What is Islam?

A Talented One
A Talented One Members Posts: 4,202 ✭✭✭
edited December 2015 in For The Grown & Sexy
That's the title of a brand new book by the late Shahab Ahmed. Here is an excerpt from a book review.


 How Has Islamic Orthodoxy Changed Over Time?

By Elias Muhanna

 The medieval English allegorical poem Piers Plowman described the birth of Islam as the result of a clever hoax. Muhammad, it asserted, was a former Christian who had made a failed attempt to become pope and then set off for Syria to mislead the innocents. He tamed a turtledove and taught it to eat grains of wheat placed in his ear. In a scene reminiscent of the enchantment of Melampus, the Greek oracle who was granted the ability to understand animal speech when his ears were licked by snakes, Piers’s Muhammad mesmerized audiences by having the bird fly down during the course of his preaching and appear to whisper in his ear. Staging a moment of revelation from ? , the false prophet led men to misbelief by “wiles of his wit and a whit dowve.”

 In the centuries following Muhammad’s death in 632, many Christians like William Langland, the author of Piers Plowman, sought to make sense of Islam in the terms and symbols of their own faith. Was it just another schismatic sect led by a great here­siarch, as Dante portrayed it in his Divine Comedy? Or was it an ancient form of chivalry, a Saracen code of ethics? Did Muhammad’s followers think him a ? ? The figure of the prophet-as-trickster found in Piers Plowman was not the most outlandish attempt to explain the origins of Islam. Medieval French chansons de gestes attributed a welter of fantastical qualities to the cult of “Mahom,” including a pantheon of minor deities superimposed from Roman mythology.

University chairs in Oriental studies began proliferating in Europe in the 17th century and were soon followed by the establishment of scholarly associations and academic journals. By the late 19th century, European knowledge of the languages, histories, and customs of Muslim societies had advanced significantly beyond the scope of medieval apologetics, but the interpretation of Islam through the lens of Christianity remained a central current of Orientalist scholarship. As Shahab Ahmed writes in a major new study, the consequences of this approach and its legacy have made it difficult for moderns—­scholars and laypeople, Muslims and non-Muslims alike—to grasp the “historical and human phenomenon that is Islam in its plenitude and complexity of meaning.” Coming to terms with Islam—“saying Islam meaningfully,” as he puts it—requires making ourselves sensitive to the “capaciousness, complexity, and, often, outright contradiction” that inheres within the broadest possible range of practices, beliefs, representational forms, metaphors, and objects associated with Islam.

Ahmed, a scholar of Islamic studies at Harvard, died this autumn at the tragically young age of 48. His book is a strange and brilliant work, encyclopedic in vision and tautly argued in the manner of a logical proof, yet pervaded by the urgency of a political manifesto. It is, in a way, all of these things. For those who knew him, the peculiar ambition of What Is Islam? will not come as a surprise, because Ahmed had been at work for years on a much-anticipated and controversial study about the formation of Islamic orthodoxy. The surprise is that What Is Islam? is not that book.

* * *

Shahab Ahmed arrived at Harvard as an assistant professor in 2005. I was a doctoral student at the time and had heard most of the hagiographical accounts of his life that flowed through graduate-student circles. Fluent in many languages, Ahmed had lived in Singapore, England, Malaysia, and Egypt before coming to America for graduate school. After completing a doctorate at Princeton, he was admitted to Harvard’s prestigious Society of Fellows, where he spent three years before joining the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Mutual acquaintances spoke of his terrifying erudition and wit, sharpened by an unrepentantly refined British accent.

....


 The story Ahmed was telling comprehended a tremendous braid of narratives, a pageant of contradiction and diversity in an intellectual tradition that spanned over a millennium. By historicizing the transformation in attitudes toward Muhammad’s prophetic mission, Ahmed hoped that his study might provoke an engagement with the tremendous resources of the past in confronting the questions of the present. How has Islamic orthodoxy been formulated over time, and how might it be reformulated today? As ambitious a thinker as he was, however, Ahmed also seemed to recognize that developing the full implications of his argument was a delicate business. This was the reason for the immensity of the book’s dimensions. As he confided to me one afternoon while we sifted through the mountains of references I had flagged, he was erecting a scholarly edifice so formidable that no one could challenge it.

