• Features
  • Books
  • Teaching
  • Digital & Film
  • Blog
  • IHS
  • Texas
  • Spotlight
  • About

The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Monsoon Islam: An interview with Sebastian Prange

September 1, 2020

Here Sebastian R. Prange is interviewed about his 2018 book, Monsoon Islam: Trade & Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast (Cambridge 2018), by Anuj Kaushal, a PhD candidate in History at the University of Texas at Austin. Sebastian R. Prange is Associate Professor of South Asian history at the University of British Columbia. He obtained his doctorate from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies in 2008 and has since held academic appointments in Canada, the United States, and Germany. His first book Monsoon Islam: Trade & Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast (Cambridge 2018) has been awarded both the John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History and the American Historical Association–Pacific Coast Branch Book Award. Its Malayalam translation is forthcoming with Other Books (Kozhikode). The following is a the transcript of an extended interview between Dr Prange and Anuj Kaushal.

Anuj Kaushal is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses upon Islamicate healing practices and traditional medical science in South Asia. His work seeks to study identity formation and gender relations in South Asia through medical print culture, private consumption habits, and pluralistic approach to sexology during the 19th-20th century.   

Q. Your book’s title, Monsoon Islam, is a key intervention in the study of Islamic “discursive traditions.” While Monsoon Islam challenges the new orientalist conception of Islam as a monolithic entity, it also provides the opportunity to learn more about diverse cultural influences over Islam. Could you briefly elaborate upon this essence of “Monsoon Islam” that allow readers to better understand Islamic pluralism or what Talal Asad calls the “discursive traditions” of Islam?

In the book, I use the term “Monsoon Islam” to describe what I see as a distinct trajectory of Islamic history that developed within the trading world of the medieval Indian Ocean. To be clear, it is not meant to denote a formal school of law or a distinct theology; rather, it encapsulates interrelated sets of legal interpretation and socio-religious practices that took shape among Muslim merchant communities in the trading ports of the Indian Ocean. The commercial context is crucial: merchants were key in the formation and transmission of this Monsoon Islam across maritime Asia. The role of trade in the so-called ‘spread of Islam’ has long been acknowledged, but the literature has tended to regard traders as mere conveyances, rather than recognize them as creative agents in communicating and elaborating the faith within new settings. In the Indian Ocean world, Muslim merchants lived in close and sustained contact with non-Muslim societies; in these diaspora contexts, they were continually confronted with new situations for which the standard texts of Islamic law offered no clear course of appropriate action. So in many cases, such as on the Malabar Coast for example, these merchant communities produced new collections of legal interpretation and guidance that addressed the kind of issues that they faced there. As might be expected, most of these have to do with commercial law, but they also engage with questions of cohabitation, commensality, intermarriage, and many other social and political matters that reflected the concerns of Muslims living as part of a majority non-Muslim society. And these interpretations were then taken up by other Muslim communities in other parts of the Indian Ocean world, especially in Southeast Asia. My work reinforces a vision of Islamic history in which there wasn’t a linear transmission of a uniform religion to different places but rather a circulatory process by which the faith came to be translated and reframed in new settings and contexts. As you rightly say, anthropologists such as Asad have long pointed to processes of localization and vernacularization within Islam; my book seeks to offer an additional perspective on this, together with new empirical support, for the medieval period.

Q. Your work analyzes the dynamism of Islam through a “twin process” of meaning making in distinct regions across the Indian Ocean. What are these processes?

The book argues that “Monsoon Islam” was shaped by two intertwined processes. On the one hand, Islam was introduced into new regions by merchants (accompanied by scholars and sufis, who operated within this transoceanic commercial milieu) and influenced by their often quite pragmatic priorities and preferences. On the other hand, the reality of these Muslim merchants living as trading diasporas within majority non-Muslim societies also significantly shaped how Islam was conceived and conveyed in those places. “Monsoon Islam” was defined by the tension between these two forces: between the global and the local, between the competing impulses and imperatives of severalty and syncretism. The book explores this twin process from a dual perspective: it looks both outwards, from the Malabar Coast towards the movements of Muslim communities across the Indian Ocean in space and time, and inwards, to ask how these communities understood and responded to changes in their local, social, and political environments. It does so through the lens of four different spaces that defined the existence of Malabar’s Muslim trading communities:

  • the Port, which offers an economic history of the practical organization of long- distance trade in the medieval Indian Ocean);
  • the Mosque, which examines the internal stratification and social organization of these Muslim trading communities;
  • the Palace, which looks at their political relationships to South Indian states and elites;
  • and lastly the Sea, which traces the trans-oceanic networks of the pepper trade, religious and scholarly ties, as well as political patronage.

It is the entanglement of all these four realms—the commercial, the social, the political, and the trans-oceanic—that shaped the formation of Muslim communities, and of Islam, across the trading world of the medieval Indian Ocean.

The monsoon winds that blow across the expanse of the Indian Ocean facilitated the trade of spices and the expansion of Islam. Credit: National Museum of African Art/Smithsonian Institution.

Q. Your book emphasizes trans-oceanic exchanges through networks and actors operating at different levels and in different environments across the Indian Ocean. Could you elaborate upon your methodology through which you analyzed these actors and networks or the role of the brokers in developing this “trans-oceanic network”?

There is no question that network theory has become the dominant paradigm of Indian Ocean studies. The study of networks has underpinned the view of the premodern Indian Ocean as an integrated world system (even if that particular term has fallen out of favor), but it also throws up its own set of core-periphery questions. Within networks, cores are often defined in terms of origins, be it of a kinship group, religious tradition, or trade good. However, as the network expands and evolves over time, its center of gravity also shifts. The spread of Islam, a seminal process in Indian Ocean history, is a prime example of this, but we can also look to Buddhism, or Christianity, or any number of other instances. The actual connections that produced such trans-oceanic milieus of shared cultural ties between distant regions have come to be almost universally described in terms of networks. My book is no exception to this, but I’m also aware that we easily run the risk of reifying every form of contact as a network. Clearly, the network paradigm is as much a product of our present-day worldview as it is of the historical record: in the digital age, even premodern linkages have come to be conceived through the metaphors of circuits, hubs, and nodes.

