Review of Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam?

Shahab Ahmed’s monumental What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, 2016) is a provocative and illuminating approach to the vexing question that besets anybody studying “Islam” and in particular, the question of what unity there is in the diversity of this unruly and capacious concept. Ahmed begins his book by posing six “questions,” which are really six phenomena which at first glance might seem to be “contradictory” to the “religion of Islam.” These are as follows: (1) Islamic philosophy, which scholars have long noted is not written just by Muslims, nor is it written just by Arabs — and thus Maimonides for instance can well be thought of as belonging to “Islamic philosophy.”[1] But this isn’t even the problem, precisely. Consider not the Jewish Maimonides but Avicenna, “undisputedly one of the most seminal sources of foundational and orientational ideas for the civilization and history we call Islamic” (11). Ahmed tells us that the views expressed by Avicenna “are in direct contradiction of the letter of the graphically and painfully reiterated theology and eschatology of the Qur’ān that is taken as constitutive of general Muslim creed” (11) and yet formed “the basis of post-Avicennan Islamic scholastic theology (ʿilm al-kalām)” (13). In particular, Ahmed says, Avicenna argued that “there is a superior Divine Truth that is accessible only to the particularity of superior human intellects, and a lesser version of that Truth that communicates itself via Prophets such as Muḥammad, and is prescribed by them to the commonality of lesser human intellects, and that, as a logical consequence, the text of the Qur’ān with its specific prescriptions and proscriptions is not a literal or direct expression of Divine Truth, but only what we might call a ‘Lowest Common Denominator’ translation of that Truth into inferior figures of speech for the (limited) edification of the ignorant majority of humankind.” (11)

Ahmed notes a similar apparent contradiction in (2) Sufism, “the theory and practice of holistic, experiential knowing of Divine Truth [which] was, for over a millennium, a foundational, commonplace and institutionalized conceptual and social phenomenon in societies of Muslims” (20) yet which is even more explicit than Avicenna that those who reach their goal by being “at experiential one-ness with the Real-Truth, al-ḥaqīqah, are no longer bound by the specific forms and strictures of Islamic law and ritual practice, al-sharīʿah, that confine less spiritually and existentially developed souls” (19). Ahmed asks us: “is this an Islamic or an un-Islamic truth-claim?” Ahmed asks a similar question when he turns to (3) the “thought-paradigms” of Ibn Arabi and al-Suhrawardi: “Both are cross-inflections of (Avicennan) philosophy and of Sufism; both are grounded in a hierarchical vision of the cosmos and thus in a hierarchical vision of humankind; 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. Are these Islamic ideas?” (26)

And Ahmed asks the same of (4) Hafiz, whose Divan is “the most widely-copied, widely-circulated, widely-read, widely-memorized, widely-recited, widely-invoked, and widely-proverbialized book of poetry in Islamic history — a book that came to be regarded as configuring and exemplifying ideals of self-conception and modes and mechanisms of self-expression in the largest part of the Islamic world for half-a-millennium — takes as its definitive themes the ambiguous exploration of wine-drinking and (often homo-)erotic love, as well as a disparaging attitude to observant ritual piety” (32). Ahmed asks the disarmingly simple question: is Hafiz Islamic?

One might argue that these “contradictions” so far brought up refer to the realm of philosophers and mystics and their “truth-claims.” Yet these influence and reflect the practices of ordinary Muslims. Ahmed thus brings up (5) a practice most clearly forbidden in the Qu’ran, as interpreted by all schools of Islamic law, the consumption of (grape) wine: “The consumption of wine was, thus, like the production of figural painting discussed above, prohibited in legal discourse, but positively valued in non-legal discourse — especially amongst those social and political elites who instituted and secured the structures of the state and the very legal institutions that regulated society. Thus, the Mughal Emperor, Bābur, writes disarmingly in his autobiography about his life-long struggle with the bottle, the diplomatic gifts of the Ṣafavid Shāh ʿAbbās to the Great Mughal Jahāngīr included a choice selection of wine, and the Ottoman Sultan İbrāhīm, remembered as Sarhōsh (“the Drunk”), was popularly reputed to have undertaken the conquest of vine-rich Cyprus for the express purpose of lubricating his habit.” (67)

How does one go “not so much about conceptualizing unity in the face of diversity, but rather about conceptualizing unity in the face of outright contradiction” of this sort (72)? Ahmed’s question is not really how to make “Islam” a coherent analytical framework as it is rather an argument about “the prolific scale and definitive import of the phenomenon of internal contradiction to the constitution of the human and historical phenomenon of Islam” (72). That is to say, the contradictions Ahmed notes are “not on the social and political and intellectual margins of the Muslims’ discourses about Islam, but rather at the very social and political and intellectual center of Muslims’ discourses about Islam — and that, as such, they cannot be accounted for by the reflexive insistence that some of these discursive claims (such as law) somehow possess an inherently greater agency of normativity in constituting Islam than do others (such as the Sufi-philosophical amalgam)” (73).

