Social Origins Of Islam: Mind, Economy, Discourse

Introduction

The story examined in this work has thus far been largely confined to an area of specialized scholarship that, as Edward Said has effectively demonstrated , consciously resists theoretical accounts. “Regional Studies,” as they are often called, are regularly restrained to “factual” narrative.1 This work attempts, at least in part, to proceed against such a restriction. It employs interdisciplinary approaches from cultural anthropology, historical sociology, Qur’anic exegesis, literary analysis, and economic history. These approaches are employed to suggest some connective dynamics operating between grand spheres of social life. For example, what is particularly important here are such issues as the connections between the emergence of certain economic practices (such as trade and money-based exchange), cultural thought patterns (as observed in pre-Islamic poetry and ontotheology), and the reconfiguration of transtribal patterns of solidarity . The central role of such links is indicated in the trilateral subtitle, which suggests that the story of the origin of the set of doctrines that came to be known as Islam is interwoven, in a complicated process, in the sociopolitical, social organizational, and cultural employment of a system of faith. This process is embedded in conditions of material life, charted vii Introduction amid a maze of existent ideational contours, and elaborated against the backdrop of available modalities of expression. In this sense, this is primarily a book in the social theory of ideological transformation. It is an attempt to understand grand cultural shifts that give rise to new systems of faith, conducted in the context of a momentous , richly informative story. It is not a book of history, in the sense that it does not claim to discover any new facts or to render a more “truthful” causal sequence of events than hitherto attempted. Neither is it a total thesis on what Islam is or was, in the sense that it refrains from any claim regarding an essential meaning, an invariable ideological position, or a uniform social role of the faith. In this work, my interest is extrinsic rather than intrinsic, in the sense that I want to see what the story of Islam could tell us about ideological formations in general, rather than strictly to tell a specific historical tale. In this spirit, I emphasize a theoretically informed perspective and generally refrain from pure philological digressions customary in traditional orientalist scholarship. Thus, this work employs a different approach to the question of historical factuality than do, for instance, the recent revisionist histories of Patricia Crone and Sulayman Bashir. In the revisionist school, discoveries are not made by marshaling in new “facts” about the origins of Islam but by recombining and contrasting a variety of tales pervading well-known classical sources.2 But according to what logic and what order of selection are such recombinations and contrasts conducted? What validity do their criteria possess? Take, for instance, Crone’s three criteria for dismantling the reliability of the classical sources: contradictions, storytelling mode, and later perfection.3 Why did such facts of discourse pose apparently little problem for the ancient audience? In my view, studying an ancient worldview requires a readjustment of the listening faculties, an attention to configurations of the world that an ancient audience could have digested with a yet-to-be appreciated contentment, and an ability to see what it could have been possible to see in the past rather than to single-mindedly insist on “facts” as if they possess the same value and appearance across the distance of centuries.4 With some effort at listening to the interplay of ideational and discursive configurations reverberating through the classical story of Islam, almost all “contradictions” uncovered by revisionist historians can be shown to be contradictions solely in a modern logic and modality of reading.5 viii • Introduction It is possible to argue that history itself does not exist as such without an implicit or explicit theoretical perspective that allows it to be discerned as being instructive. In this sense, if one drops preexisting lenses of perspective by which historical tales are organized, history begins to appear untidy, unbalanced, vacuous, or at best irrelevant and nonindicative.With no solid paradigmatic support, categories employed would be shifting and confused, concepts and definitions unrefined and porous. With no causal chain outlined in terms of acceptable rational precepts, the received chronology would appear as one sediment loaded freely upon another . With no value-oriented delimitation of the...