Where it gets interesting, to my mind, is when we look at how different types of exchange intersect and overlap to create persistent ties. What my book focuses on primarily is the role of long-distance trade as the facilitator of other forms of communication and exchange. Commercial networks were tightly interwoven with kinship, religious, and scholarly networks: Buddhist temples were situated on trade routes; scholarly prestige was established through association with a teacher on the other side of the ocean; pilgrimage was inseparable from economic activity; religious specialists often had an eye for profitable business; and intermarriage created ever more layers of complexity. Networks rarely served a single purpose, in much the same way that traders were not exclusively economic actors but also social and political beings. The analytical focus on networks can serve as an organizing principle for the multiple levels of material and intellectual connections across the ocean, without having to necessarily subsume them into claims of a coherent, overarching system.

Jan Huygen van Linschoten (1563-1611) & Bernard Paludanus (1550-1633), Almadies [bark canoe] or boats of Fisherman of Goa and Cochin (Almadies ou bateaux de Pescheurs de Goa & Cochin), c. 1638, Intaglio technique of printing, David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, (Stanford University, California),

Q. Your discussion of agents is multilayered and quite dense. I am curious to understand your model of partnerships as discussed in your work along with the role of slaves. How diverse are the roles of these agents in your analysis, both as an external and internal influencer, in the development of the networks?

The role of agents, both as commercial conduits and cultural ‘go-betweens’, has attracted a lot of scholarly attention in the past years. Work by scholars such as Natalie Rothman, Francesca Trivellato, Roxani Margariti, or Sebouh Aslanian have vastly expanded not just our empirical understanding of their functions, but also the conceptual tools for framing their personal and structural entanglements. My book seeks to add to that growing body of scholarship by highlighting the complexity and fluidity of many of those arrangements. And as you say, I’m particularly interested in the role of slaves as business agents, which is something I’ve worked on ever since my Masters thesis. Looking at the Malabar Coast, it is striking that several Arabic epigraphs state that a mosque was endowed or renovated by someone who in the inscription is explicitly identified as a former slave; in other cases, there are less direct but nonetheless quite compelling clues for this. As we know, for example from the Geniza records, slaves served as business agents in the maritime trade between Arabia and India. The extreme disparity in power between master and slave prompts the question of how principal-agent problems were resolved. But even when the agent was free and of equal status to the principal, their relationship required complex institutions in the context of the vast distances involved in oceanic trade, the slow and unreliable communication, and the ever-present temptations of malfeasance. It was only really through networks that these relationships could be managed and constrained. Premodern trade was an inherently social activity, and many of the social conventions and practices that we come across in the sources also, or even primarily, served an economic purpose.

Q. You discussed du‘ā al-sultān being carried out in the Friday prayers (khutba), in Malabar region, with the name of Rasulid sultans purely as a ritual through which Malabar rulers could develop close affinity with rulers of Aden and extract trade benefits. However, ritual aspect aside, what impact did this act have in challenging native authority over time?

In recent years, a number of new sources for the medieval Indian Ocean have become accessible to scholars. One of the most significant of these is a thirteenth-century chronicle from Yemen that contains a list of annual payments made by the Rasulid sultans to Muslim communities in coastal India. These stipends were not ceremonial investments like robes of honor; they were direct and regular payments to the religious leaders of merchant communities all along the Indian coast, to be conveyed annually with the merchant fleets from Aden. Éric Vallet was first to interpret this practice as an expression of a Rasulid “oceanic policy,” designed to boost Aden’s commerce and promote the dynasty’s self-appointed role as champions of Muslim communities across the Indian Ocean. Notably, the places detailed in the ledger—in Gujarat and the Konkan, on the Malabar and Coromandel coasts—were all under Hindu rule at the time. To extend patronage to judges and preachers who reside in the territory of another Muslim ruler would have been an unmistakable claim to political suzerainty that no self-respecting sultan would have tolerated. In lands under Hindu rule, however, the Rasulids could act as the benefactors and patrons of the local Muslim communities without calling into question the sovereignty of the local king.

This investment was repaid by at least some of those Muslim communities in a symbolic currency. It took the form, as you mention, of the du‘ā al-sultān or “invocation of the ruler”, which formed part of the Friday prayer (khutbah). Its purpose was to openly declare the relationship between a city or territory and its ruler. The dedication of this congregational prayer was a highly symbolic act: when a new sovereign was installed, the altered khutbah is frequently noted in the annals as the most significant public affirmation of the new political reality. As is known from different sources, Muslim communities in coastal India oftentimes invoked distant Muslim rulers in their khutbah. To a degree, Muslim traders on the Malabar Coast were able to pursue their own foreign policy, which of course was directed towards cordial relationships with important trading partners, perhaps in the hope of gaining tax exemptions. From a merchant’s point of view, dedicating the Friday sermon to the ruler of Aden was a richly symbolic, yet entirely free, way of substantiating vital economic ties.

Guillaume de l’Isle [great French map cartographer] (1675-1726), The Coast of Malabar and Coromandel a Very Accurate Map (Orarum Malabariae, Coromandelae, &c. tabula accuratissima), c. 1742 , published by Coven & Mortier [largest cartographic publisher in 18th cty Netherland] (1721-1866), (Amsterdam, Netherland),

For Muslim merchants living in the Hindu states of the Malabar Coast, invoking a foreign ruler in their khutbah was not in itself seen as a challenge to local sovereignty. That said, there were clearly also limits to this. For example, we don’t have any inscriptions about a Malabar mosque being endowed by, or dedicated to, a Muslim ruler. The building of mosques was an exclusively private endeavor, financed by merchants; anything else would likely have been viewed as a competing claim over land or people. So we don’t see the material and ritual ties that were forged across the ocean by Muslim rulers and Muslim merchants evolving into joint political projects on the Malabar Coast.

