“What is Religion?”

What Is Islam? is a great deal of fun to read. And sometimes very funny, too. Both intensely personal and deeply learned, it is gorgeously sprawling—gripping really. In many ways it is several books: a plea for a broader, more cosmopolitan reading of what counts as Islam; an engagement with critical religious studies; and a master class in hermeneutics. Canvassing the many ways in which Islam has come to be demarcated in academic studies, Shahab Ahmed argues for more widespread acknowledgment of the cosmopolitan Islam of what he calls the Balkans-to-Bengal complex. Lovingly detailing the poetry, art, and alcohol consumption of these Muslims, Ahmed demands that they be incorporated into our portrait of Islam without any asterisks. He rejects legalistic and scriptural definitions in favor of an ongoing revelation through the many actual practices of Muslims unified not by prescriptions or proscriptions but by a love of God lived out in a life of meaning.

Ahmed does this work, what he calls making visible a wider repertoire of practices of Islam, by widening the lens and sense of possibility, pressing on us reams of evidence for this broader, richer meaning of “the importance of being Islamic.” Pressure on the limitations of the received meaning of these terms—Islam, Islamic, Islamicate, Muslim—largely comes for Ahmed from the empirical evidence, from the splendid archive he reveals to us. Narrower definitions just cannot be sustained, as he shows us time and time again, particularly legal and political ones. We must, he repeatedly says, include this, and this, and this . . . and this. The stakes are high. Being Islamic is for him necessarily full of both contradictions and coherence—but a broader view lending itself, ironically perhaps, to more coherence than other, more restricted versions. Following Wilfrid Cantwell Smith, Islam is presented not as a religion but as a way of being human.¹ Being human necessarily incorporates contradiction.

What makes the book thrilling reading for the religious studies scholar who does not study Islam is the way in which his language plays games in your head. He tells you that “the historical phenomenon of Islam . . . conceptually frustrate[s] the religious/secular binary or religion/culture division” (116). “Yes, of course,” you respond. Already trained by this point in the text, you are already tending to switch out the word Islam for religion—or for another religion—or for just plain “being human.” It is not just Islam. The religious/secular and religion/culture binaries are inadequate to human phenomena, period. It is not too much to say that what Ahmed wishes to do in this book is to make visible a richer, more complex understanding of the human, tout court. Perhaps to argue for the importance of being human beyond the constraints and coercions of modern political history?

To illustrate the ways in which this book can help one to think religion differently, I offer a reading from my own archive. In 2018 I visited the Heavenly Bodies exhibit of Catholic fashion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.² I will take one object and its presentation from that exhibit as my hermeneutical object, contrasting its contribution to our understanding of the importance of being Catholic with that of the companion collection of vestments and ritual objects borrowed from the Vatican for the occasion (fig. 1).

Designed by French haute couture designer Jean Paul Gaultier, the dress includes ex-votos embedded into the exquisitely crocheted silk, silver, and gold fabric. Metal representations of body parts and religious holographic images left as gifts at healing shrines, they give the dress visual interest and texture. Their previous lives as devotional offerings create a kind of hypertext—or mis en abyme effect—referencing centuries of Catholic practice as well as linking the dress to the surrounding medieval images, as can be seen in the photograph (fig. 1). The dress is accompanied by a crown/halo that also finds echoes from other images in the gallery. In his section on hermeneutical engagement, Ahmed proposes that we conceptualize human and historical Islam as an “engagement with Pre-text, Text, and Con-text” (363). We might...