Islam, Civility and Political Culture 3030567605, 9783030567606

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
1: Introduction: Eschaton and Civility in Islamic History
1.1 Overview
1.2 Taha’s Understanding of Civility
1.3 The Polarity and the Binary in Religion and Politics: Further Theoretical Reflections
1.4 The Example of Ibn Khaldun’s Macro-History
1.5 Moses and Muhammad: Exemplars of the Eschaton
1.5.1 Moses
1.5.2 Muhammad
1.6 Closing Remarks on Introducing Relationships, Dynamics and Tensions
Works Cited
2: The Quandary of Modernity: Islam and Civility
2.1 Introduction
2.2 A Genealogy of the Problem of Islamic Civility
2.3 What Is (Not) Islam About: Phenomenological Clarifications
2.4 The Limits of Civility in the History of Islam
2.5 Quasi-Civility in the History of Islam
2.6 An-Naim and the Hermeneutics of Civility: A Case Study Test
2.7 Conclusion
Works Cited
3: Islamic Civility: Narrative, Habitus, and Institution
3.1 Introduction
3.2 The Horizons of Civility Beyond the Straits of Civil Society
3.3 Individual Autonomy and Private Interests
3.4 Adab and Hadith: Between Narrative and Habitus
3.5 Mild Institutionalization in the Islamic Ecumene
3.6 Concluding Remarks
Works Cited
4: Good Behaviour: Islam and Christianity as Framework for Religious Life
4.1 Introduction: Four Arguments Regarding Manners and Religious Life
4.2 Elaboration of the Contrast Between Christianity and Islam
4.3 Conclusion: Informalization and Amplification
Works Cited
5: Considerations in Hadith and Qur’an: Text and Interpretation in a Study of Civility
5.1 Introduction
5.2 The Concept of Rahma
5.3 The Concept of Al-ma‘ruf
5.4 The Concept of Adab
5.5 Qur’anic Norms of Behavior
5.6 Prophetic Norms of Interpersonal Behavior
5.7 Conclusion
Works Cited
6: The Limits of Islamic Civility in India
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Adab in Bahār-i ‘ajam
6.3 The Beginnings of Adab in India
6.4 Sufi and Juridical Discourses on Adab
6.5 Persianate Adab in India: The Literarization of the Vernaculars
6.6 Conclusion
Works Cited
7: Islam Divided: The Underlying Political Culture of the Conflict Between the Sunni and the Shi‘a
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Levels of Fundamental Difference
7.2.1 The Question About Religious and Political Authority
7.2.2 The Interpretive Issue
7.2.3 Socio-historical Aspects
7.3 Trajectories and Transformations
7.3.1 The Shi‘a
7.3.1.1 Phase I: A Protest Movement
7.3.1.2 Phase II: A Revolutionary Movement
7.3.1.3 Phases III–IV: From Establishing a Polity to Institutional Disillusionment
7.3.1.4 Phase V: Ideological Shi‘a
7.3.1.5 Phase VI: Political Shi‘ism
7.3.2 The Sunni
7.4 Phenomenological Reflections
7.5 Further Reflections on Historicity and Conflict Theory
7.6 Conclusion
Works Cited
8: The Paradox of Gendered Holiness in Islamic Mysticism
8.1 Introduction
8.2 Theoretical Framework
8.3 Contextualising Women in Islam
8.3.1 Interpreting Eve
8.3.2 Woman in Islamic Thought
8.3.3 Women in Islamic Law
8.4 Complexity and Controversy of the Woman in Islam
8.5 The Woman in Sufism
8.5.1 Sufi Women
8.6 Conclusion
Works Cited
9: Conclusion: The Prospect of an Eschatological Civility
9.1 Introductory Remarks
9.2 Comparing Distinctive Hierophanic Experiences
9.3 Benevolence, Status, Gender and … Jihad?
9.4 Closing Thoughts
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

NEW DIRECTIONS IN ISLAM

Islam, Civility and Political Culture

Edited by Milad Milani Vassilios Adrahtas

New Directions in Islam

Series Editors Joshua M. Roose Faculty of Arts and Education Deakin University Melbourne, VIC, Australia Bryan S. Turner Australian Catholic University and The Graduate Centre City University of New York New York, NY, USA

The New Directions in Islam series will promote creative ways of conceptualizing the practice of Islam in new, challenging contexts and present innovative and provocative interdisciplinary studies examining intellectual, political, legal, economic, and demographic trajectories within Islam. Although recognised as the world’s fastest growing religion, many Muslims now live in secular societies where Islam is a minority religion and where there is considerable social conflict between Muslim communities and the wider society. Therefore it is vital to engage with the multitude of ways by which Muslims are adapting and evolving as social and cultural minorities. How are they developing their faith in line with local and national customs? How are converts and subsequent generations adapting in these challenging contexts? This series moves beyond dichotomies about radicalism, citizenship, and loyalty evident in the proliferation of descriptive and repetitive studies of Islamophobia and Orientalism, which have become both negative and predictable. Rather, contrary to the perception of Muslims as victims of secular modernity, we are interested in ‘success stories’ of Muslims adapting in and contributing to society at local, national and even transnational levels, such as the case of Muslim middle classes in Canada, the United States, South Africa, and Argentina. This series will go beyond the geographic boundaries of the Middle East to examine Islam from a global perspective in vastly different contexts from Brazil to Vietnam and Austria to Papua New Guinea. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14746

Milad Milani  •  Vassilios Adrahtas Editors

Islam, Civility and Political Culture

Editors Milad Milani Western Sydney University Penrith, NSW, Australia

Vassilios Adrahtas Macquarie University Sydney, NSW, Australia

New Directions in Islam ISBN 978-3-030-56760-6    ISBN 978-3-030-56761-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56761-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image © Fahrul Azmi on Unsplash This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book came about as a result of a number of conversations with colleagues about the quandary of Islam in the modern age. In the course of discussions, we arrived at some basic points of investigation that would allow us a reasonable framework for analysis. One key point in this regard was the question of civility. Another, equally important point was the political culture(s) that drive religious activity in the social domain. I am particularly grateful to my co-editor, Vassilios Adrahtas, who is both a good friend and colleague, not least for his dedication to honest discussion and critical assessment of materials under scrutiny. My thanks must be extended to the editors of Palgrave’s New Directions in Islam Series, Bryan Turner and Joshua Roose, for seeing the value in this research and for their vision in seeing this work as a potential book. To Bryan I am especially beholden for his academic support and in his sharing a wealth of experience in the study of Islam. His work, in particular, has been an inspiration to this present volume. Indeed, we must also extend our gratitude to our colleagues and contributors who agreed to take on the challenge of writing on the said issues from their own fields of expertise. We thank Bryan Turner, Armando Salvatore, Aisha Musa, Prashant Keshavmurthy, and Marley Krok. To Armando Salvatore, a special thanks is due, since it is his published work on the topic of civility in Islam that was the stimulus for furthering v

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research and exploration, the kind with which we are preoccupied in this book. Finally, we are greatly appreciative of the hard work and dedication of the editorial and production team at Palgrave Macmillan, specifically to thank Poppy Hull, our editorial correspondent.

Contents

1 Introduction: Eschaton and Civility in Islamic History  1 Milad Milani 2 The Quandary of Modernity: Islam and Civility 17 Milad Milani and Vassilios Adrahtas 3 Islamic Civility: Narrative, Habitus, and Institution 43 Armando Salvatore 4 Good Behaviour: Islam and Christianity as Framework for Religious Life 65 Bryan S. Turner 5 Considerations in Hadith and Qur’an: Text and Interpretation in a Study of Civility 87 Aisha Y. Musa 6 The Limits of Islamic Civility in India105 Prashant Keshavmurthy

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7 Islam Divided: The Underlying Political Culture of the Conflict Between the Sunni and the Shi‘a131 Vassilios Adrahtas and Milad Milani 8 The Paradox of Gendered Holiness in Islamic Mysticism157 Milad Milani and Marley Krok 9 Conclusion: The Prospect of an Eschatological Civility181 Vassilios Adrahtas Index187

Notes on Contributors

Vassilios  Adrahtas is an Honorary Research Fellow at Macquarie University, Australia. He specializes in Early Christianity, Patristics, Byzantine Philosophy, Islamic Studies, and Indigenous Australian Religions. He has taught at a number of universities (University of Sydney, Macquarie University, University of New South Wales [UNSW], National University of Athens, Hellenic Open University) and has authored five books, as well as numerous book chapters and peer-reviewed articles. In the Greek-speaking world, he is considered an expert on religion and a leading figure in redefining the “Hellenic” in Australia. He is the president of the Sydney Branch of the International Society of Friends of Nikos Kazantzakis based in Geneva. Prashant  Keshavmurthy is Associate Professor of Iranian-Persian Studies in the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. He specializes in pre-modern Persian literature, especially of South Asia. He teaches courses on selfhood and autobiography, pre-­ modern Persian literary criticism, Persian literature, Indo-Islamic literatures and history, and Islamic political-philosophical and poetic trajectories of love. He is the author of Persian Authorship and Canonicity in Late Mughal Delhi: Building an Ark (Iranian Studies, 2016).

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Notes on Contributors

Marley  Krok is a Master of Research student at Western Sydney University, Australia. She received Bachelors of Laws and Theology from the University of Notre Dame, Sydney, with a Major in Biblical Interpretation and a Minor in Philosophy. She was invited on scholarship to study Near Eastern Archaeology and Hebrew at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. She completed seminary training in scriptural theology and later trained and served as an international minister in Japan for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Her research interests include comparative theology and the female experience of religion. Milad  Milani  is Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religion at Western Sydney University, Australia, specializing in Islamic history and Persianate Sufism. His research focuses on the juncture of religion, culture, society, and politics, and how this relates to reading Islamic history in modernity. He has written widely on Sufism in the medieval and contemporary world, and is the author of Sufism in the Secret History of Persia (2013) and Sufi Political Thought (2018). He is the executive officer of the Australian Association for the Study of Religion and vice president of the Association of Iranica in Australasia. Aisha Y. Musa  holds a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations with a specialization in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Harvard University, USA. Her research interests include Hadith and Sunna, translation of classical Arabic texts, and Qur’anic interpretation. Musa is the author of various books and articles, including Hadith as Scripture: Discussions on the Authority of Prophetic Traditions in Islam (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). She is secretary of the board of the North American Association of Islamic and Muslim Studies (NAAIMS) and serves on the Editorial Advisory of the Edinburgh Studies in Islamic Scripture and Theology by Edinburgh University Press. Armando  Salvatore is the Barbara and Patrick Keenan Chair in Interfaith Studies and Professor of Global Religious Studies (Society and Politics) at McGill University, Canada. He is a scholar of comparative religion and historical sociologist. He has taught and researched at Humboldt University of Berlin, National University of Singapore, Leipzig

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University, and Australian National University, Canberra. He is the author of The Sociology of Islam: Knowledge, Power and Civility (2016) and the chief editor of The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam (2018) and of The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of the Middle East (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Bryan  S.  Turner  is Research Professor of Sociology at the Australian Catholic University, Sydney, Australia; an emeritus professor at the Graduate Center CUNY; Honorary Max Planck Professor at University of Potsdam, Germany; and a research fellow at the Edward Cadbury Center, University of Birmingham, England. He is a member of the Advisory Committee to the Aga Khan University Institute for Global Health and Development. He holds a Cambridge Litt.D.  He recently edited (with J. Mackert and H. Wolf ) Urban Change and Citizenship in Times of Crisis (London: 2020, 3 volumes).

1 Introduction: Eschaton and Civility in Islamic History Milad Milani

1.1 Overview This book examines the theme of civility, as well as the related idea of political culture, in the Muslim world with the aim of identifying and explaining how they have been understood in the past and up to the present time. Each chapter focuses on a specific period and deals with distinct Islamic perspectives, offering a systematic, comprehensive and interdisciplinary exploration of the theme(s) under discussion. Lastly, the project aims at satisfying the need to approach and assess the political aspects of Islam in as much an integrated manner as possible by bringing together insights from a range of disciplines, namely, history, political science, sociology, religious studies, anthropology and Islamic studies. The study of Islamic civilisation has been a central topic of concern for several decades, highlighted by Marshal Hodgson’s three-volume work The Venture of Islam (1974). Other notable works that treat the subject on

M. Milani (*) Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 M. Milani, V. Adrahtas (eds.), Islam, Civility and Political Culture, New Directions in Islam, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56761-3_1

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a grand scale are the encyclopaedic effort of Ira Lapidus’ A History of Islamic Societies (1988) and Bryan S. Turner’s thematic study The Sociology of Islam: Collected Essays of Bryan S. Turner (2013). The theme of civility, however, had not been thoroughly treated within the context of Islam until very recently, when the inquiry into the subject was spearheaded by Armando Salvatore in his extensive study Sociology of Islam: Knowledge, Power and Civility (2016). Yet, the subject still requires greater attention, especially with regards to its development from a historical point of view. There are also areas of examination in relation to civility and the cognate concepts of the political and cultural that require further systematic exploration, such as Shi’a thought, literary culture, the Sufi and falsafa. One major concern of the project is to bring forward the nuanced debates around the problem of the relationships, dynamics and tensions that are seen as either existing or perceived between the religious/sacred and the socio-political/secular in the Muslim world. Although Islam has not historically demonstrated an overt tension between such paradigms in the way that they have been problematised in Christianity, this project aspires to argue that these very same tensions have become—especially in modernity—quite pertinent (and possibly even of an urgent nature) to Islam in the current socio-political context. The chapters in this book are arranged thematically and in a broad chronological sequence. Each chapter will to some extent deal with both historical and contemporary expressions of civility and political culture in Muslim societies. The first chapter, also the introduction, addresses the historical and theoretical aspects of the abovementioned tensions, looking closely at Taha’s ‘second message of Islam’ and Ibn Khaldun’s theory of civilisations (asabiyya), and a revisiting of the prophetic missions of Moses and Muhammad as two case study examples. Chapter 2 will showcase the present quandary of Islam in modernity with a view to its historical conditioning and present imagining. Chapter 3 touches on broad concerns about the alternative presented by Islamic religiosity with regards to modes of institutionalised civility. Chapter 4 has a strong comparative focus as it traces civility across Christendom and the Islamicate coming up to its conceptualisations in the West and modernity. Chapter 5 examines the hermeneutic and interpretive articulation of civility through a textual analysis of the Islamic canon. Chapter 6 explores

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medieval to modern elements of civility in the court culture of the subcontinent. Chapter 7 addresses the distinctive character of the political phenomenology of Shi’ism by studying the successive transformations of Shi’ite political engagement. Chapters 8 and 9 examine the quintessential ‘flashpoint’ of gender in the context of the modern values of democracy and human rights (Shepard 2014, p. 342); in fact, the question of gendered holiness goes to the heart of the dilemma of Islam and civility, and this final chapter addresses the issue in terms of the paradox of gender in Islamic mysticism. The issues raised in this book are also examined with an eye to the parallel roles of the interpretive and dogmatic modes that pervade the intellectual history of Islam. These (often unobserved activities) continue to determine Muslim sociality and politicality. That is to say, it is a question of how the different styles of thinking shape Islamic social and political engagement. This also has ramifications for views to ‘orthodoxy’ as a central debate when attempting to define Islam’s relationality to civility and political culture(s). Careful consideration is therefore given the processes of Muslim intellectualisation and rationalisation of significant events in Islamic history so as to discern the way that Muslims, as agents of history, play a direct role in shaping their future through their relationship to the past. Long have Muslim ideologues projected onto the past the utopian dream of socio-political unification. Likewise, they have sought to replicate past circumstance for present gain. Yet, is this a notion best retired? Common as it may be, should not such a truly outmoded framework (and not just in the sense of what is presently in vogue amongst academics) be abandoned for better alternatives? One alternative—albeit, a radical, hermeneutical one—that offers a genuinely original and critical rigour was proposed by Mahmoud Muhammad Taha (1909–1985), whose legacy was introduced to the English-speaking world and is carried by Abdullahi Ahmed an-Na’im (Taha 1987). Consequently, there are important currents of continuity and discontinuity in a discourse of past and present relations—that is, the question of Muslim historicality—that have generated certain kinds of ‘salvific’ discourse both within the Muslim world and in the diaspora.

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1.2 Taha’s Understanding of Civility Taha held that social equality grew out of economic and political equalities and that the former was not only the greatest challenge for societies but also ‘the crowning achievement of the civilizing process’ (Mahmood 2007, p. 176). He situated this process at the core of ‘man’s moral evolution from a lower, coercion-oriented moral sense and conduct to a higher, justice-oriented moral sense and conduct’ (Mahmood 2007, p.  176). Civility was therefore the highest good, in social terms, that could be cultivated by Muslims if they adhered to the ‘second message of Islam’ (Mahmood 2007, p. 177). Simply put, Taha proposed a revival of the Meccan revelations that carried the spiritual/ethical message of Islam that Muhammad had originally intended to impart but was unable because of the circumstances of the time. This ‘second message’ represented ‘ultimate Islam’ that is timeless. The ‘first message’ of Islam, therefore, pertained to a lesser but necessary Islam, one that came to be defined in a fixed time period: Muhammad’s pax Islamica in Medina. What tradition has misconstrued, he argued, is that the first message of Islam is passed off as the definitive Islam. The ‘true’ and ‘natural’ religion that is with God (i.e., the fully disclosed Islam) and that ultimately brings humanity to God is the essential and eternal features of the second message (Mahmood 2007, pp. 144, 177). Proof of this for Taha was that which is legally binding is inferred from divine attitude (Mahmood 2007, p.  158). Meaning that the legal and ritual aspects of the religion are secondary to its spiritual and ethical aspects. Thus, the superiority of the second message would then follow based on what were the highest virtues of Islam that could not be instilled in fullness until a later time. Taha imagined that the full realisation of Islam’s essential qualities would then be translatable—and not contestable—in the modern context, since what was thought to have been ‘modern’ values (i.e., social—including gender—equality, democracy, freedom of individuals) were Islamic all along. As such, Taha touches on several important points of tension that are important to our discussion regarding the relationality of past and present ideas of religion as they play out in the modern setting. He

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maintained that Islam was understood on two levels: the essential and the subsidiary, which corresponded to the ‘higher’ and the ‘lower’ parts of the Qur’an, relating to the Meccan and Medinan periods; he also teased apart a crucial difference between al-mu’minun and al-muslimun (the believers and the Muslims), reserving the latter for those who had attained to true Islam. Thus, ‘Muslims’ proper were distinguished from those of their brethren who went by this name as part of their religious identity, but were in fact merely ‘believers’ as per the verse 39:14 of the Qur’an. Key to Taha’s thinking is the gradual process by which Muslims are perfected in their Islam, starting from a legal/ritual and moving toward the spiritual/ ethical in an upward spiral. Taha’s authentic Islam was already inlaid with the values of democracy, equality and freedom. And it was a matter of time before Muslim societies would arrive at that level of civic existence. Interestingly, Taha’s view presents a socialistic, communistic and Marxist view, albeit at the heart of which are God and religion. This is because he believed that their core values were the fundamental features of Islam, which Muhammad taught. Here we touch on some critical points that also highlight the problematics dealt with in this book, namely, that Taha himself embodied this tension between the Eschaton and civility. He was sympathetic of the Marxist position, but saw it as ultimately flawed because of its perceived atheism. Similarly, he was drawn to Western Liberalism because of its advocacy for democracy and individual freedom, but nevertheless saw the West as failing in its promise for equality and, above all, peace. While he believed the West functioned without a moral compass in its capitalist conquest for economic domination, Communism and Marxism were not its genuine correctives, since they were beset by godlessness. Both had failed to produce true equality, freedom and peace. To him, Islam was the answer, but not without radical change. Historical/traditional Islam had to be left behind through re-embracing ahistorical/essential Islam. The only viable outcome for civilisation—where economic, political and social equalities are truly met without coming into conflict with individual freedom—is when it complies with the highest degree of Islam.1 Whilst Taha’s view on Islam as the solution to civilisational decay opens up interesting ways through which one might reconsider Islam in the light of modernity, this does have several significant drawbacks. To be

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sure, some of the latter have been resolved in the development of his ideas in the works of his former student an-Naim. Suffice it to say, the objections are merely technical in nature and not considered as undermining the integrity of his overall arguments, which stand to reason, regardless of how contentious they may be. There are two main parts to his thesis on Islam in relation to civility: historical and modern Islam and Islam as the answer to the challenges faced by humankind in modernity. The first, namely, Taha’s idea to distinguish seventh-century context from present-­ day application of the religion is novel. The problem is that, in order to allow the thesis to make sense, he has to reinterpret the past and reconfigure the nature of Islam extensively. In principle, this raises considerable historiographical concerns, but perhaps less so from an objective standpoint and in relation to his fundamental re-reading of the canon. This is because his hermeneutics—however controversial—is, nevertheless, grounded in a heuristics for social change. The other concern relates to the reading of modernity by Taha and, leaving aside his (mis-)readings of the Marxist position, what he sees to be the failure of Western civilisation to achieve its goal of peace. On one level, his view rightly reflects the political discourse of the era to which he belonged; but the extent to which it faithfully characterises the role of Western powers in terms of geopolitics—in particular relating to the Middle East—is debatable. That he asserts Islam (and not Capitalism, Communism or Marxism) as the source of human salvation brings into sharp focus the problems relating to Islam and civility in this book.