Q. One of the most fascinating chapters in your book deals with the syncretic nature of Islamic architecture in South and Southeast Asia. While your analysis supplements Richard Eaton and Phillip Wagoner’s work, I’m curious how it speaks to more recent works such as that of Chanchal Dadlani, i.e. does your study of the sources and architecture reflect any notion of the “ars memoria” tradition in the diasporic Islamic communities’ religious structures?

Beyond the textual inscriptions that they hold, my book tries to “read” the historic mosques of the Malabar Coast themselves as primary sources. In this, I build on the work of Eaton and Wagoner, whom you mention, but also scholars such as Stephen Dale, Alka Patel, and especially Mehrdad Shokoohy. Analogous to the idea of a “Monsoon Islam,”” the book argues for a discrete style of the “monsoon mosque” that we find in South India but also, in its own distinct iterations, in other Indian Ocean trading regions such as insular Southeast Asia or on the Swahili Coast. Again, this is not about the monsoon weather pattern as such, but rather about the interconnected trading world it encapsulated and about the dynamic between the global and local that I’ve mentioned before.

The elaborate superstructure of the fifteenth century Mithqālpalli at Calicut (Image copyright by Sebastian R. Prange), in Sebastian Prange, Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast (New York: Cambridge university Press, 2018), p. 132, figure 2.6.

The monsoon mosque stands at this junction. On the one hand, it is a manifestation of a universalist faith that spanned across the ocean, as well as a key part of the commercial infrastructure that sustained those trans-oceanic linkages. On the other hand, its form is an expression of the syncretic processes by which Muslim communities became part of local societies and polities. The book looks at particular stylistic features, such as their multilayered tiled roofs, to explore the establishment, the meaning, but also the contestations of mosques within local landscapes of the sacred. In that sense, it touches on similar issues to those Dadlani so masterfully explores for the Mughals. In both cases, mosques serve as a cultural index, as a form of codified historical consciousness. For Muslim trade diasporas, mosques symbolized not just their presence but also a claim on a historical foundation in a place—and, of course, also an investment in their future there. It is this aspect of the book that I most look forward to expanding on once travel becomes possible again.

Early photograph of Ponnani’s Juma Masjid. Image courtesy of Basel Mission Archives (ref. no. C-30.84.138: “Moschee i. Ponnani, Mekka v. Malabar” by Gotthilf Dengler, 1938). Accessed in Sebastian Prange, Monsoon Islam, (New York: Cambridge university Press, 2018), p. 114, figure 2.2.

Q. You position your work as being inspired by the historiographical shift that sought to pluralize Islam through cultural interpretation that countered the orientalist perception of a “monolithic Islam,” while at the same time you discuss Arab ulema and Mappila ulema in your book. How do you negotiate the three-dimensional development of Islamic pluralism along with a hierarchical interpretation of Islam (i.e. native vs. foreign)?

This is a really important question: clearly the binary between “foreign” and “local” Muslims is as problematic—-not to mention as false and as dangerous—-as that between a supposedly “authentic Islam” and a hybrid or syncretic faith. At the same time, we can’t simply elide the categories we encounter in the sources. Obviously, we find those crude dichotomies in European sources, for example in the Portuguese distinction between the “Moors of Mecca” and “Moors of the land.” But as my book shows, these identities were also very much at play within the Muslim merchant communities. Malabar’s ulama self-consciously promoted an Arabian ethnic identity to underpin their claims to status. This became one of the most prominent discursive projects that we can discern in the early sources. Then, in the sixteenth century, in the face of Portuguese aggression and the exodus of many Arab merchants, we see a refiguring of the ulama to project a more local, Mappila identity. We can even trace this shift within individual families, such as that of the famed Malabari scholar Zayn al-Dīn Makhdūm.

In Engseng Ho’s memorable image, Malabar’s Muslims were a community facing in two directions: on the one hand bound in complex relations with non-Muslim states and societies, and on the other engaged in intensive exchange with the wider trading world of the Indian Ocean and the Islamic cosmopolis. This duality means that it is misleading to speak simply of the ‘indigenization’ of a Muslim diaspora on the Malabar Coast. This is not to say that this process was not essential. It finds expression in such diverse phenomena as mosque architecture, changing compositions of the ulama, the development of new legal traditions, saint worship, and many other institutional and cultural facets. But it was taking place in conjunction with another dimension of interaction that linked them into networks of commercial partnership, economic institutions, religious learning, legal communitas, mysticism, political allegiance, and warfare. Monsoon Islam is the history of the interplay between these two dimensions in the economic, social, and political lives of Muslim merchant communities—it is the process of embedding global forces in local contexts, and vice versa. So, you’re absolutely right, we’re not looking at a binary or hierarchy, but rather at a multilayered and multidimensional exchange, which yielded distinct processes and outcomes for different communities, in different places, and of course also changed over time, with the sixteenth century as a particularly significant watershed.

Q. Your work’s objective, as highlighted by you, is to challenge the ‘static taxonomies’ that have dominated the study of history. In continuation of your objective, I am curious about the Eurocentric imagination of “piracy”. You briefly reflected upon the diverse perceptions of Mappila sailors as traders by local rulers but their simultaneous portrayal as “pirates” by Portuguese. Given your prior publications and the current monograph, how do you, epistemologically challenge the Eurocentric imagination of pirates in the Indian Ocean?

The brief mention of pirates in Monsoon Islam hints at a wider project I’m pursuing now, which examines the political dimensions of piracy in Asian waters. It challenges the conventional wisdom that Asian waters were great voids in indigenous political imagination and that Asian polities never regulated maritime space before the arrival of European empires. But as soon as we look at instances of maritime violence more closely, we quickly recognize its political dimensions, whether at the communal level or as part of rivalries and competing claims over trade routes and maritime spaces.