 Among that region’s notable characteristics are the significance of rationalist philosophy (both in its purest form and as an epistemological framework for scholastic theology); the omnipresence of Sufi thought and practice; and the tradition of figural representation in painting. The writings of Avicenna, the 11th-century Persian polymath, and the great legacy of commentary he inspired advanced the idea of a superior Truth accessible to the most powerful intellects (belonging, naturally, to philosophers), and “a lesser version of that Truth that communicates itself via Prophets, such as Muhammad.” A prophet was, to Avicenna, a kind of “über-philosopher,” and the prescribed laws promulgated in the Koran were meant “to address the multitude in terms intelligible to them, seeking to bring home to them what transcends their intelligence by means of simile and symbol.”

This understanding of the relationship between reason and revelation prompted some charges of heresy, but the scale of Avicenna’s reception suggests that, in many quarters, he had won the argument, with his philosophical method and conceptual vocabulary becoming part of a standard scholastic curriculum across the Islamic world. In this light, if a modern definition of Islam does not account for the worldview of a figure such as Avicenna—whom Ahmed describes as “the man who effectively defined ? for Muslims”—then something is amiss.

Ahmed examines the definition of Islam in a series of similar provocations. Alongside Avicenna, Hafiz, and the great Sufi thinker Ibn Arabi, he also considers the practice of wine drinking, a classical example of something prohibited by Islamic law and yet “positively valued in non-legal discourse.” The most cursory familiarity with premodern Islamic literatures, even beyond the Balkans-to-Bengal complex, attests to it. Poetry and belletristic prose in Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and Urdu fairly overflow with wine, while historical accounts of famous rulers and their courts portray scenes of literary salons congregating late into the night, fueled by musical performances and great quantities of drink. On the cover of What Is Islam? is one such sovereign, the 17th-century Mughal emperor Jahangir, pictured on the face of a gold coin contemplating a goblet of wine.

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Comments

  • A Talented One
    A Talented One Members Posts: 4,202 ✭✭✭
    How to make sense of these contradictions? Since the beginnings of their academic study of the faith, scholars have grappled with the problem of reconciling the heterogeneity of Muslim beliefs and customs with the uniformity of “Islam.” One long-standing approach makes a distinction between the domains of “religion” and “culture.” Perhaps the most prominent representative of this school, the historian Marshall Hodgson, coined the term “Islamicate” to account for the fullest range of ways of thinking and living found within the cultural sphere of “Islamdom.” Ahmed thinks that Hodgson was motivated by the correct impulse, but came to the wrong conclusions. To separate religion from culture is to make an artificial distinction that becomes untenable in the case of Islam, in which religion and culture are thoroughly interwoven.

    Another approach argues that it is senseless to speak of Islam as a monolith; what exists is an array of local islams. If Islam is anything, it is “whatever Muslims say it is.” This has a powerful and pluralistic ring; it accommodates both Avicenna and his great critic, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, the 11th-century theologian. But as Ahmed observes, the islams argument is analytically weak, sacrificing explanatory power in the service of rhetorical efficiency. The assertion that Islam is whatever Muslims say it is offers a description, not a concept.

    ....

     Can the celebration of wine drinking be Islamic? To Ahmed, the answer is: obviously, yes. It is Islamic insofar as this celebration is expressed, for example, in the terms of such classical Sufi metaphors for “the experience of intoxication with the Divine,” as well as the more mundane recognition of wine’s virtues as a social lubricant. The extensive medical literature of the premodern Islamic world attests openly to the latter fact. As the 10th-century physician and philosopher Abu Zayd al-Balkhi put it, “It is wine that provides excellence to society and conversation…and there is nothing that makes possible relations of intimacy and confidence between friends so tastefully and pleasantly and effectively as does drinking wine together.”

    To say that wine drinking is un-Islamic may be akin to saying that the refusal to serve in the military during a period of wartime conscription is un-American. In the view of some citizens, such a refusal may well violate the essence of Americanness, in addition to violating American law; to others, however, this act may rather fulfill and epitomize the requirements of citizenship. By Ahmed’s logic, the refusal to serve in the military is not just American in spite of its opposition to other, contradictory values associated with Americanness, but precisely because of it.


