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  • Islam as Enigma
  • A. Azfar Moin (bio)

What Is Islam? was Shahab Ahmed’s first book, but it was written as if it were his last.1 Its ambition is to explain, once and for all, the phenomenon of Islam—a veritable theory of everything Islamic. When faced with this question, most scholars would limit themselves to a particular milieu with the excuse that to give a universal answer would be to misconstrue what Islam (or any other “world religion” for that matter) became and meant for its many adherents, now approaching two billion, who experienced it according to their particular cultures and histories. Indeed, what would a Muslim in Bengal possibly have in common with a Muslim in the Balkans? However, Shahab Ahmed turns this evasive strategy on its head to explain Islam in all its variety in what he calls the “Balkans-to-Bengal complex.” For him, the sharply divergent practices and beliefs of Muslims across different cultures and even of non-Muslims who engage with Islam are entirely consistent with what Islam is. Moreover, he insists that these customs [End Page 203] and ideals must be taken together in all their contradictory and ambiguous glory as the very essence of “being Islamic,” and not explained away as local accretions to an authentic and pure tradition. To be clear, even for Ahmed, the Balkans-to-Bengal complex existed in a particular historical setting, sandwiched between the earlier era of caliphal power and the later modern age of nation-states. However, he holds it up as the model age in which Islam became the religion of an immensely diverse but culturally connected set of peoples around the world; as such, it yielded the richest historical expression and humanistic self-understanding of what it was to be Islamic. This is why Ahmed develops his formula for making sense of Islam from the literary, philosophical, and artistic products of this milieu.

He presents his long argument not as history but as a sophisticated interpretive mechanism. He constructs a powerful logic machine to decode the enigma of what he terms the historical and human phenomenon that is Islam. A good analogy would be the calculating engine that Alan Turing built during World War II to decrypt messages encoded with the German enigma machine. This machine takes as input a piece of scrambled data: in our case, a jumbled belief or inconsistent gesture such as an eminent Muslim scholar of Islam proudly celebrating the drinking of wine as Islamic. And out comes an answer for how such a speech or act is coherent in an Islamic manner: because wine, despite being prohibited by sharia, is a private, poetic, and moral— as opposed to a public, rational, and legal—means of experiencing and affirming one’s love of God. Similarly, when a Sikh wrestler chants the name of Ali, a champion of early Islam who fought the Prophet’s enemies with great bravery, the wrestler is being truly Islamic even if he is not a Muslim. This is because, for the Sikh man, invoking the epic feats of Ali is a widely accepted act that is both effective and affective.

The interpretive fuel that turns Ahmed’s logic engine is the methodical meaningfulness of a particular thought or action. If an idea or practice is meaningful with reference to Islam to the person imagining or performing it in some systematic and collectively held sense, then it is Islamic. With this in mind, a Muslim caught in an un-Islamic act or a non-Muslim in an Islamic one must not be dismissed as signs of deviance or naivete. Rather, as long as these actions or concepts mean something Islamic in a well-considered sense (say, in a philosophical mode) or deeply felt manner (say, via poetic means), then we must treat them as the innermost signposts of what is Islam—as opposed to some received notion of salvation and faith or proclaimed measure of truth and law. This is the importance of being Islamic. Once Islam is imagined this way, all the confusion about ambiguity and aberration melts away and, along with it, the angst that the question “what is Islam?” throws up about...

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