1.3 T  he Polarity and the Binary in Religion and Politics: Further Theoretical Reflections The history of religion, broadly conceived, touches on the problematics of the phenomenology of the sacred and the profane—that is, it presents numerous accounts about how that which is other is perceived as manifest in the familiar. By extending this relationship between the sacred and the profane to the monotheistic religions (i.e., the Judaic, Christian and

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Islamic), certain subsidiary (and abstract) polarities can be extrapolated for the purposes of analysis. The primary polarity that is of central concern to this book is that between the Eschaton and civility, while related polarities are such as religion and politics, and revelation and reason, all of which—within the context of this study—fall under the banner of Islam and civility. In general terms, the context of the Islamic world is uniquely different to the traditional Christian world setting, in which religion is made categorically to stand ambiguously, if not opposed, to politics, science, individualism and rationalism. Islamic intellectual history develops along the lines of a balance (and sometimes even a fusion) of the religious and the worldly, wherein there is not a polarity of thought between ‘religious thinking’ and ‘political thinking’, since Muslim civilisations do not evolve along a trajectory of separation of Church and State. Therefore, the assertion made is that in the Islamic context religion can be found to be at odds—though not opposed—to civility in the course of that history. The Muslim relationship to the worldly is in many ways akin to historical Israelite religion in that it too has in the past strived to shape the world with which it has come into contact. This is to make a broad statement about the modern logic of Muslim/eastern-cum-­ religionism and Christian/western-cum-scientism mindsets—the latter observed as being prone to dualistic categorisations: religion and politics, religion and science, and religion and rationality. Generally speaking, the binary thinking of the former tends toward geosocial and geopolitical discords such as ‘East’ versus ‘West, ‘Islam’ versus Capitalism, Islam versus Communism and so on and broadly captured as religion positioned against materialism, consumerism and corporatism. Contrasting religion and civility, as proposed here, is admittedly a crude distinction. It is, however, one that is theoretically necessary in order to underline the relationship between the two, in the first instance and also, subsequently, in terms of how they are prioritised throughout Islamic history to serve varying purposes at different points of the civilisational timeline. Fundamentally, the point about Islam as a historical phenomenon is that it is representative of a religious tradition that is intensely engaged with the world, that is, society and politics, for the purpose (to be blunt) to dominate it, subdue it and make it Islamic. Indeed, ‘[o]ne qualification which must be stressed is that Islam is not a

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political religion, but a religion that is or may become politically engaged’ and it is certainly in the early phase of its history ‘a religion that has historically seen political power as part of its religious project’ (Milani and Cottle 2018, p. 374). As will be expanded on at length in the subsequent chapter, the mission of Muhammad is one that is defined by the mood of the Eschaton, as conveyed in the early revelations at Mecca—having the full sense of a religious project to sacralise the world. What is encountered, however, later on, by the ninth-century Abbasid era, among the early falasifa (‘the Muslim Philosophers’) is an effort to reconcile religion to civility—though never losing sight of that initial eschatological mood. Throughout the course of Islamic history there are two currents—in view of Hodgson’s categorisation (‘Islamic’ and ‘Islamicate’)—which represent the Muslim civilisational agenda and the religious enterprise. The basic point herein is to assert that Muslims did not perceive a conflict of interest between civilisational pursuits and their religious identity, and that this only changes with the decline of the State across the Islamic world (due to the rise of the European powers through expansion and commerce and ultimately ‘the West’).2

1.4 T  he Example of Ibn Khaldun’s Macro-History Before we turn to our exemplary case studies for the purposes of setting the scene, it is important to pause and consider the historical-sociological theory of Ibn Khaldun on the political state of Islam at his time. This relates to civility in an indirect manner, but still in a way which is implicitly significant to any discussion of civility in the Muslim world. We reference Ibn Khaldun’s theory in order to further contextualise the notion of civility in Islamic political thought, but more specifically to underline the process of its coming to the awareness of Muslim statesmen. Ibn Khaldun provides the possibility for a conversation about civility in the Muslim world, and it is precisely because of his theorising that we can consider the notion of a ‘proto-civility’ in the pre-modern era (this problem will be taken up in the next chapter). Ibn Khaldun makes

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available this notion to us specifically through his insight into Islamic revelation, within which, he says, the seed of civilisation is contained. As such, he understands that the statutes of worldly dominion (mulk) are part and parcel of Sharia (Ibn Khaldun 1989, p. 95). For us this is clearly stipulating that the absence of ‘civility’ is only in form, since it is inherent to revelation, but it would become divulged through the activity of the Islamic polity in a state of political dominion. Ibn Khaldun outlines a transitional historical process about this, whereby the world which has had natural dominion or non-religious polity is suddenly interrupted by the arrival of Islamic revelation. Here, in this stage, ‘proto-civility’, though not overtly mentioned, is self-contained in the content of revelation. What follows, he says, is a period when the Islamic polity and natural polity are intermixed, that is, the religious adjusts to the worldly and the worldly appropriates the religious. The final stage is where the two separate and natural dominion becomes the normative expression of authority (Ibn Khaldun 1989, p.  98). Ibn Khaldun reflected on the historical process of the state of Islam from the time of the Prophet and he conceded that the Caliphate (i.e., the Deputyship) was, like all social phenomena, similarly subject to socio-­ political decay. This falls perfectly within his ‘cyclical’ vision of history regarding the fate of all human civilisations, and although Ibn Khaldun never used the term ‘proto-civility’ the idea is prevalent in his theoretical outline of the problem of governance in his era. Though a pragmatic man by all accounts, his answer is nevertheless quasi-utopian in that he places tremendous hope in the fact that the kings or sultans who have worldly power are after all Muslim, and thus obligated to the requirements of Sharia, even if to a lesser degree than the ideal. So he thought that their accountability to Sharia, to whatever degree, would ensure the right conduct for the right outcome in managing the State. What is surprisingly refreshing about Ibn Khaldun is that he is soberly aware of the fact that although the offices of the government were agreed to be, in his time, subordinate to the Caliph, he understood that there was no actual Caliph in office at that time (Ibn Khaldun 1989, pp. 188–221, 232–242). This meant that Ibn Khaldun relied on a systemic approach to ensuring the posterity of Islamdom as a civilisation, a

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theory that was squarely based on Sharia as the backbone of society in terms of what we come to call civility. It is important to note that while Ibn Khaldun accepted the organic presence of non-Islamic dominion, for instance that of Persia and Byzantium, this was for him defined as ‘natural dominion’, which meant that the experience and quality of hierophany was reserved only for the religious dominion, namely, Islam. In a careful reading of his Muqaddima it becomes clear that Ibn Khaldun made a conscious distinction between the secular and the sacred through the natural and religious forms of governance and authority. As such, and crucially, Ibn Khaldun’s separation of natural polity and Islamic polity is predicated upon the deeply held view that the latter sprang forth from the sacred, while the former was utterly devoid of it. Ibn Khaldun’s theory of politics, whilst an unprecedented endeavour in historical and social scientific writing in the Muslim world, and whilst pragmatic and methodical, is ultimately weighed down by the gravity of the epistemological framework of the Eschaton from which he could not escape.

1.5 M  oses and Muhammad: Exemplars of the Eschaton What has hitherto been theoretically explained has its genesis in the case of Moses and Muhammad. Each presents the fundamental point about the impact of the eschatological message of religion in the face of the civilisational situation. In the following, the point is made about the tension between the Eschaton and civility, where the elements of traditional narrative (the Shemot and the Sira) are drawn on for the purposes of its demonstration. It should be pointed out that for the Islamic tradition, as well as for the Christian, Moses is a pivotal figure, highly regarded, comparable and a precursor as the lawgiver.

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1.5.1 Moses It is to the central point of the story of Moses as lawgiver that we turn. Moses is discovered by the daughter/wife3 of the Pharaoh and raised in their household as an Egyptian. Yet knowing of his heritage and seeing the plight of his ‘brethren’ (Exodus 2:11), he is moved to act in the killing of an Egyptian, having subsequently to flee to another place because the Pharaoh wanted to kill him. In these initial pages of the Shemot the tension that has been pointed out is clear: the Pharaoh’s order to kill all the ‘male born’ of the Hebrew (Exodus 1) is contrasted with God’s command to deliver His people from ‘the hand of the Egyptians’ (Exodus 3:8). As is known, Moses’ return to Egypt as God’s herald to demand the Pharaoh ‘to obey His voice’ (Exodus 5:2) and to free the Hebrew is met with refusal and then followed by a series of plagues upon Egypt as retaliation that ultimately bring the Pharaoh to yield. Herewith the fundamental at-odds-ness—though not opposed-ness—between the Eschaton and civility is made evident. The three following sections of the Shemot demonstrate the dominion of the Eschaton unto civility. Firstly, the revelation event of Moses-as-­ lawgiver sets the course for a renewed civil engagement that is aligned with the will of God (i.e., through the worship of and by following the law of God) and is revealed in the form of the Decalogue. This, the Law of God, is the example of a form of sanctioned ‘religious’ civility as defined by the Eschaton. Secondly, God’s raising of the Israelites as His chosen people and setting them against the Canaanites who are not the people of God (and are, as such, fair game) presents the example of the Eschaton prospering in the face of what is seen by the God of Israel as non-sanctioned ‘irreligious’ civil order that needs to be rectified. Lastly, the Israelites incurring the wrath of God, for example, due to their abandonment of Him in their transgression of making an idol in the image of a golden calf (Exodus 32) would be an example of the internal and periodic punishment of those in the community of God when they go (or are led) astray.

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1.5.2 Muhammad The revelatory narrative of Judaic and Islamic tradition would be perfectly aligned if ‘the Prophet’ prophesied by Moses (Deut. 18:15) were Muhammad. In the Qur’anic narrative, at least, Moses and Muhammad are shown to be parallel as prophet-messenger-lawgiver. Indeed, the continuity between the Israelite religion and Islam is palpable. The next chapter will elaborate on the advent of Muhammad’s mission further, but here is a summary to make the point clear. The life of Muhammad, generally recounted from the Sira, conveys a sequence of events which transform the civil norm of Arabian Hijaz (Mecca/Medina [Yathrib]) to the Muslim stronghold it becomes through the seventh century. Yathrib, the city to which Muhammad is invited to arbitrate on behalf of its warring tribes—result of a longstanding feud between the two principle Arab families (Banu Aws and Banu Khazraj) to whom the three Jewish tribes were allied differently (Banu Nadir and Banu Qurayza were with the former and Banu Qarquna with the latter)—becomes the ‘City of the Prophet’ (medinat an-nabi). In the course of his prophetic mission (and as the recipient of divine revelation), which lasted 23 years—13 of which was spent in Mecca and 10  in Medina—Muhammad’s proclamation upset the Arab traditions and way of life. As master of Medina, the first Islamic state, the civic order is reformulated in alignment with God (under the Contract of Medina) (Guillaume 1955, p. 231). What transpires is the renewal of Arabia in God through Shariah—God’s Law. Muhammad thus leads the new community of the people of God, and subsequently the (one and only) version of a sanctioned ‘religious’ civility defined by the (true) Eschaton.

1.6 C  losing Remarks on Introducing Relationships, Dynamics and Tensions In his ‘history’, Ibn Khaldun outlines the unfolding of the sacred in the profane, doing so in order to demonstrate the necessary cycles of human civilisation as predetermined by the human condition. The rise and fall of

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civilisations is symptomatic of the human weakness to abide by God’s Law; and thus humanity and, by extension, civilisations continually suffer the rise and fall of their civic state due to these (unavoidable) episodes of godliness and ungodliness. Ibn Khaldun’s sociology is nihilistic about the fate of Islamdom in that Muslim governance is ultimately unable to adhere to Sharia because of its being entrenched in the worldly and by virtue of its worldly entanglement unable to be fully restored to the sacred. It is worth noting that he makes this judgement from within the system for which he worked as a ‘civil servant’ and during the imperial era of Muslim dominance. Conversely, Taha lived under colonial rule and was executed under an Islamist dictatorship. As a Muslim progressive but also an apologist for the conservatism of tradition, he embodied the balance of these forces in taking his stand. The revivalist project of Taha more specifically addressed the palpable challenge faced by Islam in modernity regarding the loss of freedom and democracy, advancing the potential for an alternative to his brethren and countrymen. This alternative put the spotlight on the role and place of the individual as the agent of the good in society, having the State as the guardian of the freedoms of the individual. The failure of the guardianship of the State, as the medieval ideal, in Ibn Khaldun’s observation of history—that is, the failure of the hope for a virtuous State because of a virtuous ruler—is precisely what Taha had avoided in turning to the individual in underpinning redemption as a modern ideal. But this was not in his view of modern at all, but rather originated (and we dare say anachronistically) with the unfulfilled—and overlooked aspect of—revelation to Muhammad. Taha’s radical hermeneutics overrides the historical narrative with a theological one that seeks to rescue elements of the religious past from the confines of traditional perspective; notwithstanding, his move for a paradigm shift does not escape the problem of dichotomy that nevertheless remains in the form of Taha’s undermining of all forms of non-Muslim civil order. Indeed, the gravitational pull of the historical precedent of the prophetic missions of Moses and Muhammad is inescapable for any modern Muslim thinker. Their example is, in and of itself, enough to demonstrate the weight of the eschatological message upon the social order, then and now. Yet we seek to problematise the potentiality of the Eschaton in

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civility by reference to both Ibn Khaldun and Taha, which is to say that as embodiments of its message, Moses and Muhammad were the exemplars, though their communities and companions were less than exemplary. Moreover, the question about the failures or successes of the Muslim state, both as ideal and reality, pivots on some basic questions about successorship and interpretation. How fixed is the tradition to which the figureheads are made to appear as bound by its adherents? What was the intention of these figureheads for the future generations when they were gone? A point that should not be overlooked is that Islamic history is almost unilaterally read as a story of successorship under whose legitimate guardianship interpretation is validated. One could, and should, however, inquire, in the light of both Ibn Khaldun and Taha, whether what was left to the community was in fact an inheritance to be developed over time by virtue of individual membership and not by way of the handing over of, and the subservience to, a singular individual. Was Muhammad the exception in this case as the interim guardian until such time that the community had matured to a level of spiritual awareness to understand the cardinal message of Islam? In the next chapter this issue about the quandary of modernity is taken up in discussing Islam and civility, key aspects of which are explored at length and with reference to an-Naim who works to apply them in the reform of Sharia in the modern context.

Notes 1. For further discussion on this, see Mahmood (2007, ch. 5). 2. For in-depth discussion on these issues and their corollaries, consult Milani (2018, pp. 38–63). 3. Exodus notes ‘daughter’ (2:5), while Qur’an has ‘wife’ (28:9).

Works Cited Guillaume, A. 1955. The Life of Muhammad. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Khaldun, Ibn 1989. The Muqadimmah: An Introduction to History. Trans. Franz Rosenthal and Rev. and Abridged N.J.  Dawood. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Mahmood, M.A. 2007. Quest for Divinity: A Critical Examination of the Thought of Mahmud Muhammad Taha. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Milani, M. 2018. Sufi Political Thought. London: Routledge. Milani, M., and D. Cottle. 2018. Quest for Justice: Islamism, Social Justice, and Civility in Islamic History. Journal of Religious and Political Practice 4 (3): 368–388. Shepard, W.E. 2014. Introducing Islam. 2nd Ed. Abingdon: Routledge. Taha, M.M. 1987. The Second Message of Islam. Trans. and Introduction Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

2 The Quandary of Modernity: Islam and Civility Milad Milani and Vassilios Adrahtas

2.1 Introduction The discussion about civility and civil society is a growing one in Western/ global legal, political, and sociological discourse (e.g., Davetian 2009; Balibar 2015; Hefner 2018). The issue, though, is just how relevant is such a development to non-Western situations and worldviews. For example, would one be justified in ascribing such concerns to Islam/ Islamdom, either in history or in the present? This chapter will address the issue with regard to the early history of Islam and with a view to the scriptural narrative. However, Armando Salvatore will examine the same concerns in relation to the pre- and early modern Islamicate world, paying attention to the civilizational narrative, in particular. One can understand the importance of the discourse about civility or even civil M. Milani (*) Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] V. Adrahtas Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia © The Author(s) 2021 M. Milani, V. Adrahtas (eds.), Islam, Civility and Political Culture, New Directions in Islam, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56761-3_2

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society in the present state of social affairs, as well as the concomitant need of drawing into its orbit as much human experience as possible, but this in itself does not entail that there are no unresolved tensions at play. This is not to say that civility is incommensurable or incompatible with Islamic ways of living, but that it is not a historical given or a self-evident expression of contemporary Muslim sociality. Therefore, the present chapter will attempt to clarify the issue, weigh the evidence put forward in defence of Islamic civility, trace and evaluate possible other grounds of substantiation, and finally present the thinking of Abdullahi Ahmad an-­ Naim (1990, 2008, 2010) as a pertinent case study.

2.2 A  Genealogy of the Problem of Islamic Civility It is inconceivable, to say the least, to think of (an) Islamic (sense of ) civility prior to the colonial and post-colonial periods. The socio-political experience we broadly call “civility” is simply part and parcel of a Lebenswelt that first emerged during the “Age of Enlightenment”.1 But if the issue of Islamic civility constitutes a genuine concern (Hefner 2011)—and it certainly does—the question that should guide our exploration is as follows: What exactly are Muslims drawing upon with regards to their Islamic past whenever they attempt to formulate a sense of civility? This is a rather daunting question, since it seems that the advent of Islam brought about the end of the Greco-Roman cosmosystem that was socio-politically based precisely on the most cherished civil imaginary of the Enlightenment: the societas civilis, the res publica, and the polis.2 Furthermore, while asking a general question about Muslims is quite convenient, providing a general answer cannot escape the accusation of being unwarranted. In other words, one has to turn to specifics. At the very start, one should consider who are the Muslims espousing an experience of civility or, at least, promoting a sense of civility. Presumably these are the so-called Modernist Muslims, that is, those who according to Milani (2018, pp. 6–8) come under the moderate, reformist, or liberal progressive sub-types and are either secular or revisionist in

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terms of attributes. Figures involved in the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms and explicitly modernist thinkers such as al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, Rashid Rida, al-Mawdudi, and Sayyid Qutb would suffice to show that the Islamic discourse on civility comes from a number of dispersed geopolitical centres—each one of them reflecting different social concerns and demands—and thus should not be treated in a homogenous or even sweeping manner. What is even more important is to acknowledge that the very elements that have been evoked in the most recent cases for Islamic civility (cf., Salvatore 2016), namely, the practices of tasawwuf, adab, and waqf, are either not referred to or remain marginal in the work of the aforementioned modernist instances. On the contrary, the references that actually come up consistently and repeatedly in the work of Islamic modernist thinkers with regards to civility belong to a different set of concerns. The most prominent amongst them are features of the Islamic social, cultural, and intellectual makeup, such as shura (agreement in common/consultation), maslahah (common good), ijtihad (effort/interpretation), insaniyya (humanity/humanism), ummah (community), mizan (balance), and i’tidal (moderation/temperance). Another aspect of Islamic modernism that is especially noteworthy relates to the fact that this was not some kind of detached academic exercise in social theory, but in effect an intellectual movement of politically engaged figures aiming at concrete and urgent social change. In other words, modernists deemed their own Islamic societies as lacking but at the same time capable of accommodating aspects of modernity—civility being a cardinal one—that could allow them to be on a par with the West. The historical experience of Islam is said to have lent itself to such a process, since according to the modernists it already included a number of elements that could be drawn upon and underlined so as to bring about a genuine sense of civility, although at the same time there were other elements that simply reflected a substantially different life experience and should be sidelined or undermined. It is precisely at this point that a series of critical questions arise: Why was not civility perceived as being present in Islamic history? What had conditioned the absence of this social quality all along? Ultimately, what was/is it about Islam that did/does not demand civility?

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2.3 W  hat Is (Not) Islam About: Phenomenological Clarifications Although it is a kind of truism to conceive nowadays of politics as a universal historical phenomenon, one should be reminded that it is of Hellenic provenance. It was with the ancient Greeks of the Classical Period that the primacy of the sacred over the social—a condition traceable across history and socio-cultural formations—was inverted in favour of the social. Through this process—usually and simplistically dubbed ancient Greek secularization—the social emerged as politics and politics was affirmed as the endonomous foundational hierophany3: the sacred and the polis became consubstantial.4 In this respect, one may understand why and how to be a citizen (politēs, civis)—in other words, to exhibit what could be termed as the traits of civility—consisted in realizing the sacred, namely, Nature, through politics (cf. Sourvinou-Inwood 2000). Consequently, the original ground of our understanding of civility is inherently Nature-based, Nature-centred, and Nature-oriented. Hardly anything could be more non-Islamic or even anti-Islamic, one would dare say, than this.5 Accordingly, one way or another, civility ultimately goes back to the Greco-Roman socio-political legacy, which as noted presupposes and reflects a set of certain hierophanic experiences, that is, foundational ways of human living. The latter constituted the basis that warranted one’s being a citizen, in other words, one’s being-as-a-citizen, which amounted to exemplifying themselves as an integral part of Cosmic Nature, that is, the Physis of the polis or res publica. In this respect, the politics of the Greco-Roman hierophanic worldview were all about the abidingness and permanence of the immediate, that is, constructed human environment. If this is the case, then, from a phenomenological perspective, Islamic and cognate (Jewish and Christian) hierophanic experiences could be seen as reflecting a substantially different concern, namely, the undermining and dispensing with given socio-political life-forms in light of a pursued Eschaton. Thus, Islamic distinctiveness does not seem, in principle and/or originally, to share any need or intention with regards to the abiding and permanent hierophanic politics of civility. Whether and

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when Islamdom comes across civility—and it does—is an issue that has to be explored by taking into consideration major influences and trends beyond Islam, most notably the discovery of Antiquity and its espoused permanent ideal society. But what exactly is the substantially different concern mentioned above all about? In what way can we still affirm the political significance of the eschatological undermining and dispensing with given socio-­ political life-forms? Basically this is about a negative or, even better, apophatic politics: one way or another, Jews, Christians, and Muslims—in principle, if not in practice—are not supposed to espouse any definitive state of realized or realizable political affairs; the latter is not their prerogative, but is assigned to the total otherness of what they regard as the sacred. More specifically, in order to have a life/history trajectory in the first place Jews need to subvert others (through an alternative history), Christians cannot but subvert themselves (by altering their history), whereas Muslims have to subvert each other (by alternating within their history).6 This is a prime paradox, one pertaining to what we could call a phenomenology of political alterity: being political without becoming political. If the Eschaton is always elusive, politics cannot relate to it but only negatively, that is, by demonstrating its own inherent inadequacy. In this regard, any pursuit of civility could face the risk of substituting the given-image for the archetype-to-be. Nevertheless, the challenge posed by such a risk had to be taken on and tackled, and this is precisely what happened. But we now have to examine how the challenge of civility was accommodated within the experiential parameters of Islam.