This realization forces us to reconsider the conceptual categories we have used to study and to develop new models for interpreting the role of piracy in Indian Ocean history. Situating Asian pirate communities within their local social and political settings highlights the severe shortcomings of projecting notions of legitimacy and sovereignty that are based on the European model of the modern nation-state back onto the premodern past. It shows that what European sources and historians have dismissed as mere piracy was, more often than not, the manifestation of the political contestation of trade routes and sea space by Asian potentates. The central aim of my project is not just to recover the voices and deeds of Asian seafarers, but to examine piracy as a historical category in the context of Indian Ocean history.

Accusations of piracy tend to accompany situations in which claims to sovereignty over maritime space are imposed, subverted, or openly contested. In this light, the study of piracy opens up questions about power relations, hegemonic practices, and permeable jurisdictions—questions that are at the heart of scholarly thinking about the emergence of the modern world order. In Asia as in Europe, the early-modern period was marked by a shift from fluid to more rigid parameters of social and political identity, from semi-private to public forms of warfare, and from personal to increasingly codified legal regimes. Recognizing that maritime violence was a crucial vector in all of these developments reveals the much-maligned pirate as a key player in the making of the early-modern world.

Veloso Salgado, Vasco de Gama before the Samorim of Calicut c.1498 (Vasco da Gama Perante o Samorim de Calecute), (c. 1898), oil on canvas, Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa  (Lisbon, Portugal), accessed from – Wikimedia Commons

Q. You state in your acknowledgement that this work is the product of 10 years of labor, the foundation of which was laid during your doctoral studies at SOAS. Given this work is a product of your dissertation, could you highlight the alterations and changes the dissertation went through to reach the stage of a popular monograph?

Yes, it took me a very long time to turn the dissertation into a book. Other projects intervened, as did life in general, but the greatest challenge was to conceive of the empirical findings put forward by my doctoral research in terms of a broader argument. Inspired by my earlier studies at the LSE, my doctoral work was originally conceived as a quite narrow economic history of the pepper trade. But coming to terms with the ways that trade diasporas functioned forced me to grapple with social history—as I said earlier, premodern long-distance trade was inherently social. Partnership and agency agreements forced me to look at Islamic law, and in particular the interpretations of Shāfi‘ī law that were produced by Muslim merchant communities like those on the Malabar Coast. Before long, I was thinking not just about commodities and markets but about personal networks, scholarly affiliations, legal schools, and the nature of diaspora communities. The whole time, though, I was plagued (if that is a word we can still use) by the scarcity of sources. I had so many questions, and very limited means to address them. For that reason, the dissertation was really focused on establishing an empirical basis, while the writing of the book was much more about the interpretation.

All of which is to say, it was a really haphazard process, with no clear or predetermined end in sight. Now that I’m in the position of advising graduate students myself, I inevitably apply hindsight in trying to derive some kind of lesson from my experience that I can pass on. But what my experience exemplifies, above all, is the immense privilege I’ve enjoyed, which allowed me to pursue this quest, to trace the evidence and figure out the ideas that eventually coalesced into Monsoon Islam. It takes the resources of many institutions, the trust and support of numerous people, and countless other perquisites to research and write a book. This is what I want to acknowledge most about the entire process, from dissertation to monograph.

Q. Your work intersects multiple fields in terms of maritime history, Islamic pluralism, religious studies, economic history, political-military studies of littoral areas etc. What would be the 5 key works that either reshape the field of analysis or help us better understand the field when read together with your work?

Here are five recent books I would feel very honored for Monsoon Islam to be read alongside with:

  • Islam Translated by Ronit Ricci (2011)
  • What is Islam? by Shahab Ahmed (2016)
  • A Sea of Debt by Fahad Bishara (2017)
  • Abraham’s Luggage by Elizabeth Lambourn (2018)
  • Across Oceans of Law by Renisa Mawani (2018)

Anuj Kaushal is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses upon Islamicate healing practices and traditional medical science in South Asia. His work seeks to study identity formation and gender relations in South Asia through medical print culture, private consumption habits, and pluralistic approach to sexology during the 19th-20th century.    

This is a revised version of an interview that appeared in https://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/xqs_xxii_-_a_conversation_with_sebastian_prange.html. With thanks to Chapati Mystery. Images reproduced with thanks from Sebastian Prange’s collection.

Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age, by Muhammad Qasim Zaman (2012)

October 10, 2016

by David Rahimi

coverStarting with the encounter with European colonialism and modernity in the eighteenth century, Muslims increasingly began to worry that Islam was beset by existential crises as Muslim countries slowly fell under colonial domination. Some thought Islam had stagnated and made Muslims weak; others said true Islam already had the answers to modernity. Consequently, many prominent Muslim intellectuals from the Middle East and South East Asia, like Rashid Rida, Shah Wali Allah, Muhammad Iqbal, ‘Ubayd Allah Sindhi, and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, insisted over the course of the next two centuries that Islam must in some way rediscover, renew, or reform itself to address the challenges of a changing world. This, of course, raised a host of questions. What needed to be reformed? How should reform be enacted? Who or what had the authority to decide such matters? Were these crises even real?

