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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.
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Can the celebration of wine drinking be Islamic? To Ahmed, the answer is: obviously, yes. It is Islamic insofar as this celebration is expressed, for example, in the terms of such classical Sufi metaphors for “the experience of intoxication with the Divine,” as well as the more mundane recognition of wine’s virtues as a social lubricant. The extensive medical literature of the premodern Islamic world attests openly to the latter fact. As the 10th-century physician and philosopher Abu Zayd al-Balkhi put it, “It is wine that provides excellence to society and conversation…and there is nothing that makes possible relations of intimacy and confidence between friends so tastefully and pleasantly and effectively as does drinking wine together.”
To say that wine drinking is un-Islamic may be akin to saying that the refusal to serve in the military during a period of wartime conscription is un-American. In the view of some citizens, such a refusal may well violate the essence of Americanness, in addition to violating American law; to others, however, this act may rather fulfill and epitomize the requirements of citizenship. By Ahmed’s logic, the refusal to serve in the military is not just American in spite of its opposition to other, contradictory values associated with Americanness, but precisely because of it.
Is Ahmed right? His definition of Islam as a model of “coherent contradiction”—one whereby a Muslim can simultaneously hold in mind many competing views of Islam’s teachings and values—is compelling; but is it true? There is something Gödelian in this project, an attempt to speak aloud a self-negating paradox. Perhaps an unavoidable consequence is that Ahmed’s arguments sometimes sound circular. If the Islamic is that which is recognizable in terms of what has been previously identified as Islamic, where does the buck stop? And might one not argue that any concept as vast as Islam must also be vastly self-contradictory and yet somehow coherent, especially when surveyed through the encyclopedic prism that Ahmed sets before his subject? What distinguishes Islam from such concepts as Christianity, Judaism, or liberalism in this respect?
A more significant problem concerns the consequences of insisting, as Ahmed does, on the inapplicability of distinctions like “religious vs. cultural” or “sacred vs. secular” when studying Islam. There is something unpleasantly exoticizing about making “Islamic” the only, or even the principal, lens through which to interpret a Hafizian love poem, a historic building, a metaphor, or a wine goblet. This was the sort of thing that got Orientalists into hot water: the assumption that every aspect of quotidian life in the societies of the Orient was somehow a reflection of Islam. The Orientalists, at least, pointed out the practices and artifacts that seemed to contradict the tenets of conservative piety. Ahmed’s “Islam” comprehends these contradictions, and so flirts with another analytical pitfall: the danger that “Islam,” by containing multitudes, means nothing in particular as a concept.
The academy is not the only place where concepts matter. Ahmed’s intended audience, one senses, also lies beyond the gates of Western universities. Looming in the background of the work is the specter of modern Muslim “textual-restrictivism” and “legal-supremacism,” as exemplified by many political Islamists. Here, he detects an ironic agreement between much Western scholarship and modern Islamist thought. Both groups concur that what is central to Islam is the law, which must be accessed through the study of the Koran and the Hadith. Philosophy and Sufism are dismissed by most Islamists as marginal—if not inimical—to the core of Islam, and to Ahmed’s great frustration, Western academics have tended to agree. Like the Islamist, the academic who makes a distinction between the religious essence of Islam on the one hand, and the cultural practices of the “Islamicate” on the other, is favoring one as more authentic than the other. To Ahmed, the modern fundamentalist happily agrees with this formula, insofar as it necessitates a return to “pure and authentic faith…back to the religion, back to Qur’an and [Hadith], back to the law, back to Islam, and not—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.
http://www.thenation.com/article/contradiction-and-diversity/
Another approach argues that it is senseless to speak of Islam as a monolith; what exists is an array of local islams. If Islam is anything, it is “whatever Muslims say it is.” This has a powerful and pluralistic ring; it accommodates both Avicenna and his great critic, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, the 11th-century theologian. But as Ahmed observes, the islams argument is analytically weak, sacrificing explanatory power in the service of rhetorical efficiency. The assertion that Islam is whatever Muslims say it is offers a description, not a concept.
....
Can the celebration of wine drinking be Islamic? To Ahmed, the answer is: obviously, yes. It is Islamic insofar as this celebration is expressed, for example, in the terms of such classical Sufi metaphors for “the experience of intoxication with the Divine,” as well as the more mundane recognition of wine’s virtues as a social lubricant. The extensive medical literature of the premodern Islamic world attests openly to the latter fact. As the 10th-century physician and philosopher Abu Zayd al-Balkhi put it, “It is wine that provides excellence to society and conversation…and there is nothing that makes possible relations of intimacy and confidence between friends so tastefully and pleasantly and effectively as does drinking wine together.”
To say that wine drinking is un-Islamic may be akin to saying that the refusal to serve in the military during a period of wartime conscription is un-American. In the view of some citizens, such a refusal may well violate the essence of Americanness, in addition to violating American law; to others, however, this act may rather fulfill and epitomize the requirements of citizenship. By Ahmed’s logic, the refusal to serve in the military is not just American in spite of its opposition to other, contradictory values associated with Americanness, but precisely because of it.
Is Ahmed right? His definition of Islam as a model of “coherent contradiction”—one whereby a Muslim can simultaneously hold in mind many competing views of Islam’s teachings and values—is compelling; but is it true? There is something Gödelian in this project, an attempt to speak aloud a self-negating paradox. Perhaps an unavoidable consequence is that Ahmed’s arguments sometimes sound circular. If the Islamic is that which is recognizable in terms of what has been previously identified as Islamic, where does the buck stop? And might one not argue that any concept as vast as Islam must also be vastly self-contradictory and yet somehow coherent, especially when surveyed through the encyclopedic prism that Ahmed sets before his subject? What distinguishes Islam from such concepts as Christianity, Judaism, or liberalism in this respect?
A more significant problem concerns the consequences of insisting, as Ahmed does, on the inapplicability of distinctions like “religious vs. cultural” or “sacred vs. secular” when studying Islam. There is something unpleasantly exoticizing about making “Islamic” the only, or even the principal, lens through which to interpret a Hafizian love poem, a historic building, a metaphor, or a wine goblet. This was the sort of thing that got Orientalists into hot water: the assumption that every aspect of quotidian life in the societies of the Orient was somehow a reflection of Islam. The Orientalists, at least, pointed out the practices and artifacts that seemed to contradict the tenets of conservative piety. Ahmed’s “Islam” comprehends these contradictions, and so flirts with another analytical pitfall: the danger that “Islam,” by containing multitudes, means nothing in particular as a concept.
The academy is not the only place where concepts matter. Ahmed’s intended audience, one senses, also lies beyond the gates of Western universities. Looming in the background of the work is the specter of modern Muslim “textual-restrictivism” and “legal-supremacism,” as exemplified by many political Islamists. Here, he detects an ironic agreement between much Western scholarship and modern Islamist thought. Both groups concur that what is central to Islam is the law, which must be accessed through the study of the Koran and the Hadith. Philosophy and Sufism are dismissed by most Islamists as marginal—if not inimical—to the core of Islam, and to Ahmed’s great frustration, Western academics have tended to agree. Like the Islamist, the academic who makes a distinction between the religious essence of Islam on the one hand, and the cultural practices of the “Islamicate” on the other, is favoring one as more authentic than the other. To Ahmed, the modern fundamentalist happily agrees with this formula, insofar as it necessitates a return to “pure and authentic faith…back to the religion, back to Qur’an and [Hadith], back to the law, back to Islam, and not—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.
http://www.thenation.com/article/contradiction-and-diversity/
