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WORK TITLE: Before Orthodoxy
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 12/11/1966-9/17/2015
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahab_Ahmed * https://beenasarwar.com/2015/09/20/rip-shahab-ahmed-prominent-islamic-scholar-from-pakistan/ * https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-09-20/an-extraordinary-scholar-redefined-islam
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born December 11, 1966, Singapore; died of leukemia, September 17, 2015, Boston, MA; son of Razia and Mohammed Mumtazuddin Ahmed; married Nora Lessersohn, August 1, 2015.
EDUCATION:International Islamic University Malaysia, law degree; the American University, Cairo, Egypt, bachelor’s and master’s degree; Princeton University, Ph.D., 1999.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Scholar, educator, and writer. Previously worked as a journalist in Afghanistan; American University, Cairo, Egypt, faculty member, 1998-2000; Princeton University, visiting lecturer and research fellow, 2004-05; Harvard University, associate professor of Islamic studies, 2005-14, lecturer on law and research fellow in Islamic legal studies at Harvard Law School, 2014-15. Work-related activities included International Islamic University, visiting scholar,2007-08; junior member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, 2000-03.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles and book reviews to periodicals, including Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, Journal of Comparative Poetics, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, and Studia Islamica.
SIDELIGHTS
Shahab Ahmed was an Islamic scholar who was born in Singapore and went to primary school there; he completed his higher education in Malaysia, Egypt, and the United States. Ahmed, who died in 2015 from leukemia, was called “the most brilliant and creative scholar of Islam in his generation” by Noah Feldman, a professor of constitutional and international law, in a Chicago Tribune Online obituary. Feldman went on to remark that Ahmed was fluent in possibly up to fifteen languages, noting that Ahmed “was too modest to name a number.” Feldman also wrote: “He was as comfortable chatting with mujahideen in Afghanistan … and madrassa teachers in rural Pakistan as he was in the seminar rooms of Princeton and Harvard.”
What Is Islam?
In his book, published posthumously and titled What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic, Ahmed presents a comprehensive examination of Islam and what it means to be Islamic. Ahmed “offers an original, challenging definition of Islam completely at odds with what Salafis and other radicals, not to mention many Westerners, believe,” wrote Feldman in the Chicago Tribune Online, adding: “Ahmed’s vision of Islam … offers an authentic, sophisticated and inspiring alternative to the cramped, reductive and often violent versions that predominate today.” Cross Currents contributor Peter Heinegg noted: “Ahmed provides no easy, straightforward answer to the question in his title (everything he says requires unpacking), but he comes close to that when he calls for a crucial ‘hermeneutic engagement’ with Islam.”
Ahmed drew from a wide range of sources translated from various languages for What Is Islam?, with most of the translations performed by Ahmed himself. Writing in the book’s preface, Ahmed remarks: “This book is a culmination of innumerable conversations down the years with friends, fellow-dwellers and fellow-travelers in various places across the world.” He also notes that he realized while writing the book that he had “formulated several of its fundamental ideas, albeit in a very nascent form, in a plenary lecture” he had given at the University of California, Santa Barbara, some years earlier.
What Is Islam? examines Islam from a wide range of perspectives, keeping at the forefront the idea of providing a better understanding not only of what Islam is but also how it can be studied in a meaningful way. In the process, Ahmed presents his case that existing approaches to the study of Islam have been inadequate in revealing Islam’s “coherence … by focusing either on particular aspects of Islam or on the contradictions in previous systematizations of it,” as noted by Choice contributor J. Hammer.
Ahmed discusses the human and historical phenomenon of Islam and the variety and contradictions found in the religion. Another issue Ahmed addresses is whether or not the religion of Islam should be distinguished from the cultural aspects of Islam, while also exploring whether the term “Islamic” should be abandoned altogether. Ahmed provides a look at how Muslims have understood divine revelation throughout its history and how this understanding has influenced Muslims in their embrace of various values, as well as how it has affected Muslim art and music. The book also offers a new way of understanding Islamic law and how this law is related to philosophical ethics and political theory.
“Ahmed’s project, which will now have to be carried on by others, provides a glimpse of a vast array of superb, but under-appreciated texts,” wrote Cross Currents contributor Heinegg, adding: “Could these be building blocks for an Islamic Renaissance?” A Publishers Weekly contributor called What Is Islam? an “enduring and timely work” and recommended it to readers who want to distinguish “the essence of Islam beyond the seeming paradoxes of its own representations.”
Before Orthodoxy
Ahmed is also the author of the posthumously published Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses in Early Islam. The book examines the reported incidence that the Prophet Muhammad of the Muslim faith once accidentally thought words suggested by Satan were actually a divine revelation. Called the Satanic verses, the words essentially praise pagan gods, which is antithetical to the Islamic believe in Allah as the one god. Ahmed points out that most modern-day Muslims reject the story surrounding the Satanic verses. However, he writes that many Muslim scholars dating from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries discussed the story in depth, with many believing it was true. Furthermore, from circa 632 to 800 CE, the majority, if not all, Muslims, firmly believed in the Satanic verses as fact.
While examining the Satanic verses story and history, Ahmed also explores how religions ultimately establish what they believe to be true. Ahmed notes that this issue is especially relevant to Islam, which, unlike the Catholic Church for Catholics, for example, has no universal, centralized authority to establish codes of belief. The book discusses what Ahmed refers to as Islamic orthodoxy, describing it as a movement with the Islamic religion to establish control over certain sects as well as movements to interpret Islam in certain ways. “The battle over Islamic orthodoxy continues to rage on today, making this work of contemporary relevance,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, July, 2016, J. Hammer, review of What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic, p. 1625.
Cross Currents, September, 2016, Peter Heinegg, review of What Is Islam?, p. 399.
Publishers Weekly, October 12, 2015, review of What Is Islam?, p. 63; March 13, 2017, review of Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses in Early Islam, p. 78.
ONLINE
Muftah, https://muftah.org/ (April 1, 2016), Usman Butt, review of What Is Islam?
Nation Online, https://www.thenation.com/ (December 23, 2015 ), Elias Muhanna, “How Has Islamic Orthodoxy Changed Over Time?,” review of What Is Islam.
OBITUARIES
Chicago Tribune Online, http://www.chicagotribune.com/ (September 21, 2015), Noah Feldman, “Extraordinary Scholar Shahab Ahmed Redefined the Islamic Faith.”
Islamic Studies, Harvard University Website, http://www.islamicstudies.harvard.edu/ (November 25, 2017), “In Memoriam: Shahab Ahmed, 1966-2015.”
Journeys to Democracy, https://beenasarwar.com/ (September 20, 2015), Beena Sarwar, “Rest in Peace, Shahab Ahmed, Prominent Islamic Scholar from Pakistan.”
