Trolling for exemplars of Islamicate critique

Symposium Trolling for exemplars of Islamicate critique 0(0) 1–5 ! The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/2050303219848067 journals.sagepub.com/home/crr Bruce B Lawrence Duke University, USA Sometimes books are best understood from their dedications. Irfan Ahmad (2017) can/ should be compared with another Ahmad/Ahmed, Shahab Ahmed (2016). Both are Muslim scholars from South Asia who have achieved renown in Euro-American academic circles. Shahab Ahmed, now deceased, dedicates his posthumous tome (What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic?) to his parents. It was they “who raised me in the Islam of their cosmopolitanism, and in the cosmopolitanism of their Islam” (Ahmed 2016, 8). What follows is an often dense, but always animated, discussion of disparate approaches to Islam and the meaning, or importance, of being Islamic. Only in one section of a 550-page book does the reader find the tribute to his parents analyzed. In it, Ahmed (224–238) addresses the nature of cosmopolitanism. There he argues that understanding adab as Islamic, and therefore Islamically cosmopolitan, provides the coherent contradiction of meaning making within Islam across time and space. “What renders adab adab is the fact that it is the literary expression of a larger sensibility that imagines the this-worldly and the other-worldly, the Seen and the Unseen, as set upon a cosmological communicative inter-course [or reciprocal exchange].” This reciprocal exchange is one of the things that makes it Islamic adab but also cosmopolitan in its depth and scope (235–236). In a similar vein, Irfan Ahmad’s key themes are also highlighted in a dedication to his father, a niece, and a nephew. This initial dedication is followed by another: “to the memory of the Aboriginals and their cultures (in Australia and elsewhere), victims of the Enlightenment and Western modernity!” (7). The Aboriginals do not appear in the actual monograph, though Australia does and Ahmad’s contacts in Monash University are both cited and thanked in the Preface. But what is far more important in this brilliant, far ranging study, is the recurrent accent on Muslims—and also Islam—as “victims of the Enlightenment and Western modernity.” Corresponding author: Bruce B Lawrence, Duke University, Durham, USA. Email: brucebennettlawrence@gmail.com 2 Critical Research on Religion 0(0) Irfan Ahmad begins by invoking Shah Valiullah (d. 1763) as the epigone of Islamic critical thinkers, at once the precursor and the victim of both the Enlightenment and Western modernity. Critical thinking pervades Shah Valiullah’s writings. Other scholars have observed the centrality of Shah Valiullah for any reassessment of Islamic norms and values, traditions and teachings. Consider, for instance, Ahmad Dallal (2018). In Islam without Europe: Traditions of Reform in Eighteenth-Century Europe, Dallal dedicates a large section to the hadith-based reformation of the scholar whom he calls Shah Wali Allah al-Dihlawi (using the Arabic rather than Urdu spelling of his name and adding the nisbah of Delhi to indicate his location; see pp. 248–274). Irfan Ahmad, however, goes beyond Dallal in showing how the self-critical reflection of Shah Valiullah is at once non-observable and hence unverifiable yet also rational, just as was the Hobbesian accent on “the state of nature,” itself the leitmotif for Western modernity going back to Kant and his argument for “the genealogy of critique.” The point here is not to suggest that Shah Valiullah was a Muslim counterpart to Hobbes or Kant but rather that he was a “traditional” Muslim scholar who wrote about religion not as blind faith but rather as a “specific type of reason (‘aql’)” (4). Ahmad writes as both a philosopher and an anthropologist. In mounting an anthropological critique of the Enlightenment and Western philosophy, he proposes “an alternative genealogy of critique—tanqid/naqd—in the Islamicate traditions of South Asia as expressed in the Urdu language” (25). Especially notable is Ahmad’s effort to move beyond literary resources, or high cultural heroes, and also “to account for mundane social-cultural practices” in the everyday life of ordinary men and women (29). No anecdote is more effective or more poignant than his encounter with a hawker in Aligarh, the academic town in Uttar Pradesh where he was doing doctoral fieldwork a decade ago. Ahmad heard the hawker reciting a line of poetry to the effect: “Whatever I get God gives. What can Asaf-ud-Daula give?” Asaf-ud-Daula was an 18th century member of the Muslim elite. Hailing from Lucknow, a large city in North India, he was known as a collaborator with the British and a self-indulgent ruler. The hawker, himself poor, gave some money to another man, a beggar, and then explained to the curious onlooker (Ahmad) that no one, not even a ruler like Asaf-ud-Daula or Alexander the Great, takes wealth with them beyond the grave. Hence, it was due to the lack of both faith in God and a sense of justice that he, along with the beggar, found themselves in the 21st century, scrounging to survive. In Ahmad’s reading, the hawker was not just a good Muslim, he was also a noteworthy critic (201). The larger inquiry that guides this book delves into the origins of modern sociology, including the foundational figure of Max Weber, whom Ahmad links to Hobbes and also William Rasch. Observes Ahmad: “it was Weber who stipulated that ‘the State itself. . . with a rational, written constitution, rationally-ordained law. . . is known only in the Occident.’ And that state, as Hobbes theorized it, was uniquely Christian. In the Leviathan, Hobbes proclaimed ‘Jesus is the Christ’ as a flag under which all Christians could unite. . . Hobbes’ Commonwealth was thus not a rupture from Christianity: truth took on other forms to reside in ‘many locales from which it launches its various crusades’ (Rasch 2009, 109).” (46). In Rasch’s essay on “Enlightenment as Religion,” from which Ahmad is here quoting, it could be argued that Rasch overstates the religious import of the Hobbesian state but what I think remains clear is the Christian, specifically Anglican, notion of the State as a director/ monitor/authority for all religious institutions, including their leaders and practices. Hobbes himself, though the son of a parson, was variously labeled a deist, or covert atheist, Lawrence 3 but in any case anti-clerical, anti-Puritan, and anti-Catholic yet not immune to the cultural mood, or zeitgeist, of his time and place. What Ahmad makes clear, however, is the need to probe more deeply than labels in pursuing critique. There is more to account for in self-criticism than one’s religious allegiance or disaffection; there is also the context within which assumptions about religious “truth” still pervade. Hence, one can detect residual Christian biases in Hobbes’s pursuit of a social contract: while it claims that it would banish official religion to the sidelines, it still retains a pro-Western bias marked by the Christian ambience of his time and place. In short, as Ahmad scathingly notes, “the Enlightenment and its reason were rooted in a distinctly local political anthropology” (48). Not only Western social scientists but even the category of time needs to be revisited and revised. Consider the notion of Axial Age and its recent child, the modern age. “To see the modern age as the age of criticism,” notes Ahmad, “as did both Kant and Foucault, is to celebrate ‘the us modern’ [despite the fact that] criticism as a practice is probably as old as humans themselves” (49). The chief methodology that Ahmad advances is immanent critique. As he explains it, immanent is “‘connected criticism,’ i.e., it is connected to the ethos of a culture even as it seeks to question it” (58). His is not a novel approach, having already been explored by Talal Asad in relation to Islam, but Ahmad goes beyond Asad in linking immanent critique, or what Asad calls “tradition-guided reasoning,” to “focus on qalb (heart) as the locus of reason or intellect (‘aql)” (60). Rather than the Cartesian/Straussian dichotomy between faith and reason, Ahmad discerns and accents anti-dualism, “an alternative genealogy of critique advocated in Islamicate traditions of South Asia as expressed in the Urdu language” (25, 63). It must be noted that this critique is viable, even if the distinction in English between criticism and critique circulates between several Urdu words on this topic, namely, tanqid, intiqad, naqd (as Ahmad himself clarifies later in chap. 3, see p. 213, n.1). Poetry is especially crucial to Islamicate critique, for “in the crucible of Urdu ghazal, Indian and Islamic elements fuse into a true Indo-Islamic consciousness” (65). Where Irfan Ahmad and Shahab Ahmed converge is in their accent on adab. Adab becomes the key term that needs to be recuperated and restored to its fullest meaning. Adab is not merely literature, nor solely morality; it is both, intertwined and inseparable one from the other. Despite the claims of some Urdu literary critics, one cannot demarcate adab as literature from “the wider Islamic notion of adab that is marked by its radical comprehensiveness addressing all domains of life.” Indeed, “adab as literature can properly be construed only in relation to the moral universe, which this concept denotes in its comprehensive usage” (67). Central to this retrieval of an expansive adab is a notion of “constructive literature,” that is, an axiomatic stance that literature is connected to religion, to such an extent that “seldom is any great literature [in Indo-Islamic history] delinked from spiritual goals, moral imperatives, or Sufi influence” (76). Critique, like literature, is also rooted in religion, and can be traced through an alternative genealogy which also draws on the writings of Abul Ala Maududi, the founder of Jamaat-i Islami. It is an alternative genealogy that reckons all the prophets as also critics, critics of the social order of their time, of political structures, and also of moral compromises, both individual and collective.1 Maududi is both a critic and himself the subject of critique, as Ahmad demonstrates time and again, in chapters 4, 5 and 6. Especially in chapter 6 when Ahmad turns to women, he examines the shortfall of Maududi in assessing and projecting the multiple social roles of 4 Critical Research on Religion 0(0) Muslim women. Maududi remained wedded to patriarchal, or neo-patriarchal, values that he did not address or revise in his