     Is Ahmed right? His definition of Islam as a model of “coherent contradiction”—one whereby a Muslim can simultaneously hold in mind many competing views of Islam’s teachings and values—is compelling; but is it true? There is something Gödelian in this project, an attempt to speak aloud a self-negating paradox. Perhaps an unavoidable consequence is that Ahmed’s arguments sometimes sound circular. If the Islamic is that which is recognizable in terms of what has been previously identified as Islamic, where does the buck stop? And might one not argue that any concept as vast as Islam must also be vastly self-contradictory and yet somehow coherent, especially when surveyed through the encyclopedic prism that Ahmed sets before his subject? What distinguishes Islam from such concepts as Christianity, Judaism, or liberalism in this respect?

     A more significant problem concerns the consequences of insisting, as Ahmed does, on the inapplicability of distinctions like “religious vs. cultural” or “sacred vs. secular” when studying Islam. There is something unpleasantly exoticizing about making “Islamic” the only, or even the principal, lens through which to interpret a Hafizian love poem, a historic building, a metaphor, or a wine goblet. This was the sort of thing that got Orientalists into hot water: the assumption that every aspect of quotidian life in the societies of the Orient was somehow a reflection of Islam. The Orientalists, at least, pointed out the practices and artifacts that seemed to contradict the tenets of conservative piety. Ahmed’s “Islam” comprehends these contradictions, and so flirts with another analytical pitfall: the danger that “Islam,” by containing multitudes, means nothing in particular as a concept.

    The academy is not the only place where concepts matter. Ahmed’s intended audience, one senses, also lies beyond the gates of Western universities. Looming in the background of the work is the specter of modern Muslim “textual-restrictivism” and “legal-supremacism,” as exemplified by many political Islamists. Here, he detects an ironic agreement between much Western scholarship and modern Islamist thought. Both groups concur that what is central to Islam is the law, which must be accessed through the study of the Koran and the Hadith. Philosophy and Sufism are dismissed by most Islamists as marginal—if not inimical—to the core of Islam, and to Ahmed’s great frustration, Western academics have tended to agree. Like the Islamist, the academic who makes a distinction between the religious essence of Islam on the one hand, and the cultural practices of the “Islamicate” on the other, is favoring one as more authentic than the other. To Ahmed, the modern fundamentalist happily agrees with this formula, insofar as it necessitates a return to “pure and authentic faith…back to the religion, back to Qur’an and [Hadith], back to the law, back to Islam, and not—? forbid!—to Islamicate.”

    The challenge facing modern reformers is to circumvent this obstacle by making use of the rich resources of the historical tradition to explore the different modalities of Islam. Ahmed was quite pessimistic about this prospect, as he felt that the connection between Muslims and their medieval philosophical/Sufi heritage had become considerably attenuated in the modern world. Yet if a 14th-century theologian such as Ibn Taymiyyah—­the intellectual godfather of Wahhabism and other ultra-orthodox currents—­can become one of the best-selling authors of the contemporary Middle East, perhaps there is hope yet for Avicenna.

    http://www.thenation.com/article/contradiction-and-diversity/
  • Rasta.
    Rasta. Members Posts: 9,342 ✭✭✭✭✭
    How many ? on the iC gonna read this ? ?
  • A Talented One
    A Talented One Members Posts: 4,202 ✭✭✭
    Rasta. wrote: »
    How many ? on the iC gonna read this ? ?

    Honestly, I don't know. But maybe more than you think.
  • Will Munny
    Will Munny Members Posts: 30,199 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Rasta. wrote: »
    How many ? on the iC gonna read this ? ?

    not me..

  • A Talented One
    A Talented One Members Posts: 4,202 ✭✭✭
    _Lefty wrote: »
    It said an excerpt. You posted the whole muthafuckin book.

    That's nothing b.

    And it's not the whole thing. So it's an excerpt.
  • atribecalledgabi
    atribecalledgabi Members, Moderators Posts: 14,063 Regulator
    Rasta. wrote: »
    How many ? on the iC gonna read this ? ?