Extraordinary scholar Shahab Ahmed redefined the Islamic faith
Noah Feldman, Bloomberg View
Bloomberg
My friend Shahab Ahmed, who died Thursday at 48, was the most brilliant and creative scholar of Islam in his generation. Master of perhaps 15 languages -- he was too modest to name a number -- Ahmed led a remarkable, fascinating life that took him from Kuala Lumpur to Cambridge and seemingly everywhere in between. He was as comfortable chatting with mujahedeen in Afghanistan (where he was pretty sure he played soccer with pre-terrorist Osama bin Laden) and madrassa teachers in rural Pakistan as he was in the seminar rooms of Princeton and Harvard. And he left behind a 600-page magnum opus, "What Is Islam?," scheduled to be published in December.
In it, he offers an original, challenging definition of Islam completely at odds with what Salafis and other radicals, not to mention many Westerners, believe. Ahmed's vision of Islam -- profoundly informed by more than 1,000 years of history, poetry, mysticism, science and philosophy -- offers an authentic, sophisticated and inspiring alternative to the cramped, reductive and often violent versions that predominate today.
Ahmed's cosmopolitan ideas grew out of a stunningly cosmopolitan life. Raised in Malaysia by Pakistani parents, he was sent to British boarding school as a child. I had the impression that the experience was fairly brutal for the only Muslim boy in the school, many thousands of miles from home -- like something out of Roald Dahl. Ahmed sometimes said that what saved him from utter ostracism was his cricket skill as a spin bowler. He never lost the patrician English accent that he learned there, nor his love of cricket, particularly as explained by one of his idols, the West Indian Marxist historian and cricket writer C.L.R. James.
After boarding school, Ahmed studied at the Islamic University of Kuala Lumpur, flirting with the forms of Salafism and political Islamism that were nascent in the 1980s. Instead, he ended up as a journalist in Pakistan, crossing into wartime Afghanistan, where he once played soccer with, as he put it, "a 6'6" Arab whose teammates refer to him as 'the shaykh.' " From there, Ahmed earned his undergraduate degree at the American University in Cairo and his doctorate in Islamic studies at Princeton. He came to Harvard as a postdoctoral fellow in 2000 and remained there as a professor until last year.
Ahmed's path to his field-changing reconceptualization of Islam came through profound study of how orthodoxy was formed in early Islam. He discovered and proved that in the first two centuries of Islam, almost all Muslims believed the story according to which the Prophet Muhammad was briefly deceived by Satan into reciting the so-called Satanic verses, which described three Arabian goddesses as intercessors between man and Allah. Today, in contrast, essentially all believing Muslims reject the story as false. Ahmed charted and began to theorize the process of change.
From this study of orthodoxy, Ahmed began to consider Islamic non-orthodoxy. Specifically, more than other great world religions, Islam, as understood and practiced by Muslims great and small throughout history, seems to embody deep contradictions. Outside the Arabic-speaking world, especially in the swath of territory stretching from the Balkans to Bengal, Islam was not lived or experienced primarily as a body of laws or religious rules. Yes, there were rituals, and, yes, there were courts. But in practice Islam focused as much or more on texts such as the poetry of Rumi and on the rituals of mystical Sufi brotherhoods.
Among elites, poetry, philosophy and mysticism came together in the practice of wine drinking at parties specially designed to generate close unions that were mystical, philosophical -- and physical. Considering that the Quran prohibits the drinking of wine, not to mention some of the forms of love that go with it, Ahmed began to think that Islam must be much more than the rules in the law books.
Ultimately, Ahmed concluded that Islam is not a religion in the usual Western sense, or primarily a system of religious law or a set of orthodox beliefs, as many contemporary Muslims have come to believe. Islam is rather a welter of contradictions -- including at the same time the tradition of orthodoxy and law and the contrasting, sometimes heterodox traditions of philosophy, poetry and mystical thought.
Today's Salafis miss the contradiction and complexity because they see Islam as only rule and creed. In fact it's that and much, much more. It's capacious enough to include both the prohibition on wine and the elevated practice of drinking it to achieve higher truth.
Islam is thus in some ways a kind of culture or a civilization -- but more than that, this contradictory Islam is a way for those who call themselves Muslims to make meaning in the world. Islam is made, Ahmed argued, through three things: the text of the Quran; the context of lived ideas and culture produced by actual Muslims; and the nature of the universe itself against which the Quran is revealed, which Ahmed called the "pre-Text."
Defined this way, Islam contains multitudes. It incorporates the scientific study of nature, the philosophical inquiry into reality, and the mystical experience of seeking after the divine -- understood in its deepest sense of true love. Indeed, Ahmed described what he called a sixth madhhab, or school of Islamic law, beyond the orthodox five: the madhhab of love.
Writing as a historian, Ahmed never overtly called himself an adherent of the madhhab of love. But that is what he was to his very core.
And his broad, extraordinary vision could not be more timely given the challenges now faced by Islam. Salafis, whether peaceful or violent, claim that they alone possess the true understanding of Islam, based on their narrow and limited beliefs about the Prophet and his generation. In their violent form, they want to impose their beliefs on others. The killing and enslaving of non-Muslims and the destruction of the historic past of the Near East -- including the Islamic past -- are alike features of this single-minded narrowness.
Ahmed showed, with 600 pages of textual and historical proofs too numerous and prominent to be denied, how Islam is and has always been much greater and more capacious than that. He demonstrated, in his work and in his life, that it's within the power of today's Muslims to make rich and cosmopolitan meaning within their tradition -- to embrace, not reject. His legacy should extend beyond the world of scholarship to the world of thought and belief and action and love.
_ Noah Feldman, a Bloomberg View columnist, is a professor of constitutional and international law at Harvard and the author of six books, most recently "Cool War: The Future of Global Competition."
For more columns from Bloomberg View, visit http://www.bloomberg.com/view
Copyright © 2017, Chicago Tribune
In Memoriam: Shahab Ahmed, 1966-2015
It is with deep sorrow that we share the sad news of the passing of Shahab Ahmed, a brilliant scholar of Islamic studies. Shahab died Thursday evening, September 17, and was laid to rest in Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Saturday, September 19. A memorial service will be held later this fall at Harvard.
Shahab received his primary schooling in Singapore, and his general certificate of education “A” and “O” levels in Surrey, United Kingdom. International Islamic University in Malaysia granted him a law degree, after which he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from American University in Cairo. In 1999, Princeton awarded him a doctoral degree in Islamic studies under the mentorship of Michael Cook. From 2000-2003, Shahab was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard, returning to teach at Princeton as a Visiting Lecturer and Research Fellow (2004-2005).