2.4 T  he Limits of Civility in the History of Islam The task of discerning civility in Islam is a complex matter. This is because in general the Islamic lifeworld is imbued in numerous cultural layers and cultivated through multiple civilizations over the ages. To make an observation, the early Hijaz community appears decidedly austere compared to the augmentation of the Abbasids, less than a century later. A

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corresponding observation can also be made with regards to the development of religious thinking within the Muslim world using the same timeframe. The framework of the Islamic worldview is defined by the Qur’an primarily, with supporting views corroborated by what could be agreed on as a legitimate attribution to the Prophet’s own practice. Yet this basic worldview is, over time, appropriated along with a surplus of developments, external and internal. From the initial period we get a sense of Islam as a religion espousing a modest creed about the absolute singularity of a transcendent and merciful god, with whom the faithful avail in the possibility of a personal relationship. However, the presence of Hellenic philosophy, from the ninth century onwards, introduces major intellectual reforms in the form of Islamic philosophy and political theory. This later development exhibits a certain interrelation with the preoccupation of governance (i.e., the project to establish an Imamate or Caliphate). The earlier period does this by reference to internal history, while the later period with the aid of Neoplatonic and Aristotelian theories about governance. What does come out most clearly from the early period, though more or less obscured in the later, is the Islamic Message, which in principle places particular value on two notions: individualization and egalitarianism. It is of course commonly agreed that Islam is properly defined as an egalitarian religion, but perhaps it would sound strange to associate Islam with individualization, since it is a religion that is primarily about the submission to the Absolute, underpinned by the loosely understood principle of tawhid.7 Even so, there is room in the theological framework of Islam for the individual, though not as independent agent, but only through Allah’s true agency. In other words, the religion allows for each of the faithful to stand equally individualized before Allah (17:70). The emphasis is on (the degree of ) piety as an instance of the individualization of the faithful, and not on a universally given equality of individuals. To put it differently, in effect there is no universal individuality in Islam8; there is only an individuality we would phrase in terms of occasionalism.9 On the contrary, a civil code of rights entails and presupposes a given, that is, an ontological and thus universal individuality. This is vastly different to the Islamic notion found in the Qur’an: “The most honoured of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous. Indeed, Allah is Knowing

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and Acquainted” (49:13; our emphasis). What may be perceived here as inequality is actually a differentiation based on equality; however, the latter does not stand on its own, as pre-given, or even given-as-such by Allah—something that would render it a universal condition—but rather occurs thanks to and is occasioned by Allah as the Individual. It is Allah-­ the-­Individual who is experienced, whenever experienced, in terms determined by His own individuality. On the other hand, it could be argued that as soon as the preoccupation of Muslim elites with governance found a way to be facilitated through the appropriation of Hellenic philosophy, Islamic discourse with regards to the godhead was put in a different key. Although not originally an ontological discourse, it gradually started acquiring an ontological character that potentially, but also actually, shifted the intentionality of Islamic thinkers. In this respect, the spontaneity of Muslim experience was becoming reified, substituting thus a given, ontological and universal backdrop for a manifested, experiential and occasioned condition. This is how it seems that equality turned into egalitarianism and individuality into individualization. At the same time, this course of thinking creates a basis for understanding how ideas—civility being one of them—can be misapprehended for what they are not. The same is true of the later medieval period during which the political philosophers al-Farabi (d. 950) and Ibn Sina (d. 1037) were active. During this time the specific attention of the falasifa shows concern for civic stability based on Islamic-Hellenic visions of a just society—something that was in effect a philosophical exercise without a concomitant political/civil culture—in the absence of a Greco-Roman city-state (Black 2011). Thus, in light of the above, nowhere prior to the early modern period, nor specifically in the Islamic canon (the Qur’an and the Hadith), do we find a civil sensibility in the way that pertains to our interpretation of it in modernity. We do, of course, encounter terms and notions, like those previously mentioned in the introduction, which may be seen as lending themselves to our modern placing of them in the construction of Islamic tradition for a modern era. However, this is quite different to the view that such ideas about civility actually existed there in the past as a fait accompli. Furthermore, calling upon terms such as tariqa, adab, and waqf to substantiate the existence of Islamic civility should be regarded as a

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distinct issue. Basically, we maintain that with regards to civility these terms are misleading, and for good reasons. Firstly, tariqa has been invoked because it exhibits the “other” within Islam—and this “other” has to be affirmed in order to sustain an Islamic modernity, and by extension civility—but at the same time it is capable of keeping this “other” emphatically Islamic.10 Secondly, adab seems to be the less Islamic of the three due mainly to its cultural provenance, giving thus the impression of representing an Islam relatable to modern civil sensibilities—which, nevertheless, still stands as an Islamic ethics due to its origins. Adab does not enter into the Qur’an as a fully developed concept of civility. Nor is the term at all mentioned. It is typically related to two references in the Qur’an (2:44 and 61:2–4) that, whilst do not mention the term, are seen by Muslims as containing the bare essentials of its meaning, albeit, as a moralistic and prescriptive injunction upon believers with regard to their conduct as a model for others. Salvatore and Keshavmurthy will in subsequent chapters expand upon adab as contextualized in the cultural, social, and political arena of the Islamicate world as a highly sophisticated notion that resembles ideals of civility as pertaining to “Western” notions. Lastly, waqf is particularly utilized, since it is so typically Islamic, on the basis of its associative social potential, which in turn has been immoderately understood as the Islamic equivalent of the modes of social relatedness that Western civility comprises. Consequently, the focus on the aforementioned terms is on the one hand correct, insofar as it does point to elements within Islam that are comparable to the emergence of modern civility (otherness, ethics, sociability), but on the other hand incorrect, since it assumes and/or projects too much into their historical potential. To put it simply, proponents of such a way of conceptualizing Islamic modernity run the risk of being not as correct as they think they are. Another important consideration with regards to the modern concern for civility relates to the issue of Islamic plurality. The latter has already been put forward as an approach of “Islam(s)” rather than “Islam” (cf. Knysh 2017; Hughes 2012). Beyond the technicalities of terminology, the core of the issue is centred upon the varieties of Islamic expression, manifestation, and, most importantly, interpretation. Interpretation is particularly significant because it is correlative with the Islamic concept

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of ijtihad (independent, individual, reasoned effort), which is normally used in advancing a theory about doctrine, whether in relation to its application or understanding in a given context. Despite the fact of this rendering not being commensurable to the meaning of Greek hermēneia (literally, interpretation), the latter is an important term to consider, since Islamic history has been built on the occasion of interpretive changes, however subtle. Whatever the more general nature of these changes (political, social, cultural, intellectual), individual activity has been the predominant and specific agent of their actual fruition. In other words, what “Islam” meant was squarely based on what it meant to be “Muslim” in the first place; thus the Muslim has always been a hermeneut (Ahmed 2016)! This way of reasoning focuses on Islam differently than what is usually the case. In particular, the image of Islam that emerges through the methodological lens of hermēneia is about a multifaceted construction of interpretations such as the Islam of the ulema, the Islam of the philosophers, the Islam of the mystics, or the Islam of the fundamentalists.11 Historico-phenomenologically speaking, the absence of civilitas per se in Islam fits perfectly the conceptualization of the latter as an eschatological event, which (if we are to draw on the traditional narrative) ushers in the end of the old Arab world of the Hijaz (jahiliyya) and the beginning of Allah’s community on earth; this is the Islamic Eschaton as a realized-­ in-­the-present-Message. Yet, to be clear, such an absolute assertion does not preclude in itself a justified view about Islamic plurality. Our main point in considering the role of interpretation in Islam is to sidestep the finality of what it means to be “Muslim” due to the Eschaton. In other words, what it means to be Muslim can and does change, especially when socio-political shifts take place. And although we would all agree that for Muslims today Islam does not mean the same thing it did in the seventh century, there are Muslims whose prerogative is a revivalism that advances strict taqlid (imitation) through their own “effort” to play out a historicized past on account of a perceived adherence to the Eschaton. Consequently, the modern concern for civility is not a discourse that emerges from the revivalist, but rather the contextualist quarter.12 The return to a historicized taqlid—bolstered by ijtihad—carries with it the

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Prophetic fervour of the Eschaton, particularly because it dispenses with the Greco-Roman socio-political legacy of civility. Nevertheless, the fact that historical Islam was not concerned with civility per se does not mean that the latter could not be accommodated within the former, and for that matter as a potentiality of the Prophetic Eschaton-Event itself. This potentiality would be actualized in a more or less insular way within a predominantly religious setting (madhhab) and in a quite assertive manner within a civilizational one (‘umran).13 What defined Islam at the very early stage, and more accurately in terms of its phenomenological constitution, was the hic et nunc realization of the ending of “time” as the Arabs then knew it. Strictly speaking, the mission of Muhammad was the arrival of the Eschaton, and as such it had neither a need for civility nor any sensitivity towards it. This is not to say that it was barbaric (which is to the mind of moderns the opposite of civil), but rather it espoused a moralistic treatment of the other as mediated by divine decree. On all grounds, the urgency generated by the Eschaton did not allow any space and/or time for the protracted cultivation of the spirit of civility. However, this spirit would eventuate in a certain guise, that is, as a semblance of the civility legacy of Late Antiquity. Muhammad’s investment in Allah’s Message was not primarily for the betterment of society or the purification of corrupt politics. It was, however, for the purpose of bringing about their end by publicizing divine vindication which superseded the socio-political matters of his time. To put it emphatically, it was intended as a decimation of “what was” so as to make way for “what has come”. This eschatological perspective seems to presuppose and entail a subtle distinction between the taken-for-­ granted (Greco-Roman) and an alternative civil; a distinction which upsets the normally perceived socio-political standard. On the one hand, this places the mission of Muhammad in line with the prophetic tradition recorded in the Qur’an (invoking Biblical narratives) that shows figures like Noah, Abraham, and Moses at the helm of cataclysmic events: there is a role reversal in the prophetic sentiment which undermines worldly civilization (kosmos) as the province of Man and not God, while its fall is related to the corruption of civilization and its concomitant civility (as Ibn Khaldun pointed out in his muqaddima, 1989). Thus civility carries a negative connotation, which one should not fail to make

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abundantly clear. On the other hand, though, the inverse assessment of civility should not escape one’s consideration as to the potential implications of the eschatological event. Throughout history, these implications came forward as a semblance of civility, both with regards to the taken-­ for-­granted civility and with the one that Revelation was believed to allude to.14 In this connection, the most problematic issue with those attempting to identify modern elements of civility within Islamic history is the fact that they seem to ignore that civility per se (the Greco-Roman type) has never been present in Islam, and that what has always been there was basically a phantom-like quality that could be read into Islam— and this is exactly what we refer to in our critique as quasi-civility.

2.5 Quasi-Civility in the History of Islam Our previous theoretical, more or less, discussion about civility in Islam has to be set within a historical contextualization. More specifically, we would argue for a certain conceptual model of historical imagining that allows one to realize the problematic issue of civility in Islam and at the same time identify the conditions under which civility would become an Islamic concern. For us the real problem lies in  locating the Islamic Eschaton-Event as something to come, and not as something that had already arrived with Muhammad. It seems, though, that the presence of Muhammad is in effect this Eschaton-Event, the intensity of which wanes as time passes. In other terms, the Islamic Eschaton-Event gradually turns into an Apocalypse-Event that is pushed forward to the end of a linearly conceived timespan and perceived as the coming disaster of an expectant Armageddon. Consequently, this process—admittedly not exhaustive of developments in Islam, but nevertheless dominant—makes way for the normalization of the yet-to-arrive Latter Days as a religious promise to be feared rather than an experience to be lived in the present. The original eschatological force of Muhammad is increasingly overladen with a return to the ordinary, that is, to concerns with everyday crises and dilemmas of power politics and group preservation. It is indeed tempting to see this as a decline from the pristine, but in reality, it would be better to see it as a

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return to the mundane; the latter generating the space needed for the accommodation of civility, namely, the non-Islamic “other”. Islam would take over society after society, dominating the public sphere and cancelling the previously normative (Greco-Roman/non-­ Islamic) civility. The latter was not needed because the Prophet’s Message itself superseded it, yet it was not simply relinquished. The Prophet’s Message as a foundational hierophany related to the social in a dialectical manner: on the one hand it undermined prominent social conventions, in this case pre-existing civility, and on the other hand underlined others by suggesting alternative social patterns. This is not to say that civility was re-affirmed within and through Islam—let’s say in a different guise—but that the latter’s Prophetic Message replaced civility with something new and better. To be sure, this is a return to the mundane, though now with a substantially new religious outlook. However, to place this development in its proper context it would be necessary to take a closer look at two things: the nature of the revelations at Mecca and the Medina Contract. This is especially important, since these two sources of Islamic history contain data that relate to a number of important factors about early Islam and the mission of Muhammad. The eschatological character of Muhammad’s prophecy and the apocalyptic vision of his revelation underscore the sincerity of Muhammad’s conviction, which cannot be doubted or sidelined as secondary to other factors. After all, he did catch the attention of the inhabitants of Yathrib and he succeeded in establishing a confederacy there between the natives of the city and the muhajirun (the emigrants). This confederacy did not constitute but rather increased the momentum of Muhammad’s cause. Nevertheless, it demonstrates nothing less than the role of a strong leader and a charismatic individual capable of bringing together a feuding community, and holding them together. Both of these historical facts bespeak of Muhammad’s resolve to see his mission through to the end, which cannot be underestimated as some kind of mere fiction on the part of the later community. Indeed, one should not hesitate to suggest that Muhammad was not in any way less than resolute in fulfilling his destiny as the rasul—and for that matter not just to the Arabs. Although it is rather romantic to regard Muhammad as an entranced religious/mystical figure, at the same time it would be futile to see him as

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either a power-hungry tyrant or a Machiavellian operator. He was not there to just improve his world, but determined to change it for good. In this respect, he stood opposed to the social norms of the tribal Arab world. This kind of intentionality is often downplayed for the effect of presenting a “softer” Islam for the modern world, while it is also played up for the negative effect of demonizing Islam as a religion for hardliners and fanatics. Yet in both cases the point is missed and, most importantly, one loses sight of the shifting processes of Muslim socio-political sensibilities over time. Undoubtedly, there was a move within ummah towards redefining and civilizing, so to speak, Islam for the sake of culturally sensitive communities and the inclusivity of an increasingly diverse population. This process, which was not yet a manifestation of civility per se, but instead a case of openness to civility, taking root in the Middle Ages (i.e., from the late ninth century onwards), was transformed into a distinctively Islamic civility only at the dawn of the post/colonial period (cf., Chap. 3). Moreover, as already suggested, there was a potentiality for civility embodied in Revelation, which allowed for, but was nevertheless distinguished from, the actual civility-friendly historical process. The emergence of Islam on the scene of history was particularly forceful, for it disrupted the old Arab way of life. Muhammad’s deliverance of Revelation shook those it touched to the core, as no doubt was its intended purpose. This is evidenced by the tone of the earlier parts of the Qur’an, which is well represented by surat at-takwir (The Overthrowing). It might be difficult to imagine the sense of immediacy and imminence with which this revelation would have been received by the faithful few in Muhammad’s circle initially, since the assumption is to think of it as an event that was to come much later. Nevertheless, the urgency of surah 81 is clearly present in the tone of its verse: “Each soul will know” (81:14). This is one of the earlier Meccan revelations, possibly the sixth or seventh in chronological order, and portrays a series of graphic images about the end of the world as experienced by the Arabs of the Hijaz (see verses 1–13),15 as well as the responsibility of each soul for their ultimate destiny. At the same time, it reasserts Muhammad as the Messenger of Allah thanks to the medium of Jibril (Gabriel) and juxtaposed to customary passion-induced poetic inspiration. On the other hand, the Medina “contract” segued into the eventual—and, we would dare say,

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pragmatic—transformation of Arabia, something rather different from the eruptive tenour of the Mecca period. The document, in its present form, portrays Muhammad as a formidable leader and a charismatic figure, who with the guidance of Revelation built a community of faithful which included the so-called Peoples of the Book in light of Allah’s mercy. One could imagine this as a sign of civility, but it seems more likely that it reflects the pragmatic concerns of Muhammad’s initial Realpolitik. In the context of the latter, it is evident that the Prophet intends to bring about a social bond that carries the seal of Allah. In this respect, it is worth emphasizing that the Medina Contract is a typical case of divine imposition upon earthly matters, and not some kind of arbitration between religion and politics or the divine and the secular. In other words, it is a clear proof of the Islamic venture into the sacralization of the world. The apocalyptic nature of the first revelations in Mecca and the pact-­ between-­men made in the name of Allah at Medina are both indicative of the first era of Islam as a historical phenomenon that is more or less driven by the challenge of the Eschaton rather than a social movement focused on the indulgence associated with a culture of civility. Thus, these sources should be seen as indicating nothing more than the presence of a phantom-like or quasi-type of civility, which is precisely what in this chapter we have been referring to simply as a potentiality for civility discernible within the Message of Muhammad. Furthermore, the burgeoning community at Medina and the subsequent revelations during that time continue in the same eschatological/apocalyptic mood, while the Rightly Guided Caliphs follow in the footsteps of this experience during their efforts to expand dar al-Islam. However, it is at the time of the imperial turn, when the Arabs become the masters of the Eastern Provinces of Byzantium and the entirety of Persia, that we witness the first signs of a shift towards the civil through a subtle Hellenization and bureaucratization of Islam. Yet the short-lived success of the falasifa, who are gradually replaced by the litigious-minded fuqaha, bespeaks of the growing propensity for ritual and textual conformity rather than intellectual and theological exploration. Notwithstanding that, it should be noted that a kind of middle ground can be found within developments of Islamic mystical and moral experience.

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Placed in their proper historical context, the Islamic components of tasawwuf, adab, and waqf can only be seen as becoming more and more instrumental in the overall effort to substantiate the Islamic potentiality for civility we have referred to. Nevertheless, with the dawn of modernity—as the Islamic world would be coming increasingly within the orbit of the West—a degree of coagulation was to be realized between the aforementioned inherent Islamic potentiality and the European dynamics of re-invented civility. In theoretical terms, if the latter is aptly conceptualized as “secular civility”, then the end result of what has happened with Islam throughout modernity in this respect can be reasonably thought of as “eschatological civility”—especially given the fact that one cannot justifiably assert the disappearance of eschatology from Islam. Most likely, the term “eschatological civility” sounds like a conceptual antinomy in light of the differing historical trajectories of both eschatology and civility. However, modernity itself is far from being devoid of antinomies (Kaiwar and Mazumdar 2003), on the one hand, while the Islamic experience of modernity, on the other, can only be appreciated for what it stands for precisely through the antinomies it has been called to face, tackle, and resolve—anyhow, without them there would be no quandary of modernity in the first place. To our understanding, when Muslim scholars of the late medieval era, and especially the modern period, redeploy traditional Islamic concepts, such as shura, maslahah, ijtihad, insaniyya, ummah, mizan, and i’tidal, for the purposes of advancing a case for Islamic civility, fundamentally—although unwittingly—they are re-imagining and reinventing the Islamic eschatological experience in the guise of an “eschatological civility” (Fig. 2.1). In the section that follows we shall explore the hermeneutics of civility in Islam as they are undertaken in the case of Abdullahi Ahmad an-Naim’s work. However, it would be pertinent to sum up the points hitherto discussed (as seen in the preceding diagram). Firstly, civility proper had nothing to do with Islam, since it came from and reflected an entirely different (Greek and Roman) hierophanic Weltanschauung. Secondly, within the Islamdom of the Middle Ages the fundamental and predominant eschatological mood would not allow anything else

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Antiquity

Middle Ages

Modernity

Greece and Rome

Islamdom

the West

Global Islam

civility proper

quasi-civility

civility proper re-invented

eschatological civility

Plain lines between types of civility denote direct historical connections. Dotted lines between types of civility denote indirect historical connections. Fig. 2.1  Periodisation of civility

than a quasi-­civility on the basis of the moral potentiality of Revelation (as espoused, for instance, by Ibn Khaldun). This potentiality, though, was not fully realized in social and cultural terms until it was brought into play and contextualized by those who were particularly politically minded. Furthermore, it was the actual circumstances that determined the materialization of quasi-civility, depending upon the possibilities available within the socio-political context where it was intended to be imbedded. Thirdly, civility proper was articulated by re-imagining the relevant legacy of Antiquity in a way that would bring forward the distinctiveness of the civil sensibility of the West over against its “other” (ostensibly represented by Islamic quasi-civility). Finally, a concern for civility became overt in the Muslim world as it took up modern concerns of progress and development, especially under the condition of globalization. Nevertheless, there is a significant difference in this connection: although Muslim intellectuals were brought into the debate about modern civility by default, they could only respond creatively by what was inherent in their traditional experiencing, namely, eschatology—and this is how eschatological civility came into being.16

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2.6 An-Naim and the Hermeneutics of Civility: A Case Study Test The selection of Abdullahi Ahmad an-Naim as a case study for the testing of our argument, namely, that Islamic experience is not a source of civility per se, that historical Islam exhibited a socio-political ethos only seemingly about civility, and that what can be called Islamic civility is not conceivable but within modernity, might give the impression that it is not the most obvious choice. We will attempt, nevertheless, to show that it is perhaps the most pertinent one. It may have been more natural to consider typical examples of Islamic modernism such as al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, Rashid Rida, al-Mawdudi, and Sayyid Qutb, yet our contention is that, in order to understand Islamic modernism, a radical/extreme example could be more telling than a typical/standard one. In any case, an-Naim belongs to the stream of Islamic modernism and is heir to the most original Muslim modernist reformist, Mahmoud Muhammad Taha.17 As such, we see an-Naim as elaborating on Taha’s thought and offering an original contribution to the challenge of modernity. It should be noted, though, that we are not examining an-Naim’s work in detail, but only employing it as a schema relevant to the issue of Islamic civility. It is worth emphasizing that, despite the Muslim criticism that an-­ Naim’s work has received, there is something genuinely and sincerely Islamic at the core of his thought. Both his rooting in Taha’s experience and the fact that he is not just interested in contributing to the pool of modern ideas, but mainly in proposing something substantially viable in Islamic terms, make him a prime case for studying the Muslim engagement with the project of modernity (an-Naim 1990, pp. 182–187). For an-Naim such an engagement can truly commence, only if Muslims realize that within modernity Islam is faced with a fundamental challenge (an-Naim 1990, pp. 34–51); only if they address the huge problem of disparity between their own historicity and that of the modern West. Although it would be fair to say that most modernist Muslim thinkers regard modernity as a minimal/peripheral challenge that basically can be tackled by rendering it a kind of reminder of basic Islamic values and

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practices (e.g., shura, maslahah, ijtihad, insaniyya, umma, mizan, and i’tidal), which in turn just have to be reinvigorated in order to achieve an alignment with modernity, an-Naim categorically regards the whole issue as one that is intrinsically related to the very gist of how Islamic jurisprudence is articulated. And this is most certainly a problem that pertains directly to the sources of Islam, that is, the Qur’an and Hadith (an-Naim 1990, pp. 52–68). The most telling example of this is Sharia as a blueprint for Muslim private and public living, based as it is upon canonical stipulations that are simply incompatible with the civil aspirations of modernity. What one gathers from an-Naim’s engagement with modernity is an attitude that could be defined as quite dialectical, that is, critical and at the same time accepting of aspects of modernity. To be sure, at times his thought becomes so accepting of modernity that he gives the impression of not standing anymore on what is recognisable as historical Islam. Yet, at other times he justifies this seeming paradox on the grounds of his self-­ asserting experience as a Muslim. This dialectical positioning within modernity becomes a real puzzle, because it is not about cherry-picking from Islam and modernity so that a new synthesis can emerge, but about affirming/negating modernity precisely for the sake and in light of Islam. Ultimately, an-Naim is putting forward a socio-religious agenda of re-­ creating, re-imagining, and re-inventing historical Islam, an agenda that in a number of ways cuts across the misplaced and misleading division between the secular and the religious.18 At the same time, we think that it would not be a misinterpretation of his work to hypothesize that his thought presupposes and entails an Islamic sense of civility which is workable only within the framework and prospect of the self-­transcendence of (historical) Islam.19 It is quite evident that an-Naim distinguishes and juxtaposes between historical Islam and the meaning of Islam or, to be more precise, between historical Sharia and the ethico-religious intention of the sources upon which historical Sharia is based. Most importantly, it is this very distinction and juxtaposition that allows an-Naim to claim that Islam cannot but be in agreement with modernity; in other words, because it is not to be identified so much with its already-realized history as it is with its not-­ yet-­realized history,20 which for him can find the necessary conditions of