800px-miqbal4

Muhammad Iqbal was knighted in 1922, by King George V (via Wikimedia Commons)

Muhammad Qasim Zaman takes these concerns as his starting point to examine Muslim contestations of religious authority and “evolving conceptions of [Sunni] Islam” from the nineteenth century to the present day.” At its core, this is a story of inconclusive debates, ambiguity, and cyclical tension as old wounds reopen and close, as lay and traditional religious scholars (the ‘ulama) contest how Islam should be understood and lived. By tracing the contextualized debates of the modern ‘ulama in a comparative, transnational framework, Zaman shows the multifaceted dimensions of internal debate and how this fosters ongoing fragmentation of religious authority in Islam, despite efforts to the contrary. Disposing with an overall chronology or single narrative, Zaman divides his book into the following key thematic issues: religious consensus, ijtihad (i.e. independent analogical reasoning), the common good, religious education, the place of women in law and society, socioeconomic justice, and violence. The problems surrounding these issues have continuously resurfaced within Muslim intellectual and religious circles since the nineteenth century. What links these hot-button, yet seemingly disparate, topics together are the fundamental issues of religious authority, that “aspiration, effort, and ability to shape people’s belief and practice on recognizably ‘religious’ grounds,” and internal criticism among Muslims. Each chapter topic, then, serves as a vehicle through which to explore the interplay between authority and criticism, and what the consequences and implications are for Islamic thinkers and Muslims more broadly.

muslim_percent_population_v2-svg

Countries with Muslim-majority populations (via Wikimedia Commons).

The real world consequences of this battle over religious authority through internal criticism come across strongly in the chapter on violence. For example, the moderate Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the head of the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR), wrote in his 2008 magnum opus Jurisprudence of Jihad that jihad was only permissible in cases of defense. Zaman shows, however, that this opinion does not align with the majority of classical Islamic jurisprudence, to which Qaradawi claims to faithfully adhere. Furthermore, another prominent moderate, Taqi ‘Uthmani of the Pakistani branch of the Deobandi school, had previously rejected purely defensive jihad in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2009, ‘Uthmani reaffirmed this theory of offensive jihad, adding that it only applied, however, to “formal” Islamic states and not to individuals. This disagreement about jihad conveys Zaman’s central point that is replicated across the other chapters as well. The ‘ulama are active in articulating their views, but who or what holds ultimate authority to resolve these religious problems remains unclear, since even the theory of authoritative scholarly consensus is hotly contested. Ultimately, Zaman argues that greater attention must be given to religious authority as a relational concept, formed by the specificities of the context in which this authority is performed. Abstract authority not only comes into tension with authority as it is practiced in real life, but historical circumstances and individual beliefs shape how Muslims respond to or recognize religious authority. The ECFR, founded in 1997, exemplifies this tension, since on the one hand, it seeks to create a new authoritative consensus around a particular set of ‘ulama, yet on the other hand, it claims not to compete with the authority of the many non-affiliated ‘ulama. The unsettled nature of these debates, Zaman insists, results in an “authority deficit” and persistent fragmentation within Muslim intellectual and religious circles.

qaradawi_wih_free_syria_flag

Yusuf al-Qaradawi (center) in 2013 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age is a work of tremendous insight and compelling vignettes. The weakest portions are its introduction and conclusion, which both tend to be verbose and slightly disorganized. It is also unclear at moments whether the author intends to offer a strong overarching argument or to merely “open a new window onto the Muslim religious and public sphere” – one that forefronts debates among the ‘ulama. Thankfully, these are minor problems. While not meant for readers looking for an introduction to Islam, those hoping for a meticulously researched study of the internal religious dynamics of Sunni Islamic thought will find their expectations well met.

Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age: Religious Authority and Internal Criticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
bugburnt

You may also like:
Listen to 15 Minute History Episode 58: Islam’s First Civil War 
See our suggestions for Great Books on Islam in American Politics & History
Lior Sternfeld recommends Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn by Asef Bayat (2007)
bugburnt

Episode 82: What Writing Can Tell Us About the Arabs before Islam

April 26, 2016

In most world history survey courses, Arabia is introduced for the first time only as backstory to the rise of Islam. We’re told that there was a tradition of oral poetry in Arabic, a language native to central Arabia, and that the Qur’an was the zenith of this oral tradition. New evidence, however, suggests that Arabia was linguistically diverse, that the language we’ve come to know as Arabic originated in modern day Jordan, and that the looping cursive writing system that’s become the language’s hallmark wasn’t the original system used to write it. What to make of all this?

Guest Ahmad al-Jallad has spent the past several summers digging in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, uncovering new inscriptions thousands of years old, and shares his research that’s shedding new light on the writings of a complex civilization that lived in the Arabian peninsula for centuries before Islam arose.

Episode 58: Islam’s First Civil War

November 11, 2014

In 7th century Arabia, the Islamic community was nearly torn apart by a civil war over the assassination of the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan (d. 656), and the accession to the caliphate of Muhammad’s adopted son Ali, supported by Uthman’s assassins. The events of the first fitna, as it is known, are often portrayed as a struggle over the right to rule the Islamic community, but it was much more—a power struggle between Muhammad’s wife Aisha and Ali, and a dispute over who had the right to avenge the murder of Uthman.

In picking up where Episode 57 left off, guest Shahrzad Ahmadi describes this tragic turn of events that sent shockwaves through the nascent Islamic community, and that continue to reverberate today.

Carved in Stone: What Architecture Can Tell Us about the Sectarian History of Islam

September 1, 2014

by Stephennie Mulder

Syria – birthplace of civilization, home of the first alphabet and the earliest cities, land that bears the spectacular architectural imprint of empires from the ancient Hittites, to Alexander, to Rome, to the Ottomans  – is now a country synonymous with civil war, fanaticism, and unspeakable brutality. The stories coming out of contemporary Syria are horrifying and heartbreaking, and, we’re often told, have their roots, in part, in a primeval sectarian conflict between Islam’s two main sects, the Sunnis and the Shi’is. Sectarian conflict, it is said, has raged for 1,400 years, since the founding of Islam in the 7th century.  This truism is usually accepted uncritically by the media, is common in popular discourse about the Islamic world, and, as we’ve seen in recent months, is also one embraced by violent extremist groups like the Islamic State (IS), who use it to justify heinous acts of cruelty against minority groups. But it’s worth pausing for a moment to imagine how it would look if a similar narrative were applied elsewhere: if today’s tensions between, say, Turkey and Europe were said to stem from an ancient conflict between the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne and the Byzantine Empress Irene. Attributing modern sectarian conflict in the Middle East to events that transpired in the 7th century is every bit as nonsensical.