His long-anticipated book What is Islam? An Essay on the Importance of Being Islamic will be published December 1, 2015. At the time of his death, he was writing two other books: Neither Paradise Nor Hellfire: Rethinking Islam through Ottoman Culture/Rethinking Ottoman Culture through Islam and The Problem of the Satanic Verses and the Formation of Islamic Orthodoxy.
Shahab is survived by his sister, Dr. Shahla Ahmed (London), and his parents, Drs. Razia and Mohammed Mumtazuddin Ahmed (Pakistan). Also bereaved is his newly-wed wife, Nora Lessersohn, a doctoral candidate in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University; they were married on August 1, 2015.
His friend and colleague at Harvard Law School, Noah Feldman, calls Shahab “the most brilliant and creative scholar of Islam in his generation.” Michael Cook, his doctoral adviser at Princeton, writes that Shahab “was a brilliant scholar with immense promise, tragically cut short.“ Shahab will be deeply missed among his family, friends, colleagues, and students.
Rest in peace, Shahab Ahmed, prominent Islamic scholar from Pakistan
Posted on September 20, 2015 by beenasarwar
A beautiful sunny day… and Shahab Ahmed’s funeral. His friends, including prominent scholars some of whom had known him for decades and traveled long distances to be there, like Kamran Ali Asdar and Shahnaz Rouse; many from Harvard like Homi Bhabha, Parimal Patil, Asad Ali Ahmed, Martha Minnow, Asim Khwaja; students and former students now themselves teachers; family members; all devastated and in shock. We were together in this panel at Harvard on the ‘blasphemy’ issue a few years back. I had last heard from him in July when his then fiancé Nora replied on his behalf to an email I’d sent. That’s when I learnt he was ill in hospital. My report today, basically just getting the facts out for now. Thanks to Nora for sharing his biographical details and photo at her time of grief. (NOTE: Updated below with comments from Michael Cook, his dissertation advisor, and others):
Prominent Islamic scholar Shahab Ahmed laid to rest
Shahab Ahmed in Pakistan. Photo by Rehan Lashari, courtesy Nora Lessersohn
Prominent Islamic scholar Shahab Ahmed, originally from Pakistan, was laid to rest on Saturday morning at the historic Mt. Auburn cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his adopted home. Born in Singapore on Dec 11, 1966, he passed away on Sept 17, 2015 in Boston.
Dr. Ahmed’s former student Suheil Laher, currently a lecturer on Arabic at Harvard University, led the final prayers at the graveside. The scholars and students who participated in his final rites included men and women, Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Jews, and atheists — appropriate, given Dr. Ahmed’s inter-faith work and inclusive outlook.
Diagnosed with a rare form of leukaemia in June, doctors had planned a transplant for him that his sister Dr. Shahla Ahmed, a gynecologist in London flew in as a potential donor for. However, the transplant option had to be ruled out as his condition deteriorated.
Dr. Ahmed’s parents, Razia and Mohammed Mumtazuddin Ahmed, both doctors, had been with him for some days. They returned to Pakistan a week ago, hoping for a miracle.
Also bereaved is his wife Nora Lessersohn, a Ph.D. candidate in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. The couple tied the knot on Aug. 1 this year.
“I am dumbfounded,” said Prof. Shahla Haeri, an anthropologist at Boston University who has lived and worked in Pakistan. “How could a young intelligent energetic and exciting man like Shahab be dead? I am so sorry to hear that and want to extend my deepest sympathy to his wife, his family, and his friends.”
Shahab Ahmed was considered one of the world’s most promising and exciting new scholars in Islamic studies. Growing up in different countries, he attended primary school in Singapore, and did his GCE “A” and “O” Levels in Surrey, UK.
After obtaining a law degree from the International Islamic University, Malaysia he obtained his Bachelors and Masters degrees in Arabic Studies, both from American University in Cairo. He also taught there for a couple of years, 1998-2000.
In 1999, the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University, awarded him Ph.D. He was a Junior Fellow, Society of Fellows at Harvard University (2000-2003) then returned to Princeton as a Visiting Lecturer and Research Fellow (2004-2005).
In 2005, he returned to Harvard as Associate Professor of Islamic Studies. He also served on the University’s Committee on the Study of Religion. His last academic appointment at Harvard was at the Law School, where he was a Lecturer on Law, and Research Fellow in Islamic Legal Studies (2014-15).
Shahab Ahmed also taught in Pakistan at the Islamic Research Institute, International Islamic University in 2007-2008, on leave from Harvard, and planned to return to Pakistan to teach again.
A recipient of several awards, distinctions and fellowships, Prof. Ahmed was looking forward to re-joining Princeton University in the coming academic year.
His much anticipated first book What is ‘Islam’? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton University Press) to be published in December this year, has garnered critical acclaim from respected scholars in the fields of law and Islamic scholarship and history.
It offers “a new way of looking at Islam,” says Prof. Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Princeton University. Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman terms the book as “not merely field changing, but the boldest and best thing I have read in any field in years.”
Engseng Ho, Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Professor of History, Duke University has called the work “Strikingly original, wide-ranging in its engagement, subtle in its interpretations, and hard-hitting in its conclusions”, predicting that it will “provoke debate for a number of years”.
Sadly, Shahab Ahmed is no longer around to participate in that debate.
Shahab Ahmed
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Shahab Ahmed (December 11, 1966 – September 17[1], 2015) was a Pakistani-American scholar of Islam at Harvard University. Professor Elias Muhanna of Brown University described Ahmed's posthumous work, What Is Islam?, as "a strange and brilliant work, encyclopedic in vision and tautly argued in the manner of logical proof, yet pervaded by the urgency of a political manifesto."[2]
Contents [hide]
1
Life
2
Publications
2.1
Books
2.2
Articles
2.3
Book reviews
3
References
Life[edit]
Ahmed's parents were Pakistani doctors who were living in Singapore at the time of his birth. He was born at Mount Alvernia Hospital, and educated at an English boarding school, the Caterham School, before studying at International Islamic University Malaysia.[1] After work as a journalist in Afghanistan, he gained a master's degree at the American University in Cairo and his PhD at Princeton University.[3] He was a junior member of the Harvard Society of Fellows (2000-2003), and served as a Visiting Lecturer and Research Fellow at Princeton University (2004-2005), Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Harvard University (2005-2014), Higher Education Commission of Pakistan Visiting Scholar at the Islamic Research Institute in Islamabad (2007-2008), and Lecturer on Law and Research Fellow in Islamic Legal Studies at Harvard Law School (2014-2015).[4][5][6]
A polyglot who was "master of perhaps 15 languages",[7] Ahmed’s broad field of study was Islamic intellectual history, with a special interest in the Satanic Verses incident and the evaluation of its historicity by Islamic scholars of the medieval period.[8][9]
In a posthumous presentation about him, Shahab Ahmed's sister highlighted her brother's fondness and appreciation for good wine. In this regard, she noted that "he felt very much in good company with Jahangir, with Ghalib, and with other writers [...] he adored."[1]
Publications[edit]
Books[edit]
Ibn Taymiyya and his Times. Coedited with Yossef Rapoport. Oxford University Press: 1st Edition: September 9, 2015. (ISBN 019940206X)
What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton University Press: November 17, 2015. (ISBN 0691164185)
Before orthodoxy: the Satanic Verses in early Islam. Harvard University Press: April 24, 2017. (ISBN 9780674047426)
Neither Paradise Nor Hellfire: Understanding Islam through the Ottomans, Understanding the Ottomans through Islam (forthcoming)
Articles[edit]
“Ibn Taymiyyah and the Satanic Verses”. Studia Islamica 87 (1998): 67–124.
