El-Zein’s (1977) notion of “islams,” and
Geertz’s (1968) attention to diversity in his comparative study of Islam in
Indonesia and Morocco. Asad’s anthropology of Islam, and of religion in
general, has been very productive, has been spread through the work of his
students, and is at present canonical (cf. Scott and Hirschkind 2006). It has
resulted in famous monographs on piety, gender, and self-fashioning, and
the use of media (e.g. Mahmood 2005; Hirschkind 2006; Deeb 2006; Van
Middle Eastern Studies and Isl am 253

Nieuwkerk 2013). This dominance may partly explain the current neglect
of other subjects, such as the classical study of kinship.
However, the Asadian paradigm seems to be past its heyday, as Schielke’s
polite and circumspect critique argues (2010). New key notions as “everyday
Islam” and “everyday Sharia” are in the air (cf. Dupret, Pierret, Pinto, and
Spellman-Poots 2012; Schielke and Debevec 2012; Wiegers 2013; Dessing,
Jeldtoft, Nielsen, and Woodhead 2014). A new generation of scholars uses
the notion of “everyday religion” to criticise the dominance of “Islam” as a
category, and to look beyond Islam at many other aspects of life which are
not necessarily narrowly religious, but at least as important, such as “fun.”
They often seem to prefer the term “ethnography” to “anthropology,” as so
many other people do nowadays, thereby stressing a technique for research
and reporting rather than a theoretical perspective. For an anthropologist
educated in the 1980s with respect for the histoire des mentalités of the
Annales school, the study of popular culture promoted by Peter Burke and
Carlo Ginsburg, and an admiration for the work of Lucette Valensi and her
students, this new turn in the study of Muslim societies seems a bit less
new. In fact, the current references to “everyday Islam” somehow sound to
me like a faint echo of the title of the second volume of Snouck Hurgronje’s
monograph on Mecca, Aus dem heutigen Leben (1889).
Thus far the transformation of the tradition has resulted in an “Islamisa-
tion” of the object, seeing all issues through the lens of Islam. This has
manifested itself in the increasing use of the concept of “Muslim societies”
next to, and to a certain extent also instead of, the older concept “Islam.”
The notion of “Muslim societies” has the advantage of stressing diversity,
instead of the monolithic singular of Islam, and the social embeddedness
of religious phenomena. But identifying societies or cultures (a term less
frequently used because of the aversion to culturalism) as Muslim or Islamic
also raises new problems, notably suggesting that Islam is the dominant
or determining force. For social scientists this is very misleading, as they
will see religion as a social phenomenon in itself, which does not explain
phenomena, but needs to be explained itself. The label “Muslim” also
focuses too much on religious dimensions, whereas the lives of Muslims,
as of other people, are about so many other things (cf. Bayat 2003). After
the strong focus on Islam as a religion anthropologists should now turn
to a much broader, “cultural” understanding of Islam and other religions,
such as Christianity and Judaism, in Middle Eastern societies in order to
see the religious concerns of “ordinary people” in proper perspective. The
well-established traditions of anthropology and social history offer all the
necessary tools to make this endeavour successful.
254 Léon Buskens

5 A Reflexive Turn

In 1978 Edward Said made Islamicists lose their innocence with his Ori-
entalism, even if some of them fiercely resisted his message and preferred
to continue to live in denial. Said was not the only scholar to come up
with this criticism, nor the first. Others, such as Maxime Rodinson and
Jacques Waardenburg, had done so earlier and were much better informed,
but were less eloquent, or at least less sophisticated in their conceptual
apparatus, and so unwise not to write in English and work hard on their
own presentation. Although it took classically trained scholars on Islam
and the Middle East some time to understand and accept Said’s analysis,
nowadays younger generations sometimes seem to feel more comfortable
in the library criticising their intellectual ancestors than going into the
field to meet actual Muslims. In this way they surprisingly resemble their
nineteenth-century predecessors in philology.
Said’s critique has not led to the dissolution of the field, but on the con-
trary made it much stronger. By explicitly addressing the nexus between the
production of knowledge on Islam and the Middle East and the exercise of
power, it provoked important debates about methods, ethics, and epistemol-
ogy. The increased self-criticism was part of a much wider postcolonial
turn, with its peculiarities and its own partly unreadable canon. Reflective
criticism and deconstruction of our representations of Islam understood as
social and political practices have since the 1970s become an integral part
of scholarly practice, thereby strengthening its analytical acumen. A recent
collection of essays (2014) edited by François Pouillon and Jean-Claude
Vatin demonstrates to what extent the debate has moved on since 1978,
beyond the politically correct, to look at new, more productive questions
to understand the tradition within which we are working.
The reflexive turn is an expression of a profounder development in the
field towards theory and social science-based disciplines. Islamic studies in
itself is not a discipline, but a field of studies more or less vaguely identified
by its object, which is also reflected in the manuals published to demarcate
the field (e.g. Pfannmüller 1923; Pareja 1964; cf. Elias 2010). For almost a
century Islamicists adopted philology as their main approach, a clear
discipline with a tradition that goes back to the Renaissance, in combina-
tion with the at that time kindred disciplines of history and comparative
religion. Suzanne Marchand (2009) and Urs App (2010) have shown how
the study of the history of religion and comparative religion were rooted
in religious concerns of their European practitioners. A similar story could
be told for the nineteenth-century founding fathers of Islamic studies, who
Middle Eastern Studies and Isl am 255

were often wrestling with their own Christian or Jewish faith, encouraged
by the historical-critical method of philology and Bible studies. Philology
came under attack in the 1970s, which made historians and scholars of
religion turn to the social sciences. Many felt an intense craving for theory,
and found models to imitate in anthropology, philosophy, and, later, in
cultural studies. These developments have left a strong mark on Islamic
studies, where researchers now often identify themselves as historians,
anthropologists, or religious studies scholars. Fortunately, philology as a
discipline is valued again, also by Edward Said towards the end of his life,
and might experience a renaissance in which its contribution to critical
humanism receives special attention (Said 2004; Pollock 2009; Pollock,
Elman, and Chang 2015). The future might bring a new combination of
philological, historical, and social sciences approaches, leading to a better
understanding of the Middle East and Islam, if we take these lessons seri-
ously enough and work hard.

