Introduction

The late Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic is a tour de force review of past and present conceptualizations of Islam. As much a review of the historiography of Islam as an original historical argument, the book answers the question “what is Islam?” by reflecting on an interconnected set of historical examples. Ahmed begins with three anecdotes and six questions. In three ordinary scenarios—a contemporary Muslim scholar who sees no contradiction between being Muslim and wine drinking; the objects of contemporary “Islamic Art” exhibits; and the importance of being Muslim in marriage arrangements—we are confronted with an underlying question: What defines “Islam” when we consider the vast array of historical human experiences that could be said to represent it? Ahmed is particularly interested in how we understand seeming contradictions between essentializing conceptions of Islam, on the one hand, and practices organized around “Muslim law,” on the other. For instance, how might we view the significance of celebrations of wine drinking in court culture or among premodern elite circles of Muslims by contrast? Ahmed is also interested in the broader cultural implications of this question: how might we understand the significance of what is “Islamic” when reading “Islamic philosophy,” he asks. Or poetry? Likewise, what is “Islamic” about “Islamic art”?

Much of Ahmed’s attempt to reconceptualize Islam in our times considers its many meanings beyond the typical emphasis on sharia or even textual traditions. Instead, he stresses the importance of other forms of creative expression, from Illuminationist philosophies to Sufipractices. His focus on the Balkans to Bengal from the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries, moreover, provides a vast array of examples of literary and other works through which to consider this question. For this reason too, he emphasizes the inherently polyglot nature of this vast geographic scope and historical era. In brief, Ahmed wants us to avoid any essentializing definitions. But he also wants to avoid glib reconfigurations that answer the question “what is Islam?” with what he considers meaningless retorts, like “Whatever Muslims say it is” or “There are many Islams, not one Islam.” There is no need, he argues moreover, to think in terms of meta-descriptions of “religion,” either as a way of life relegated to some abstract realm of the sacred or as an orthodox discursive tradition, or even as a “total social fact.” In place of what he sees as abstract, partial, or para-historical conceptions, he proposes that we instead define Islam as a dynamic hermeneutic engagement with revelation. Ahmed therefore also tries to move between emic and etic definitions of Islam: for a Muslim, Muhammad’s revelation is both a specific historical and a divine act; yet it is also continuously re-signified in historical time and through each hermeneutic engagement. Ahmed is therefore interested in the structural and spatial dimensions of understandings of revelation both before and after revelation so to speak. It is for this reason that he divides this hermeneutic engagement into “Pre-Textual,” “Textual,” and “Con-Textual” processes to show how this was part of a dynamic and yet coherent engagement through time.

Taken together, the seven reviews invited by the editorial board in this Kitabkhana engage with Ahmed’s framework and provide another set of themes to further consider his original question, “What is Islam?” Collectively, they also highlight how history can both illuminate and at times obscure our understanding of both the question and the attempt to answer it.

Much of Ahmed’s argument is driven by the desire to bring together historical conceptions with historical practices around “being Islamic.” And yet, as a number of reviewers wondered, what kind of historical explanation can be offered in this way? As Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins notes, unlike Ahmed’s Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses in Early Islam 2017, in What Is Islam? the exact historical argument is not as clear here. In Before Orthodoxy, Ahmed’s argument centered on how juridical views came to assert a self-constituted authority over the textual tradition...