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  • The Coherence of Contradiction
  • Yahya Sseremba (bio)

In one of his traditions, the Prophet Muhammad, may peace be upon him, highlighted the power of words when he said, “Indeed, there is magic in eloquence.”1 Shahab Ahmed exhibits this magic when he charmingly advances a radically new way of understanding Islam in his 2016 book, What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Ahmed sets out to establish Islam as “a historical and human phenomenon . . . in its plentitude and complexity” and hence to “conceptualize unity [in Islam] not in diversity but in the face of outright contradiction.”2 To exemplify the enormity of the contradiction he seeks to reconcile, Ahmed says that wine drinking, which is clearly prohibited in the Quran and Sunnah and which is categorically denounced in fiqh (juridical) discourses, should be approached as Islamic because there has been a “mutually-constitutive relationship between wine and Islam in history” (67). The insightfulness with which he fits together various conflicting aspects of Islam will provide lessons beyond Islam. Before European colonialism downsized custom to craft customary law, African societies, including non-Muslim societies, had, as Yusuf Bala Usman notes, diverse traditions that “were quite distinct and some of whose elements were actually conflicting and contradictory.”3 Africanists can pick lessons from Ahmed’s reconciliation of contradiction in Islam to study how conflicting African traditions cohered.

Reconciling Contradiction

Let me shed light on Ahmed’s project using one of his examples—wine. His idea is not that wine was seen as lawful, for those who say that it is lawful and those who say that it is unlawful are the same, given that they both make their verdicts in terms of the law. Ahmed wants us to think of Islam outside the parameters of the Islamic text and Islamic law if we are to recognize the Islamic character of beliefs and practices that may be prohibited [End Page 208] in the Islamic text but valorized as Islamic across time and space. Interestingly, he moves beyond the Five Pillars, including the shahadah, and proposes an understanding of Islam that would include even “idolatry” as an Islamic practice! (28). To establish the Islamicity of the truth that contradicts the truth of the Islamic text, Ahmed finds a source of Islamic truth that is not the text. Unlike Talal Asad, who begins from the text (Qur’an and Sunnah), Ahmed begins from the “Unseen Reality” he calls the “Pre-text” and then proceeds to the “Text” and finally to the “Con-text.” (350). To notice these different sources and layers of truth in Islam is to realize how the two contradictory attitudes toward wine drinking become equally Islamic.

Toward the end, Ahmed holds modernity, including European colonialism, capitalism, the nation-state, science, empiricism, rationalism, and others (514–15), responsible for the “downsizing of Revelation” (527) and for establishing Islam as a predominantly fiqh and text-driven phenomenon in which the Pre-text and sometimes even the Con-text are no longer sources of Islamic meaning. Let me begin with this claim on modernity.

Fiqh in the Premodern and Modern Periods

Unlike Mahmood Mamdani’s native, whose subjectivity is shaped through the colonial state structure of indirect rule,4 it is not clear how modernity produces Ahmed’s fiqh-oriented Muslim. Whereas Ahmed notes that the modern “state is entirely a law-made entity” (530), he does not explain how this reality of the state— and indeed other aspects of modernity—has penetrated the Muslim body and psyche to entrench fiqh in just 150 years as virtually the only meaningful Islamic discourse. If indeed the “Sufi-philosophical amalgam” was as prevalent as he depicts it, what particular modern structures, instruments, or mechanisms have wiped it out almost completely in such a short time? Even if we assume that Ahmed has in mind Michel Foucault’s web of institutions such as the prison, hospital, school, and so on, the explanation would still be lacking. Mamdani has warned us against deploying Foucault in “the colonies where the rural population lived beyond the reach of these modern institutions.”5 Ahmed gives modernity the power to produce Islam in supposedly unprecedented terms without giving a clue on the...

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