6 Geographies of Scholarship

Many of the intellectual changes discussed so far manifest themselves

in the linguistic hegemony of English in Islamic studies, as in most other
domains of scholarship. At the beginning of the twentieth century Brill in
Leiden published the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, the major
reference work in the field, in German, French, and English. The second
edition started to appear after the Second World War, in French and English.
From the turn of the millennium onwards the fascicles of the third edition
are issued in English only, still by the same publisher, which meanwhile
had established an office in Boston as well. Until the 1970s scholars could
write in their own languages and would comfortably refer to the publica-
tions of their colleagues in many European languages, including Spanish,
Italian, and Dutch. In the nineteenth century German and French were as
important as scholarly linguae francae as English. In the meantime German
scholars have surrendered to English in their desire to be referred to, while
much of what colleagues write in French or Spanish, which is often of very
high quality, is ignored until it is translated into English and published by
an Anglo-American publisher.
These trends in language and publishing correspond to a shift in academic
hegemony from Europe to the United States, which again demonstrates the
nexus between knowledge production and the exercise of power in Middle
Eastern and Islamic studies identified by Edward Said. As discussed earlier,
256 Léon Buskens

Islamic studies originated in Europe in the nineteenth century, partially as

an answer to the question of how to administer colonised Muslim subjects.
It was solidly European in its philological and historical approach, to which
was later added colonial sociology and ethnography. With decolonisation
these studies were considered less useful in Europe, but continued in the
form of classical humanities studies of literature and other forms of “high
culture.” In the United States, however, area studies developed as a sequel
to war efforts to understand the regions in which American soldiers were
fighting, and as a reaction to the demand for knowledge to win the Cold
War. Thoroughly trained German scholars who had fled Nazi Germany
played an important role in establishing and transforming Islamic studies
in the United States, as the example of Gustave von Grunebaum shows.
Programmes in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at American uni-
versities attract bright young PhD students and established scholars from
all over the world, with their huge libraries and generous conditions for
research. This has resulted in a cultural hegemony of American scholarship,
which is more imitated than questioned or contested, at least in Western
academia. In the presently dominant model for the study of Islam and
Muslim societies, scholars practice the social sciences and a certain form of
history. Islamicists in France and Spain work to a certain extent according
to their own standards by writing in their own languages, but also take the
American model as a norm. This is reflected, for example, in the work of
Lucette Valensi, who is the maître à penser of several generations of French
historians on Muslim societies, but also strongly connected to developments
in the United States (cf. Pouillon 2002).
The only serious counter-discourses to this dominant model are devel-
oped in the Muslim world. In richly endowed research institutions in Saudi
Arabia or Malaysia, researchers write their own histories of Orientalism and
mustashriqun, Orientalists, and work towards an Islamisation of knowledge
in many fields, including in Islamic studies, with their own book series
and journals (cf. Abaza 2002; Muslih 2006). They are especially critical of
Western studies on the formative period, for example, Joseph Schacht’s or
Gautier Juynboll’s work on the origins of Islamic law. In Western academia
these critical studies do not receive much attention as serious alternative
narratives. These are separate scholarly networks which hardly commu-
nicate with each other.
In the Muslim world we witness a form of culture wars: scholars who
orient themselves towards classical forms of Islamic scholarship, such as
practiced at Al-Azhar University in Cairo or in Medina, oppose their col-
leagues who strive to model themselves on Western academic standards.
Middle Eastern Studies and Isl am 257

From my own students I know of these kinds of clashes taking place in

institutes for Islamic higher learning in Indonesia (IAIN), where faculty with
Western degrees are not always considered to be properly trained scholars.
One of the most notorious cases is the sad fate of our regretted colleague
Nasr Abu Zayd (cf. Thielmann 2003). When he applied for promotion at
Cairo University some of his enemies declared his hermeneutical studies
on the Qurʾan and hadith to be proof of his apostasy (ridda). Not only would
he find his marriage dissolved, he had to flee to the Netherlands as he was
fearing for his life. At Leiden University students from all over the Muslim
world turned to him for supervision.
Abu Zayd’s fate also shows how successful scholars from the Muslim
world become co-opted in Western academia. He found a safe place to
think and teach independently in his own liberal way. As the director of the
International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World, based
in Leiden, our dear colleague Khalid Masud developed a highly stimulating
approach to Islamic law under the label “the social construction of shari
ʿa,” which is both an important and courageous contribution to scholarship
and to current debates in Muslim societies (Masud 2001). The Moroccan
anthropologist Abdellah Hammoudi also combined high-profile scholar-
ship with a critical discussion of issues in Moroccan society while directing
the Institute for Transnational Studies in Princeton (Hammoudi 1997).
Tariq Ramadan, who takes quite different positions, is another example of
an Islamic intellectual who has applied for and found his place in the halls
of Western academia, although he is not welcome in countries as diverse
as and the United States, and his work received strong criticism in the
Netherlands (Van Sandwijk 2014). In Germany we presently see recruitment
at a considerable scale of scholars with a Muslim background in order to
teach in the new programmes of Islamic theology, which should educate
teachers of religion.
Many researchers with a Muslim background have been appointed
because of their excellent scholarship which fully complies with the
standards of top universities in the United States or France. They often
have completely integrated the Western model, and combined this with
unsurpassed linguistic skills and profound knowledge of primary sources.
For European or American students who come to the field at a much later
age it is quite difficult to compete with them. Publications of scholars who
are not based at Western universities are neglected, alas, serving at best as
sources for researchers publishing inside the hegemonic model. If we want
to practice a truly humanistic approach we should also make a serious effort
to integrate the knowledge produced by scholars from the areas that we
258 Léon Buskens

are studying in a more honest way than by just exploitatively co-opting the
best of them in international academic elites.
At present a reverse phenomenon, related to new economic conditions is
taking place. Gulf countries with huge wealth derived from oil export have
started to import knowledge by inviting American universities to create
campuses in the region. This is part of larger efforts to create alternative
economies of learning, culture (by establishing museums such as the Louvre
in Abu Dhabi), and leisure (sports, shopping). Western cultural models are
recreated in a highly controlled setting, being part of a transformed Indian
Ocean context. Western and Middle Eastern scholars from poorer countries,
such as Egypt and Morocco, are invited to provide their knowledge to these
new institutions. Turkey has a much longer history of universities striving
for international excellence by bringing (back) scholars educated in the
West and by offering a safe haven for scholars who fled Nazi Germany.
The Saudi-Moroccan funded Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco,
is modelled on and partly staffed by American scholarship, and aims to
train local elites, who will move on to the US for further studies. These
new developments have as precedents the older Western universities in the
Middle East, often with religious missionary roots, such as the American
University in Cairo, the American University in Beirut, and the Jesuit
Université Saint Joseph, also in Beirut.
The scholar cum bureaucrat from the Maghrib Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406)
offers an excellent case to study convergences and conflicts in the under-
standing of the Islamic legacy. Both scholars in Western academia, such
as Ernest Gellner, and in the Muslim world claim him as an intellectual
ancestor and a founder of the modern historical and social science. Readings
of his work are often strongly coloured by anachronistic concerns and
ideological considerations. The literature on his life and work is abundant
and has a long history, as the critical survey in Franz Rosenthal’s canoni-
cal English translation of the Muqaddima shows. The debates have been
extensively analysed by the Moroccan historian Abdesselam Cheddadi in
a monograph, and in his two-volume annotated translation of his major
writings in the Pléiade collection (Cheddadi 2006).
Some practitioners of the study of Islam stress the importance of keep-
ing distance as a method to see better. Others, mainly working inside the
Muslim world from a pious perspective, consider distance to be an impedi-
ment to proper understanding, and normative questions superior to more
descriptive ones. They question the legitimacy of outsiders’ views. Keeping
distance or “going native” are not only methodological but also ethical
questions. In a postcolonial setting researchers are supposed to be open
Middle Eastern Studies and Isl am 259