    Ask @zzombie
  • zzombie
    zzombie Members Posts: 11,280 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Islam is simply the religion and practices of Muhammad and the five so called rightly guided caliphs.
  • zzombie
    zzombie Members Posts: 11,280 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Islam will also be the religion of the ultimate anti christ
  • white sympathizer
    white sympathizer Members Posts: 1,570 ✭✭✭✭
    A ? joke that muslims hide behind when people question their ? up ass culture, thats what islam is.

    Promotion of ? and murder in the promise of receiving a bunch of virgins (more than likely underage virgins) when you die, give me a ? break.
  • not_osirus_jenkins
    not_osirus_jenkins Members, Banned Users Posts: 3,670 ✭✭✭✭✭
    .....no worse than Christianity
  • Copper
    Copper Members Posts: 49,532 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Somebody explain to the ? what an excerpt is.
  • Will Munny
    Will Munny Members Posts: 30,199 ✭✭✭✭✭
    .....no worse than Christianity

    In 2015 tho???






    Ive been tryna ? this muslim somali chick for soooooo long. I swear imma ? this girl if the last ? damn thing I do. No, I'm not talking about Kai.
  • Copper
    Copper Members Posts: 49,532 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Will Munny wrote: »
    .....no worse than Christianity

    In 2015 tho???






    Ive been tryna ? this muslim somali chick for soooooo long. I swear imma ? this girl if the last ? damn thing I do. No, I'm not talking about Kai.

    Post her pics
  • CapitalB
    CapitalB Members Posts: 24,556 ✭✭✭✭✭
    muslims get promised virgins in the afterlife and christians who were promised their own mansion and a seat at some huge ass dinner table find the idea far fetched..

    go figure..
  • Rasta.
    Rasta. Members Posts: 9,342 ✭✭✭✭✭
    muslims get promised virgins in the afterlife and christians who were promised their own mansion and a seat at some huge ass dinner table find the idea far fetched..

    go figure..

    Lmfao...eternal life in paradise through Jesus Christ our lord and savior vs 77 virgins in the afterlife

    Genesis 3:22
    And the LORD ? said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever."
  • Idiopathic Joker
    Idiopathic Joker Members, Moderators Posts: 45,691 Regulator
    I need to make my own cult religion


    "LET ME RELIEVE YOUR FINANCIAL BURDENS, BY GIVING ME ALL YOUR MONEY!"


    The only difference between me and creflo dollar is I get straight to the point
  • leftcoastkev
    leftcoastkev Members Posts: 6,232 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Judaism (Kabbalah), Christianity (Gnosticism), Islam (Sufism).

    Each one builds from the other.

    Learn about all of them, there are jewels in each, but I personally subscribe to none of them.

    Think for yourself.
  • Copper
    Copper Members Posts: 49,532 ✭✭✭✭✭
    muslims get promised virgins in the afterlife and christians who were promised their own mansion and a seat at some huge ass dinner table find the idea far fetched..

    go figure..

    Christian leaders spreading the word of ? get the mansion and huge dinner tables in this life...
  • atribecalledgabi
    atribecalledgabi Members, Moderators Posts: 14,063 Regulator
    edited December 2015
    That 7 virgins when you die ? makes no sense to me...muslims can practice polygamy in the middle east sooooo why don't they just marry 7 virgins?
  • zzombie
    zzombie Members Posts: 11,280 ✭✭✭✭✭
    You people know nothing about Islam or Christianity
  • Rasta.
    Rasta. Members Posts: 9,342 ✭✭✭✭✭
    zzombie wrote: »
    You people know nothing about Islam or Christianity

    ? .....i know more than you can ever eschew in your ? hub you call a brain idiot
  • ChillaDaGawd
    ChillaDaGawd Members Posts: 12,021 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited December 2015
    Will Munny wrote: »
    .....no worse than Christianity

    In 2015 tho???






    Ive been tryna ? this muslim somali chick for soooooo long. I swear imma ? this girl if the last ? damn thing I do. No, I'm not talking about Kai.

    There's a lot of sexy ass Somali ? in Minnesota