Mulder cover

One reason for the continuity of this narrative of unending conflict is that it’s a tale frequently told in the medieval Arabic texts themselves. In this version, the key moment was the Battle of Karbala in Iraq in AD 680, when Sunnis martyred al-Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and leader of the early group of Shi’i partisans, and took his head and his family members in chains back to Damascus, capital of the triumphant Sunni Umayyad Caliphate.  The Sunnis prevailed and the Shi’is became a persecuted minority, devoted to the Prophet’s family, which they marked by the proliferation of a culture of shrine building and veneration. Another pivotal episode in this text-based narrative occurred between the 11th and 13th centuries. The Arabic sources call this the era of “Sunni Revival,” for it saw the demise of the last Shi’i caliphate and the final entrenchment of Sunnism as the predominant sect in most regions of the Islamic world.

But architectural historians don’t rely only on texts alone, and in this case, the history of architecture in Syria reveals a somewhat different tale. If we let the buildings speak, some vivid contradictions to the familiar narrative arise. For example, we learn that the period of Sunni Revival in Syria was, counterintuitively, the one in which the largest number of “Shi’i” shrines were built, some 40 of which survive into the contemporary period. And, we find that these “Shi’i” shrines were endowed, patronized, and visited by both Sunnis and Shi’is: in many cases, by some of Islam’s most illustrious Sunni rulers. Far from being vanquished during the Sunni Revival, Shi’ism may well have been the dominant sect in northern Syria in the 11th-13th centuries.  Although episodes of conflict are certainly part of the sectarian history of Islam, it would seem there’s another tale too. Looking at architecture reveals an equally important past marked by cooperation and accommodation.

Magnificent 12th century shrine, Mashad al-Husayn, in Aleppo surrounded by modern buildings. The red-roofed structure in the shrine’s courtyard was built to provide shade for today’s pilgrims.

Let’s take as an example a shrine in northern Syria and read it through the eyes of an architectural historian. The building in question is the Mashhad al-Husayn, dedicated to the Prophet’s martyred grandson, who was also one of the Imams, the perfect and infallible religious leaders of the Shi’a. On aesthetic grounds alone, the Mashhad al-Husayn is one of the most spectacular buildings of the 12th-13th centuries, but despite its magnificence, it has rarely been studied. Imagine for a moment that Chartres Cathedral had been largely ignored by architectural historians, and you’ll get a sense of how peculiar this is. The reason probably has something to do with the fact that the standard, conflict-driven narrative had no room for the construction of such a monumental “Shi’i” building during the era of Sunni revival.

Interior, Mashhad al-Husayn

Interior, Mashhad al-Husayn

The story of this shrine begins in the year 1177, when a shepherd sat on a high hill overlooking the medieval city of Aleppo in northern Syria. His name was Abdallah and he was from a poor neighborhood of immigrants. Abdallah had just returned from the noon prayer at the mosque and, from his perch in the warm sun atop the mountain, he could see his sheep and hear their tinkling bells as they cropped the green shrubs and yellowing grass that grew down the hillside. On the horizon, inside the stout medieval walls newly rebuilt by the son of the great Saladin – the Sunni Muslim general who would soon recapture Jerusalem and evict the Crusaders from the Holy Land – the towering mass of the ancient fortified Citadel shouldered its way toward the sky. Below the Citadel, the vast, labyrinthine suq (market) sprawled for miles in colorful, chaotic splendor under shady, vaulted-stone passageways, testimony to Aleppo’s long history as a vibrant and cosmopolitan trade entrepôt, a key terminus of the Silk Route that linked China to the ports of the Mediterranean.

Citadel_of_Aleppo

Ancient Citadel, Aleppo (Memorino via Wikipedia)

In the heat of the afternoon, Abdallah began to doze off. As he slipped into a dream, he had a strange vision. Nearby, a man emerged from a cleft in the rock and ordered in a commanding voice: “Tell the people of Aleppo to build a shrine here and call it the Mashhad al-Husayn (a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad)!” Abdallah awoke, and, awestruck at the miraculous vision, dropped his shepherd’s staff and ran to the suq, where he began recounting the miracle and exhorting the city’s inhabitants to come build a shrine. Excited crowds quickly gathered and, inspired by the vision of the humble shepherd, organized themselves for the task. Within days, groups of volunteers were created, workdays were assigned, and soon, the merchants of Aleppo had arranged a surcharge on their goods to provide funding for the project. Not long afterwards, the shrine gained some more illustrious patrons. The mayor of the city of Aleppo himself built an elaborate portal and, a few years later, in 1196, that portal was torn down and replaced by an even more spectacular one built by Aleppo’s Sunni governor, al-Malik al-Zahir, the son of Saladin. Thus, even the Arabic textual sources reveal much that complicates the narrative of perpetual conflict. We learn, for example, that the shrine was an intra-sectarian project, and that it was built by elites and commoners alike. What more can we deduce using the methods of an architectural historian?

Portal of al-Zahir, Mashad al-Husayn

We can begin by observing some formal elements of the building. The portal built by al-Zahir was higher and taller than almost every other medieval architectural portal in Syria and it was ornamented with a particularly exquisite kind of radiating, inlaid-stone interlace pattern on the outer face, married with a complex type of three-dimensional, interlocking, faceted stone ornament called muqarnas on the interior. In other words, al-Zahir’s portal was a monument meant to awe and astonish. Above all, it was something that the Sunni ruler, al-Zahir, was proud to sponsor and build alongside the Shi’i residents of Aleppo, and as if to confirm this, he emblazoned his name over the entrance on a large, square foundation plaque. Thus we can already see that al-Zahir wanted to emphasize that through the process of its construction and ornamentation, the Mashhad al-Husayn became not a “Shi’i shrine,” but rather a monument to pragmatic cooperation centered on a sentiment shared by both sects: reverence for the Prophet’s family. Indeed, as if to drive the point home, al-Zahir left yet another inscription.