about their identity, not feigning to be a Muslim if they lack the proper niyya
(intention). Equality and honesty would not only create a better rapport
between researchers and informants, but should lead to more reliable data.
The structural distinction that many Muslims make between believers and
others, and the rules articulated in Islamic texts regulating the relations
between these groups, make that outsiders may find great difficulty in
studying certain aspects of Islam in specific settings.3
It is necessary to further explore this clash between emic and etic views
of Islam, and the several forms of cultural dominance. We should take the
Japanese case into account. Japan has been very active, and successful, in
developing Islamic area studies (cf. Miura 2010). Japanese scholars have pro-
duced excellent research in several fields, for example, on Islamic religious
foundations, urban history, and Sufism, and have published the results with
American and European firms. They have brought scholars from the West,
and also from the Muslim world (for example, Nasr Abu Zayd) to Japan. At
several occasions Japanese colleagues have been claiming that they can
offer an alternative to Orientalism, as they are from an Oriental society
themselves and have not been involved in colonialism in the Muslim world.

7 Conclusion: Religion and Culture

The flourishing of the study of Islam, often at the expense of Middle Eastern
Studies in a broader sense, has led again to the dominance of notions such
as “Islam,” “Muslim societies,” and “Islamic culture.” These categories seem
self-evident, but should be analysed as constructs, with various emic and etic
meanings. They have a long genealogy, which can, for example, be traced by
studying the history of a major reference tool such as the Encyclopaedia of
Islam. The categories themselves do not explain anything, but rather obscure
things, or at best can be taken as invitations for further research. The main
aim of this essay has been to deconstruct the equation of the Middle East
and Islam. It is a critique of essentialism and exceptionalism, against the
deeply rooted idea of a radical difference and uniqueness of the Middle East
as an area dominated by Islam. I have also tried to criticise the dominant
arabocentrism in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, although less explicitly.

3 In her dissertation Olly Akkerman describes the problems she had in accessing the library,
or “dark archive,” of the Ismaili Bohra community in Baroda Gujarat during her research and
the solutions she and her hosts found for that. Her work is a good example of the fusion of
philological and ethnographic approaches that is currently in the making.
260 Léon Buskens

As an alternative I plead for directing our attention to diversity and

exchanges. The Middle East is an interesting area to study because of its
huge diversity in religious, ethnic, and linguistic forms, which have a long
history. The utility of the notion of Abrahamic religions, which is becoming
fashionable in religious studies, is being questioned (Levenson 2012). But
the dynamic interactions between Jews, Christians, Muslims, and members
of other minor religious communities, also in an era in which the power
relations amongst them are changing even more dramatically, resulting
in new diasporas, should be a main focus in research on religion in the
Middle East. For example, what happens to shared cults among Muslims,
Jews, and Christians, and what are their histories (cf. Bowman 2012)? Ethnic
diversity gains new meanings in political, economic, and cultural domains
as movements of Kurds and Berbers/Imazighen show.
As the borders of the Middle East are difficult to define it is productive
to study it primarily as a connecting area, trying to understand specific
local articulations of globalising processes. The exchanges and networks
have a history of millennia, in which major languages, such as Arabic and
Persian, and writing technologies, such as the Arabic script and paper
production, have played a crucial role. Area studies, although the term is
old-fashioned and politically ill-charged, offers in its new understandings
important tools and concepts for this focus on connections. A view stressing
hybridity instead of authenticity can also contribute significantly to debates
in society, both in the West and in the Middle East.
For methods and approaches we may still rely on the old triad of philol-
ogy, history, and anthropology. Without a future philology which enables
us to take texts seriously, a central phenomenon in the Middle East since
millennia, we will be lost. We also need a truly historical perspective. The
phenomena we witness in our times are profoundly modern, not survivals
of a distant past. The present is part of a historical process, not yet another
manifestation of an unchanging essence, or of a stagnation. Again, the
availability of texts and sometimes a strong oral tradition privileges us to
practice such a historical approach.
True ethnography resembles good philology: it means observing and
listening while trying to avoid imposing categories that are not there. We
should not assume that a practice is “Islamic,” or that certain texts play a
role, but take the utterances and explanations of the people themselves as
our point of departure. An ethno-methodological or praxiological approach
is a radical solution for this issue, and the idea of the ethnographer as “a fly
on the wall” might be a fallacy. However, the work of Baudouin Dupret on
normativity in the Middle East demonstrates the value of an approach that
Middle Eastern Studies and Isl am 261

does not take for granted the presence of references to Islam (e.g. Dupret
2011).
Using general sociological concepts, such as “social movements,” is
another means to avoid culturalism and essentialism. These concepts
do not belittle the importance of specific local meanings, which we can
understand through meticulous philological, historical, and ethnographic
approaches. General notions do not lead to glossing over cultural differences
but encourage us to make them the object of study by taking comparison
seriously.
Although the Middle East seems to be an ideal area for comparison it is
astonishing to see how little comparative work is actually being done. One
of the exceptions is Asef Bayat, a scholar who takes his instruments from
general sociological theory to study urban social movements in Iran and
Egypt. The old Leiden notion of an “ethnological field of study” introduced
by J.P.B. de Josselin de Jong for the study of Indonesia (1977 [1935]), might
still demonstrate to be productive, focusing our attention on similarities
and differences. Scholars have also done fruitful work in comparing the
Middle East with other regions, either within the abode of Islam, as Clifford
Geertz did, or with Christianity, as did his critic Talal Asad. Of the present
generation John Bowen takes the comparative perspective seriously with
fieldwork in Muslim communities in Sumatra, France, and England.
The debates in which scholars studying Muslim societies have been
engaged during the last decades have brought their field, which for a long
time was peripheral in anthropology and history, to the centre of intel-
lectual debates in the humanities. At least three central concerns are of
great relevance to students of other areas. First there is the study of the uses
of texts, and their multiple relations to practices, in which scholars have
made important progress beyond earlier simplistic views of literate culture.
In their specific studies they demonstrate how to bring the study of texts
and practices, philology, history and ethnography, together.
A second major merit is the serious attention to the genealogy of the
scholarly tradition in which we are working. All scholars in area studies
should practice such a Saidian critical approach, but avoid getting stuck in
it. In the end there are always the people and societies in the outside world
who deserve our attention.
A third merit of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies is its contribution to
a radical revision of our understanding of the concept of religion. Clifford
Geertz did seminal work on the basis of his fieldwork in Java, Bali, and Mo-
rocco. This provoked a strong critique by Talal Asad through a comparison
of Islamic and Christian traditions mainly based on historical sources. Asad
262 Léon Buskens