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its realization within modernity. However, the sufficient conditions for this realization can only be satisfied when Islam acknowledges and confronts its disparity with modernity; a disparity which pertains to the latter’s ideals of humanism, that is, the ultimate and unalienable value of the human person. These ideals translate directly, although not fully or adequately—an-Naim is well aware of the shortcomings of Western civil society—into political and legal terms and affect human rights, constitutional law, criminal law, and international law. It is within these four domains that an-Naim, especially as a scholar of law, locates the most conspicuous absence of the disposition necessary on the part of Islam in order to conform to these ideals.21 Undoubtedly, an-Naim does not explicitly treat the notion of civility, but implicitly the latter is what he presupposes and entails throughout his work, since directly or indirectly the aforementioned legal domains are intrinsically related to the development of the mentality of civility in the West, initially, and all over the globe, subsequently. It seems that for him the whole issue comes down to the following question: how are Muslims to define and position themselves in terms of (Western) civility given the baggage they bring with them from their (Islamic) past? In other words, Muslims are caught in-between a legacy that, on the one hand, despite humane sensitivities at the social and moral level, has not been conducive to the formation of a proper citizen and, on the other hand, an expectation that, regardless of the humaneness invested or not in social institutions, assumes that everyone conforms politically according to the established norms of civility. An-Naim suggests two possible ways out of this quandary: one which we could aptly call hermeneutic and another which we could regard as pragmatic. His hermeneutics involves, more or less, all the cardinal insights of Taha—the Mecca and Medina periodization of the Qur’an, the inversion of naskh (abrogation), the concept of evolutionary Islam, the intention of Revelation, and the ethico-religious essence of Islam—but in such a way that extends and brings them into a global concern of civility.22 His pragmatics in turn stem from a certain Islamic experience within the condition of modernity that allows one to realize the inadequacy of Sharia and the relativity of fiqh. More specifically, Muslims within the condition of modernity are faced with a type of individuality that is not

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the one historical Sharia was catering for, since the modern individual becomes the concomitant locus of evaluation within the social predominance of the secular, privileging thus the ethical/spiritual value of the private sphere over against the legal/worldly concerns of the public sphere. In such a condition, Sharia and fiqh, although rightly prominent once, cannot and should not be so now—and this, an-Naim argues, is by no means a betrayal of Islam. The hermeneutic and pragmatic reasoning of an-Naim is, as one can imagine, against taqlid and for ijtihad. In other words, Muslims have no other option but to become proper citizens, but this endeavour should be undertaken in Islamic terms. Coming up with such terms is what ijtihad amounts to in the context of modernity or, to phrase it differently, this is what ijtihad can possibly mean in a modern sense. In particular, since there can be no Islamic terms independent of the Qur’an and since at the same time the Qur’an is not devoid of stipulations that are simply incompatible with the civil aspirations of modernity, an-Naim utilizes—ingeniously, but for that matter not uncontroversially—the Mecca and Medina periodization of the Qur’an in favour of Taha’s understanding with regards to the inversion of naskh. For an-Naim it is the Qur’anic verses of the Mecca period—and, more precisely, the intention of those verses—that take precedence over all historical realizations of Islam. The latter are justified only insofar as they have allowed for the original intention of Allah’s revelation to permeate institutions and mentalities awaiting the proper socio-historical conditions for its enactment. This intention, exemplified through the deeply humane values of freedom, equality, and justice, is argued by an-Naim to have ultimately found its most pertinent field of reference in the humanistic prerogatives of modernity. Thus what in the past situation of Islam was impossible, namely, the fruition of a proper civility, is in the present—and, more so, in the future—situation of Islam a most welcome possibility. Needless to say, this understanding betrays indirectly but unmistakably an-Naim’s eschatological/utopian appraisal of modernity as far as the possibilities for an Islamic civility are concerned. For an-Naim the absence of a proper civility in historical Islam was not due to the inherent inability of Islam to produce one—and in this respect as a case study he does not seem to fit neatly into our overall

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argument—but to the unconducive socio-historical conditions that Islam had by necessity to cope with. Of course this kind of reasoning begs the question to the extent that it presupposes and entails that Islam has not yet been truly itself or, otherwise, it unwittingly invokes a theological justification with regards to the historical inadequacy of Islam. In any case, an-Naim’s version of Islamic civility is envisioned as a (potential) reality only within the condition of modernity, which finally allows it to come forward. And this does conform to our argument about Islamic civility as an eschatological manifestation of what it truly means to be human/e in accordance with the Prophetic Sunnah.

2.7 Conclusion In the present chapter we have attempted to argue a number of interrelated issues regarding Islam vis-à-vis civility. Firstly, we have substantiated the methodological parameters for discussing the problem of civility in Islam by identifying modernity as the only pertinent field of reference. Secondly, we have aspired to present a clarification as to the fundamental hierophanic particularities of Islam that do not allow one to regard civility proper as an inherent outgrowth of Islamic experience. Thirdly, we have suggested possible elective affinities between the socio-political ethos of historical Islam and forms of civility proper prior to and within modernity by drawing up a typology that cuts across Greco-Roman Antiquity, Islamdom, and modernity. Fourthly, we have proposed eschatological civility, that is, a certain rendering of the aspirations of modern civility in light of Islam’s inherent eschatological historicity, as the only alternative for Muslims qua Muslims. Lastly, we have brought forward Abdullahi Ahmad an-Naim as a case study for the testing of our overall argument and concluded that eschatological civility is indeed the underlying pattern informing his thought, especially as he seems to be postulating basically a theological resolution of the shortcomings of historical Islam and the concomitant quandary of modernity. In light of an-Naim’s reasoning another interesting remark that could be made is that in relation to civility there is no such thing as multiple modernities, but only varieties of a single pattern.

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Notes 1. Throughout the present chapter we employ “civility” sensu stricto, that is, as a mode of political culture that relates to the set of processes (e.g., secularization, individualization) that have shaped the political empowerment of individual agents in modernity, and not sensu lato, that is, as the set of qualities (e.g., politeness, tolerance) that such agents might and/or should exhibit. Thus we use “civility” in the sense of “political civility”. 2. We employ “cosmosystem” according to the political theory of George Contogeorgis (2006, 2014). On the end of the Greco-Roman cosmosystem in the Middle East due to the advent of Islam during the seventh century CE, (see Rich 1992; Cameron 1993). 3. We term it “foundational hierophany” because it constituted the basis or comprehensive framework for all mediation between the sacred and the social, and also “endonomous” because it was experienced neither as devoid of the sacred (i.e., as autonomous) nor as other to the sacred (i.e., as heteronomous). The hierophanic endonomy of Classical Greek political life-forms refers to their intrinsic and fundamental sacredness. 4. Regarding this term, we draw on Castoriadis (1975). 5. In using the term “nature” as intrinsic to the Greek worldview we are not implying that Islam has an anti-nature bent, but that in a sense it is otherworldly. 6. This categorization of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is of course schematic and therefore abstract, but no less indicative of the type of historicity they presuppose and entail. Judaism’s historicity as an alternative is conditioned by its minority status; Christianity’s historicity as a successive alteration is conditioned by its status as an equivocal totality; and Islam’s historicity as a constant alternation is conditioned by its status as an unequivocal totality. To put it differently, we could render this categorization as follows: Jewish historicity is about a part that poses as a total; Christian historicity is about a total that is supposed to be a part; and finally, Islamic historicity is about a total imposed onto and through its parts. Of course all these considerations involve much broader issues that cannot possibly be dealt with in their entirety within the scope of this chapter. 7. Tawhid is typically translated as “oneness”, but more popularly understood as “unity”. The matter of its translation and usage revolves around

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a general misapprehension of the term’s doctrinal meaning. It determines the singularity of the godhead, Allah, but not necessarily to interject that the godhead represents unity. The word for unity is wahdat (as in the case of Ibn Arabi’s wahdat al-wujud). Thus tawhid is more accurately representative of the godhead as “absolute” and “ultimate”, if we are to see the term as underlining the assertion about the monotheistic creed: Allah is one and supreme. Understood in this way, tawhid not only does not exclude individuality but on the contrary becomes the very basis of individualization in Islam through the latter’s heightened experience of Allah as the One or, otherwise, the Individual. 8. To be sure, there is no universal individuality nowhere before the advent of modernity, when for the first time the understanding of the human condition is conceptualized in terms of inherent equality. If one was to look for precursors for this understanding, then Stoic cosmopolitanism and Christian anakephalaiōsis (universal salvific recapitulation in Christ) would be the most likely candidates. Nevertheless, the former was only a potentiality and the latter an emotionality towards a proper theory of universal individuality. 9. As far as Islam is concerned, occasionalism is mainly associated with al-­ Ghazali (d. 1111) (Marmura 2005), who advocated the argument that perceived causality is about non-necessary connections. In this regard, something occurs, when it occurs and in the way it occurs, due to Allah: causes and effects do not relate inherently, but only through the power of Allah who occasions both. Thus what we refer to as occasionalism in this connection pertains to the fact that be(com)ing a Muslim individual is ultimately occasioned by Allah-the-Individual. 10. This refers to Sufism, in particular to networks of Sufi lodges across the Muslim world, which in their capability of incorporating otherness are supposed to have created a heightened sense of plurality (much needed for the conceptualization of civility). Nevertheless, the latter eventually does not have the effect of leading to an equally heightened appraisal of otherness (for everything remains definitively Islamic), which indeed would be a protomodern type of development. 11. We should emphasize that we highlight the difference between ijtihad and hermēneia for a number of reasons, most importantly methodological ones. For us, the latter is utilized as an analytical category that accounts for plurality, creativity, and innovativeness in Islam. In this sense, it refers to the Islamic experience from its very beginning. On the

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other hand, ijtihad enters the scene much later and pertains to a very specific context of Islamic experience: when the empire-like conditions of the Caliphate had been consolidated, Muslims had the “luxury”, and at the same time were compelled to ponder into what their eschatological message was supposed to stand for, since everything seemed more or less established. Moreover, one should not lose sight of the fact that ijtihad has been predominantly a legal-technical practice rather than a theological-speculative exercise. 12. For the “contextualist” reference (see Duderija 2017). 13. Ibn Khaldun had suggested such a distinction, though not in these exact terms, in his muqaddima. He distinguished Islamic polity from natural polity, stipulating that Sharia (for him, divinely inspired religious polity) and mulk (described as worldly derived non-religious/natural polity) have a complex relationship. At first, Revelation had no need for worldly polity, which was based on reason, because this was already contained within the divine edict. After a while, natural polity came to the foreground in the absence of both the Prophet and later on the Deputyship. Thus the reins of power were turned over, so to speak, to worldly power (kingship), and the religious and worldly polity were intermixed for a time. Finally, the two of them became separate, whereby natural polity was dominant over Islamic polity. See Ibn Khaldun, muqaddima Chapter 3, excerpt 32. 14. In this respect, the Islamic semblance of civility is highly dialectical and should be conceptualized both negatively, that is, as seemingly so—since it is not real civility in Greco-Roman terms—and at the same time positively, that is, as virtually so—because it is happening in eschatological terms. 15. Abdullah Yusuf Ali, 1991. The Meaning of the Holy Qur’an, p. 1605. 16. To be precise, the eschatological civility we are referring to on the part of Islam is only one amongst other cognate developments in modernity with regards to Christianity and Judaism. In this respect, it would perhaps be more apt to talk about Islamic eschatological civility. 17. For a comprehensive introduction to Mahmoud Muhammad Taha’s thought, see Taha 1987. 18. Hence an-Naim’s advocation of the secular state, within which he envisages the possibility of the flowering of a truly (multi-)religious society and, by extension, the proper realization of Islam as an ethico-religious endeavour (An-Naim 2008, pp. 1–44).

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19. By this we are not insinuating that in effect an-Naim ceases to be a Muslim—since self-transcendence has always been the case with the historical development of Islam—but we are certainly hinting at the possibility that his Muslim experience allows one to envision a “space” wherein Islam and Christianity (can) meet afresh and be in a mutually constructive dialogue. 20. Here, presumably, we are utilizing a structure that is distinctively Christian (Cullmann 1946), but to the extent that this structure constitutes the meta-structure of modernity and has informed, from the very beginning, the eschatological Islamic experience of history, we assert that it is methodologically warranted for understanding a thinker such as an-­ Naim, who purports to stand firmly on the grounds of Islamic tradition and at the same time to engage genuinely with modernity. 21. Just to give some examples of what an-Naim refers to while discussing these four domains, we could mention the following: the secondary or subordinate social status of women in Islam with regards to human rights; the absence of democratic procedures in issues of Islamic governance with regards to constitutional law; the problem of non-Muslims’ legal rights under Sharia with regards to criminal law; and the always precarious unbalancing of international relations in light of the priorities of Islamic assertion with regards to international law. 22. In Taha, these very issues are more or less about the objective of justice in the here-and-now of despotic totalitarian Sudan, whereas in an-Naim this transforms into a wider concern of justice as civility.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sh. 2016. What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ali, A.Y. 1991. The Meaning of The Holy Qur’an. Brentwood, Maryland: Amana Corporation. An-Naim, A.A. 1990. Toward an Islamic Reformation. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. ———. 2008. Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Sharia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2010. Islam and Human Rights: Selected Essays of Abdullahi An-Na’im. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Balibar, E. 2015. Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press. Black, A. 2011. The History of Islamic Political Thought: From the Prophet to the Present. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cameron, A. 1993. The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity AD 395–600. Abingdon: Routledge. Castoriadis, C. 1975. L’institution imaginaire de la société. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Contogeorgis, G. 2006. The Hellenic Cosmosystem: The State-Centric Period of the Polis. Athens: Sideris Publications. [in Greek]. ———. 2014. The Hellenic Cosmosystem: The Period of the Construction of the Ecumene. Athens: Sideris Publications. [in Greek]. Cullmann, O. 1946. Christus und die Zeit: Die urchristliche Zeit- und Geschichtsauffassung. Leipzig: Evangelischer Verlag. Davetian, B. 2009. Civility: A Cultural History. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Duderija, A. 2017. The Imperatives of Progressive Islam. Abingdon: Routledge. Hefner, R.W. 2011. Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia. Oxford: Princeton University Press. ———., ed. 2018. Democratic Civility: The History and Cross Cultural Possibility of a Modern Political Ideal. Abingdon: Routledge. Hughes, A. 2012. Theorizing Islam. Durham: Acumen Publishing. Kaiwar, V., and S.  Mazumdar, eds. 2003. Antinomies of Modernity: Essays on Race, Orient, Nation. North Carolina: Duke University Press. Khaldun, Ibn. 1989. The Muqadimmah: An Introduction to History. Trans. Franz Rosenthal and Revised and Abridged by N. J. Dawood. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Knysh, A. 2017. Islam in Historical Perspective. 2nd Ed. Abingdon: Routledge. Marmura, M.E. 2005. Probing in Islamic Philosophy: Studies in the Philosophies of Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali, and Other Major Muslim Thinkers. Binghamton: Global Academic Pub., Binghamton University. Milani, M. 2018. Sufi Political Thought. Abingdon: Routledge. Rich, J. 1992. The City in Late Antiquity. London: Routledge. Salvatore, A. 2016. The Sociology of Islam: Knowledge, Power and Civility. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Sourvinou-Inwood, C. 2000. What Is Polis Religion? In Oxford Readings in Greek Religion, ed. R. Buxton. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taha, m. M. 1987. The Second Message of Islam. Trans. with Introduction Abdullahi Ahmad an-Naim. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

3 Islamic Civility: Narrative, Habitus, and Institution Armando Salvatore

3.1 Introduction This chapter provides an analysis of the balance and tension between religion and civility in the Islamic ecumene. It starts by distilling out a notion of civility resistant to being collapsed into “civil society”, as it usually happens when adopting as universal the peculiar (albeit long hegemonic) Western perspective on civility. On a second move, the chapter examines the discursive field of hadith that innervated shari‘a, in its interaction with the courtly (but also Sufi) articulation of adab, the main arrow of civility writ Islamic. The third part of the chapter addresses how within the Islamic ecumene institutions were formed at the intersection of these two narratives and habituating fields.

A. Salvatore (*) School of Religious Studies, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 M. Milani, V. Adrahtas (eds.), Islam, Civility and Political Culture, New Directions in Islam, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56761-3_3

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3.2 T  he Horizons of Civility Beyond the Straits of Civil Society The Western notion of civil society—which is as conceptually grounded as it is “aspirational”—is not suitable to provide a transcultural testing ground for how notions of civility can be used in the analysis of non-­ Western historical trajectories. To distil a notion of civility not pre-­ empted by the presuppositions of civil society is not an easy task. The difficulty is due to the theoretically integrated nature of civil society and the way it emerged from both reflections and normative discourses integral to the modern self-understanding of North-Western Europe—however seeking its “origin” in classic Greco-Roman models. Although the term translates the classic societas civilis of Cicero and the Stoics (whose precedent was Aristotle’s koinonia politike), the eighteenth-­ century elaboration of the concept hinged on an exquisitely modern (and capitalist) view of a society where relations become predictable, peaceful, and, therefore, civil. This outcome mainly owes to the triumph of the law of contract: not just fully institutionalized in the laws of the country, but internalized by the culture of social interactants. The main inheritor (and executor) of the Scottish Enlightenment’s idea of civil society was nobody less than Adam Smith (1723–1790). He both completed and unsettled the theorizations of his predecessors (among whom we should also count the earlier English political theorists Hobbes and Locke) by policing those theories from the lingering influence of Aristotelian and Calvinist elements, like those found in Scottish authors like Francis Hutcheson and his friend Adam Ferguson. Smith (1853 [1759]) was particularly eager to clarify that classic conceptualizations, variably influenced by Aristotelian anthropology and sociology, could be finally superseded by the discursive formation of a new realm of cultivation of private interests. These interests were characteristically matched by a new sense of publicness largely overlapping with the ubiquitous vocabulary of the market, which at that historical juncture was already solidly integrated into legal and political terminologies (Salvatore 2016, pp. 51–54). What particularly matters here is that the developing rhetorical focus on publicness that accompanied the surge of the modern liberal notion of

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civil society impoverished rather than strengthened civility. Whether deliberately or inadvertently, civility now functionally shrank into an emphasis on contractually based cooperation among self-interested individuals. What was lost from classic conceptions was the dimension of collective deliberation we associate with Athens’ ancient democratic regime. Its distinctive combination of citizens’ contentions and consensual governance was not resurrected but marginalized by the modern liberal notion of civil society. This is why—paradoxically for some observers—the classic ideals, even in the absence of the term “civil society”, happened to permeate a particularly thriving, broad knowledge field within the Islamic ecumene. This field transcended specific Aristotelian lineages and can be identified with the long hegemonic “philosophical-Sufi amalgam” reconstructed by Shahab Ahmed (2016) in his What is Islam? This knowledge field generated a notion of the self-regulating subject innervated by the narratives of adab that, as we will see in the next section, provided the most visible arrow of Islamic civility and a key ingredient to the amalgam. From this perspective, it should not be too surprising that a scholar of the calibre of Şerif Mardin was convinced that civil society “does not translate into Islamic terms. Civility, which is a latent content of civil society, does, but these two are not interchangeable terms” (Mardin 1995, p. 279). The admirable investigation of patterns of civility in late medieval and early modern Japan by Eiko Ikegami in a book whose first chapter was significantly titled ‘Civility without Civil Society’ (Ikegami 2005, pp. 19–43) has made school here. We are all, whether writing on Europe, the Islamic ecumene, or East Asia, variably influenced by Western traditions of social sciences and humanities and carry the baggage of a resistant sense of Western centrality within modern civilization. And yet this historical sociologist managed to provide a convincing alternate view of civility by reflecting, in a comparative perspective, on a key non-Western case like the Japanese one. She averred: “Sociologically, civility might be thought as a ritual technology of interpersonal exchanges that shapes a kind of intermediate zone of social relationships between the intimate and the hostile” (Ikegami 2005, p. 28). The most comprehensive and theoretically savvy approach to civility that specifically addressed Western European developments, at the

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crucial transition from the Late Middle Ages to early modernity, is to be found in Norbert Elias’ theory of the civilizing process (Elias 2000 [1939, 1968]). It becomes evident in Elias’ work (and in the way it resonates with Ikegami’s investigation) that the analysed patterns of civility took shape in political centres within milieus inhabited by royal court personnel and the nobility. It is also evident that the production of patterns of civility was the cumulative result of what appears to be at the same time, and quite indissolubly, as a cultural and political process. This process revolved on the increasingly sophisticated, and subtly ritualized, power games taking place in early modern royal courts and finalized to tame the residual autonomous powers of the landed aristocracy traditionally trained in war games (Elias 1983 [1969]). Not by chance, Eiko Ikegami wrote her Bonds of Civility as a sequel to the Taming of the Samurai (Ikegami 1995), a work reflecting a framework of inquiry comparable to the one we associate with Elias’s lifework. The underlying idea is that the civilizing process induced the formation of patterns of cultured self-­ restraint among elite groups, which could then be imitated by other classes—first of all the business class. What Elias neglected, and Ikegami valued, is the variability of broader cultural conditions affecting the process, wherein religious traditions may play a role, through dynamics other than the top-down ones explored by Elias. Here Ikegami herself can help us where she highlights the role played both by religious actors and by marginal groups in fostering bonds of civility during specific stages of the process (Ikegami 2005, pp. 76–101). Elias’ consciously Eurocentric view and state-centred approach reduced civilization (as a process) and civility (as a resulting set of patterns of conduct) to, as he put it simply, “modes of behaviour considered typical of people who are civilized in a ‘Western way’, starting from what we call ‘manners’” (Elias 2000 [1939, 1968], p. ix). We should give credit to the Scottish Enlightenment’s venture in theorizing civil society before its dilution by Adam Smith for providing a fair complement to this restricted view, thus enhancing the cross-cultural comparability of civility without in principle restricting it to Western models. In the Scottish moralists’ philosophical, rather than socio-historical approach, one captures a broader process consisting in producing a type of social connectedness and cohesion that can be dubbed civil to the

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extent it minimizes recourse to overt violence. Indeed, Elias’ approach itself, though rooted in a quite simple definition of “manners”, is associated with games of self-control and conditioning others. The resulting patterns of civility increase in complexity until they  configure a rather impersonal dispositif of coordination of individual actions that ultimately stabilizes the social nexus. The process facilitates state governance without (or with a modicum of ) regulatory state interventions. Here, however, underestimated by both the Scottish moralists and Elias, the shadow of the Leviathan justifies those interventions via a legitimate use of violence, in case self-regulation fails to warrant social peace. If one subsumes such dynamics into a trans-state, global process accompanying the universalization, outside of Europe, of the Westphalian model of state centralization and governance (at least as an elite ideal), the interpretation of civility as articulated outside of its purported Western cradle incurs further theoretical strains. Such interpretive twists are particularly evident in the present epoch during which civility is often, explicitly or implicitly, presented as the antidote to uncivilized, violent forms of radicalism, extremism, and ultimately terrorism, often seen as finding privileged breeding ground in Islamic milieus. Elias aimed to understand civility as the outcome of a variety of transformations of patterns of life conduct ultimately feeding into state-­ building. State-building was correspondingly conceived as a much broader socio-cultural process than conventionally assumed by political theorists and political scientists. Elias’s approach was doubtless a way to make more plastic and sophisticated Weber’s musings on modernity as the outcome of a purpose-oriented rationalization. Whoever does not subscribe to a rigidly “Weberist” (more than a critically Weberian) view of a monopoly of modernity wielded by (Western) Europe and “the West” overall (whatever this label means, and it is doubtful that it may be of much help without adequate unpacking) may consider promising an approach to exploring multiple articulations of civility. Elias himself showed the way by comparing France and Germany (Elias 2000 [1939, 1968]). The main gate to this opening is through recognizing Elias’ approach as defective to the extent it neglects the force of regulation of traditional or classic models of conceiving and norming the self-other connectivity,

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like Aristotelian elaborations within Christian and Islamic traditions. These religious teachings were often associated with patterns of life conduct practised by cultural elites—including trained religious personnel, like those operating within monastic and Sufi milieus. Yet we shouldn’t see classic and modern patterns as mutually exclusive. The Eliasian building of the self from the inside out is not “rational” in a way that necessarily clashes with the value rationality Weber himself imputed to civilizing traditions of the East and West. Civility is not exclusively, often not even predominantly purpose-oriented. This is why civility should not be considered the outcome of a linear type of systemic rationalization obliterating the habitus and norms originating from traditional codes of conduct. The “civilizing process” broadly conceived, and freed from its Eurocentric Eliasian biases, integrates emerging modes of sociability, conflict, and cooperation into more traditional patterns and disciplines. In other words, while the emergence of “the social” (Arendt 1958) out of an (actually ancient, traditional) organicist notion of a society based on sophisticated, impersonal models of solidarity was heralded as a modern North-Western novelty, its underlying condition of possibility, namely civility, was not necessarily so. Patterns of civility had been developed by a variety of cultural and religious traditions within a variety of civilizations since at least the onset of the Axial Age during the first millennium BCE, and they were likewise susceptible to be re-articulated in new forms within non-Western modernities. To sum up, one should acknowledge that civility is neither the monopoly of a given civilizing trajectory nor the signature of modernization processes. Like in the case of premodern and early modern Japan masterfully studied by Ikegami, the Islamic ecumene (no doubt an innerly much more diverse and less civilizationally contoured realm than Japan) stands out not just as an interesting case study but as a salient (though often silent) terrain to test and enrich the historical and comparative study of civility. It should be considered the prime non-Western case that can help to understand the extent to which civility, its patterns, and trajectories (or the civilizing process overall, if we want to keep alive Elias’ essential notion) are neither intrinsically embedded within religious traditions nor configure a thoroughly secularized dispositif of civic morals.