Detail, Inscription Praising Rightly-Guided Caliphs

Detail, Inscription Praising Rightly-Guided Caliphs

This one wrapped around the portal’s entrance façade and was located just under the heads of visitors entering the shrine. It bore a remarkable message, for it named the twelve Imams of the Shi’a alongside the four Rightly Guided Caliphs of the Sunnis, and, by using calligraphy of similar size and style and directly juxtaposing the two inscriptions, it visually equated the two groups of holy men. At the end, in clear, bold script, he wrote an unambiguously worded entreaty: “May God be pleased with all the Companions of His Prophet.” And with these words, al-Zahir carved in stone a sentiment that powerfully reflects the nuanced, negotiated sectarian history of Islam in Syria and elsewhere in the Islamic world.

bugburnt

Stephennie Mulder is Assistant Professor in the  Department of Art and Art History at UT Austin. This essay comes from her new book, The Shrines of the ‘Alids in Medieval Syria: Sunnies, Shi’is and the Architecture of Coexistence

Photographs are by the author, except where noted.

Further reading on the history of Islam and on sectarian co-existence in the Middle East may be found here.

Previous articles on Not Even Past on the history of Islam are listed here.

Medieval Islam and its Monuments

September 1, 2014

Want to learn more about the monuments, beliefs, and lives of medieval Islam?

Here are Stephennie Mulder’s suggestions for further reading.

Islambooks

Ross Burns, Monuments of Syria: A Guide

Ross Burns also has a website, Monuments of Syria, with a list of recently damaged monuments:

Alain Chenevière, Syria: Cradle of Civilizations

Jonathan Berkey, The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Near East, 600-1800

Yasser Tabbaa, Constructions of Power and Piety in Medieval Aleppo

Najam Haider, Shi’i Islam: an Introduction

Teresa Bernheimer, The Alids: First Family of Islam

Tariq al-Jamil, Power and Knowledge in Medieval Islam

Usama ibn Munqidh: The Book of Contemplation: Islam and the Crusades

Episode 51: Islam’s Enigmatic Origins

April 22, 2014

The story of Islam’s beginnings have been told and retold countless times. The traditional narrative says that the Prophet Muhammad, an illiterate orphan from the town of Mecca, became a prophet of God and founded a community that conquered much of the known world in little more than a century after his death. But what do we really know about Muhammad and the time in which he lived, based on historical evidence? How has this led some to reinterpret the origins of Islam?

Our guest, Fred M. Donner from the University of Chicago, has spent much of his career studying the earliest history of Islam. He offers his hypothesis on what the early Islamic community may have looked like, and describes an exciting new find that may shed new light on an old puzzle.

Great Books on Islam in American Politics & History

September 29, 2013

Four excellent books about Islam in modern western politics and history.

image

 Ziad Elmarsafy, The Enlightenment Qur’an: The Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam (2009).  A history of European translations of the Qur’an and their impact on such luminaries as Voltaire, Rousseau , Goethe, and Napoleon.

Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, A History of Islam in America (2010). A path-breaking survey of American Muslims, documenting their diversity and importance as citizens, from the colonial era to the present.

[Reviewed on Not Even Past by Reem Elghonimi here]

Andrew F. March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for An Overlapping Consensus (2009).  A political scientist’s “study of Muslim citizenship in non-Muslim liberal democracies as a religious problem for believing Muslims,” in which the author does identify an actual Islamic and liberal “consensus” about Muslim citizenship.

Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558-1685 (1998). A portrait of English intellectual, diplomatic, and military contact with Islam, including the first English translation of the Qur’an in the seventeenth century and the introduction from the Middle East of “the Mahometan berry,” also known as coffee, which resulted in the spread of coffee houses in London long before Starbucks.

Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject by Saba Mahmood (2004)

March 3, 2013

by Janine Jones

jones mahmoodPakistani anthropologist Saba Mahmood began her field research among Muslim women’s revival (da’wa, Arabic “call”) movements in Cairo in 1995 with a number of admitted preconceptions. An ardent feminist and leftist scholar, Mahmood assumed a certain degree of internalized subordination in women who find solace and meaning in deeply patriarchal traditions. Yet, over the course of two years listening to and learning from several religious revival groups run by da’iyat (female “callers”), she discovered an entirely different understanding of religious devotion. Her innovative ethnography of that time, Politics of Piety, sets out a new vision of feminist theory that re-examines the complicated, underexplored relationship between gender and religion from the perspective of women who participate within – as opposed to fight against – patriarchal systems. In doing so, Piety advances a new and timely approach to the study of ethics, identity, agency, and embodiment in post-colonial cultures.

Popularly accepted da’iyat are historically quite new. Concerns about possible gender-mixing improprieties and the belief that only men are intellectually and spiritually able to lead Muslim communities mean that, generally speaking, Islamic preaching and community leadership have been the prerogative of men alone. Female Islamic preachers arose as part of the resurgence of Islamic devotion that swelled region-wide in the Middle East beginning in the 1970s. They continued to gain popularity and acclaim as modern communications technologies facilitated women’s access to Islamic education. By the 1990s, Muslim women from different social classes and backgrounds, all interested in rediscovering their religious community’s rich traditions and ethical moorings, were regularly attending classes associated with local mosques, learning at the feet of dai’yat known for their moral rectitude and religious wisdom.