has been very successful, through his own work and through inspiring a
generation of students, although we seem to be in a stage of diminishing
returns, and new approaches and questions concerning religion, again
rooted in studies in the Middle East, make themselves increasingly heard.
The Middle East is not a world dominated by religion and hence radically
or temporarily different from “us,” the secular West. If we want to under-
stand the Middle East we should turn religion, and hence also Islam, into
a true object of historical and social study, without belittling or denying its
own character and great importance for people. Overcoming misleading
oppositions between religion and culture is in my view the central issue
in “religion and the area studies.” We need more refined views than the
“re-emergence” and “return” of religion, which are current now, among
Muslim as well as among policymakers and opinion makers.
At present, Muslims often oppose culture and religion, culture being
something contingent, subject to change, and liable to criticism and sup-
pression, if necessary, for example, if it entails “honour killings.” Religion,
on the contrary, should be respected, and seems to exist outside time and
place. This dichotomy fits well with, for example, the Dutch political tradi-
tion, in which respect for religion is a dogma, whereas culture is subject
to reform and assimilation. This participants’ view does not fit with an
anthropological analysis, where religion is an aspect of culture, as law, art,
kinship, etc. Religion does not require a special approach or theoretical
framework. Religion can, nay should, be studied as any other element of
culture, by understanding it in its specific historical, geographical, and
social context, as historians and anthropologist do.
Unfortunately this opposition between religion and culture is increas-
ingly articulated in a disciplinary opposition between the humanities and
social sciences versus religious studies. The present renaissance of philology,
which is of crucial importance for area studies, should not strengthen the
focus on Islam as a religion in a strict sense, but rather encourage a broader
perspective using the notion of culture. We should not revert to the tradi-
tional bond between philology and the history of religions and comparative
religion. The future of the field depends on developing a broad view of Islam
as a cultural phenomenon with many facets, for the understanding of which
the triad of philology, history, and ethnography offers all the necessary
theories and methods.
Middle Eastern Studies and Isl am 263

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 Notes on Contributors

Jonathan P. Berkey is James B. Duke professor of international studies

and chair of the History Department at Davidson College, North Carolina.
His publications include The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo:
A Social History of Islamic Education (Princeton University Press, 1992),
Popular Preaching and Religious Authority in the Medieval Islamic Near
East (University of Washington Press, 2001), and The Formation of Islam:
Religion and Society in the Near East, 600-1800 (Cambridge University Press,
2003), which was awarded the Albert Hourani Book Award by the Middle
East Studies Association. He is currently completing a narrative history
of the Middle East since the rise of Islam, Shattered Mosaic: The Middle
East Since the Rise of Islam, to be published by W.W. Norton & Co. He has
served as associate editor of the New Dictionary of the History of Ideas and
the third edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam. He has been a member of
the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Professeur Invité at the
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

Léon Buskens holds a chair for Law and Culture in Muslim societies at
Leiden University and is director of the Netherlands Institute in Morocco
(NIMAR). From its foundation in 2009 until the end of 2016 he was the
first director of the Netherlands Interuniversity School for Islamic Studies
(­N ISIS).The focus of his studies is Islamic law and society, and the An-
thropology of Muslim Societies, with a particular interest in Morocco and
Indonesia. Currently he is working on a study on the life and work of the
Dutch Orientalist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936).

Marion Holmes Katz received a BA from Yale and a PhD from the Univer-
sity of Chicago. She has taught at Franklin & Marshall College and Mount
Holyoke College and is currently associate professor of Middle Eastern and
Islamic studies at New York University. She has studied and done research
in Jordan, Egypt, and Yemen. Her research revolves around issues of law,
gender, and ritual. Her publications include Body of Text: The Emergence of
the Sunni Law of Ritual Purity (SUNY Press, 2002), The Birth of the Prophet
Muhammad: Devotional Piety in Sunni Islam (Routledge, 2007), and Prayer
in Islamic Thought and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2013). She
received a Carnegie Fellowship (2006-2008) for the project “Contesting the
Mosque: Debates over Muslim Women’s Ritual Access” and has recently
published a study of the history of women’s mosque access in Islamic legal
270  Isl amic Studies in the T went y-first Century

discourse and in practice, Women in the Mosque: A History of Legal Thought

and Social Practice (Columbia University Press, 2014).

Christian Lange (PhD Harvard, 2006) is professor of Arabic and Islamic

studies at Utrecht University. He is the author of Justice, Punishment and
the Medieval Muslim Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2008), a
study of notions of this-worldly and otherworldly justice in late medieval
Islam, and the co-editor of a collection of essays on the topic of public
violence in Islamic societies (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), as well as
of a multiauthor volume on the Seljuq dynasty (Edinburgh University Press,
2011). His current research interests lie in the area of Islamic eschatology, in
particular the cultural history of the Muslim paradise and hell. From 2011
to 2015 he was the principal investigator of the research project “The Here
and the Hereafter in Islamic Traditions,” funded by the European Research
Council and located at Utrecht University.

Muhammad Khalid Masud (MA and PhD, McGill University, 1973) is

presently ad hoc judge of the Shariat Appellate Bench, Supreme Court of
Pakistan. Formerly Masud held positions as director general of the Islamic
Research Institute, International Islamic University, Islamabad; chairman
of the Council of Islamic Ideology, government of Pakistan, Islamabad;
professor and academic director of the International Institute for the
Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM), Leiden, the Netherlands; senior
lecturer at the Centre for Islamic Legal Studies, Ahmadu Bello University,
Zaria, Nigeria; distinguished professor at the Faculty of Law, International
Islamic University, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and visiting professor at the
Collège de France, Paris. He has published extensively on Islamic law,
contemporary issues, and on trends in Muslim societies. He is the author
of Shāṭibī’s Philosophy of Islamic Law and Iqbal’s Reconstruction of Ijtihad,
both published by the Islamic Research Institute in Islamabad in 1995.
He is co-editor of Islamic Legal Interpretation: Muftis and Their Fatwas,
with Brinkley Messick and David Powers (Harvard University Press, 1996),
editor of Islamic Laws and Women in the Modern World (Islamabad, 1996)
and Travellers in Faith: Studies of the Tablighi Jamāʾat as a Transnational
Islamic Movement for Faith Renewal (Brill, 2000). He has translated Toshi-
hiko Izutsu’s 1959 The Structure of the Ethical Terms in the Koran: A Study
in Semantics as Mafahim-i Qurʾan (2005), is co-editor of Dispensing Justice
in Islam: Qadis and Their Judgments, with David S. Powers and Ruud Peters
(Brill, 2006), editor of Athharwin Sadi Isawi men Barri Saghir men Islami
Fikr he Rahnuma in Urdu (Islamabad: Islamic Research Institute, 2008),
Notes on Contributors 271

co-editor of Islam and Modernity: Key Issues and Debates, with Armando
Salvatore and Martin van Bruinessen (Edinburgh University Press, 2009),
and author of Nuqushe Tagore (Faisalabad: Mithal, 2012) and Shariʿa Today:
Essays on Contemporary Issues and Debates in Muslim Societies (Institute
for Research and Dialogue, 2013).