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But before turning to the analysis of this case, let us pause and reflect on the idea of the autonomy of the individual and private interests that provided the main normative signature to the modern North-Western twist of the civilizing process as previously exemplified through Adam Smith’s theorizing.

3.3 Individual Autonomy and Private Interests By the end of the eighteenth century, what made society civil was less a classic type of public ethos sustained by religious articulations of the common good than patterns of civility located in the ego’s simultaneous pursuit of interest and benevolence towards alter. The sociological significance of egoism and altruism so defined consisted of their mutual integration within a type of social game “providentially” (which means through a religious notion now well-disguised) providing cohesion via the policing effect of mutual gaze and resulting disciplines of self-control. The first dystopian bending of civil society also dates to the same period, Jeremy Bentham’s infamous panopticon. The civility of society now appeared to be intrinsically and ineluctably hostage of a network of overlapping ego-alter dyadic links where reciprocal scrutiny and supervision organically translated into surveillance (Salvatore 2007, p. 235). We owe Ernest Gellner a provocative, yet effective characterization of how this North-Western twist of classic notions of societas civilis, through the foil of its providentially capitalist bias, expressed a lopsided nostalgia of a traditional, purportedly “communitarian” social bond. According to this provocation, it was precisely through the anti-capitalist radicalization (most notably via Marxism) of the idea of rational modernization integral to Western modernity that the ideal of civil society appeared to be a kind of “failed umma” (Gellner 1995, p.  39). Gellner himself became rather infamous for propagating a cliché according to which “Islam as such” could be seen as the very antithesis of this type of Western modern civil society. And yet imputing to a radicalization of civil society the danger to surreptitiously mimic its very antithesis, Gellner unveiled a serious

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contradiction. He showed that the idea of civil society was itself, whether their proponents admitted it or not, inherently fragile, based as it were on the idea of a “modular self ” escaping traditional status ascriptions and entering ad hoc relations and cooperations (Gellner 1995, pp. 40–43). The slippery glue of civil society was at serious risk to generate a deluded pipedream consisting in reconciling the  virtues of the ancient and the modern: here, concretely, the communitarian shell of the Scottish moralists’ “moral sense” and the functional imperative of mobility demanded by the modern “social”. Gellner’s allusion to the Islamic umma as almost the prototype of a traditional community can be retained through the lenses of the paradox he constructed, to the extent hegemonic ideals like the North-Western “civil society” are themselves, arguably also according to Weber, the product of a civilizing process of sorts. They should be considered ex post rationalizations and simplifications resulting from the overlaying of earlier and later models, but also the outcome of the projection of the ideal into a shared global future where the West keeps intact its ongoing civilizing mission. In envisioning civil society as a failed umma, Gellner continues to deconstruct this Western delusion by exposing the contours of an Aristotelian design of a koinonia politike,  or political community, that no given ideal in human history can pretend to capture and immobilize into a pure model. Understanding civility through the spectacles of a civilizing process is a radical alternative to any either nostalgic or future-oriented idea of civil society. Not so paradoxically, and pace the often one-sided Eurocentric modernism of Elias himself, a civilizing process fits the dynamics of civilizing and religious traditions perhaps better than ideas of modernity, which often oscillate between self-reification and the postulation of a radical type of modularity or even liquidity of agency and subjectivity. This is why studying civility with regard to Islam and in the context of the historical unfolding and differentiation of the Islamic ecumene (which, here pace Gellner, is much more complex than the theological framing of the umma: see Salvatore 2016) is not merely the pursuit of a major case study but the marker of an urgent shift of the benchmark for multiple theorizations of civility on a global scale, be they comparative or otherwise. To do so, one should train oneself to recognize Islam and the

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Islamic ecumene not through the obsolete prism of “delay and catch up” with Western modernity but in the guise of their historical and geo-­ cultural centrality: as the epicentre of a sort of precolonial proto-­ globalization nourished by a cosmopolitan spirit—now recognized even by the scholars who used to express skepticism on  Islam’s originality (Cook 2015). To sum up, one should abandon the delusional dead-end of reading civility into an integrative code of a largely autonomous social space like civil society or cognates (“civil sphere” being newly en vogue: see Alexander 2006). The inherent ambivalence of such modern Western concepts and their nostalgic reliance on traditional notions of the social bond should encourage us to recalibrate and sharpen the idea of civility as “patterns” through a different strategy—namely by focusing on articulations of the type of connectedness as defined above by Ikegami which are transversal to what we may conceptualize as traditional and modern practices. Accordingly, civility appears as a fragile, though vital dimension of the social bond dependent on an ethical (and often, at least partly, religiously grounded) training of subjects empowering them to face a variety of social situations “between the intimate and the hostile”.

3.4 A  dab and Hadith: Between Narrative and Habitus Much has been written on adab and hadith, but less frequently so on how these two discursive traditions innervate the interpenetration of religion and civility in the Islamic ecumene (for a recent partial exception, see Mayeur-Jaouen 2019). The corpus of hadith, providing a “scriptural” source second in importance only to the Qur’an, could be defined as “the increasingly systematic body of reports/narrations providing the quantitatively (and to a large extent also qualitatively) most solid ‘database’ to the entire normative system subsumed under the umbrella keyword of shari‘a” (Salvatore 2019, p. 37). Shari‘a, in turn, should be understood as denoting the Islamic normativity issued from a divine decree rather than translated as “Islamic law” intended as a searchable code.

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Hadith, intended as exemplary prophetic speech and action, has a complex origin, yet was the outcome of an increasingly uniform and certified methodology for retrieving sources originating from Muhammad’s closest companions (Şentürk 2005). The multi-genre body of works that have been tagged as belonging to adab is, in principle, an altogether separate corpus, which, however, also engaged leading scholars belonging to the wider shari‘a field. Moreover, as we will also suggest, adab explicitly permeates key segments of the hadith corpus itself. Like hadith, adab evokes a unitary ethos, while unlike hadith, it rests on an intrinsic plurality of sources. Therefore one needs to disentangle adab’s various layers of signification. Its fundamental meaning is as plastic as the idea of inviting guests to a banquet and being able to entertain the gathering. It signifies a type of practical, yet cultured activity set in a context marked by movement, as the guests are visitors from somewhere else, potentially from afar (Murata and Chittick 1994, p. 307). More concretely, adab denotes the outcome of the learning activity accompanying a practice, namely the practical wisdom acquired through education and the associated mastery of literary and behavioural forms. By instilling a capacity to appreciate beauty and propriety in their social embeddedness, adab came to designate etiquette and “courtesy” as the norms of proper conduct at rulers’ courts—demanding refinement in interpersonal relations, or even what we may dub “social virtues”: an “open code” guiding people in giving form to an ethical, both good and beautiful, life. As such, and unlike the hadith corpus, adab is only moderately scripted, yet open to ad hoc reconstruction and performance in the guise of a rather adaptable savoir-faire. What is scripted is rather a character-building path that equips the practitioner to internalize the code. This code pivots on acquiring a sense of the diversity that is intrinsic to social situations and encounters, which leaves space to negotiation and improvisation. Embedded in discursive streams enacting a variety of virtuous examples (not unlike hadith that orbits on the virtues, wisdom, and the beautiful character of Muhammad), adab is left often under-articulated at the normative level. It is bent to educate into a habitus habilitating normative reconstruction at particular junctures, rather than to configure a top-down disciplining discourse.

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Not surprisingly, the narration and cultivation of adab was mainly the preserve of literati and high administrators within royal courts. The recommended amalgam of narrations and codes took form as the outcome of some degree of convergence of pre-Islamic Arab poetry and folk wisdom on the one hand and Persian (Sasanian) courtly canons on the other. The combination of both streams configured a non-divine origin and a non-prophetic source. It yielded a distinctively traditional type of wisdom stored and transmitted through the generations rather than via the event of revelation. However, it is symptomatic of the efforts to answer the question What is Islam? (Ahmed 2016) that there seemed to be an at least tacit consensus on the effect that adab was, indeed, Islamic. Most generally, one could argue that, since it promoted virtue, adab could only be Islamic. Though never appearing in the Qur’an, one would have a hard time to peruse Islamicate writings and find a place where it is stated (and documented) that adab is not commanded by God. One step forward, it has been asserted that adab moulds the human character and equips it “to embody the beautiful, to bring out the inner harmony, oneness, and balance demanded by tawhid”, which is the key concept of Islamic doctrine (Murata and Chittick 1994, p. 307). This soft Islamization of adab is part of an absorption process that does not evacuate the principled autonomy of adab as a non-prophetic, non-­ revelatory discourse—only that the distinction with the shari‘a corpus is a soft and subtle one (Salvatore 2019). One could dare to suggest that adab makes the implementation of shari‘a gentle and even spiritual (Murata and Chittick 1994, p. 307). It remains that as two complementary ways to turn exemplary narratives into virtuous habitus, hadith and adab kept clear-cut lines of mutual distinction, as prominently shown by scholars who considered themselves adept in both areas. To provide a snapshot of the intersecting trajectories of the two traditions within the precolonial Islamic ecumene, we could say that rather than searching for forms of civility as sharply distinguished from religion, one needs to explore socio-cultural forms and norms delineating ways of soft distinction. This is a distinction between a corpus of norms of prophetic origin constituting the umma (the community of the faithful proper) and a type of civil ethic innervating a “civilizing process” of sorts. This process provides a scaffolding to both the competitive and the cohesive dimensions

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of social life in the Islamic ecumene. This regulating impetus of the adab tradition has been strengthened by how Islamicate cultural elites from various epochs and locales have considered the normative import of shari‘a not self-sufficient in the task of governing the increasing complexity and diversity of the Islamic ecumene itself and its diversifying relations with partners and foes. Therefore we could see the fields of shari‘a and adab as not building a stale symmetric binary of sharp differentiation but engaging in a continuous reciprocal relation of accommodation and cross-pollination through which each could be constructed as the internal limit of the other. Adab as wisdom does not, as it cannot, contradict divine normativity, the authoritative chain linking Prophet Muhammad, a champion of adab, to the  ‘ulama’ as religious personnel, inheriting his charisma. Those in charge of the law need adab, as one can see from the success of sub-genres like adab al-mufti and adab al-qadi (Masud 1984). One could even speak of a significant grey zone of overlapping narratives of hadith and adab via storytelling. While it is easy to focus on norm and habitus as the two arrows innervating institutionalization, one should not underestimate the narrative form itself underlying the process. It is important to acknowledge that it is not us, the observers and interpreters, who attribute to hadith and adab the fashionable label of “narratives”. It is the makers of hadith and adab who worked on their selection and transmission in full consciousness of their narrative structure and power. What allows the wisdom of old Sasanian kings and Prophet Muhammad to be isomorphic is precisely the plastic narration of their exemplary feats, regardless of their different legitimation. Adab took a solid root beyond courtly milieus by being appropriated, codified, and practiced within a variety of Sufi brotherhoods. These were successful in interfacing between elite and government milieus, wealthy merchant circles, and the “commoners”. In this way, they disseminated the ethos and prestige of adab among a large variety of subjects and groups in society beneath the level of the cultural, political, and economic elites. This Sufi intervention in the discursive field of adab enriched its intersection with the hadith narrative tradition, which was intensely cultivated among Sufi scholars, particularly in the late Middle Periods and the early modern era (Papas 2008). In several instances, adab became

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a strategically crucial concept for both Sufi practice and theory, occupying a central place in manuals for aspirants. Thanks to these Sufi interventions the process of diffusion of adab as the main arrow of civility in the Islamic ecumene diverged from the sharply vertical “trickle-down” flow that characterized the trajectories delineated by Norbert Elias with regard to Europe (1983 [1969], 2000 [1939, 1968]).

3.5 Mild Institutionalization in the Islamic Ecumene The rise of Islam completed the transition from the empires of antiquity to the civilizational idea of a “commonwealth”. This should be intended as a wider community whose cohesion does not depend primarily on autocratic rule but on the normative reconstruction of order by specialists of the norm. “Ethical monotheism” (to use a Weberian concept) triggered by prophecy played a key role in the process. Several former Jewish rabbis and Zoroastrian mobeds, which we grossly identify as “religious personnel”, joined the ranks of Muslim ‘ulama’ and decisively contributed to give form to the Islamic ecumene. Alongside the Persian and Judaic legacies, Hellenic high culture also contributed to how Islam reshaped what Marshall Hodgson called the Irano-Semitic civilizational region, based on the big picture of the Islamic ecumene that he drew in his three-volume The Venture of Islam (Hodgson 1974), a seminal work that has recently inspired a collective volume (Salvatore et al. 2018). For sure, the inner composition and variety of an Irano-Semitic zone that was able to absorb key Hellenic inputs exceeded the prophetic message and added to the theological idea of the umma the said dimension of “commonwealth”. The configuration itself of the Islamic ecumene was not in itself hostile to empire-building but was able to survive its dynastic ebbs and flows. In this sense, the advent of Islam brought to full fruition the meta-institutional power through which prophets, spiritual leaders, and reformers could shape patterns of the social bond that were potentially alternative to the logic of the accumulation of sheer power characteristic of empire building. It was particularly during the post-classical,

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post-caliphal age, which Hodgson called the Middle Periods, from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries, that the Islamic ecumene provided a unique historical case of a balanced, though also unstable, interplay between the autonomy of religious personnel on the one hand and the political and institutional dynamics of empire and state-building, on the other. One can make sense of these dynamics by showing how civility contributed to a “mild institutionalization” of cohesive patterns in the Islamic ecumene, bringing to fruition and stabilizing the meta-­ institutional power of the Islamically inflected intersection of religion and civility sketched in the previous section. Hodgson thus summarized the process unfolding in the Irano-Semitic civilizational area: In the mid-Arid Zone … the pressures toward a cosmopolitan dissolution of local legitimations could be unusually strong. Perhaps on this account, in that region the compensating institutions proved to be the less tightly structured. They were highly flexible, for agrarian times; but they also, more than in either India or the Occident, did tend to leave the individual relatively insecure in status, and face to face with society at large—as his religion left him face to face with the supreme God—with a minimum of buffering intermediaries. (Hodgson 1974, II: p. 63)

This synthetic statement would require several specifications, which Hodgson’s work, though theoretically rich, could only partly inspire. In comparative terms, the above statement evokes the key sociological question of the relationship between “individual” and “society”. “Religion” matters here for placing demands on the individual (or even for defining individuality as agency) in ways that may place incentives on specific modes of sociality rather than others. This could be a suitable formulation of the background question concerning any articulation of civility. In the case of Islam, Hodgson seemed to place value in the normative force of what he saw as “religion per se”, as divine command soliciting a human response. It is the reciprocity entrenched in this pattern of command and response—the sum of Qur’anic theology and anthropology, as it were—that according to Hodgson predetermines the low level of institutional mediation or “buffering” of this model.

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It seems that, based on this view, religion (in this case, Islam as the fundamental act of human commitment to God) finds its place at the intersection of a meta-institutional level of building the social bond and a mild level of institutionalization, of which Hodgson provided key instances, which I will summarize below. Trying to extrapolate further implications of this interpretive model, one could dare to see the Islamic ecumene as a connective (rather than collective), and rather un-organic body, where accountability is seldom of a corporate nature and tends to bounce back on the individual as Muslim. The argument provides a radical revision, if not an inversion, of Weber’s argument on how the dynamic of Verbrüderung, of building confraternities, in late medieval cities within Latin Christendom (most typically in Italy) played a decisive role in the process of generating the Anstalt (institution) as the exceptional outcome of what he saw as Occidental political cultures. Weber’s general model was not represented by monastic orders, but probably by the “lay”, non-monastic confraternities, often based on common devotional practices, which mushroomed in European late medieval cities and were geared to mutual help among their members. Weber also laid stress on how the simple nexus of brotherhood used to morph into the idea of a collective body, through the communal act of taking an oath. He covered this process through the term of schwurgemeinschaftliche Verbrüderung (Weber 1980 [1921–1922], p. 748), the formation of a “sworn confraternization”, that is, a brotherhood nexus communally consecrated through a collective oath. The concept describes the process through which a brotherhood acquires a corporate personality by initiating its members (the “brothers”) into a common bond through the ritual of “swearing themselves into” the corporately constituted community (Salvatore 2020, pp. 22–23). This particular procedure for cementing the bond of brotherhood produces the kernel of an institution in the form of a corporation, which transcends the overlapping dyadic ties among “brothers”. It is important to stress that, whatever the model that inspired Weber, procedures of incorporation happened to involve multiple groups, starting from those located in cities (like the corporations of arts and crafts or guilds) but also reaching up to the royal courts of the (soon “national”) states taking shape in the same era. Not last, the phenomenon keyed the juridical

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personality of what still nowadays are known as “corporations” not just in common parlance but also in the civil codes, that is, the business companies. Interestingly, however, in the Weberian approach, the key genealogy of incorporation is religious more than just economic. We can speak here of a “socio-political theology” that allows one to “rationalize” accountability by turning a crisscrossing set of relationships within a brotherhood into a collective personality with corporate responsibility. One should here understand institutionalization as the ultimate outcome of the process, as the formula through which civility was routinized in an “Occidental” framework, destined to become globally hegemonic in the course of the modern, colonial epoch. Beneath the process of incorporation, institutional “charters” provide statutory stability to the otherwise fluid ties of civility for the benefit of several organizations, including universities (Salvatore 2016, p. 99). In sum, the fluid civility of the “brotherhood” can only jelly into an “institution” via a process of sacralization that is intrinsically both theological and juridical. It is important in this regard to remember that at that early stage of development explored by Weber, there was yet no difference between what will later become “private” corporations and “public” institutions (Weber 1980 [1921–1922], pp. 425–440). If these are the historical, winning parameters of the Western way to understand civility, what about the Islamic “difference”? Surprisingly perhaps, the Islamic articulation of civility, even starting from a definition of Islam like the one embraced by Hodgson and that is far from uncontroversial, turns out to be rather a benchmark of “normality” as far as the unfolding of civility is concerned, even by adopting Weberian standards. The rationality of civility in the Islamic ecumene shines through a refusal to sacralize the fraternal bond, by keeping fluid its initiatory and transformational power and by habituating its practice under the discursive umbrella of adab. The outcome is a mild degree of institutionalization and formalization shunning the formation of a full-fledged corporate personality. This outcome is particularly well visible in the rise of organized Sufi brotherhoods during the era that Hodgson called the Middle Periods, corresponding to the European Late Middle Ages. A system of recognition of “spiritual seniority” was often matched by an “oath of allegiance”, bay‘a. This is, and not by chance, a metaphor drawn from

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commercial transactions (Salvatore 2020, pp. 23–24). In this sense, the “oath” in question does not have the religio-magical dimension of the swearing model exemplified by Weber with regard to the medieval European cities. Bay‘a signifies an act of “buying into” (rather than “swearing into”) the authority of the master (of a Sufi brotherhood, a guild, etc.). On the other hand, one should consider that the process Weber read into late medieval European developments was also at the root of the already noted bifurcation of the corporate body between the process of achieving a mystical union in the brotherhood and the crystallization of a juridical personality in business pursuits. This bifurcation accounts for an exceptional (theologically twisted) trajectory of civility on the European, Western side, more than for any purported “normality”. What normalized the process into a global benchmark was the rise of European hegemony over the globe. This also included, by time, the secular occultation of the socio-political theology innervating incorporation (Rahimi and Salvatore 2018, pp. 256–257). We can, therefore, appreciate Hodgson’s characterization of Islamic civility as essentially non-corporatist. But was it “contractual” as he claimed? Only to the extent that we are able to understand the term outside of  the lens of European modern contract law and contractualism; only if we can appreciate all shades of the Islamic “buying into” the spiritual seniority that prevents a full-scale institutionalization; only if we give full weight to the relative fluidity of the Islamic model, which only admitted supple ritual forms staying ashore of the religio-magical patterns of incorporation prevailing in Europe. It is also remarkable how Islamic civility so defined facilitated a patterning of different belongings shunning rigid templates of chartering, corporatization, and institutionalization and was, therefore, more easily deployable over long distances. From Hodgson’s analysis, it emerges that the relative lack or weakness of chartered autonomy of a “municipal” kind in the Islamic ecumene supported the cosmopolitan outlook of urban associational life, thanks to shifting combinations of shari‘a and adab. The combined code of civility enabled a variety of social groups to explore joint interests and pursue common goods over long distances. This empowerment did not occur in abstract terms and from the top down but via recognized methods for valuing all legitimate interests and

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goods at stake in given social interactions (Salvatore 2007). This type of civility, in precolonial Islam as much as in the pre-liberal West, can be linked to the explicit or implicit use of Aristotelian categories of ordering the goods. This is what Hodgson probably intended when he saw Islamic contractualism as inflected in moral terms (Hodgson 1993, pp. 149–158). Concrete examples thereof are the mild institutionalization of three key institutions, namely the college (the madrasa), the pious foundation (the waqf), and the Sufi brotherhood itself (the tariqa). However, the examples that we can invoke to prove the success and originality of madrasa, waqf, and tariqa should be handled as cases of a larger type of institutional autonomy-cum-flexibility that is irreducible to the workings of contractualism and moralism or of the underlying individualism. Hodgson’s approach needs qualification and revision. Said A. Arjomand had the merit of reflecting on the aspects of Islamic law as morally based which may have immunized Islamic civility from becoming entrenched into corporatism and therefore discouraged a full-fledged institutionalization process (Arjomand 2004). Without the protective shield of a public law, which shari‘a, due to its “individualism”, hesitated to cover, the custodians of the law, administrators of the waqf, and masters of the brotherhoods (the ‘ulama’ broadly conceived) may have held a disproportionate power of arbitrage over how to inflect the normative idiom of civility. This quasi-monopoly does not allow us to take the individualism and contractualism diagnosed by Hodgson at face value, even more since these are categories that we tend to inflect based on their significance within Western history and society. In other words, one needs to dynamize the model initially sketched by Hodgson. However, precisely since the monopoly was not absolute, due to the emphatic absence of priesthood in Islam and its principled theological individualism, counter-elites could periodically rise to challenge the religious establishment, as they felt legitimized to raise the banner of the moral norm against them. Incidentally, these patterns may be viewed as cyclically activating a “revivalist” challenge of the socio-political order, which it would be myopic to only impute to colonial circumstances and conflict fields—although it may be true that the first conscious “jihadist” were Sufi brotherhoods challenging European imperialism. On the other hand, it is precisely this type of dynamics of mutual challenge between

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elites and aspiring counter-elites that made Islamic civility vital on a socio-political plane. It made it also difficult to co-opt and emasculate via a two-pronged routinization in the form of social mannerism and state-­ building, like the one described by Norbert Elias in European cases. It is also noteworthy that this clearer embedding of civility within social contentions did not discourage, but promoted social mobility in ways that compare quite positively with the bordering civilizations of Western Europe, China, and India, and which resulted in what Hodgson celebrated as Islam’s “egalitarian cosmopolitanism”.