“The Poetics of Solidarity: Palestine in Modern Urdu Poetry”, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics/Alif: Majallat al-Balāghah al-Muqāranah 18 (1998), thematic issue on “Post-colonial Discourse in South Asia/Khiṭāb mā ba`d al-kūlūniyāliyyah fī junūb āsyā,” 29-64.
“Mapping the World of a Scholar in sixth/twelfth century Bukhara: Regional Tradition in Medieval Islamic Scholarship as Reflected in a Bibliography”, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 120.1 (2000), 24-43.
“The Sultan's Syllabus: A Curriculum for the Ottoman Imperial Medreses Prescribed in a Fermān of Qānūnī I Süleymān, Dated 973 (1565)”, cowritten with Nenad Filipovic. Studia Islamica 98/99 (2004): 183–218
Book reviews[edit]
Review of Andrew Rippin (ed.), The Qur’ān: Formative Interpretation, Aldershot: Ashgate-Variorum, 2000, Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 36.2 (2003), 216-218.
Review of Issa J. Boullata (ed.), Literary Structures of Religious Meaning in the Qur’ān, Richmond: Curzon Press, 2000, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 14.1 (2003), 93-95.
Review of Meir M. Bar-Asher, Scripture and Exegesis in Early Imāmī Shiism, Leiden: Brill, 1999, Journal of the American Oriental Society 123.1 (2003), 183-185.
Review of Daphna Ephrat, A Learned Society in a Period of Transition: The Sunni `Ulama’ of Eleventh-Century Baghdad, State University of New York Press, 2000, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 123.1 (2003), 179-182.
ixv
Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses in Early Islam
264.11 (Mar. 13, 2017): p78.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses in Early Islam
Shahab Ahmed. Harvard Univ., $49.95 (349p) ISBN 978-0-674-04742-6
In this in-depth examination of the history of interpretation of the so-called Satanic verses incident--the story that a few verses were supposedly revealed to the Prophet Mohammad by the devil, only to be later withdrawn after Allah's intervention--the late Ahmed (What is Islam?) illustrates that early Muslims in the first two centuries of Islam accepted the story's historicity and integrity as part of the prophetic biography. Meticulously combing over various retellings of the incident, Ahmed shows that there was nothing peculiar or problematic about this narrative in early Islam. By extension, Ahmed's statement is not just about the Satanic verses: he undertakes a historical investigation into the origins of what he calls Islamic orthodoxy, a movement that seeks to wield power over certain sects and interpretive movements in the Muslim world. The battle over Islamic orthodoxy continues to rage on today, making this work of contemporary relevance. Unfortunately Ahmed died before he could complete a second volume that would have expanded on what is already a valuable piece of in-depth scholarship on the formation of the early Islamic community and its discourses about Muslim beliefs and practices. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses in Early Islam." Publishers Weekly, 13 Mar. 2017, p. 78. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485971698&it=r&asid=930a354ffd88122ec462554d572a8ca3. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485971698
What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic
262.41 (Oct. 12, 2015): p63.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic
Shahab Ahmed. Princeton Univ., $39.50 (620p) ISBN 978-0-6911-6418-2
The recently deceased scholar Ahmed (Ibn Tamiyya and His Times) offers a bold notion of what Islam is, one that stands in stark contrast to popular, traditionalist, and radical notions. Taking a cosmopolitan, far-reaching approach to millennia of Muslim history, poetry, music, science, philosophy, theology, and practice Ahmed reconceptualizes Islam as a hermeneutical engagement comfortable with the contradiction of its own diversity and immense variety. The book is as imposing as it is inspiring. It dives deep into heady discussions of philology, religious studies, aesthetics, poetry, epistemology, and fiqh--Islamic jurisprudence. A book that aims to present such an audacious hypothesis is likely to be long, but one senses Ahmed could have been less repetitive and protracted. However, his deft organization and outline are helpful for the fatigued reader. The big danger is that Ahmed's reconceptualization marginalizes voices from other geographies, perspectives, and theologies. Nonetheless, this is an enduring and timely work well worth the effort for those interested in discerning the essence of Islam beyond the seeming paradoxes of its own representations. (Dec.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic." Publishers Weekly, 12 Oct. 2015, p. 63+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA435387856&it=r&asid=a7a3eb9b7ff15e3871fb8267191ea009. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A435387856
Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic Princeton
Peter Heinegg
66.3 (Sept. 2016): p399.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Association for Religion and Intellectual Life
http://www.wiley.com/bw/journal.asp?ref=0011-1953
Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. xvii + 609, pp. $39.50.
There are several distressing things about this brilliant attempt to redefine Islam, but the most distressing is that its author died in 2015 at the age of 48, and so will never follow up his incredibly wide-ranging prolegomenon with something like a finished thesis. Other difficulties include the unrelenting abstractness of his argument and his (mostly) graceless, polysyllabic academic style. But these are obstacles that anyone seriously interested in Islam both as a religion and a philosophy will simply have to take in stride.
A Pakistani-American, Ahmed, had reached a level of learning that can only be described as dazzling and ultra-cosmopolitan. He went to grammar school in Singapore and secondary school in England (Surrey). He received a law degree from the International Islamic University in Malaysia, an A.B. and M.A. in Arabic Studies from the American University in Cairo, and a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton. He was fluent in many languages, including Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Turkish, and Pashto. (And he goes to the heroic, but dubious extreme of providing transliterations of all the non-English texts he quotes.) He may have known more about the history and literature of Islam than anyone else on the planet.