Brinkley Messick is a professor in the Departments of Anthropology and

Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University, in
New York, where he also co-directed the Center for Palestine Studies (2010-
2015) and currently directs the Middle East Institute. He has conducted
extended research in both Morocco and Yemen and is the author of The
Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society
(University of California Press, 1993) and a co-editor of Islamic Legal In-
terpretation: Muftis and Their Fatwas (Harvard University Press, 1996). His
new book on the textuality of the shariʿa will be published by Columbia
University Press. His articles on cases and on the doctrines of intent and
evidence are part of a current book project on shariʿa court litigation in
pre-revolutionary Yemen.

A. Kevin Reinhart is associate professor of religion at Dartmouth College

specialising in Islamic religion. He was trained at the University of Texas,
Austin, in Middle Eastern studies and Arabic, and at Harvard University in
the study of religion. He has been at Dartmouth since finishing his PhD. His
study of Islam has been informed by long periods spent living in Islamdom
– in Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq, and Morocco, as well as extensive visits
to Syria, Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Iran. His research has
focused on Islamic law and theology, as well as ritual and ritual theory.
Lately he has trained in Ottoman and Ottoman studies and written a few
articles on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Ottoman religion.
His contribution to this volume represents a return to the study of ritual
theory, which began with his article “Impurity/No Danger” in 1990. He is
currently finishing a book on how to think about varieties of Islam and a
survey of Islamic ritual. An article on ritual recently published is “What to
Think about, Before We Think about Ritual.”

Dorothea Schulz is professor at the Department of Cultural and Social

Anthropology at the University of Cologne, Germany. Her book Muslims
and New Media in West Africa (Indiana University Press, 2012) deals with
Islamic revivalist movements in Mali that rely on various media technolo-
gies to promote a relatively new conception of publicly enacted religiosity.
272  Isl amic Studies in the T went y-first Century

She has also published widely on media practices and public culture in
Sahelian West Africa, gender studies, and the anthropology of the state. She
is currently investigating how Muslims in Uganda position themselves as a
religious minority in local and national contexts, and how in this process,
they structure their relations to Christians in public arenas.

Abdulkader Tayob (PhD, Temple University, 1989) currently holds a research

chair on Islam, African publics and religious values at the University of
Cape Town, South Africa. He has published extensively on Islam in Africa
and modern Islamic thought. His work has traced the discursive formation
of mosques, rituals, and political and legal views among contemporary
Muslims. His most recent books are Religion in Modern Islamic Discourse
(Hurst/Columbia University Press, 2009) and Schools and Education in
Europe and South Africa (Waxmann, 2011), edited with Inga Niehaus and
Wolfram Weiße. He is currently leading a project on Religion Education in
South Africa.

Annemarie van Sandwijk holds a double MA in history and in theology

and religious studies (both cum laude, Leiden University). An article about
Ernest Renan’s Orientalist views on Islam, based on her history thesis, was
published in the peer-reviewed Dutch journal Tijdschrift voor Theologie
51 (2011). In 2014, an article based on her second MA thesis, “The Rise and
Fall of Tariq Ramadan in the Netherlands: The Interplay of Dutch Politics,
Media, and Academia,” appeared in Brill’s Journal of Muslims in Europe 3. She
worked as an editor at the Netherlands Interuniversity School for Islamic
Studies for several years.

Knut S. Vikør is professor of the history of the Middle East and Muslim
Africa at the University of Bergen, Norway, and was formerly the director of
the Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Bergen. He has written
on the history of the central Sahara (The Oasis of Salt: A History of Kawar, a
Saharan Centre of Salt Production [Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic
Studies, 1999]), and on the Sanusiyya Sufi order and its founder, Muham-
mad b. Ali al-Sanusi (d. 1859), Sufi and Scholar on the Desert Edge (Hurst,
1995). He has also worked on the history of Islamic law and has published
Between God and Sultan: A History of Islamic Law (Hurst, 2005), in addition
to various books in Norwegian. He has also written on the history of Islam
in Sub-Saharan Africa and was the editor of the journal Sudanic Africa: A
Journal of Historical Sources (1990-2007). Among his research interests are
the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discussions of ijtihād in law, as
Notes on Contributors 273

well as the relationship between reformist Sufism and politics in the same
period. His most recent book is The Maghreb since 1800: A Short History
(Hurst, 2012).

Pnina Werbner is professor emerita of social anthropology, Keele University,

and author of the Manchester Migration Trilogy, including The Migration
Process: Capital, Gifts and Offerings among British Pakistanis (Berg, 1990,
republished with new preface, 2002), Imagined Diasporas among Manches-
ter Muslims (James Currey and School of American Research, 2002), and
Pilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult (Hurst and Indiana
University Press, 2003). In 2008 she edited Anthropology and the New Cos-
mopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspectives and is the editor
of several theoretical collections on Sufism, hybridity, multiculturalism,
migration, and citizenship. She recently co-edited The Political Aesthetics
of Global Revolt: The Arab Spring and Beyond (Edinburgh University Press,
2014) and published The Making of an African Working Class: Politics, Law,
and Cultural Protest in the Manual Workers’ Union of Botswana (Pluto Press,
2014). She has researched in Britain, Pakistan, and Botswana and has been
director of “New African Migrants in the Gateway City” (Economic and
Social Research Council) and “In the Footsteps of Jesus and the Prophet:
Sociality, Caring and the Religion Imagination in the Filipino Diaspora”
(Arts and Humanities Research Council).
 Overview of NISIS Autumn Schools,
2010-2014

First Autumn School, 27-30 October 2010

Theme: Texts and Practices
Venue: University of Amsterdam

Keynote speakers and lecture titles:

– Jonathan P. Berkey (Davidson College) | Texts, the Transmission of Texts,
and Religious Authority in Medieval Islam: Problems and Prospects
– Charles Hirschkind (University of California, Berkeley) | Ritual and
Formation of a Secular Body
– Marion Katz (New York University) | Studying Gender Through Islamic
Texts
– A. Kevin Reinhart (Dartmouth College) | What to Do with Ritual Texts?
– Dorothea Schulz (University of Cologne) | Studying Gender in Muslim
Societies: Key Concepts and Debates
– Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen (University of Copenhagen) | Studying Islam’s
Carrier Groups in Modern Times

Second Autumn School, 25-28 October 2011

Theme: Classical and Modern
Venue: VU University Amsterdam

Keynote speakers and lectures:

– Carl W. Ernst (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) | Problems
in the Historiography of “Classical” Sufism
– Christian Lange (Utrecht University) | Power, Orthodoxy and Salvation
in Classical Islamic Theology
– Muhammad Khalid Masud (Supreme Court of Pakistan, Islamabad) |
Classical Islamic Law: Imam Shafiʿi’s (d. 820) Legal Theory
– Mark Sedgwick (Aarhus University) | Modifying the Model of Modern
Mysticism: Recovering the “Religious” in Islamic Studies
– Abdulkader Tayob (University of Cape Town) | Modern Islamic
Trends and New Theologies: Foundations between Justification and
Representation
– Knut S. Vikør (University of Bergen) | Islamic Law in the Modern World:
State Law and Private Law
276  Isl amic Studies in the T went y-first Century

Third Autumn School, 23-26 October 2012

Theme: Centres and Peripheries. Networks connecting Muslim Societies
in Past and Present
Venue: Leiden University

Keynote speakers and lectures:

– Ulrike Freitag (Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin) | Hajj: Networks
Converging on the Hijaz
– Michael Kemper (University of Amsterdam) | Arabic, Tatar, Russian:
Language Interaction in the Islamic Discourse in Russia
– Ghislaine Lydon (University of California) | Networks and Trade in the
History of Muslim Africa
– Peter Mandaville (George Mason University) | Islamic Movement
Networks in Europe and North America
– Benjamin Soares (African Studies Centre, Leiden) | New Muslim Public
Figures in Africa
– Pnina Werbner (Keele University) | Sufi Networks, Ethics of Hospitality,
and Vernacular Cosmopolitanism

Fourth Autumn School, 22-25 October 2013

Theme: Islam: Culture or Religion?
Venue: Utrecht University

Keynote speakers and lectures:

– Léon Buskens (Leiden University) | Changes and Continuities in Islamic
Studies in the Netherlands in an International Perspective
– Syrinx von Hees (Universität Bonn) | Artistic Production of the Middle
East in View of the Question Islam: Culture or Religion?
– Carole Hillenbrand (University of Edinburgh) | The Academic Discipline
of Islamic History: The Case of Jihad Scholarship
– Bruce Lawrence (Duke University) | Islam between Scripture and
Discourse
– Roman Loimeier (University of Göttingen) | “African Islam” vs. “Islam
in Africa”: The Problem of Binary Constructions of Muslim Societies
– Adam Silverstein (Bar-Ilan University) | Islam as an Abrahamic
Civilization
Overview of NISIS Autumn Schools, 2010 -2014 277

Fifth Autumn School, 12-24 October 2014

Theme: The Religious/Secular Divide in the Muslim World
Venue: Radboud University (Nijmegen)

Keynote speakers and lectures:

– Yolande Jansen (VU University Amsterdam) | Is It Preferable to Dif-
ferentiate between Secularisms or to Critique the Secular-Religious
Framework More Generally: What Kind of Critique Is Useful for What
Purposes?
– Sherine Hafez (University of California) | Islamic Activism and Social
Reform: Rethinking the Islamic/Secular Binary
– Nadia Fadil (University of Leuven) | Reclaiming the “Traditional Islam”
of the Parents: Practices of Authentication of Liberal and Secular Mus-
lims in Belgium
– Markus Dressler (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen) | Beyond the
Binary Knowledge of Religio-Secularism: Reinterpreting Ziya Gökalp
– Gudrun Krämer (Freie Universität Berlin) | Secularity Contested: The
Case of Egypt
– John Bowen (Washington University in St Louis) | Secularism as Govern-
ance and as Translation
 Index
ʿAbd al-Jabbar 138 Babaji 226-227
Abou-Bakr, Omaima 103 Al-Baghdadi 151
Abrahamic religions Balkan 242
notion of 260 Baltaji, Muhammad 195
Abu Hanifa 164, 198 Al-Barbahari 148
Abu Zayd, Nasr 24, 185-186, 188, 191 Ibn Batutta 227, 252
on reason and revelation 194 Bauer, Karen 94
on reason and “text” 194-195, 199 Bayat, Asef 249, 261
Africa al-Baʿuniyya, ʿAʾisha 103
anthropological studies on 126 Bell, Catherine 84
Africanus, Leo 252 Bible 47
agency 75 bibliomancy 51
Ahmed, Leila 87, 93, 96, 98 al-Biqaʿi, Burhan al-Din 88
Al-Akhawayn University 258 Boas, Franz 34-35
ʿAli b. Abi Talib 195 book magic 51
Ali, Kecia 98 Boyarin, Jonathan 38
Andalusia 60 bridal payment (ṣadāq) 99
Angevin kings 56 Brown, Jonathan 59
Anglo-Norman kings 56 al-Bukhari 59
anthropology/anthropological 11, 30, 34, 38, 74,
162, 247-249, 253, 260 Cairo 49, 51, 53
Africanist 126 medieval madrasas in 58
anthropologist as reader 34, 39 canonisation of religious scriptures 58
approach to Islamic law 20 chairs for Arabic studies 12
Boasian 35 Chamberlain, Michael 55
comparative 39 Chishti, Muʾin al-Din 235
divide between * and philology 17, 24-25 Christianity
Geertzian 38 transformation into secularism and
historical 31, 40, 42, 45 modernity 246
linguistic 37, 41 Christians 50
of gender 118 pre-Islamic 71
of Muslim societies 17 circumcision 47
of religion 253 Clifford, James 38
of shariʿa 17 codification of (family)law 209-212
philology of the spoken word 39 colonialism 30, 244
study of Islam 127 consecration
anthropomorphism 148 act of (iḥrām) 82
apostasy 186, 191, 257 constitution 211-212
Ibn ʿArabi 67, 149, 187 contextualisation 19
archival texts 33, 88 conversion to Islam 60, 234
archives Cook, Michael 48, 72
absence of * in the pre-Ottoman period 57 cosmopolitanism 21, 223, 226, 231, 239, 251
Asad, Talal 23, 39, 246, 252, 261 Muslim 224
Al-Ashʿari 151 Pakistani 224
Ashʿarism 141, 147, 155, 192 Sufi ethical 227, 229
authority 55 vernacular 223, 231
of the (Sufi) saint 228 Crone, Patricia 48
Averroes 143 culturalism 246, 261
Avicenna 141 culture
“Axial Age” opposition between religion and 262
theory of 176, 179 use of the concept “culture” 241
Ayyubids 56, 58 Cyrenaican Bedouin 230
Al-Azhar University 216, 219, 256
in the 2012 constitution 220
280  Isl amic Studies in the T went y-first Century