3.6 Concluding Remarks The analysis of the productive tension of religion and civility in the Islamic ecumene has not only required an excursus into the sacred precinct of Western civility, namely civil society, but also revisiting the key theoretical (and theological) underpinnings of one of Weber’s key reconstructions of the “Occidental” normative patterns of collective action. We also saw how the relation of these patterns to a dynamic, culturally vivid idea of civility is no doubt foundational, given the civil/urban dimension of the process, yet also ambivalent, because of its legal “sterilization” in the form of a corporation. However, the relativization of such ambivalent Western assumptions on civility entailed shedding light on the originality of the simultaneous articulation of civility and religion in the Islamic ecumene, prior to the onslaught of European colonialism and imperialism. I have focused on the field (or discursive tradition) of adab in its relation to hadith, the corpus of traditions (of sayings and deeds) of Prophet Muhammad. Adab and hadith would therefore configure a privileged prima facie “pre-­ institutional” case of studying the cultural and narrative dimension of the  entwining of civility and religion. Both fields/traditions are about stories enacting norms of behaviour and inculcating habitus. The courtly (but also Sufi) inflection of adab provided the key arrow of civility writ Islamic. We have here to do with a twin field that needs to be carefully  analysed before discussing how civility and religion translate into institutions.

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While in principle comparable with Western notions, religion, civility, and institution differ in the Islamic ecumene as to their degree of formalization and “routinization”. For sure, the inception of the modern era in the Islamic ecumene, prior to its gradual subjugation to European colonial powers, witnessed an institutional integration of precisely those brotherhoods that could suit the structures and fit the goals of increasingly centralized and self-conscious imperial bureaucracies. These were often anxious to stabilize cooperation with Sufi masters and sedate the subversive potential of unregulated fervour. In this guise, the civilizing process started to take contours comparable to the European cases famously analysed by Elias.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sh. 2016. What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Alexander, J.C. 2006. The Civil Sphere. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Arendt, H. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arjomand, S. A. 2004. Transformation of the Islamicate Civilization: A Turning Point in the Thirteenth Century? In Eurasian Transformations, 10th to 13th Centuries: Crystallizations, Divergences, Renaissances, eds. Johann P. Arnason and Björn Wittrock, 213–45. Leiden: Brill. Cook, M. 2015. The Centrality of Islamic Civilization. In Benjamin Z. Kedar and Merry E.  Wiesner‐Hanks (eds.) The Cambridge World History, Vol. 5: Expanding Webs of Exchange and Conflict, 500CE–1500CE, Cambridge: Cambridge University, 385–413. Elias, N. 1983 [1969]. The Court Society. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2000 [1939, 1968]. The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell. Gellner, E. 1995. The Importance of Being Modular. In Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison, ed. J. Hall, 32–55. Boston: Polity Press. Hodgson, M.G.S. 1974. The Venture of Islam. Conscience and History in a World Civilization. 3 vols. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1993. Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam and World History. Ed. with Introduction and Conclusion Edmund Burke III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Ikegami, E. 1995. The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2005. Bonds of Civility. Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mardin, Ş. 1995. Civil Society and Islam. In Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison, ed. J. Hall, 278–300. Boston: Polity Press. Masud, M.Kh. 1984. Adab Al-Mufti: The Muslim Understanding of Values, Characteristics, and Role of a Mufti. In Moral Conduct and Authority. The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam, ed. B. Daly Metcalf, 124–151. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Mayeur-Jaouen, C., ed. 2019. Adab and Modernity. A Civilising Process? (Sixteenth-Twenty-First Centuries). Leiden: Brill. Murata, S., and W.C. Chittick. 1994. The Vision of Islam. New York: Paragon. Papas, A. 2008. No Sufism Without Sufi Order: Rethinking Tarîqa and Adab with Ahmad Kâsânî Dahbidî (1461–1542). Kyoto Bulletin of Islamic Area Studies 2 (1): 4–22. Rahimi, B., and A. Salvatore. 2018. The Crystallization and Expansiveness of Sufi Networks Within the Urban-Rural-Nomadic Nexus of the Islamic Ecumene. In The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam, ed. A. Salvatore, R. Tottoli, and B. Rahimi, 253–271. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Salvatore, A. 2007. The Public Sphere: Liberal Modernity, Catholicism, and Islam. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2016. The Sociology of Islam: Knowledge, Power and Civility. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Salvatore, A., R. Tottoli, and B. Rahimi, eds. 2018. The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Salvatore, A. 2019. Secularity Through a “Soft Distinction” in the Islamic Ecumene? Adab as a Counterpoint to Shari‘a. Historical Social Research 44 (3): 35–51. ———. 2020. East of Westphalia: Shaping the Body-Politic Via Institutional Charisma. In Political Theologies and Development in Asia: Transcendence, Sacrifice and Aspiration, ed. G. Bolotta, M. Feener, and Ph. Fountain, 18–39. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Şentürk, R. 2005. Narrative Social Structure: Anatomy of the Hadith Transmission Network, 610–1505. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Smith, A. 1853 [1759]. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. London: Henry G. Bohn. Weber, M. 1980 [1921–1922]. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie. Ed. J.  Winckelmann, 5th ed. Tübingen: J.  C. B.  Mohr (Paul Siebeck).

4 Good Behaviour: Islam and Christianity as Framework for Religious Life Bryan S. Turner

4.1 Introduction: Four Arguments Regarding Manners and Religious Life My chapter is organized around three interconnected arguments. These arguments are contentious, to some extent counter-intuitive and in probability immodest. Contentious arguments can hopefully make for good debate. My arguments involve a comparison of Islamic and Christian ideas about piety/civility, which in this discussion I call simply “good behaviour”. I use this phrase in order to include in the same discussion secular and religious norms of piety, courtesy and civility. In other words, the aim is to include under adab what pass for a range of disciplines from etiquette to norms for guiding children to religious rituals. This intellectual enterprise would probably be more suited to a large volume than a modest essay.

B. S. Turner (*) Institute for Humanities & Social Science, Australian Catholic University, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 M. Milani, V. Adrahtas (eds.), Islam, Civility and Political Culture, New Directions in Islam, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56761-3_4

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The notion of adab has also been a matter of etymological and philosophical dispute. Scholars have claimed that it does not have an Arabic root and furthermore that it owes a debt to both Persian and Greek sources (Gutas 1998). Adab covers both “high ethics” (fundamental ideals and wisdom literature) and social ethics, covering good manners and norms of appropriate speech. In the Qur’an (3:134) we find the recommendation that when somebody offers you a courteous greeting, respond with a more or at least equal courtesy. In its fuller meaning, adab can also refer to the correct pathway or right track, and hence adab is associated with Sunnah or the road to righteousness. One can therefore detect two related but distinct paradigms for “good behaviour”. As the correct pathway it has a religious meaning and in its figurative meaning it describes customary manners (Afshar 2019). The main burden of this chapter is not to investigate this Islamic tradition in isolation, but rather to undertake a study of the parallel developments of notions of good behaviour in both Islam and Christianity. In crafting this comparison, I take on board the fact that, in modern scholarship, there is something of an aversion to such large-scale comparisons. An earlier generation of scholars were less risk-adverse when it came to comparisons between whole civilizations. Here I think for example of William Montgomery Watt’s Muslim–Christian Encounters (1991) or Ninian Smart’s World Religions: A Dialogue (1960). Perhaps more pertinent to my considerations in this chapter is the ambitious contribution of Marshall G. S. Hodgson’s ‘A Comparison of Islam and Christianity as Framework for Religious Life’ (1960). In this discussion, I do not attempt a general comparison, but only focus on norms of conduct that in one way or another discipline human behaviour. The first argument is that, in both its origins and development, behavioural norms (such as civility) in Western Christendom were essentially secular, whereas in Islamicate cultures adab provided both a religious and secular framework for conduct. Furthermore, Christian norms of behaviour were modest and late to develop, whereas Islam appears to have produced far more elaborate and detailed codes of conduct. One immediate problem with this comparison is that implicitly it assumes Christianity and Islam were somehow separate and not shaped by similar influences. To take one example of common roots, the idea of virtue (never far

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removed from notions of piety or civility) in both religions was influenced by Aristotle’s secular notion of virtuous behaviour which had a lasting impact on Islam for example in the philosophical tradition of al-­ Farabi. Neoplatonism also played a role in Islamic Falsafa. Foundational Islamic norms of correct behaviour of course are rooted in the Qur’an and the Hadith. Such norms cover all aspects of life and, in that sense, have both a secular and a religious dimension. However, the underlying idea of Adab al-Islam is that such norms follow and affirm the fundamental principle of Islam or tawhid—the Oneness and Uniqueness of Allah. The norms of pious behaviour or civility remind the believer of his or her dependence on God (Al-Kaysi 1986). In my second argument, norms of good behaviour are typically connected to what we may call “body management”. My emphasis on the body was made obvious in The Body and Society (1984). In my recent work on religious practice and habituation, I found inspiration in the work of Saba Mahmood, especially Politics of Piety (2005). In her work on female agency, she developed a robust theory of practice to overcome conventional assumptions in the social sciences that privilege religious belief over embodied practices. Against the secular bias of much social research, the force of devotional practices in everyday life is more obvious than the effects of religious beliefs. In this respect, one can detect the influence of Talal Asad (1993, 1997) on her intellectual development. In breaking with the classical anthropological interpretation of the body as a system of signs, for example in the work of Mary Douglas, he argued that the human body is to be understood as an ensemble of aptitudes. This approach was to foreground the idea that practice must play a large role in any understanding of religion. Mahmood’s work was thus a component in the widespread criticism of the legacy of Clifford Geertz which privileged culture and personality over politics and practice. In this perspective, a person becomes good or virtuous by the habitual performance of good behaviour, whereby pious practices produce pious women. In short, the piety of Muslim woman arises through the quest for virtue through habits and behaviours. Mahmood thus adhered to the principles of virtue ethics that are fundamental to the Aristotelian revival associated with Alasdair MacIntyre (1999), who also sought to revive philosophical interest in the body rather than the mind.

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In both religions, the human body is a potential location of error and misbehaviour. The body must be regulated and disciplined not to cause offence to others or to God, and hence the body is the physical manifestation of piety. In both traditional Catholicism and Islam pious women cover their heads. In ultra-orthodox Judaism, women shave their heads. For Muslims, tattoos are prohibited because they imply that the body is not a perfect creation. In ultra-orthodox Judaism, these norms include the type of hats that must be worn. Leviticus, the third book of the Torah and part of the Old Testament, was first composed around 538–332 BCE. It contains a virtual encyclopaedia of what to eat and drink and how to do that. However, by contrast to both Judaism and Islam, Christian norms are minimalistic rather than expansive. The Ten Commandments include instructions such as not to covet one’s neighbour’s wife, but specific norms regulating the body are limited. Pauline Christianity rejected circumcision but did not go into detail about body management. The New Testament set itself against what it saw to be the ritual legacy of Leviticus and the Law by claiming that Christians lived by an inner grace and not by external behavioural prescriptions. To take one very specific example, unlike both Judaism and Islam, pork does not, in the Christian tradition, contaminate or corrupt. In the Philippines in the town of Balayan a communal roast pig festival is celebrated on the day commemorating Saint John the Baptist. Eating or not eating pigs becomes a visible and often antagonistic division between Christian and Muslim communities. In short, New Testament norms are modest by comparison to the adab culture, because its original theology was not primarily a practical guide to this world. Of course, when we look at the Reformation, specifically Calvinism, my argument that in the West good manners were housed in a secular framework would appear to fall flat on its face. John Calvin (1509–1564) went to great lengths to develop a code of practice to regulate the lives of individuals especially with respect to marriage and family life. Similar arrangements for behaviour also come from the sermons of Martin Luther (1483–1546). The Reformation led to a major attempt to bring about the reform of manners. Indeed, in his The Disciplinary Revolution Philip Gorski (2003, p.  22) draws attention to how the Calvinists ‘aimed at nothing less than the establishment of an all-encompassing regime of

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moral and social discipline—a disciplinary revolution’. However, he also points out that in this revolution Church and State worked hand in hand. Through the “confessionalization” of society with the Reformation, ‘church-building and state-building go hand in hand’ (Gorski 2003, p. 17). Hence in this historical period, any distinction between religious and secular becomes blurred. My third argument draws attention to the foundations of Christianity in a messianic movement and its long-term implications. While there are similarities in the codes of good behaviour in all three of the Abrahamic religions, Christian codes are economical by comparison. We cannot understand Christian attitudes to behaviour in this world without reference to the doctrine of the Second Coming. Christ’s ministry was short and dramatic, but his crucifixion was followed by resurrection and thus the crucifixion was merely a prelude to Christ’s return at a future date. The Second Coming or Eschaton will occur at an unknown date in the future. Elaborate preparations for such a final event are unimportant and hence an elaborate code of life on this earth is not present in the New Testament gospels. Another problem for “good behaviour” in Christianity, and especially in the Reformation theology of Calvin and Luther, was the doctrine of predestination, namely, that the salvation of each individual was in God’s hands and therefore “good works” were of no avail. Human striving for salvation was useless and in addition one’s salvation status in the next world could not be known in advance. This dilemma of existential uncertainty was the topic of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2002). Protestant believers came to accept success in this world, including great wealth, a sure sign of spiritual salvation. In contrast to the Christian doctrine of a Second Coming, in Islam the life of the prophet Muhammad is the Eschaton or the dividing line between an unjust world living in error and a new world of justice for which there are specific guidelines for the correct behaviour of the faithful. Certain eschatological hadith do refer to Jesus (Isa) returning at the end of time to triumph over al-Dajjal (The Cheat or Charlatan). In Shi’ism the Twelve Imams play a similar role. However, while one can find examples of messianism in Islam, the idea of “a return” is not central

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to faith and not as significant as the doctrine of a Second Coming in Christianity. The final argument raises issues about the modern history of norms of behaviour. In the West behavioural norms have undergone a process that sociologists have called “informalization” (Wouters 2007). The so-called permissive society and the expressive revolution encouraged more relaxed and informal social interaction. The general disappearance of formal business suits for men and the widespread adoption of jeans and T-shirts are illustrations of informal norms. This development is an attempt to modify the theory of the civilizing process of Norbert Elias without overthrowing it. The Civilizing Process (Elias 2000) appeared to imply that secular norms of good behaviour would continue indefinitely in an evolutionary process of formality as the norms of the court spread to the middle classes and beyond. Wouters sees informalization as a deepening of the democratic process. One can also regard this development as a deepening of the secular character of interpersonal behaviour. In the modern period I argue that under the impact of modern revivalism through various piety movements (such as the role of female preachers in piety movements or Da’wa), there has been an amplification of the scope of adab. It is commonly observed that in Southeast Asia for example in earlier generations women were not veiled (Turner 2008). By contrast younger women are veiled, attend Quran study groups and discipline their families into stricter observance. With greater Islamization, there is increasingly widespread application of norms governing dress, especially head covering (Cherkaoui 2020). The approval of food outlets and commercial beverages such as Coca-Cola is increasingly covered by the issue of halal certificates.

4.2 E  laboration of the Contrast Between Christianity and Islam I argue that the critical difference between Christianity and Islam is that we have to regard the idea of the Second Coming as a foundational belief of the early Christian communities, and hence the origins of Christianity

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are very different from the origins of Islam. In addition, in historical terms, Islam comes after the foundation of Christianity. Muhammad is the Prophet whose revelation occurs in a world where the idea of religion is well developed. Indeed, recent work on the Axial Age religions indicates that both Christianity and Islam are variations on themes emerging in 800–200 BC (Jaspers 1953). The origins of the idea of a Second Coming are disputed, but it appears to be related to the Essene movement. The relationship of Jesus to the Essene sect is contentious. Another problem of interpretation relates to the Qumran commune, the guardians of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which was also connected to early Christianity and to the Essenes (Jokiranta 2017). Whether or not Jesus was an Essene, there is a striking relationship between the beliefs of the Essenes and the teachings of Jesus as recorded in the New Testament. What we know about the Essenes comes from Josephus, who discussed the Essenes living in Roman Judea in his The Jewish War around 75 BCE. Another source is from the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, who died in 79 CE. From these early sources we gather that the Essenes developed a theology of peace, lived communally, strictly followed the Sabbath, practised poverty and charity. In particular, they adhered to celibacy. In their theology there is a reference to the Teacher of Righteousness and the making of a New Covenant. The historian Fred Bratton concludes in A History of the Bible (1967) that there is a remarkable similarity between what we know about the Essenes and the community that lived at Qumran as guardians of the Dead Sea Scrolls, on the one hand, and the life and teaching of Jesus, on the other. In my comparative account of Christianity and Islam, celibacy is the critical issue in relation to basic norms of conduct. While both Judaism and Islam shun celibacy, its presence in the Christian tradition draws strength from the fact that there is no biblical record of Jesus as a married man with family and children. Quite the contrary, when the issue of loyalty to his person is raised, much of the teaching of Jesus rejects loyalty to family as a barrier. The sayings of Jesus are almost never explicit about how to behave in this world. Jesus demanded loyalty and commitment to himself over and above family and kinship obligations. Jesus commands his followers to “Follow me” without regard to domestic commitments. The famous commandment about loyalty—‘Let the dead bury the dead’—is another

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demand to ignore familial duties. These claims are based on the fact that Jesus came not to build a State or set up a new kingdom. In John 18:36, in response to his interrogation by Pilate, he famously declared that ‘My kingdom is not of this world’. This statement has been crucial in the treatment of Christianity in political theory. Thomas Hobbes argued in Leviathan that Christianity was not suitable as a political doctrine, because its doctrines were not prescriptions for how to rule a society, and hence Hobbes had more respect for Moses and Muhammad as political leaders. In Hobbesian political theory, Christianity was an anti-political doctrine. My claim is that, given a lively expectation of the Second Coming, there is no need to develop a detailed and exacting code of behaviour for life on this earth. Consequently, the message of salvation for the faithful, living in this world in expectation of the next, had to be developed after the Resurrection by Saint Paul, whose letters begin to spell out a set of manners, for example relating to marriage. Even so, Paul as a citizen of the Roman Empire had no intention of radically overthrowing existing institutions and insisted that Christians were subject to the existing authorities. In Paul’s famous epistle to Philemon regarding the status of the slave Onesimus, slavery was one such existing institution—why should one change anything when the world is ending? The context of Christianity in the time of Saint Augustine (354–430) was different. He had to face a very specific issue, namely, the sacking of Rome by barbarians in 410. Many in the city laid the blame with the Christians. In Augustine’s The City of God, Christians were advised to conduct their lives as Romans while abiding in the secular city, but their true destination was as citizens in a heavenly city. Hence Augustine had to argue that, while on this earth, Christians were to remain good Roman citizens. While Saint Augustine and subsequent Christianity developed a modus vivendi for life on this earth, Christianity has never abandoned the millenarian notion of a Second Coming. It is built into the Nicene Creed of 325 AD and modified in Constantinople, thereby producing the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 AD. A Christian may be defined as a person who believes in and endorses without reservation the Nicene Creed which declares that ‘He shall come again to judge the

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living and the dead; whose Kingdom shall have no end’. This creed is shared by both Protestants and Catholics and receives special prominence in such denominations as the Church of Latter Day Saints. This belief has political consequences in the contemporary notion of Dispensational Theology, namely, that there are epochs in which there is a special dispensation. In American politics, President George W. Bush holds to a dispensational theology in which he and like-minded Christians anticipate a messianic event in the land of Israel that will bring the world to an end ushering in the final dispensation (Smith 2006). There is nothing equivalent in Sunni Islam to a doctrine of the Second Coming. There have been messianic figures in Islamic history such as the Mahdi, an eschatological figure who will rid the world of injustice and is occasionally associated with Jesus as a messianic figure. The idea of the Mahdi has been particularly associated with the Ahmadiyya movement that emerged in the late nineteenth century in Punjab during British rule. There is also a tradition in Twelver Shi’ism of a messianic saver who will transform the world. Shi’ite beliefs regarding the arrival of the Rightly Guided One have enjoyed a long history in what is now Iran, but they have never been accepted within mainstream Sunni Islam and there is no support for messianism in the Qur’an. Islam offers detailed guidance to its followers about how to live in this world. Consequently, the Qur’an and later Muslim texts pay considerable attention to how to live properly as a Muslim on this earth. The extensive lists regarding manners that fall under the heading of adab are overtly practical guides to living, but their religious purpose is to act as a remembrance of God in everyday life. For example, going to and leaving the toilet is framed as an act of remembrance. My argument is that Islam offers far more authoritative guidance about everyday behaviour than has been characteristic of Christianity. To take one example in the Maliki tradition of fiqh, there is a discussion of the appropriateness of keeping a dog in the home and the ruling is that dogs are not permissible unless they are for hunting or guarding the home. The key issue in Islamic teaching in the Qur’an, Hadith and Shari’ah concerns the role of manners in binding the community together. Manners were concerned not simply about individual behaviour but about the welfare of the community. Adab was to foster a community of