extensive writings and public addresses (162). Yet Maududi also saw “Islam as a distinct civilization,” for which the foundation “is essentially conceptual and spiritual, with metaphysical postulates” (109). In this regard, he is comparable to both Ibn Khaldun and Marshall Hodgson, each of whom at different times and for disparate audiences, accented the central role of belonging and conscience as the basis for Islamic/Islamicate civilization (209, n. 2; 215, n. 20). If Maududi can be invoked to explore an alternative genealogy of critique in Islamicate traditions of South Asia, he shares that space with another, lesser known but equally crucial exponent of adab: Abdul Ghaffar Khan (d. 1988). Sometimes known as the Frontier Gandhi, Ahmad demonstrates how Khan was an advocate of critical thinking and self-critical action apart from his association with Gandhi. While Maududi has been lauded and much discussed, especially within Pakistan but also among Indian Muslim scholars, Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his movement, the Khudai Khidmatgar (servants of God), have been routinely either ignored or belittled throughout South Asia. What Ahmad does in assessing Abdul Ghaffar Khan is nothing short of revisionism at its most extreme, and daring, pinnacle. In his own words, he seeks to excavate “the Khudai Khitmagar movement from the bloody debris of nation and state- [un]making to read it as a movement of critique” (185). A Pathan, Abdul Ghaffar Khan nonetheless critiqued both Pathan machismo and arab parasti (worship of what is Arab and Arabic). The former he was spared by his parents: both devout Muslims, his father nonetheless deferred to his mother, and allowed Abdul Ghaffar Khan, unlike his older brother, to remain in India for his education. He later married, and when his wife died, refused to remarry dedicating himself instead to the movement for which he is now famous: Khudai Khidmatgar. In all matters he pursued reform but also progress, and that meant understanding scripture in one’s own language, so that in jail, where he spent much time due to his protests, he wrote: The language of worship for Hindus is Sanskrit and ours is Arabic. This is why we don’t understand the meanings of words and sentences during prayer. Nor do Hindus understand theirs. Now ponder over it: will he who is neither familiar with his religion nor understands its religious text ever achieve progress? (190) Khan strove to have the message of patience broadcast as the core ethic of the Qur’an, with service (khidmat) as the crucial expression of faith in God: commitment to (re)build a world with His attributes—justice, peace, and harmony (192). The fact that his movement did not last beyond 1947, suffocated by nationalist flames on both sides of the Partition line separating Pakistan and India, does not deny its value. Unlike Maududi and many of his followers, Khan was not a scholarly figure seeking to change public life through organized religion. Many of his followers were peasants or unlettered folk on the margins of urban sites. They relied more on proverbs and random verses than canonical texts in prose to guide them through the challenges of life in a world askew with inequality and injustice. If the hawker and beggar survive as reminders of how far we remain from justice, then it is to be hoped that this book will serve as an alternative critique that is also a beacon of light for those who seek to be grounded in adab and to become worthy heirs of prophetic wisdom. Irfan Ahmad deserves the acclaim that Abdul Ghaffar Khan has been denied, but may now regain, in part thanks to this lucid, imaginative analysis of his life, his movement, and his legacy. Lawrence 5 Note 1. One of Maududi’s sympathizers even goes so far as to portray Musa as a critic of Khizr (from Q 18, Surat al-Kahf 60–82), which is usually interpreted in reverse, that is, Khizr, an enigmatic figure who appears only in this pericope, is customarily seen as a critic of the great prophet, Musa or Moses (85). References Ahmad, Irfan. 2017. Religious as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Ahmed, Shahab. 2016. What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dallal, Ahmad. 2018. Islam without Europe: Traditions of Reform in Eighteenth-Century Europe. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Rasch, William. 2009. “Enlightenment as Religion.” New German Critique 36(3): 109–131. Author biography Bruce B Lawrence is Professor of Islamic Studies Emeritus at the Duke University and Adjunct Professor at the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Vakf University, Istanbul. His research interests include: South Asian Sufism, Contemporary Islam, Islamicate Cosmopolitan, and the Qur’an as Biography and Verse. Among his recent books are: The Koran in English – A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2017), Who is Allah? (UNC/EUP Press, 2015), The Qur’an – a Biography (Grove/Atlantic, 2006), and Sufi Martyrs to Love (with Carl Ernst; Palgrave, 2002). In addition to a manifesto, Islamicate Cosmopolitan (forthcoming from Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), he is also working with Rafey Habib on a decade-long project, The Qur’an – A Verse Translation, forthcoming from WW Norton in 2021.