Ahmed provides no easy, straightforward answer to the question in his title (eveiything he says requires unpacking), but he comes close to that when he calls for a crucial "hermeneutic engagement" with Islam:
Conceptualizing Islam as meaning-making
for the Self in terms of
Pre- Text, Text, and Con-Text also
enables us to recognize that all
acts and statements of meaning-making
for the Self by Muslims
and non-Muslims that are carried
out in terms of Islam--that is, in
terms of any of the Pre- Text, Text
or Con-Text--should properly be
understood as Islamic.
Translation, please! "Pre-Text" (an unfortunate double entendre) is nothing less than the entire divine Creation as structured by and accessible to reason. The "Text" is the Qur'an (not the hadith, which Ahmed distrusts). The Qur'an is true, but not the whole truth, and "Reason is Revelation." The "ConText" is "that whole field of complex or vocabulary of meanings of Revelation that have been produced in the course of the human and historical engagement with Revelation" (author's emphases), the whole corpus of responses down through the ages to both the "Pre-Text" and the "Text." Ultimately, the "Con-Text" refers to a vast spectrum of material, ranging, for example, from Sufism, the work of Avicenna (980-1037), Hafiz (fl. fourteenth century) and other poets, thinkers, and artists, especially from what Ahmed calls the "Balkans-to-Bengal complex," and the period from 1350 to 1850. Ahmed says practically nothing about al-Andalus or the Mahgreb.
He especially privileges the radical or contradictory stances within Islam. Thus, Avicenna (Ibn Sina) believed that the world was eternal, that there was no resurrection on Judgment Day, no Paradise or Hell, that the prescriptions of shari'ah were inferior to the "Divine"--philosophic--"Truth," and so on. Sufi theology is riddled with "heresy," for example, when Mansur al-Hallaj was executed in 922 for claiming, "I am the Truth" (or "I am God"), and this notion of merging with the Divinity was a familiar Sufi teaching. Then, there were the splendid poets, particularly Persians like Rumi (1207-1273), Sa'di (1213-1291), or Hafiz (fl. fourteenth century) who celebrated passion (heterosexual or otherwise) as a metaphor for mystical love of God--and an ecstatic human experience. The same poets, along with many others, unabashedly glorified wine and (moderate) drunkenness. And then, there is the enormous body of gorgeous visual art that seems to fly in the face of the ban on figural images.
All these grand creations grew out of various communities in the medieval-to-modern period, and their influence has been immense. But, how do they jibe with the monolithic brand of legalism that appears to be triumphing all across the Muslim world today? What would Al-Azhar University's Council of Senior Scholars or Iran's Assembly of Experts make of Sufi scholar and saint, Ibn 'Arabi (1165-1240) who wrote:
My heart is become receptive of
every form:
So: a pasture for gazelles, a monastery
for Christian monks,
A temple for idols, the Ka'bah of
the circumambulating pilgrim,
The tablet of Torah, the leaves of
Qur'an;
I follow the dm (way of life) of
love. Wheresoever may turn
Its riding camels: the dm there is
my dm and my Faith.
And even if one could devise a magic formula (which Ahmed isn't quite ready to do) fusing together the narrow doctrines of the "Text" with the stunningly expansive visions of the "Con-Text," what sort of audience could the latter expect to find in today's ummah? The Wikipedia entry for "Sufism" under the heading "Current attacks" documents a wave of violent persecution sweeping over Sufis and their practices from Pakistan (by far the worst) to Kashmir to Somalia to Mali to Egypt to Libya to Tunisia to Dagestan to Iran. And given the recent attacks on Shiites and Ismai'ilis, it looks as if any hopes for an Islamic Rainbow Coalition will have to be deferred.
Furthermore, what is going to check the noxious influence of Saudi Arabia's ubiquitous Wahhabist propaganda? Near the end of the book, Ahmed presents a depressing picture of the architectural and (spiritual) devastation wrought in Mecca over the past two centuries--ancient madrasas, shrines, and gravesites bulldozed away by the Sufi-hating Kingdom. And now, the Ka'bah itself has shrunk into insignificance beneath the Cyclopean Abraj al-Bait (aka the Makkah Royal Clock Tower Hotel, 1,972 feet tall), with its shopping mall, 900 private apartments, and a knock-off of Big Ben. What chance does elitist, esoteric Sufism stand against today's "egalitarian" literalism--and its plutocratic backers?
But putting all that aside, how exactly is one to connect the bewildering variety and contrariety of the Balkans-to-Bengal legacy with what most people think of as normative Islam? One simple solution would be to echo Abdul Hamid el-Zein and speak of local "Islams" rather than a supposed universal "Islam." Or we could distinguish, with G.S. Hodgson, between "Islamic" and "Islamicate," or roughly between religion and culture. Ahmed rejects this idea because it's derived from the old Enlightenment sacred/profane, religion/ culture dichotomy. Arabic, he points out, has no word for "religion" (an increasingly marginal, part-time activity in the West). Though often translated as "religion," the meaning of dm is much closer to "way of life." And Ahmed insists on there being an organic--though sometimes fiercely conflicted (but all the better for that)--Islamic din, a union of his canonical Pre-Text, Text, and Con-Text, on the basis of immersion in and gratitude for Creation-Revelation, communal worship, harmony in and between self and society. Those are ideals, to be sure, but they've been realized in a thousand different times, places, and tongues.
The non-Muslim reader may well enjoy this dense, richly textured, expansive vision, but anyone painting a canvas that immense is bound to run into problems, major and minor. If a literary masterpiece like The Conference of the Birds by Attar (ca. 1145-c. 1221) is Islamic (no doubt there), what about The Arabian Nights, The Shahnameh, or The Adventure of Amir Hamza (Muhammad's uncle)? Muslim scientists can engage in their research with a pious intention, like Jesuits who aim to do everything Ad majorem Dei gloriam--but does that constitute "Islamic science"? (And is it fair to ask why Muslim contributions to contemporary science have been so meager?)
More surprising is how little Ahmed has to say about Muhammad and the Qur'an. Presumably, he takes familiarity with the Prophet's life and message for granted, but how can one answer the question, "What is Islam," without sketching out some sort of analytic framework for the Qur'an and passing a lot of value judgments on it? For instance, Ahmed acknowledges the potential scandal of Qur'anic verses accepting slavery or demeaning women. These could be superseded or flatly rejected, in accordance with the bold "Pre-Text" freedom of thinkers like Rumi, who famously argued that, "If the Real-Truths are manifest, the laws are nullified."
