In recent years, scholarship at the intersection of anthropology, textual studies, and historical studies has highlighted the dynamic role of Islamic textual traditions in (in)forming interpretive communities today. Building on these inroads, our panel seeks to theorize the ways in which communities form, relate to, and engage texts in practice. We take a capacious approach to the definition of a text and interpretive community, asking: How are interpretive communities formed? What is the relationship of a sacred text to its use in practice? How are historical texts reimagined, circulated, and transformed in contemporary contexts? This papers session considers the complexity of lived texts by analyzing how the diverse genres of poetry, hagiography, oration, and hadith are constituted and remade in practice, signifying expansive understandings of Muslim ethics, identity, sanctity, affective experience, and knowledge in Islamic modernities today.
This paper will think through the seeming paradoxes of an Urdu poem full of Quranic imagery—Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s famous Ham Dekhenge (We Will See) –becoming a widespread anthem of protest in defense of the secular character of India in the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019 and 2020. I argue that the poem’s reception history opens up a way for us to understand the critical role poetry plays in the Islamic tradition, and also the ways in which Urdu poetry acts a medium for Islam as a universal ethical discourse beyond the boundaries of Muslim religious identity. It also shows us how the rapid spread of the internet and social media in India has given rise to an extraordinary mimetic archive(Mazzarella 2017) of Urdu poetry that has deeply informed and transformed Indian public culture and ethical life far beyond the boundaries of Muslim identity.
In North Africa, the majdhūb saint is colloquially known as the “mad saint”: a figure pulled to God so quickly that it loses control of its rational faculties. Debates about the categorization of the majdhūb emerge in seventeenth-century hagiographic compendia yet also echo in everyday Sufi discussions of spiritual training and authenticity today. The circulation and interplay of similar transgressive acts, discursive arguments, and linguistic phrases attributed to past and living majdhūbs construct what I term “lived intertextuality.” In this presentation, I examine how the lived intertextuality of two majdhūb saints, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Majdhūb (d. 1569) and ‘Umar al-Fayyāsh (d. 1968), illuminates the reworking of the classical genre of Sufi biographical dictionaries. By tracing the interplay of sixteenth and seventeenth narratives with Facebook hagiographies, aphorisms, and pious television shows, I demonstrate how ongoing discussions of the majdhūb’s contested subjecthood renegotiate notions of sanctity, sanity, and the state.
ʿAli ibn Abi Talib (d. 40/661) is widely known as a master orator famous for his rhetorical eloquence. A collection of his orations appears in the 11th century collection, Nahj al-Balāghah. Despite ʿAli’s prominent role in the Shiʿi tradition and rampant anti-Shiʿi sentiment in Egypt today, his orations continue to serve as models and citational sources for Egyptian preachers. Taking genre as an organizing thematic, this presentation explores connections, ruptures, and continuities in Islamic oration across time. It examines the aesthetic and ethical work of oration, asking what classical oratory can tell us about the genre of Islamic oration when put in conversation with contemporary preaching. I argue that Islamic oration is characteristically marked by the marriage of the aesthetic and the ethical, but not linearly. That is, the rhetorical and ethical force of contemporary oration is dependent on the construction of classical Islamic oration.
During the 1930s, as the Fayḍa Tijāniyya Sufi revival spread throughout Senegal, poetry recitation became an important means of transmitting and cultivating spiritual knowledge of God. While the Arabic poetry of Fayḍa founder Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse has received scholarly attention, Ibou Diouf’s vernacular Wolof poetry became an equally important channel of spiritual knowledge, and it has recently undergone a resurgence through social media. Indeed, many Fayḍa adherents describe Ibou Diouf’s poetry as a kind of hidden Qur’an inspired directly by God, and classically trained scholars cite it in speeches and lessons. This paper takes a decolonial approach to examining how Ibou Diouf’s poetry contributes to cultivating knowledge of God. It untangles the distinctions between oral and written knowledge to recognize interconnected forms of knowledge typically invisible to academic observers. Although Ibou Diouf was illiterate, his poetry weaves together concepts from the Qur’an and diverse Islamic and Sufi literature.
This paper ethnographically explores the potential of understanding the citation of Islamic texts in terms of the production and circulation of “phantasms” that affect the senses and soften the heart in the context of a three-day jamaat (gathering) in Birmingham, UK. This paper turns to Mary Carruthers to glimpse the role that sensation and imagination play in the tradition that informs this Muslim community’s understanding of how they engage with texts, and then proceeds to provide two ethnographic examples that highlight this. Ultimately, the paper argues that approaching textual engagement in terms of the production of phantasms provides a capacious understanding of “text,” that allows us to understand the intimate fusion of textual citation and the environment in which that citation takes place. This simultaneously allows for the enrichment and specification of the emotional and embodied dimensions of Muslims’ engagement with texts.