Damascus relations in the Qurʾan 94

medieval 57 research on * in Africa 125
medieval madrasas in 58 roles 112
“deferral of intention” 75, 79 studies 18, 109, 111, 124, 129
Derrida, Jacques 44, 231 study of * in African Muslim societies 128
dichotomies in Islamic studies 16 transregional perspectives on * studies
centres and perispheres 16, 21 125, 129
religious/secular divide in the Muslim using * as an analytical category 114
world 22 generosity 230
texts and practices 16, 173 Geniza records 252
the classical and the modern 16, 18 Ghamkol Sharif 237
discourse analysis 185, 193, 199 al-Ghazali 67, 73, 138, 140, 142-143, 145, 153
“text” in 193 Ihyaʾ ʿUlum al-Din 67
Goldziher, Ignaz 12
education 57 Göle, Nilüfer 122
Egypt(ian) Goody, Jack 38-39
2011 revolution 214 Gordon, M.S. 97
constitution of 2012 21, 219-220 Graham, William 49
Coptic rights in the * constitution 215 Griffel, Frank 142
family and religious freedom in the Gulf countries importing knowledge 258
constitution 218 Gupta, Akhil 37
Islam in the * constitution 212-215
mūlid festivals 235 hadith(s) 47, 64
Eickelman, Dale 174-175, 249 canonisation of 59
El-Cheikh, Nadia 97 false 64
Encyclopaedia of Islam 12, 70, 146, 255, 259 female transmitters 103
English, hegemony of * in Islamic studies 255 on writing down the Qurʾan 52
Enlightenment 246 told by storytellers 64
epistemology 192, 200 Hadrami
Van Ess, Josef 150-152 diaspora 251
essentialism 259, 261 hajj 71, 73, 82, 84
religious 246 saʿy 71
ethnography/ethnographic 247, 260 wuqūf at Arafat 71
activity of reading with 40 Ibn al-Hajj 51, 64, 102
fieldwork 36 Ibn al-Hajjaj, Muslim 59
ethnology 35 Halbertal, Moshe 58, 64
exceptionalism 259 Hallaq, Wael 30, 34, 42, 61, 92
Hanbal, Ahmad b. 193
Fadel, Mohammad 94 Hawting, Gerald 72
female Ibn Hazm 151
reform activism 123 hermaphrodites 95
religiosity 127 hermeneutics 170-171, 185, 187
feminism/feminist(s) 115-116, 118-119, 124 history/historical 18, 255
and poststructuralism 113 historical-critical approach 15
politics 109 of ideas 19
scholars at Western academic institutions social 51, 248
119 study of Islam 13
feminity 129 “history of iedeas” approach 136
Foucault, Michel 34 Hodgson, Marshall 59
hornbook (mukhtaṣar) 61
Geertz, Clifford 38, 73, 172, 176, 247 hospitality 230-232
gender 249 human agency 23
and law 130 Humphrey, Caroline 75, 79-80, 84
ideology of 93 Hurgronje, Snouck 253
in Islamic societies 87-88, 91, 101
in medieval fiqh 95 ideology 191-192
issues relating to state-building projects 121 ijāza 57
politics 121 ijtihād 61
relations 246 in jurisprudence (fiqh) 61
Index 281

imitation (taqlīd) 61 Jew(s)/Jewish 50, 71

immigration of workers from the Middle East identity 47
to Europe 244 jihad 63
Indonesia Johansen, Baber 96
institutions for Islamic higher learning Judaism 47, 70
in 257 religious authority in 58
informality 54-56 Juynboll, Gautier 256
innovation (bidʿa) 62
intentionality 75, 78 Kant, Immanuel 231
interconnections 251 Karaites 47
ISIM (International Institute for the Study of Ibn Khaldun 60-61, 258
Islam in the Modern World) 13, 257 Kharijites 164
Islam/Islamic al-Khatib al-Baghdadi 52
and modernity 20, 161-163, 166-167, 169, 171, Khurasan 60
174, 176-177, 179 Kitab al-Afghani 98
and nationalism 168 Kitab al-qussas wa al-mudhakkirin 63
anthropology of 252
as a discursive tradition 252 Laidlaw, James 75, 79-80, 84
as object and category of analysis in Lane, Edward William 247
Western scholarship 241, 244 Leiden University 12
conflation with the Middle East 243 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 36
defined as a language 176 Lovejoy, Arthur 136
early * source-texts 72
emic and etic views of 259 madrasa(s) 57
family law 208 instruction 29
heresiography 151 proliferation of 60
history of 47-48, 59, 153 Maed, Margareth 37
identification of * studies with Middle Mahmood, Saba 122-123
Eastern studies 22, 245 Malinowski, Bronislaw 36
in Africa 125 Malti-Douglas, Fedwa 87
jurisprudence (fiqh) 29, 32, 61, 68-70, 102, mamluk(s) 54
188, 203, 212, 215, 217 Mamluk(s) 58
law 19-20, 29-33, 42, 47, 183-184, 190, Damascus 103
205-206, 208 Egypt 90, 102
legal studies 30 institutional apparatus of 56
legal theory 189-191 Syria 90
medieval religious discourse 63 manuscripts 12
Middle Period 59-61, 63 Marín, Manuela 93
normativity 22 marriage
“orthodoxy” 146-147, 149 contracts 89, 91
property rights 104 premodern 90
public * 175 Mary
reading the legacy of 173 in the Qurʾan 101
rituals 248 masculinity 129
ritual studies 18, 67-69, 73-74, 77, 80, 83-84 Masud, Khalid 24, 257
soteriology 155 Mawlana Mawdudi 195
study of 11-13, 16, 139, 162, 172, 180, 241, 245, Maʾmun 193
248, 251, 254-256, 258-259, 261 al-Maʾmuniyya
textual tradition 48 ʿArib 97
theology 135-137, 139, 150, 153, 156-157, media
162-163, 165, 167 modern 175, 250
tradition 62-63, 168, 192 Mediterranean 242, 247, 252
Western view of * as a problem 244 memory
role of * in cultural continuity 193
Jackson, Sherman 61 Mernissi, Fatima 87, 97
Japan Messick, Brinkley 17, 52-53
Islamic studies in 259 Middle Ages 47
Ibn al-Jawzi 63-64
282  Isl amic Studies in the T went y-first Century