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shared norms and not an order of society based on hierarchical etiquette. One core element of Islamic norms concerns courtship, marriage, parenthood and divorce. Muhammad had various wives and children, and by contrast Jesus had no wives and no offspring, and hence no family life or at least no family life which the New Testament thought was of any relevance. At a much later stage Roman Catholicism came to elaborate a theory of marriage as a sacrament, whereas in Islamicate societies marriage is a contract. The Church also elevated the status of Mary as the Mother of God. In many contemporary societies such as Italy and the Philippines images of and devotion towards Mary appear to be equivalent to adoration of Jesus. In other words, later developments in Catholicism went along with a construction of a Holy Family. These developments also created ambiguity—was Joseph simply a companion of the Virgin? In the Qur’an Mary (Maryam) appears in the 19th Sura where she is regarded with great respect, but Islam does not struggle theologically to create a family around the Prophet. The main difference then between Christianity and Islam in this argument is that the crucifixion of Jesus and the idea of the risen Christ evolved through the mission of Saint Paul into a network of small communities within the Roman Empire. However, the New Testament does not lay down a detailed code of manners for living on this earth. By contrast Muhammad is portrayed in the Qur’an as the Prophet who creates a new society based around the idea of justice and in fact creates a State in the Constitution of Medina. Hodgson (1974, vol. 1, p.  187) simply says ‘Muhammad had created a new local polity, founded on his prophetic vision. But almost immediately that polity took on far-­reaching international dimensions’. The polity rapidly became an empire from Nile to Oxus. By contrast Jesus did not by intention or by accident come to create a State. He created a following that through the missionary activity of Paul evolved into a series of more or less isolated communities within the Roman Empire. Because the foundation event of Islam was the creation of a State in which Muhammad was able to unify various tribes into a political community or polity with its urban base in the cities of Mecca and Medina, there is no distinction between Church and State in Islam. Indeed, there is no Church in Islam and no priesthood. The New Testament has no

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understanding of the early Christian communities as constituting a State. Early Christian “pious behaviour” was more a matter of belief than ritual cleanliness, because early Christians were circumcised in their hearts and not on their bodies. There are no rules relating to dress, or etiquette, or bodily cleansing that fall under the category of adab. The exceptions are few and far between, such as the instruction about hair in 1.Corinthians 11.14—‘Does not the very nature of things teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him’. By contrast long hair for a woman is a glory to her, because she can cover her head. I turn now to Hodgson’s remarkable ‘A Comparison of Islam and Christianity’ (1960). For Hodgson, the crucial difference between the two religions is the crucifixion of Jesus which puts suffering, death and redemption at the forefront of Christian experience and devotion. The Christian symbol is the Cross and through Christ’s sacrifice humans can find consolation. Through his sacrifice, Christians live without the need of the Mosaic Law. By contrast ‘The Islamic tradition has shied away from the poignant, from the passionate and the paradoxical in life. Islam sees itself as the religion of sober moderation, and most Muslims would distrust Paul’s grand defiance of reason and of nature or an exaltedly private credo quia absurdum’ (p. 56). The analysis in his 1960 article continued to influence his ideas about piety and religion in volume one of The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization (1974). The importance of piety is captured in this comparison: ‘Personal piety is in some ways but a small part of religion. Yet it is the core of it’ (vol. 1, p.  360). Piety suffuses the Qur’an, the Hadith and Shari’ah. The study of adab owes a great deal to the legacy of Hodgson, especially in volume one, where again adab is not simply a list of dry rules of conduct. The legacy of Hodgson has been embraced and developed by Armando Salvatore in The Sociology of Islam: Knowledge, Power and Civility (2016). Salvatore’s aim is ‘to explore the extent to which the history and the present of an internally diverse, civilizational constellation—wherein various aspects of Islam as religion, culture, and civility play combined roles—justifies and legitimates a more comprehensive and less Western-centered view of civility’ (p.  278). Following Hodgson, he considers waqf, tasawwuf and Hadith as

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meta-institutions and as the framework for his civilizational analysis in the sociology of Islam. This chapter is written within the legacy of their work. I do not reject Hodgson’s characterisation of the two religions, but it is striking that he makes no reference to the idea of a Second Coming. Naturally in The Venture of Islam he recognized the origins and evolution of the two broad systems of Islam namely Sunnah and Shia. However, the central message of Islam is that everybody is ‘summoned in his own person to obey the commands of God’, whereby there can be no intermediaries and ‘no question of a church, ministering God’s grace to humans’, nor of ‘priests whose ritual acts mediated between a group of worshippers and God’ (vol. 1, pp. 318–319). Christianity has not been so preoccupied with manners (either “good” or “pious behaviour”) in terms of a rule book that can be mastered through childhood education. Islam was more likely to measure human responsibility by reference to legal codes and moral systems. This explains in part the central importance of the Shari’ah in the personal and collective experience of Muslims. Hodgson returned to the same theme in volume 2 when he notes that ‘For Christians the Law, the necessities imposed by living, is transcended as people are liberated, in loving response, to act through the inward power of God’s free spirit’ (vol. 2, p. 338). Taking full note of Hodgson’s eloquence and his brilliance, we have to remind ourselves that Hodgson was a committed Quaker, and one might legitimately observe that here Hodgson writes from within a Quaker tradition in which the believer is motivated, not by customs, rituals or laws but by an inner Light (Turner 1976). The Quaker is not obliged to respect the authority of secular powers; he is under no obligation to remove his hat before a figure of secular authority. Quakers follow an inner Light and not external secular customs. However, for the majority of ordinary humans, coping with the demands of everyday life requires some basic rules, especially when it involves disciplining the behaviour of recalcitrant children. In the absence of a guiding Light, people have filled in the gaps with systems of rules. A system of rules to guide manners is typically articulated to regulate sex, the relationship between men and women and the status of their offspring. (Expanding on this in the Islamic milieu, see Chap. 8.) The problem of how to manage the human body was especially

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prominent in the great ‘reformation of manners’ that gained importance in the Reformation. In fact, this transformation of the norms governing sexuality began in the late fifteenth century, as measured by the growing number of convictions for sodomy (MacCulloch 2005, p.  630). The growing concern to regulate sex was also a response to the emergence of a new plague on European soil, namely, venereal disease or ‘the French pox’. The word “syphilis” has its origin in a poem by doctor Girolamo Fracastoro in 1531. This new disease was as common among the rich as among the poor and gave rise to drastic action such as the closure of licenced brothels in the middle of the sixteenth century. Public bath houses were also closed. Another development was the attempt by both Protestant and Catholic reformers to condemn premarital sex and to give prominence to a religious marriage ceremony. These new regulations were also related to the attempt by the Catholic Church to promote the family by strengthening its sacred aura. The idea of the Holy Family was elevated and elaborated by including Joseph as a father figure while maintaining the virginity of Mary. These developments revealed a tension in the Catholic Church between the centrality of the family to civilized society and the necessary celibacy of the priesthood. The idea of marriage as the basis of a happy life was associated with companionship as the antidote to the problems of isolation and loneliness. The work of Erasmus was important in these developments. In 1518 he published Encomium matrimonii in praise of marriage and at the same time a ‘diatribe against celibacy as a commendation of marriage’ (MacCulloch 2005, p. 647). While the Protestant theologians had rejected the Catholic idea of marriage as a sacrament, they nevertheless promoted the idea of marriage as a secular blessing. After all Luther had given his blessing to married life and the joys of having children. As Protestants came to promote marriage, not as a sacrament but as a contract, they also came to accept divorce as its inevitable corollary. John Milton having famously praised marriage as companionship, defended divorce as an acceptable route out of wedlock. As cities such as London and Amsterdam became more diverse and populated in the seventeenth century, they were also seen to be increasingly dangerous and deviant. By the 1690s ‘Societies for the Reformation of Manners’ began to emerge. Religious pluralism was famously

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celebrated by Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) published the Character of Holland in 1653 during the Anglo-Dutch War. The poem serves to address the relationship between tolerance and trade. Amsterdam was a bustling seaport with religious diversity and a reputation for religious tolerance. Marvell wrote: Hence Amsterdam—Turk, Christian, pagan, Jew, Staple of sects and mint of schism grew: That bank of conscience where not one so strange Opinion but finds credit and exchange.

These societies were concerned with religious diversity, blasphemy and respect for the Sabbath, but perhaps more immediately with the role of the courts to prosecute with what they called “lewdness” and the maintenance of brothels. I have dwelt at some length with the Second Coming and its long-term consequences in spelling out the similarities and differences between Islam and Christian systems of discipline, in order to argue that Christianity provided only a limited guide to body regulation and to the institutions that might deliver it (such as the family). While Christianity struggled to reconcile priestly celibacy and lay sexuality, Islam was in many respects more practical. The Prophet accepted the need for polygamy as a practical solution to widows whose husbands had died in wars protecting the State that was emerging from the tribal alliances that supported the new religion. However, no society can survive without regulatory norms to discipline behaviour. The questions are: How and to what extent did the Christian West fill the gap left by the doctrine of the Second Coming? Did these norms in Christendom have an essentially secular character because they aimed at regulating life on earth against the Second Coming for which obviously there was no definite date? One guideline is to return to Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), humanist and advocate of a secular marriage contract. One can date the idea of secular civility in the Western tradition in humanism with the publication of De civilitate morum puerilium libellus (civility or good manners in children) by Erasmus in 1530, and its consequent impact on the education of youth into norms and practices that defined acceptable

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behaviour. Erasmus was critical of the attachment to external rituals in his day. He developed by contrast the idea of pietas as an inner moral consciousness in opposition to external rigid rules, which he disparagingly called ‘a kind of Judaism’. This work by Erasmus is seen to have special importance in the evolution of manners in the West according to Norbert Elias. The evolution of manners and the rise of the State were given classic expression in Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process (2000). This work first appeared in German in 1939 and has remained a definitive analysis of the history of manners in the West for both historians and sociologists. Beginning with a discussion of Erasmus, Elias traced the evolution of table manners, such as the influence of the fork, dress codes and bodily deportment. This transformation included for example the disappearance of the spittoon and piss-­ pot as toilet behaviour became more private and circumspect. According to Elias, the publication of Erasmus’s work on civility appeared at precisely the juncture of the breakdown of knightly society and the unity of the Catholic Church. Erasmus is often seen as caught between traditional Catholics, the Protestant Reformers and between humanism and religion. These tensions are found in his central interest in the relationship between piety and faith, where faith expressed an individual’s relationship to God in Christ and piety referred in broad terms to moral behaviour (Hoffman 1989). His text covers the history of norms of civilizational behaviour from the warrior society of Western feudalism to the emergence of middle-­ class norms of good behaviour via the court system and the rise of sovereign States in the modern world. Elias in his magnum opus says virtually nothing about the impact of Christianity on such norms. Although this apparent gap might appear odd, one explanation is that indeed Christian ideas about good behaviour did not impinge on the predominantly secular nature of the norms of everyday life—such as the use of the fork, the availability of a spittoon, the introduction of the handkerchief, the flushing toilet and so forth. In medieval Europe, good manners were the secular manners of the court, giving rise to such notions as courteous. The mediaeval warrior was slowly accommodated to the life of the court. As Western norms of behaviour developed with the rise of the modern State,

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the manners of the court were eventually modernized to equip the middle classes for a bourgeois lifestyle. These norms were not to prepare human beings for their salvation; they were about regulating day-to-day behaviour especially among strangers. These norms also created an honorific hierarchy in which lower orders in fact had no “manners”. The courtly behaviour described by Elias was based on the acceptance of a social hierarchy in which there was little or no social mobility. Over time, the middle class acquired manners and were able to organize their domestic environment with suitable furniture. Good behaviour did not include the working class. In France it was not until the twentieth century, for example, that peasants became Frenchmen (Weber 1976) and in the United Kingdom it was not until the establishment of the BBC that the State became concerned to create national standards of spoken English and accepted norms of correct behaviour. Moral tone of the BBC was established by the austere John Reith, the Director General of the BBC from 1927, whose Presbyterian religious upbringing defined its underlying mission, which was to educate, rather than entertain, the masses. The basis of the new order of personal management was based on shame. In this respect, Elias recognized the relevance of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory to his own early formulation of the theory of civilization. Elias had sent a copy of the text of The Civilizing Process to Freud, which he acknowledged by a postcard from Vienna in 1938. The main difference between their theories was that Elias treated shame as the basis of social discipline. Freud put greater emphasis on the role of the sex drive and sexual repression. In Freudian analysis, sexual repression was connected to anxiety and guilt rather than to shame (Kaye 2019). Despite his view of the long history of civilized manners in Europe, it is striking that Elias claimed that religion played little or no part in the growth of manners in the West. ‘Religion, the belief in the punishing or rewarding omnipotence of God, never has in itself a “civilizing” or affect-­ subduing effects. On the contrary, religion is always exactly as “civilized” as the society or class which upholds it’ (Elias 2000, p. 169). I take this quotation as further support for my argument, namely, that in the West good behaviour was primarily a secular code and not a religious one. Civility, whether ultimately driven by shame or sexual repression, has a

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secular framework for guiding actions, especially of the wealthy and powerful over the lower ranks of society. In twentieth-century political theory, civility came to be seen more within a secular democratic framework. The secular and democratic nature of Western civility was explored in major publications by Edward Shils in ‘Ideology and Civility’ (1958) and The Virtue of Civility (1997). He did not connect civility with any religious tradition, but saw it rather as the necessary underpinning of liberal politics. For example, political dialogue and debate cannot take place without respect for the other’s point of view and their right to state it without being attacked by verbal abuse or physical violence.

4.3 Conclusion: Informalization and Amplification There were major changes to piety and good behaviour in the twentieth century. In the West with the growth of populist political movements, there has been, following Shils’s argument, a breakdown of manners with serious consequences for democracy. There has also been in the West, and perhaps especially in the United States, a growing informalization of manners and emotions. Wouters (2007) attributes these changes to a further democratization of society from the 1890s onwards, in which there is less overt emphasis on hierarchy and distinction. There has been a relaxation of dress and speech, which is associated with the decline of etiquette books. On a personal note, when I entered university in the early 1960s, we invariably referred to academic lecturers as “Doctor” or “Professor”, while they addressed us as “Mr” or “Miss”. Academics wore jackets and academic gowns. Despite the lingering formality of academic life, the 1960s can be regarded as a more definitive decade of transition for the West, and for Christianity in particular. Informalization can be seen especially in ‘rock music, psychedelic drugs, free love, communes, returning to nature, and eastern philosophy’, all of which are ‘now engraved on recent memory as the cultural testament of an era’ (Lopez 2002). The Rolling Stones’ ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’ summed up a specific challenge to Christian notions

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of sexual propriety and respect for the values of earlier generations. Consumerism and experimental lifestyles transformed popular culture and made disobedience a new norm (Sica and Turner 2005). The swinging sixties had long-term consequences in terms of speech, dress and values. The availability of contraceptives changed sexual behaviour, and premarital sex became the normal expectation of courting couples. These experiences and opportunities created the baby boomer generation, whose members are now typically among the rich elderly retired cohort of the West. The long history of the post-war baby boomers demonstrated the fact that generations rather than classes shaped the norms of the modern world in the West (Edmunds and Turner 2002). Perhaps in the Middle East the young people behind the Arab Spring provide a valid comparison of generations and revolution. This period of Western history from 1950 onwards was also a period of secularization in the specific sense that the influence of Christian Churches on private and public behaviour was challenged by youth movements on the back of growing post-war prosperity. If the West experienced informalization, then Islamic piety has gone in a different direction under the impact of the Islamization of society and a growing concern for correct behaviour. I refer to this trend as the amplification of behavioural norms of good conduct. These developments in piety norms include veiling, the more comprehensive use of halal certificates, popular Qur’an reading competitions, stricter control of sexual norms, more comprehensive food norms and stricter observation of norms regulating dress. What is driving these developments? There are various causal factors. On a global level, Saudi investments in mosque building and educational institutions have spread the influence of Wahhabism. Norms of good behaviour have consequently been caught up in the political conflicts between Iran and Saudi Arabia for political and religious influence. This struggle between Sunni and Shia versions of Islam is an ancient not modern conflict, but it has been intensified by the oil wealth behind both the Saudi kingdom and the revolutionary regime in Iran that emerged out of the Shia Revolution of 1979. The revolution in Iran began as a struggle with the nationalist and authoritarian regime of the Pahlavi Shah and his pro-Western foreign policy. The role of religion in this protest movement

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brought Michel Foucault to call the development “political spirituality” (Ghamari-Tabrizi 2016). Another struggle against the legacy of Western secularism took place in Turkey with the growing power of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Justice and Development Party. The result has been the slow erosion of the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s policies such as the amendment of the Constitution in 1928 which removed the sentence the ‘Religion of the State is Islam’. With the growing influence of the department of religious affairs (Diyanet), there is greater conformity across Turkish society as to wearing head scarves and a greater control of alcohol consumption. Another factor in the growth of Islamization has been the emergence of a global Islamic diaspora with the expansion of a global labour market. These dispersed migrant communities are now a “Global Islam” (Cesari 2009). As a result, many Muslims live as minorities in Western secular societies. Pious Muslims are more regularly confronted by questions about how to behave correctly in Western consumerist societies. Adjustment to Western societies has often produced enhanced adherence to pious norms with head scarves, prayer times, religious festivals, food preferences and dress code. There has been a growth on online fetwas in response to questions about pious life in everyday life, and this development in turn raised questions about religious authority (Turner and Volpi 2007). Pious behaviour in Islam and Christianity has often shared a common struggle with secularization, involving for Christianity the conflict over same-sex marriage and in Islam conflicts between secular norms of women’s liberation and Islamic norms of pious female behaviour. These developments, which I call “Islamization” in preference to “fundamentalization”, have not been universally accepted without a challenge, especially from educated Muslim women. One obvious conclusion from these studies is that norms of “good behaviour”, while often clothed in claims about their permanence and immutability, are constantly changing in response to large-scale structural changes in society.

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Works Cited Afshar, S. 2019. An Inquiry into the Terms of adab, adib, adabiyat in the Perso-­ Arabic Languages. Iran Namag. A Quarterly of Iranian Studies 4 (1): 26–48. Al-Kaysi, M.I. 1986. Morals, Manners and Islam. A Guide to Islamic Adab. Leicester: The Islamic Foundation. Asad, T. 1993. Genealogies of Religion. Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1997. Remarks on the Anthropology of the Body. In Religion and the Body, ed. S. Coakley, 42–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Augustine. 1980. Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans. New York: Penguin. Cesari, J. 2009. Islam in the West: From Immigration to Global Islam. Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review 8: 148–175. Cherkaoui, M. 2020. Essay on Islamization. Changes in Religious Practice in Muslim Societies. Leiden: Brill. Edmunds, J., and B.S.  Turner. 2002. Generation, Culture and Society. Buckingham: Open University Press. Erasmus, D. 2011. A Handbook of Good Manners in Children. New  York: Random House. Ghamari-Tabrizi, B. 2016. Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution After the Enlightenment. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Gorski, P. 2003. The Disciplinary Revolution. Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gutas, D. 1998. Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbasid Society. London: Routledge. Hodgson, M.G.S.1960. A Comparison of Islam and Christianity as Framework for Religious Life. Diogenes 32 (Winter): 49–74. ———. 1974. The Venture of Islam. Conscience and History in a World Civilization. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Hoffman, M. 1989. Faith and Piety in Erasmus’s Thought. Sixteenth Century Journal 20 (2): 241–258. Jaspers, K. 1953. The Origin and Goal of History. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Jokiranta, J. 2017. “Essene Monastic Sect” 70 Years After. Scientific Notes on Scrolls Labelling. Henoch 39 (1): 56–71. Kaye, H.L. 2019. Freud as a Social Theorist. On Human Nature and the Civilizing Process. London: Routledge.

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Lopez, A. 2002. Youth in the 1990s and Youth in the 1960s in Spain. In Generational Consciousness, Narrative and Politics, ed. J.  Edmunds and B.S. Turner, 111–130. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. MacCulloch, D. 2005. The Reformation. A History. New York: Penguin. MacIntyre, A. 1999. Dependent Rational Animals. Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. Chicago: Open Court. Mahmood, S. 2005. Politics of Piety. The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Salvatore, A. 1999. Islam and the Political Discourse of Modernity. Reading: Ithaca Press. ———. 2016. The Sociology of Islam. Knowledge, Power and Civility. Chichester: Wiley. Shils, E. 1958. Ideology and Civility. Sewanee Review 66 (3): 450–480. ———. 1997. The Virtue of Civility. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Sica, A., and S. Turner, eds. 2005. The Disobedient Generation. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Smart, N. 1960. World’s Religions: A Dialogue. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. ———. 1989. The World’s Religions: A Dialogue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, G.S. 2006. Faith and the Presidency. From George Washington to George W. Bush. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turner, B.S. 1976. Conscience in the Construction of Religion: A Critique of Marshall G. S. Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam. Review of Middle East Studies 2: 95–112. ———. 1984. The Body and Society. Explorations in Social Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Turner, B.S. (with Tong, Joy Kooi-Chin). 2008. Women, Piety and Practice: A Study of Women and Religious Practice in Malaya. Contemporary Islam 2 (1): 41–59. Turner, B.S., and F.  Volpi. 2007. Introduction to Making Islamic Authority Matter. Theory Culture & Society 24 (2): 1–19. Watt, W.M. 1991. Muslim-Christian Encounters. Perceptions and Misperceptions. London and New York: Routledge. Weber, E. 1976. Peasants into Frenchmen. The Modernization of Rural France 1870–1914. Stanford University Press. Weber, M. 2002. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. P. Baehr and G.C. Wells. New York: Penguin Books. Wouters, C. 2007. Informalization. Manners & Emotions Since 1890. London: Sage.