Mahmood describes Hajja Samira, a da’iya associated with a working-class mosque, and Hajja Faiza, a quiet, articulate Qur’anic exegete who teaches women from upscale neighborhoods, both of whom are deeply concerned with what they view as the modern abstraction of Islam into a private, personal affair that can be distinguished from other aspects of life. They teach their students to counter this secular division, emphasizing the “old Islamic adage: ‘All life is worship.’” Other da’iyat engage in lively debates with their students and each other about the purpose and function of the hijab, or Islamic headcovering.

image

“Marching Women,” a mural in Cairo dedicated to the women of the Egytian Revolution (Image courtesy of Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen)

Mahmood meets with students as well, interviewing participants in the mosque movement from all walks of life, educational levels, and philosophies. She notes the complex self-awareness with which many women seek to negotiate the conflicting claims of modern life and Muslim morality, including, for example, women whose work demands require them to participate in practices of dubious piety like transacting business with men or traveling in mixed-sex vehicles. Throughout, Mahmood observes that the wilting, oppressed Muslim woman of popular imagination is nowhere in sight. This is, in part, because the women of the urban women’s mosque movement are not primarily concerned with political equality or the implications of gender hierarchy. Rather than view their lives through a filter of political rights, they orient their understandings of self and role in terms of their obligations to God. Mahmood explores the intersection of that understanding with embodied practices, ethical issues, and personal identity, elaborating a theoretically dense and evocative approach to religion that will be useful to scholars in a variety of fields.

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order by Kambiz GhaneaBassiri (2010)

January 20, 2012

by Reem Elghonimi

In the last decade, the history of Muslims in America has come into its own and A History of Islam in America provides one of the most comprehensive and even-handed treatments of the subject.image Many previous studies breezily pit “Islam” against the “West.” Sidestepping the assumption that the two categories are essentially different, GhaneaBassiri studies the actual lived tradition of Muslims in America instead of second-guessing their compatibility.

America has been home to Muslims for a long time. Compelling stories come to the fore. Some Muslims arrived in the New World before slavery, like the adventurous sixteenth-century Moroccan cowboy and healer, Estevanico. Enslaved African Muslims sometimes resorted to private worship and remained active in their local communities. The story of Selim, an Algerian captive who petitioned for his freedom, is fascinating. Understanding his constraints, Selim converted to Christianity and, as a result, received economic and political benefits. He finally earned enough money to return to Algeria as a free man. Once there, he reverted to Islam.

Much past research about Islam in the West has focused on perceptions. For instance, Timothy Marr’s The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism and Susan Nance’s How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream: 1790-1935 study only non-Muslim Americans’ representation of Islam. But images of Muslims in literature and political propaganda are not the only sources at our disposal. The historical records of Muslim individuals and institutions show that in the past four hundred years, Islam and America have interacted and the relationship between the two has defined each. Islamic America, like the rest of American society, is not one uniform set of communities, practices or symbols, but it has nonetheless existed in different forms continuously on this side of the Atlantic.

American political, legal, and civic institutions have provided many ethnic and religious groups, not only Muslims, with opportunities for participation mixed with doses of exclusion. GhaneaBassiri tells us of Muslims who collaborated and challenged these norms through organizations of their own. In the period between the two world wars, Islamic community building took root in mosques and benevolent societies like the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam. Islam allowed black Muslims new tools for rethinking race, religion, and progress in the aftermath of World War II when optimism about human accomplishment waned. Civil Rights legislation offered opportunities for immigrant Muslims by declaring loudly that discrimination based on race would not be tolerated. A positive, if accidental, symptom of immigration reform was the realization that the Muslim community also struggled for self-reliance.

image

In the wake of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the popular American use of the term “Islamic terrorism” in place of “Arab terrorism,” Muslims in the United States continued to participate in activism. Optimistic that their adopted land gave them substantial socio-economic and political advantages, Muslims also realized that prejudice, like anything else, fades through interaction. Today, the juggernaut terms “Islamic terrorism and fundamentalism” are the focus of U.S. foreign policy rather than Cold War enemies. But at the same time, GhaneaBassiri believes that American Muslim objectives continue to show increased diversity. With a multiplicity of institutions, Muslim groups and organizations have ties to non-Muslim institutions and individuals. These relationships, bonds and experiences testify to a larger and more varied experience than merely cultural conflict. This book drives home the point that America’s historical encounter with Islam has not been a clash. But, as the author explains, we can only get our arms around it when we look at how Muslims actually lived on American soil.

image

Photo credits:

Marion S. Trikosko, “President Jimmy Carter greets Mohammad Ali at a White House dinner celebrating the signing of the Panama Canal Treaty, Washington, D.C., 7 September, 1977”

Library of Congress

Kamal al-Din, People Marching before the Iranian Revolution

Author’s own via Wikimedia Commons

You may also like:

Lior Sternfeld’s review of Erez Manela’s book about Woodrow Wilson and the origins of anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia.

UT Professor Yoav di-Capua’s blog post about political and social conditions in Egypt eight months after Mubarak’s ouster in February 2011.

Kristin Tassin’s review of Zachary Lockman’s 2004 book Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism.


Next Page »

Recent Posts

  • IHS Book Roundtable: Enlightenment and Geopolitics of Knowledge
  • IHS Workshop: “‘Honest, Clean, Industrious’: Working Class Respectability,” by Stefanie Shackleton, University of Texas at Austin
  • IHS Workshop: “Contested Customs: Reinventing Indigenous Authority in Ubaque, New Kingdom of Granada,” by Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez, University of Texas at Austin
  • River Depths, Bordered Lands, and Circuitous Routes: On Returning to South Texas
  • NEP Author Spotlight – John Gleb
NOT EVEN PAST is produced by

The Department of History

The University of Texas at Austin

We are supported by the College of Liberal Arts
And our Readers

Donate
Contact

All content © 2010-present NOT EVEN PAST and the authors, unless otherwise noted

Sign up to receive our MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

  • Features
  • Books
  • Teaching
  • Digital & Film
  • Blog
  • IHS
  • Texas
  • Spotlight
  • About