Middle East Ottoman(s) 57, 135, 206

as a category 242 archives of 56
as a connecting area 251, 260 codification of family law 210
as a frontier between empires 242 enrolling in madrasas 58
beginning of the academic study of 244 Mecelle laws 208
conflation with Islam 243 social and legal historians of the * period
current Western views on 242 30
diversity of 243, 260
fluidity of its borders 243 Pakistan 224
ideas about 241 Palestine 90
Middle Eastern studies 241, 259, 261 Persia(n)
arabocentrism in 259 culture 189
identification with Islamic studies 22, 245 philosophy 54
migration theosophy 54
of Muslims to Europe 20, 251 philology/philological 12, 18, 34-36, 247,
of Muslims to non-Muslim lands 225 254-255, 260
Mir-Hosseini, Ziba 90 divide between anthropology and * 17,
Mishnah 47 24-25
modernisation of society in the Middle East 117 of the spoken word 39
modernity 19, 219, 250 renaissance of 262
Moors, Annelies 90 study of Islam 13
Moos, Ebrahim 143 piety 250
Mubarak, Hosni 213 polygamy 210
Mughals 135 Powers, David S. 93
mūlid festivals in Egypt 235 prayer (ṣalā) 75, 77-78
Muslim Brotherhood 214-215, 221 preachers 63
Muslims living in colonies 11 Protestant Reformation 50
Al-Mutawakkil Bi’llah 193
Muʿawiya 195 Ibn Qadi Shuhba 61
Muʿtazila 138, 155, 187, 189, 192, 198 al-Qaffal 74
of Iraq 164 al-Qalqashandi, Ahmad ibn ʿAli al- 56
mysticism 19 Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya 91, 154
Quraysh 197
Naggiar, Mardochée 252 Qurʾan 47, 270
Nagore-e Sharif 229 arbitration by the 195
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein 54 interpretation of the 189
nationalism 30 language of the 198, 200
Nawaz, Rab 237 magical power of the 51
networks orality of the 49-50
inter- and transnational 250 recitation 173
interreligious 252 references to Christianity 72
Niebuhr, Carsten 11 textual authority rooted in the 61
NISIS Autumn School themes 21 variant readings of the 54
NISIS (Netherlands Interuniversity School for verses relating to gender relations 94
Islamic Studies) 14 Qutb, Sayyid 195
aims 14
Autumn School themes 16-18, 22 Rabbanites 47
interests and expertise of board members Rahman, Fazlur 141
15 Ramadan 71, 81
target audience 16 Ramadan, Tariq 29, 257
visibility 16 rape 99
Rapoport, Yossef 89
orality/oral 53 relations between Muslims, Christians, and
of books 55 Jews 246, 252, 260
of texts 49, 55 religion
reading (qira’a) 43 as a system of symbols 172
transmission 49-50, 53-54, 56 “everyday religion”, the concept of 23
orientalism 35 opposition between * and culture 262
study of 136, 172
Index 283

Weberian sociology of 161-162, 177-178 Skinner, Quentin 136

religious authority 48-49, 57-59, 64 slavery 96
crisis of 62 female 96-98
informality of 59 Smith, William Robertson 247
in medieval Islam 64 Snouck Hurgronje, Christiaan 12, 247
integrity of 61 social science 18, 255
limits to 59-60 approaches to Islam 11
social base of 59 research on and in the Middle East 117, 247
textual nature of 58 research on gender politics 125
religious knowledge souvereigty of God 195
transmission of 57, 60 Sperber, Dan 73
value of 57 stewardess (qahramāna) 97
religious texts stipulations (shurūṭ) 42
commentaries on 58 storytellers 63
interpretation of 59 Sufism/Sufi 60, 63, 224, 227
Rida, Rashid 152 Chishti order 235
RIMO (Dutch Association for the Study of the hospitality 229
Law of Islam and the Middle East) 20 Naqshbandi 226
ritualisation 80-81 networks 251
rituals of denial 84 orders 236, 238
Rodinson, Maxime 254 reform 229
shrines 229
Al-Sadat, Muhammad Anwar 213 study of 12
Sadeghi, Behnam 91 tolerance 224
Safavids 135 Sunnism 60
Safi, Omid 144 al-Suyuti 64
Sahib, Sufi 237 symbols
Said, Edward 180, 245, 247, 254-255 “cryptological” model of 73
Salafism/Salafi 154, 251
in Egypt 215, 217 Al-Tabari 197
Ibn al-Salah 89 Talmud 47, 59
Saljuqs 58 Ibn Tawq 88
Salvatore, Armando 174-175 Ibn Taymiyya 63-64, 89, 148, 154
Sanders, Paula 95 Tayob, Abdelkader 24
Schacht, Joseph 20, 30, 34, 183, 190, 256 temptation (fitna) 100
scholarly tradition terrorist attacks of 11 September 245
genealogy of the 261 text-centered community 47-48, 59, 64
schools of law 29, 61, 164, 206, 212 texts and practices 261
Hanbali 167 texts in Muslim societies 17
in the Egyptian constitution 218 textual authority 48, 62-63
Shafiʿi 62 crisis of 59, 61
secularism 170, 250 theology 19
secularity 250 Thousand and one Nights 98
Al-Shafiʿi 21, 183-184, 188-189, 192 tolerance 226, 233
Al-Risala 184, 190-192, 197, 202-203 Sufi 224
ideology of 196 Torah 47
on authentic knowledge 201-202 translocality 251
on istiḥsān 196 transmission of religious knowledge 54
on the Quraysh and the Arabic language transnationalism 250
198-200 Tucker, Judith 87, 93
on sunna 196 Tunisia(n)
Al-Shahrastani 149, 151 constitution 211
shariʿa
system in Yemen 31 ʿulamaʾ 48, 55, 58-59, 61, 63
texts 32 textual authority ofʾ 59
Sharqiyyât 12 Umrah 71
Shatzmiller, Maya 90 Urdu 226
Shiʿism 60
Sirhindi, Shaikh Ahmed 226
284  Isl amic Studies in the T went y-first Century

Waardenburg, Jacques 254 mosque access 92

Wakin, Jeanette 52 participation in Islamist movements 122
Wansbrough, John 48 subordination of 111-112
war on terror 11 worship 78
al-Wazzan, al-Hasan 252
Weber, Max 38, 81, 163, 168 Yemen 31
Wensinck 72 Islamic state of 31
Wittingham, Martin 142
women Zayd, Nasr Abu 257
early writings on the position of 115 ZemZem 12
in Islamic societies 87, 91 Zilfi, Madeline 97
“male bias” in women’s studies 110 Zindapir 224, 226-227, 229-230, 234
Marxist approaches to the position of 117 Zomeño, Amalia 90