And what about other, related issues: What specifically is a prophet in a modern perspective? Why should/how can the potential proselyte accept the prophet's message? Are we talking about pure fideism? How to characterize, at least summarily, the cosmology, theology, theodicy, eschatology, liturgy, ethics, politics, historiography, etc. of the "Text"? One curious, and unfortunate, fact that Ahmed clearly demonstrates here is that Western academics studying Islam and puzzled, as they predictably are, about where religion ends and culture begins, have increasingly embraced the Salafist view (abandoning Orientalist arrogance, but wrongheadedly presuming that Islam is whatever conservative Muslims say it is--at a time when "non-prescriptive and non-orthodoxizing" intellectuals are mostly silent or lying low). There are too many incendiary Sayyid Qutbs (1906-1966) and too few tolerant Muhammad Abduhs (18491905) out in the religious marketplace.
The historical figures that Ahmed conjures up are a great cloud of distinguished Muslim witnesses to a world that seems in danger, if not of disappearing, then of steadily fading away. With his astonishing erudition (he cites over 1,500 different original sources and critical commentaries), Ahmed introduces us to these eloquent spokesmen (yes, they're all male), whom most lay readers will be meeting for the first time. There are the philosophers, Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi (d. 1191) and Muhyi al-Din Ibn 'Arabi (1165-1240), about whom Ahmed notes: "Both blur, in their respective emanationist iterations of the relationship between the Divinity and the material world, the boundary between Divine transcendence and Divine immanence, and thereby flirt incorrigibly with pantheism and relativism." We have Nizami (1141-1209), a Persian epic poet who called poetry "the mirror of the invisible ... the curtain of mystery, the shadow of the Prophetic veil" and called himself "Mirror of the Unseen." Finally, there were the South Asian adherents of "crooked-hattedness," which implied both elegant, non-conformist sensuality and "an inclination towards taking one's own experiential risks vis-a-vis living with Divine Truth (loving being a risky business)." This declared that one sought to make "meaning and value" outside of legalistic Islam, "in aesthetic models" (author's emphases). The problem is, many Muslim readers would find these now-marginalized voices both unfamiliar and unacceptable.
Islam is sometimes accused of never having had a Reformation. Ahmed's project, which will now have to be carried on by others, provides a glimpse of a vast array of superb, but underappreciated texts. Could these be building blocks for an Islamic Renaissance?
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Heinegg, Peter. "Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic Princeton." Cross Currents, Sept. 2016, p. 399+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485167081&it=r&asid=33c66d24080fddf6c4637088441850c9. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485167081
Ahmed, Shahab. What is Islam?: the importance of being Islamic
J. Hammer
53.11 (July 2016): p1625.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Ahmed, Shahab. What is Islam?: the importance of being Islamic. Princeton, 2015. 609p bibl index afp ISBN 9780691164182 cloth, $39.50; ISBN 9781400873586 ebook, contact publisher for price
53-4767
BP161
2015-948828 MARC
In this monumental work, the late Shahab Ahmed (1966-2015) sought new answers to important questions: How does one understand what Islam is? How does one study it meaningfully? A prominent Islamic scholar, Ahmed boldly argued that existing approaches have all fallen short of capturing the coherence of Islam by focusing either on particular aspects of Islam or on the contradictions in previous systematizations of it. Drawing on a staggering range of textual (and visual) sources, as well as scholarly literature spanning continents and centuries, Ahmed's text weaves a paradigm of "divine revelation" that accepts revelation as fact and focuses on how what he named pre-text, text, and con-text interact with each other in history to account for both Islam making Muslims and Muslims making Islam. The book's length, long sentences, and tightly woven, complex arguments make it a challenging read, but the reward is a plethora of fascinating ideas that invite the reader to argue back and think further. This volume will be central to the study of Islam and of religion more broadly for the foreseeable future. Summing Up: **** Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.--J. Hammer, UNC Chapel Hill
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hammer, J. "Ahmed, Shahab. What is Islam?: the importance of being Islamic." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, July 2016, p. 1625+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA457393347&it=r&asid=1f94db042a4882ccdd09710a6442787d. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A457393347
Shahab Ahmed's "What is Islam"
Shahab Ahmed’s “What is Islam” Turns Modern Islamic Scholarship on Its Head
Usman Butt
April 1st, 2016
As if out of a literary tragedy, the author and academic, Shahab Ahmed, did not live to see his many years of teaching and research culminate in the publication of his much-anticipated book, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic.
Some might unfairly characterize his book as explaining rather than explaining away Islam’s contradictions, yet, in a post-Orientalist world, where Islam and Muslims are constantly in the news, the questions of what Islam is and what it means to be a ‘good Muslim’ are as vexing today as they were fourteen centuries ago.
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Any attempt to understand what Islam means, in terms of both historic scholarship and the lived experience of Muslims, is more than a little ambitious. But great ambition does not seem to have troubled Harvard University’s Shahab Ahmed whose book seeks to do just that.
Before the publication of What is Islam?, Dr. Ahmed was something of an obscure figure outside academic circles. Only forty-eight years old at the time of his death, his accomplishments were impressive; he is said to have mastered over fifteen languages, a rumor he refused to confirm or deny.
What is Islam seems to be a fitting end to Ahmed’s list of successes. Many are calling it ‘ground-breaking,’ ‘field-changing’ and the ‘boldest thing’ on Islam ever written.
It was Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses Affair that inspired Ahmed to unpack Islam’s meaning in his new book. In subsequent years, he acquired a massive collection of materials on Islamic philosophy, history, law, politics, poetry, novels and other subjects from across the world in different languages. Through this research, Ahmed found that while most modern Muslims rejected the story of the Satanic verses, a surprising number of early Muslim scholars from the eighth to the fourteenth century either believed the story was true or that it was important enough to discuss at great length.
According to the story of the Satanic verses, the Prophet Muhammad was purportedly deceived by Satan (who pretended to be God) and given false revelations about worshiping three goddess (called Lat, Uzza and Manat). For Ahmed, the Satanic Verses episode and the controversy that developed around it highlighted changing perceptions about Islam, as well as the central question of why or why not something is considered Islamic.
Studying the Satanic Verses affair also forced Ahmed to examine how Western academics approach the study of Islam. In an important point of departure from most experts, Ahmed rejects Islam’s categorization as a ‘religion’; in fact, he spends an entire chapter deconstructing the concept of ‘religion’ all together. He similarly rejects the idea that Islam is only what Muslims say and do, and argues for the importance of analyzing these words and actions against prevailing Islamic norms for that time and place.
Ahmed argues that to understand the normative Islamic landscape, both in the present and past, we should not only study Islamic law. We must also examine philosophy, history, art, literature, architecture, geography, music, food and drink, which are all areas Ahmed explores in the book.
From my perspective, this challenge to highly legalistic readings of the Islamic tradition is the most important contribution Ahmed’s book makes. Most contemporary Muslims and Islamic scholars will decide what is Islamic, how to understand Islam and how to live accordingly, entirely through the prism of Shariah and what can be found in legal texts (including legalistic readings of the Qu’ran). Anything outside of these sources is either irrelevant or inferior.