Now, one way to account for this contradiction is to resort to a distinction between “religion” and “culture” or (as Marshall Hodgson famously put it) “Islam” and “the Islamicate.” Thus, for instance, the prohibition against the consumption of wine could be said to belong to the “religion of Islam” as expressed in the shari’ah, while the white jade wine-jug (figure 1) that the Mughal Emperor Jahāngīr acquired, with the inscription “Allāhu Akbar!” (see p. 69), somehow belongs to a separate realm of “Islamicate culture.” Ahmed assembles a number of arguments against this analytical distinction, most of them in the course of the attention he pays to Islamic art (6).

In the first instance, Ahmed argues, “it should be borne in mind that even if we somehow designate something as belonging to ‘Islamic culture’ rather than to ‘Islam,’ we must still determine what the qualifier Islamic means in the term ‘Islamic culture,’ and how that attribute Islamic relates to Islam” (46). That is, even if the distinction between “religion” (belief? scripture?) and “culture” (presumably “secular” literary, artistic, and philosophical practices?) is taken as self-evident — which it is not — there is still the problem of the predicate which modifies “culture.” As Oleg Grabar himself noted in 1996 in his entry on “Islamic Art” the Grove Dictionary of Art: “These arts are almost exclusively secular arts, with the corollary paradox that most of the arts (with the exception of architecture) from a culture defined by its religious identity have been devoted to the beautification of life rather than to the celebration of the divine” (quoted in Ahmed, 46–7). Looking especially at the example of wine-cups, Ahmed asks “Are, then, these art objects “Islamic” despite their evident “irreligiosity” — can we speak of an “Islamic wine-cup” or of “Islamic portraiture”? Or are they “secular” objects — in which case are they non-/un-Islamic? Can and should we somehow speak non-oxymoronically of “secular Islamic art” (as so many art historians do) — and if so, by what criteria do we make the distinction?” (49)

I found this question very well-posed, as it expressed in more eloquent and learned form the unease I have felt with the general incoherence of the field of “Islamic art.” Is this not a nonsensical name? It seems almost trivial at this point to note that the production of figural images proliferated under conditions that Westerners might have referred to as “iconoclasm,” or what Ahmed calls “a legal, cultural and moral discomfort with figural images and, at the most, the outright enacted repudiation thereof” that amounts to “a larger normative attitude of anti-iconism (or, at least, aniconism)” that “has been evident in the history of societies of Muslims” (51). It is not that this contradiction should be “accounted for” in service of some kind of scholarly imperative, but the force of Ahmed’s book lies in his belief that these constitutional contradictions do “call for — indeed, demand and require — a suspension of these received categories of distinction in order to reconceptualize Islam as a human and historical phenomenon in new terms which map meaningfully onto the import of the prolific scale and nature of the contradictory normative claims made in history by Muslims about what is Islam” (73).

I have so far outlined the problem as Ahmed sets it up, so well illustrated through his six opening chapters. Perhaps the set-up was too good. I found the follow-through in the latter sections of Ahmed’s book to be lacking. In my opinion, too much of the rest of the book is spent on many case studies of other scholars’ approaches to solving this problem. This is a display of immense learning and erudition, and perhaps necessary work in order to undertake the large task this book promises to deliver, but I am ultimately left unsatisfied by Ahmed’s own proposals. Or, to put it more generously, I wish Ahmed had lived not just to see the publication of this volume, but in fact to take the further time and study needed to produce, perhaps in another decade’s time, a more concise, direct statement that could adequately respond to the challenge he had set for himself: “to conceptualize Islam in a manner that retains contradiction in a constitutionally coherent manner because this is the only way that we can map the human and historical reality of the internal contradictions of Islam” (233). It is a great loss for the world of learning, and indeed for human society as a whole, that Shahab Ahmed’s incisive, erudite scholarship came to an end with his passing at the age of just 48. May we continue to work through the problems he has so well articulated for those to come.

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[1] “In terms of faith, Maimonides was not Muslim, but in terms of structure, content, and meaning, much of his discourse is as Islamic as, say Avicenna’s is Neo-Platonic (and we do not say that Avicenna, or anyone else for that matter, is Neo-Platonicate),” p. 175.