Interrogating categories of Islamic Studies

This paper offers a methodological solution to the long-standing skepticism between Islamic and religious studies by drawing on the work of the late Moroccan thinker Fatema Mernissi (1940 – 2015). It returns to the well-trodden Smith-Eliade debate not just because it is a locus classicus of our discipline but also because Smith’s reference to territory revealed religion’s profound connection to contemporary geopolitics. His mention of territory reflected the way that that concept had become a dominant way of structing geopolitics. My reading of Mernissi globalizes this narrative, showing that religion was an important way that thinkers around the world understood changes in orders of territoriality. Debates within religious traditions responded to shared geopolitical events in a way that demonstrated both the specificity of traditions and the way that they partook in the redefinition of the category of religion writ large.

The category of the Islamic modernist has pervaded identity politics throughout the Muslim world for the last century. Normally, Islamic modernists are understood to be influenced — often quite consciously so — by the epistemic norms of western modernity that enforce rational coherence and display, in Thomas Bauer’s language, a very low tolerance of ambiguity. In this paper, I critically examine this notion of modernists’ intolerance of ambiguity based on ethnographic field research among self-identified modernists in Central Java, Indonesia. I focus on my interlocutors’ accounts of their own dreams as a site that is transected by incommensurable understandings of the nature of dreams and their epistemic status. Rather than an inherent limitation of modernist discourse, I argue that my interlocutors make productive use of such tensions and paradoxes normally associated with pre-modern Islam, even as they self-consciously deploy the trope of their own modernist intolerance of ambiguity.

This paper studies the Islamic Society for Spiritual Cultivation (ISSC), a project initiated by Dr. Ousmane Kane of Harvard University and a group of his students to support religious education, spiritual growth, and community service among Muslim (and increasingly, non-Muslim) students navigating the academic study of Islam in Western secular universities in and around Boston today. Through ethnographic and text analysis, I examine the history, curriculum, and programming of the ISSC, which is distinctly rooted in the spiritual and epistemological framework of Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse’s *fayḍa tijānīyya* Sufi movement (“the Divine Flood”). By bridging the deepening disconnect between studying Islam in the secular academy versus traditional spaces of sacred learning through its curriculum, it is argued that the ISSC’s program has profound implications for the function of Sufism in the Western academy not merely as object of study but as a pedagogical tool for engaged teaching and learning about Islam.

This paper examines the thought of two important South Asian Muslim thinkers Sayyid Abu'l A'lā Mawdūdī (d. 1979) and Vaḥīduddīn Ḵẖāṉ (d. 2021). Specifically, my paper engages with Mawdūdī’s Qurʼān kī car bunyādī iṣt̤ilāḥeṉ (Four core terms in the Qur’an) and Ḵẖāṉ’s Ta’bīr kī g̲h̲alat̤ī (Error in Interpretation). I propose that there are two major and competing theories of political Islam in twentieth century South Asia. At one end, we have a more “constitutional” and “classical” theory of politics as propounded by Mawdūdī. On the other spectrum, we have the more quietist “apolitical” politics of Vaḥīduddīn Ḵẖāṉ. I argue that these two opposing views lie on a spectrum, whose median is populated by other thinkers like Abu’l-Ḥasan ‘Alī Nadvī, who seek to harmonize the extremes. In arguing this, I make a broader contribution to a conception of the “political” in context of Islamic thought in South Asia.