But, as Ahmed shows, prior to the eighteenth century, average Muslims rarely viewed questions about how to practice Islam, what is Islamic, or how to be the ‘perfect believer’ through a legalistic lens. When they wanted answers to these questions, they turned to Islamic poetry, works of fiction, art, and music. It was through these mediums that Islamic ideals were disseminated to them.
After the Qu’ran and the Hadith (lessons from the life of the Prophet Muhammad), the most important source of religious education for Muslims (up until the nineteenth century) was the story of Leyla and Majnun. The story follows Qayas (who is called Majnun, which is Arabic for “crazy” or “insane”) who falls in madly love with a girl called Leyla; when he asks her father for his daughter’s hand in marriage, Leyla’s father refuses. Qayas is driven insane by the rejection and becomes even worse off when Leyla marries someone else.
Written centuries before Romeo and Juliet, the story has great symbolic meaning. Qayas, who is from a wealthy family, finds everything in life meaningless without his true love and gives up everything to pursue her. Muslims from the Balkans to Bengal looked at Qayas not only as a fascinating character, but also as a ‘true believer’ whose intensity of devotion should be emulated.
Before the nineteenth century, poetry was also viewed as a discourse for understanding the Qu’ran. In fact, under the Ottoman education system, students studied the Masnavi, the epic poem by the Persian poet Rumi, before they were allowed to study the Qu’ran.
In the Islamic world, the poetic form was not limited to a small literary elite, as it often has been in the West. Invoking Ibn Arabi’s motto, “[m]y knowledge of Him is my perplexity in Him,” Ahmed argues that individual Muslims produced their own poems about God and faith, meaning they based their religious convictions not only on the Qu’ran, but also on other religious texts.
Some of these poems challenged orthodox Islamic notion that God speaks with one tongue. These “hayrat” (perplexity) poems tried to make sense of how God could manifest himself in a variety of mutually opposing statements and forms that, if contemplated together, produce confusion. One interesting example of this, presented in Ahmed’s book, is a poem by the twentieth century Pakistani writer, Naz Khayalavi, entitled, You are a Puzzle-Lock. Through the prism of a letter to God, the poem questions various perplexing statements made in the Qu’ran and other religious texts from the perspective of a committed believer. Since its publication, the poem has become quite popular and widely recited by ordinary people; it was even turned into a song by the “qawwali” (devotional singer), Nusrat Fatah Ali Khan, in an interesting intersection between theology, poetry, and music.
Other forms of devotional music, like “sama”, which is found across South Asia and the Middle East, demonstrates how artistic mediums continue to create and transmit religious sentiments, as does the Islamic tradition of calligraphy.
As Ahmed convincingly argues, if we really wish to understand Islam’s historical role from Muhgal India to Ottoman Bosnia, we must place greater emphasis on these creative forms, from poetry to music to architecture and art, and not simply privilege the study of Shariah. We must look at how these various forces have affected one another, if we ever hope to understand what Islam meant and means to various societies.
Ahmed’s book also offers us a new way of understanding the past and, in my opinion, forces us to rethink and imagine our present and future. For many, Islam is currently experiencing a return to its historical roots, from the Islamist insistence on the caliphate’s return to efforts to emulate the piety and practice of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions. What is old is, however, often times new and what is new is usually old. And Ahmed’s book helps us recognize this.
How Has Islamic Orthodoxy Changed Over Time?
A new book by the late scholar Shahab Ahmed reveals the capaciousness, complexity, and contradictions of Islam.
By Elias Muhanna
December 23, 2015
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Shahab Ahmed. (Harvard Gazette)
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T
he 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 God, the false prophet led men to misbelief by “wiles of his wit and a whit dowve.”
BOOKS IN REVIEW
What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic.
By Shahab Ahmed
Buy this book
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 god? 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.
At Princeton, Ahmed had been a student of Michael Cook, the eminent historian. During his first year, he became interested in the “Satanic Verses” incident, an episode from early Islamic history in which the Prophet Muhammad was said to have mistaken some verses suggested by Satan as being part of the divinely revealed Koran. The topic intrigued him. Reading through the earliest sources, Ahmed found a widespread and untroubled consensus on the historical authenticity of the event, which stood in contrast to the doctrinal rejection that emerged centuries later. As he would argue in an award-winning dissertation, the early view of Muhammad as a man “subject to error and Divine correction” represented an outlook at odds with the later theories of prophetic infallibility. At the Society of Fellows, Ahmed began to expand his project into a larger study that would trace Muslim attitudes toward the figure of Muhammad through time and space, using the Satanic Verses problem as a way to explore the development of orthodoxy across the centuries. He assembled an enormous archive of legal, theological, literary, and historical sources on the subject in more than a dozen languages, drawn from manuscript libraries all over the world.
A faculty position interrupted the reverie of research. At Harvard, Ahmed swiftly established a reputation for teaching demanding graduate seminars. The first session of each course seemed designed to turn away as many curious students as possible. A fearsome syllabus front-loaded with hundreds of pages of reading each week, mainly in primary sources, was his deterrent of choice—and an effective one. While at Princeton, Ahmed had taken almost no courses, devoting all of his time to his own research. Michael Cook told me, “In those days, we had no rules obliging students to take courses—they were just expected to do so. Now, thanks to Shahab, we do have rules.”
Those who braved Ahmed’s courses were frequently stunned by the audacity of his expectations. He could be prickly, arrogant, contemptuous of poor preparation, and imperious. Despite this, I was enthralled by him. During my second year, I responded to an advertisement he placed for a research assistant. The job paid a pittance; about this, he was honest, but I convinced him to let me sign on. In his office were shelves filled with hundreds of identical orange file folders, each devoted to a different historical figure. This was the great collection he had put together on the Satanic Verses, an archive of everything ever said and written about the incident. Many of the folders contained transcriptions, in Ahmed’s impeccable Arabic cursive, of excerpts from manuscripts he had consulted in Istanbul’s great libraries and elsewhere in the Islamic world.
My task was to locate whatever information existed about the historical individuals in the archive, drawing on the extensive corpus of premodern biographical dictionaries and chronicles. For the rest of the year, I lived in a world of medieval authorities and onomastic wild-goose chases through the classical tradition. No figure in Ahmed’s archive was too obscure to escape his attention. We hunted for Transoxanian jurists, North African mystics, Andalusian grammarians, Iraqi logicians. Every scrap of opinion about the controversy buried in the great wall of orange files was somehow significant to Ahmed, and the most minor figures were often the most interesting. For months, I had no sense of what I was doing and how it fit into the larger project. Over time, however, things began to fall into place.
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.
Ahmed never fully completed the Satanic Verses project. The book grew larger in his mind, with the work accomplished occupying a correspondingly smaller portion of it. At some point, he entered a limbo between research positions and fellowships, during which time he embarked on a different project, co-authoring a book on heresy trials in the Ottoman Empire. When I saw him a year after I’d completed my degree, he seemed strangely happy, even accepting of the foregone conclusion that his chances of receiving tenure at Harvard looked impossibly slim. The new book was nearly finished; all that was left to write was an introduction.
Like the first project, however, that introduction grew larger and larger, absorbing all of its author’s attention and time. Eventually, it would become a 600-page tome with over a thousand footnotes. What Is Islam? is that book.
* * *
When discussing the modern discipline of Islamic studies, Ahmed liked to complain that it was possible to earn a doctorate in this field from an Ivy League university without ever reading the Divan of Hafiz, the great 14th-century Persian poet. He describes that work in What Is Islam? as “the most widely-copied, widely-circulated, widely-read, widely-memorized, widely-recited, widely-invoked, and widely-proverbialized book of poetry in Islamic history.” This was not merely a work of belles lettres, but a book that exemplified “ideals of self-conception…in the largest part of the Islamic world for half-a-millennium.” How could a modern student of Islamic civilization formulate an understanding of this subject without taking stock of such a work, and especially its treatment of wine drinking, erotic love, and the hypocrisies of self-righteous moralists? If Hafiz’s work is not Islamic, then what is?
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This might as well be the central question of What Is Islam? The medieval world in which Hafiz’s Divan was a best seller was also a world suffused with the traditions of Avicennan rationalism, Sufi experiential mysticism, the celebration of figural representation, a taste for literary ambiguity, a distinction between public and private selves, and one between legal discourses and other measures of normativity. It was, in other words, a world crowded with variation and contradiction.
Such variety is everywhere to be found in the textual and material record of what Ahmed calls the “Balkan-to-Bengal complex,” the great belt of Muslim societies that stretched from southeastern Europe and Central Asia into North India between the 15th and late 19th centuries. This vast zone represented “the most geographically, demographically, and temporally extensive instance of a highly-articulated shared paradigm of life and thought in the history of Muslims—it is, demographically, spatially, and temporally, an (if not the) historically major paradigm of Islam.” To answer the question of what Islam is, Ahmed suggests, one must at least come to terms with what Islam was in the Balkans-to-Bengal complex, “as a matter of human fact.”
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 God 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.
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.
* * *
The solution that Ahmed puts forward is a definition of Islam as an act of interpretation, something no less elemental than the production of meaning. It is not as narrow a practice as interpreting the Koran—the Text of Revelation—but is rather an engagement with the larger reality within which the Koran was revealed, what Ahmed calls the “Pre-Text of Revelation.” The Koran does not contain all truth; about this fact, there can be no disagreement. Where disagreement does exist “is over the question of whether and in what degree and by what mechanism the Truth of the Pre-Text of Revelation may be accessed.” Can one apprehend truth through some other means, such as the rationality of the philosophers or the Sufi “experiential annexation” of the self? Can the truth of the Pre-Text—which is ontologically prior to that of the Text—be accessed “without the Text, or via the Text, or only in the Text?”
For Ahmed, the history of Islam is a history of the many ways that Muslims have answered this question. It comprehends the literalism of “textual-restrictivists,” who give absolute priority to the text of the Koran and the Hadith (the corpus of sayings attributed to Muhammad) in determining a set of norms as exclusively Islamic, while rejecting other forms of interpretation. This history, of course, also embraces the authority of such “expansivist” projects as Islamic philosophy and Sufism, and everything in between.
When viewed as a single body, these different manners of interpretation form what Ahmed calls the “Con-Text of Revelation… the entire accumulated lexicon of means and meanings of Islam that has been historically generated and recorded up to any given moment: it is the full historical vocabulary of Islam at any given moment.” Something may be said to be Islamic—whether it is a law, a painting, an item of clothing, a poem, a joke—insofar as it expresses its meaning in the terms of Con-Text, connecting in some fashion with the whole archive of earlier hermeneutic engagements.
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.
* * *
What is the use of a concept? Does it make any difference whether we conceive of Islam as a religion, a culture, a family of heterogeneous local islams, or a process of meaning-making? Why and to whom do such distinctions matter? In the academy, concepts count for something, and Ahmed’s book represents the most sustained effort in decades to establish a conceptual basis for Islam. It goes without saying that his vision of Islam is a scholar’s vision; it is scholarly not merely in its style and rhetoric, but in the substance of its argument. If Islam is nothing less than the encyclopedic range of what it has been in history, it is impossible to be alive to that range of possibility without the deliberate study of its previous incarnations. No one could have felt this more deeply than Ahmed, whose shelves of orange file folders contained a millennium’s worth of thought and argument about a single event in Islamic history. While few could share his penchant for comprehensiveness, he believed that every Muslim had his or her own wall of orange file folders, so to speak, with which to make sense of the world.
It often seemed to me that Ahmed had contempt for the academy, even though he was as pure a product of it as could be imagined. He regarded the dominant approaches to conceptualizing Islam as structurally flawed, an assessment he documents at length in his book. Over a third of What Is Islam? is devoted to a tour of Orientalist, classical anthropological, and postcolonial scholarship on the subject. It is a survey that is, at times, hairsplitting, ungenerous, combative, and overwrought. It is also, as he put it resignedly to me before he died, “the bit that graduate students will probably end up quoting.” Unsurprisingly, the scholars whose positions are closest to Ahmed’s come in for the most sustained and sometimes withering evaluations, bringing to mind something that he liked to say about how it was “better to be 100 percent wrong than 50 percent right.”
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—God 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.
* * *
Ever since he fell ill earlier this year, I have thought of my former teacher nearly every day. The fact of his death is difficult to accept, not merely because of his young age but because Ahmed inhabited, in my mind, a kind of future tense. Many of us—students, colleagues, and his own mentors—related to him in a mode of anticipation. To ask a friend for news of Shahab was to ask about the progress of his magnum opus, his life’s work. Is he finally nearing the end of the great book we’ve been waiting to read? Is he there yet? That there should suddenly be a book in the world with his name on it while the man himself is gone seems a cruel trick of fate.
Shahab Ahmed was buried on a beautiful fall morning in September. As a group of mourners prepared to lower his body into the earth, a quiet discussion arose among them about the lawful burial rituals. The group included Muslims from all over the world; naturally, the opinions varied. The matter was eventually settled, but I imagine that Shahab would have delighted in the knowledge that contradiction and debate accompanied him to the grave.
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Elias MuhannaElias Muhanna is the Manning Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University.