5 Considerations in Hadith and Qur’an: Text and Interpretation in a Study of Civility Aisha Y. Musa

5.1 Introduction “Civility” has been broadly defined as a culturally specific injunctive social norm that determines how people are expected to behave toward one another (Jamieson et al. 2017, p. 5). For Muslims, norms of behavior are ideally derived from principles articulated in the Qur’an and embodied in the example of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions, as found in Hadith literature and Muslim histories. This chapter will examine the Qur’an and the Sunni Hadith corpus and histories to ask what these texts say about how people should behave toward one another and what kinds of behaviors they describe as worthy of commendation or censure. This chapter will then consider classical and contemporary works that show how Muslims have interpreted and used the Qur’an and Hadith literature to articulate what Salvatore describes as ‘a specific and highly malleable model of Islamic civility’ (Salvatore 2016, p. 62). How do the

A. Y. Musa (*) AYM Education & Consulting, Portland, OR, USA © The Author(s) 2021 M. Milani, V. Adrahtas (eds.), Islam, Civility and Political Culture, New Directions in Islam, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56761-3_5

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texts and their interpretation contribute to the malleability of that model of civility? There are two textual sources of authority in Islam. The first of these is the Qur’an. Muslims believe that the Arabic Qur’an contains the direct and literal words of God, as they were revealed to Muhammad through the agency of the angel Gabriel. As God’s final Prophet, Muhammad is seen as the ideal example of how to live according to the teachings of the Qur’an. The second textual source is the Hadith, that is, reports about the Prophet Muhammad. These reports inform Muslims of the Prophetic Sunna, that is, the established practices of the Prophet. For Muslims the Sunna has secondary authority insofar as it is seen as complementary to the Qur’an. There are three types of Sunna: things the Prophet said (al-­ sunna al-qawliyya), things the Prophet did (al-sunna al-fi‘liyya), and things the Prophet tacitly approved (al-sunna al-taqririyya). The third category refers to those things that the Prophet either witnessed someone else saying or doing, or things that were brought to his attention, which he did not correct or criticize (Musa 2015, p. 76). The most authoritative reports are found in the collections that form the Hadith canon. There are also Hadith collections that never became part of the canon. In addition to Hadith collections per se, stories of Muhammad and the early community are found in other genres of literature, such as biographies (sira), battle chronicles (maghazi), histories (tarikh), and Qur’anic commentaries (tafsir) (Musa 2013, p. 74). The Qur’an uses both direct commands and illustrative stories to admonish and advise. The words and actions of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions, as recorded in Hadith and other genres of Muslim literature, provide practical examples of the ideals of the Qur’an, so that they may be implemented in the daily lives of individuals and societies. The Qur’an and Hadith offer multilayered and multilevel commands, advice, and examples that inform and shape an Islamic ethic of civility that transcends ‘widening geographic distances and shifting cultural, linguistic, and religious barriers’ (Salvatore 2016, p. 26). There are a number of Arabic terms and concepts that the Qur’an uses to characterize this notion of civility. Among these are rahma (grace/mercy/compassion), layyin (leniency/gentleness/pliancy), ihsan (beneficence), and ma‘ruf (recognized good). These terms and concepts are used in the Qur’an to

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describe desired attitudes and behaviors. From a Qur’anic perspective, the overarching concept of rahma (grace/mercy/compassion) governs the relationship between God and creation and between human beings. These terms are also found throughout Hadith collections, along with another Arabic term, adab (good manners/good breeding/civility). Arabic literature is called adab, because it is said to cultivate good manners and habits of mind (Lane and Lane-Poole 1968, 1:35a). The term adab does not appear anywhere in the Qur’an, but it is quite commonly found in the Hadith treatment of norms of interpersonal behavior.

5.2 The Concept of Rahma The concept of rahma is variously translated as mercy/compassion/grace. The Qur’an uses the term in connection to the relationship between the Creator and human beings, the relationship between human beings, and the relationship between human beings and the rest of creation. The noun rahma occurs 114 times in the Qur’an, over a third of the total occurrences of words from the root r-h-m (corpus.quran.com). In addition to the other occurrences of the root within the chapters of the Qur’an, the phrase bismillah al-rahman al-rahim (‘In the Name of God, the Compassionate the Merciful’) appears before the opening verses of 112 of its 114 chapters. This makes the name al-Rahman (the Compassionate) the most frequently repeated attribute of God mentioned in the Qur’an, while Qur’an 6:12 declares that God has imposed rahma on Himself. The concept of rahma is directly emphasized as an overarching principle in the Qur’an; a principle that is closely associated with the desirable qualities of attitude and behavior that characterize the Islamic ethic of civility. The concept of rahma is also closely associated with the Sunna of the Prophet. In Qur’an 21:107, God addresses Muhammad by saying: ‘We have not sent you except as a rahma to creation.’ Because this verse is understood to be addressing Muhammad personally, Muhammad’s attitudes and behavior are seen as exemplifying how human beings can express rahma.

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5.3 The Concept of Al-ma‘ruf Along with rahma, the concept of al-ma‘ruf also governs Islamic norms of interpersonal behavior. The word ma‘ruf is the passive participle of the verb ‘arafa, to know. Ma‘ruf is, literally, something that is known (Lane and Lane-Poole 1968, 1:2017a). The term is used 32 times in the Qur’an to describe how believers should speak and act, and it is variously translated as good/right/fair/just. In 3:110 the Qur’an describes the best community as those who “enjoin the ma‘ruf.’ Other verses command individuals to speak and act according to the ma‘ruf in specific circumstances, which will be discussed below. In his commentary on Qur’an 3:110, al-Tabari (d. 923 CE) defines al-ma‘ruf as anything known that is beautiful and desirable to do (al-Tabari n.d.). The Qur’anic use of ma‘ruf implies that ‘one knows, from social conventions and moral intuitions extrinsic to revelation, what to do’ (Reinhart 2017, p. 51). This understanding of the concept of ma‘ruf, as that which is generally known/recognized as good, contributes to the high degree of malleability in Islamic norms of civility, for the norms of each specific time and place will determine the correct thing to do or say under the circumstances. The Qur’an discusses the concept of al-ma‘ruf both broadly at the level of community and inter-community relations and at the level of interpersonal relations. Like the Qur’an, Hadith reports address al-ma‘ruf in a general way. While highlighting the importance of both enjoining and acting upon al-ma‘ruf, few Hadith reports give specific details of what constitutes al-­ ma‘ruf, but those that do confirm the idea that it refers to individual behaviors that have a positive impact on others. One report that appears in several collections quotes Muhammad as advising his followers that ‘every ma‘ruf is a charity, and part of al-ma‘ruf is to meet your brother with a cheerful countenance and pour some water from your bucket into his’ (al-Bukhari, al-Adab, n.d.-b).

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5.4 The Concept of Adab As noted above, the Arabic term adab is not found in the Qur’an. However, it is the term most commonly associated with notions of correct acceptable behavior in the Hadith literature. Muhammad b. Ismail al-Bukhari (d. 870 CE), whose Sahih is the most respected and authoritative collection of Hadith in the Sunni canon, not only dedicated a chapter of that work containing more than 250 reports related to the topic of adab, but he also published an independent volume of Hadith on the topic, entitled al-Adab al-Mufrad containing more than 1300 reports. The second most authoritative collection of Hadith in the Sunni canon, the Sahīh of Muslim b. Hajjah (d. 875 CE), also contains a chapter dedicated to adab, as do many other collections both within and outside the canon.

5.5 Qur’anic Norms of Behavior The Qur’anic idiom of civility governed by rahma and ma‘ruf calls on communities and individuals to speak and behave in a civil manner even at those times when it is the most difficult to do so. Rahma is associated with interpersonal behavior in Qur’an 3:159: ‘By God’s mercy [rahma], you were gentle toward them. If you had been rude and hard-hearted, they would have turned away from you. Pardon them, ask forgiveness for them, and consult them about the matter, but once you decide on a course of action, put your trust in God. God loves those who trust Him.’ This verse highlights the importance of attitude and behavior in interpersonal interactions. It contrasts being gentle/lenient (linta) with being rude (fazzan) and hard-hearted (ghaliz al-qalb). The verb linta is the second person masculine singular past tense of the root l-y-n, which means to be lenient/pliant/gentle. Elsewhere in the Qur’an, it is used to describe the hearts of believers when they hear the word of God (39:23). Being lenient is contrasted in 3:159 with being rude and hard-hearted (fazzan ghaliz al-qalb). Among the meanings of the word fazzan (which I have translated as “rude”) listed by Lane in his lexicon is “uncivil” (Lane and

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Lane-Poole 1968, 1:2419a). The phrase ghaliz al-qalb literally means hardness of heart (Lane and Lane-Poole 1968, 1:2283b). Gentleness and leniency are seen as the opposite of these and are both quality of action and an attitude of the heart. This Qur’anic contrast is similar to the way rudeness and civility have been used as antonyms throughout history (Jamieson et al. 2017, p. 207). According to Muslim tradition, Qur’an 3:159 is describing Muhammad’s behavior with his followers after the Muslims had lost the battle of Uhud, because some of Muhammad’s followers, seeing victory at hand, had disobeyed his orders and abandoned their post (Qur’an 3:155). This turned the tide of battle and the Muslims lost. Under the circumstances, a harsh reaction on Muḥammad’s part would have been understandable and perhaps even appropriate, but the Qur’an stresses the importance of a lenient response. God tells Muḥammad that if he had been rude or hard-hearted, people would have broken away from him. Maintaining community bonds is one of the key functions of civility (Jamieson et al. 2017, p. 211). Taking a gentle, lenient approach is not reserved for a political and military leader interacting with his soldiers and community. The Qur’an uses the same terminology when God commands Moses and Aaron to speak gently (qawlan layyinan) to Pharoah in the hope that he will be reminded and feel the awe of God (Qur’an 20:43–44). The adjective describing the tone of speech they are to use is layyin, which is from the same root, as the verb used in 3:159. This example is particularly significant because Pharaoh is described in the Qur’an as someone egregiously wicked, who considers himself to be a god (20:43; 28:38). In spite of Pharoah’s wickedness, the Qur’an presents the possibility that speaking to him gently may cause him to take heed and change his ways. In both 20:44 and 3:159, the Qur’an calls for gentleness and leniency in situations where harshness would be considered appropriate or perhaps even desirable. However, the Qur’an explicitly calls for leniency/gentleness because of how others will react. These verses show that words and attitudes have an impact on the thinking and behavior of others and that impact must be considered. To be sure, the positive effects of civility and the negative effects of incivility are well-documented in modern scholarship (Porath et al. 2015, pp. 1527–1541), and so it is not at all surprising that the people of previous ages would recognize these effects as well.

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It is not only prophets and leaders whose behavior and attitudes are addressed by the Qur’an. People, in general, are commanded to speak kindly (16:125; 17:53), and the servants of the Compassionate (al-­ Rahman) are described as ‘those who walk gently on the earth, and who, whenever the ignorant address them, say: “Peace”’ (Qur’an 25:63). Those who will achieve God’s forgiveness and a place in Paradise are those who ‘control their anger and pardon other people’ (Qur’an 31:34). The Qur’an also directly commands people to resort to pardon, enjoin what is customary, and turn away from the ignorant (7:199). In addition to advising people on positive attitudes and behaviors, the Qur’an directly forbids derision and ridicule not only of other people (49:11) but also of the gods other than God, to whom they pray (6:108). The Qur’an advocates civility across society on the part of leaders, groups, and individuals alike. This is especially true when people are at odds. Kind words and good behavior are particularly important in the most difficult personal situations. For example, the Qur’an addresses the issue of divorce at length and stresses speaking and behaving in ways that are recognized as good/right/fair/just (ma‘ruf). The term ma‘ruf is repeated more than a dozen times in as many verses addressing divorce (2:228–241; 65:2–6). This same standard is called for when people draft their wills in anticipation of death, and it is also incumbent upon the executors (2:180; 4:8). One of the most frequent areas in which people are at odds is religious disputes. Indeed, Muhammad’s prophetic mission was a direct challenge to the Meccan religious establishment (Esposito 2005, pp.  7–8). Here too, the Qur’an calls for civility from individuals and groups alike. One of the earliest chapters of the Qur’an to address this issue is the chapter titled al-Kafirun, generally translated as “The Disbelievers” or “The Rejectors”: Say, “O disbelievers! I worship not what you worship; nor are you worshippers of what I worship; nor am I a worshipper of what you worship; nor are you worshippers of what I worship. Unto you your religion, and unto me my religion.” (109:1–6)

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This chapter is said to have been revealed in Mecca after Muḥammad had been arguing with Mecca’s polytheists for some time, and they offered to worship God as he did for one year if he would worship their gods for a year as well (Nöldeke et al. 2013, pp. 88–89). The refusal to do that is strong and explicit, but the final verse leaves the Meccans to their polytheism. This final verse is frequently cited in contemporary interfaith contexts as a Qur’anic foundation for a religious plurality (Winkler 2012, p. 136). While the Qur’an recognizes that God revealed the Torah and the Gospel refers to Jews and Christians as people of the Book and asserts an Abrahamic monotheism, it also criticizes the Jews and Christians for either not following what God has given them or for holding incorrect beliefs about God (Qur’an 4:171; 5:44–47). Even in this case, however, the Qur’an commands arguing only in the best possible way (Qur’an 29:46) and tells Muslims to offer a common understanding on the basis of monotheism: Say, “O People of the Book! Come to a word common between us and you, that we shall worship none but God, shall not associate aught with Him, and shall not take one another as lords apart from God.” And if they turn away, then say, “Bear witness that we are submitters.” (3:64)

Throughout Muslim history, as reported by Muslim historians and Qur’anic exegetes, this verse has been seen as the foundation of just and equitable relations between Muslims and their Christian and Jews counterparts, despite the Qur’an’s harsh criticism of some of their doctrines (al-Tabari n.d.; Ibn Kathir n.d.; al-Qurṭubi n.d.). In the twenty-first century, it has inspired the successful interfaith initiative founded in Jordan in 2007 and called A Common Word (acommonword.com). Since its founding in 2007, the project has regularly brought together Muslim and Christian scholars from around the world to seek common understanding on which to foster respectful and appreciative interfaith relationships.

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From familial relations to community and inter-community relations, the Qur’an calls for civility, in word and deed, on the part of individuals and groups in situations where disagreements might otherwise give rise to incivility and even hostility. The Qur’an leaves no doubt that speaking and acting civilly is important because of the impact it will have on others, highlighting the positive impact of civility and the negative impact of incivility (3:159; 20:43–44). The Qur’an of course uses very general terms in advising people to speak and behave gently, justly, and compassionately. However, the Qur’anic concept of al-ma‘ruf (literally, that which is known) recognizes the role of social norms and moral intuition in helping to determine appropriate behavior. While the Qur’an repeatedly admonishes individuals to speak and act according to al-ma‘ruf, the concept itself functions at the community level. The Qur’an makes this clear by describing ‘the best community’ as those who ‘enjoin al-ma‘ruf.’ Social norms and moral intuition vary from time to time and from place to place, and thus the importance given to them in the Qur’anic concept of al-ma‘ruf contributes to the malleability of the Islamic ethic of civility.

5.6 Prophetic Norms of Interpersonal Behavior The Hadith connects Muhammad’s behavior directly to the Qur’an, because when asked about the Prophet’s character, his wife Aisha replied that his character was the Qur’an (Muslim n.d., Book 6, Hadith 168). This, together with the declaration in Qur’an 21:107, ‘We have not sent you except as a mercy to creation,’ provides an overarching framework within which the Prophetic example is interpreted and applied. The Qur’an calls God’s Messenger an excellent example (33:21), and Muhammad’s example has come down to us through reports of his words and actions. Muslims throughout history have shared and used these reports to inform their beliefs and practices. Reports of Muhammad’s words and deeds are found in various genres of Muslim literature. In addition to Hadith collections per se, stories of Muḥammad and the early community are found in other genres of literature, such as biographies

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(sira), battle chronicles (maghazi), histories (tarikh), and Qur’anic commentaries (tafsir). The most authoritative reports are found in the collections that form the Hadith canon. Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims each have their own recognized canon of Hadith literature. There are also Hadith collections that never became part of the canon (Musa 2013). The most authoritative collection of Hadith in the Sunni canon is Sahih al-Bukhari, a collection compiled by Abu Abdullah Muhammad b. Ismail al-Bukhari. The canon began to crystalize around this collection and the Sahih Muslim—a collection compiled by al-Bukhari’s contemporary Muslim b. al-Ḥ ajjāj—in the early eleventh century CE. Among the reasons that these works came to form the center of the Sunni canon is the belief that al-Bukhari and Muslim—both of whom had studied under the Hadith scholar Ahmad b. Hanbal (d. 855 CE)—were the first to compile collections that contained only reports that they believed met criteria of authenticity (Brown 2007, p. 54). Both the Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim contain sections dedicated to adab, as do other topically arranged Hadith collections. While al-Bukhari’s Sahih is his most well-known and authoritative work, he also composed other works. On the issue of adab, al-Bukhari compiled a volume of more than 1300 reports that he titled al-Adab al-­ Mufrad (Individual Manners). The work is divided into 57 sections, dealing with a range of topics from the treatment of parents and kin to social interactions, as well as one’s relationship to God, and the proper treatment of animals (al-Bukhari n.d.-b, Al-Adab). As the title indicates, the volume is concerned with manners from the standpoint of the individual. The ninth-century Hadith collector al-Tirmidhi (d. 892 CE) also authored a collection that became part of the Sunni canon, and like al-­ Bukhari, in addition to dedicating a chapter of that work to the topic of adab, he also composed a separate work on the appearance and excellent behavior of the Prophet Muhammad. An examination of the various topics and reports related under the heading of adab in Hadith literature shows that adab is primarily concerned with how an individual’s behavior impacts others, whether that is speaking nicely to people (Muslim n.d., Book 1, Hadith 80), or not eating onions or garlic before going to the mosque (al-Bukhari n.d.-a, Sahih, Book 10, Hadith 246), or making sure to wear undergarments when

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sitting in a public gathering (al-Bukhari n.d.-b, al-Adab, Book 48, Hadith 1). The level and types of details found in these reports show how concerned those who passed on and collected Hadith were with the impact of an individual’s words and behavior on others. This is in keeping with what is evident from the Qur’anic verses discussed above. Like the Qur’an, the Hadith calls on people to be aware and respectful of others in what they do and say. Respecting others means respecting their physical senses as well as their emotional sensibilities, as we see in Hadith that address issues of modesty and hygiene. Along with reports that instruct people not to eat onions and garlic before going to the mosque, there are reports that instruct the faithful to bathe and put on perfume before attending Friday prayers (al-Tirmidhi n.d., Book 4, Hadith 41). Using both direct commands from the Prophet and descriptions of his personal behavior, the Hadith encourages social norms of modesty and cleanliness when interacting with others. Beyond hygiene and modesty, the Hadith also contains commands and descriptions of the Prophet’s behavior that show how people should treat one another in a variety of situations. A well-known report in al-­ Bukhari’s book on individual manners quotes Muhammad as declaring that Muslims owe each other six duties: (1) to greet each other when they meet, (2) to accept each other’s invitations, (3) to give good advice when someone seeks counsel, (4) to bless someone when they sneeze, (5) to visit them when they are ill, and (6) to walk in someone’s funeral procession (al-Bukhari n.d.-b, al-Adab, Book 40, Hadith 7). These basic duties help to cement the bonds of community, but Islamic norms of interpersonal behavior, as demonstrated in the Hadith, go beyond this. As we saw in the Qur’an gentleness, leniency, pardon, and generosity are called for regardless of whether or not the words and actions of others are considered appropriate or acceptable. Two Hadith reports, in particular, are illustrative of this. Versions of these reports appear in different collections in the Sunni canon. The first is a story reported on the authority of Muhammad’s companion Anas b. Malik. There are several versions of the report in different Hadith collections, and, while specific wording varies, the main details are the same in all of them: Anas b. Malik was walking with Muhammad, who was wearing a cloak with a rough border. A Bedouin approached Muhammad and jerked his cloak so violently that

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it left marks on his neck from the border, and then the Bedouin demanded a share of provisions from the public treasury. Muhammad turned to the man, smiled, and granted his request (Al-Bukhari, n.d.-a, Sahih, Book 78, Hadith 116). A lengthier and more detailed version of this report is found in two Ḥ adith collections: in the chapter on adab in the Sunan of Abu Dawud, in a subsection on the forbearance and good character of the Prophet (Abu Dawud n.d., Book 43, Hadith 3), and in the Sunan of al-Nasa’i, in the chapter on retaliation (qasama). This version differs significantly from most other versions in a number of key elements, and it is worth quoting in full. The following is from the chapter on adab in the Sunan of Abu Dawud:1 Narrated Abu Hurayrah: The Messenger of Allah ()used to sit with us in meetings and talk to us. When he stood up we also used to stand up and see him entering the house of one of his wives. One day he talked to us and we stood up as he stood up and we saw that an Arabi (a nomadic Arab) caught hold of him and gave his cloak a violent tug making his neck red. Abu Hurayrah said: The cloak was coarse. He turned to him and the Arabi said to him: Load these two camels of mine, for you do not give me anything from your property or from your father’s property. The Prophet ()said to him: No, I ask Allah’s forgiveness; no, I ask Allah’s forgiveness; no, I ask Allah’s forgiveness. I shall not give you the camel-load until you make amends for the way in which you tugged at me. Each time the bedouin said to him: I swear by Allah, I shall not do so. He then mentioned the rest of the tradition. He (the Prophet), then called a man and said to him: Load these two camels of his: one camel with barley and the other with dates. He then turned to us and said: Go on your way with the blessing of Allah.

The key elements are the same in each version of the report. The person in question is a Bedouin who has come to Muhammad demanding provisions and who rudely tugs Muhammad’s cloak so violently that the coarse edge of the cloak leaves a mark on the Prophet’s neck. There are, however, several significant differences between the longer and shorter versions. They are each narrated by a different companion of Muhammad, in a different context, and perhaps most importantly, the longer version

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shows the Prophet initially refusing the Bedouin’s demand unless the Bedouin first makes amends for injuring him. Muhammad repeats this three times and each time, the Bedouin repeats his refusal. Both men invoke God in their responses; Muhammad seeking God’s forgiveness and the Bedouin swearing by God. After the Bedouin’s third swearing by God that he will not make amends, Muhammad relents and orders the Bedouin’s camels to be filled with goods. As in the case of Qur’an 3:159, in which Muhammad was commanded by God for being lenient with those of his followers whose disobedience led to defeat in battle, the incident with the Bedouin shows Muhammad as a leader interacting with one of his people. The Hadith shows us that the incident took place at the end of a public meeting in which Muhammad had been addressing his companions. As noted above this version is found in the Sunan of Abu Dawud and in the Sunan of al-­ Nasa’i. A variation between the ways the Hadith is reported in each collection is worth noting here. In the full version quoted above from Abu Dawud, after narrating how the Bedouin responded each time Muhammad demanded he should make amends is the statement, ‘He then mentioned the rest of the tradition.’ This may refer to wording in the version included by al-Nasa’i that is missing in that of Abu Dawud. Abu Dawud includes the report of Muhammad’s interaction with the Bedouin in his chapter on adab in a subsection on the forbearance and good character of the Prophet, while al-Nasa’i includes it in a chapter on retaliation (qasama) (al-Nasai’i). While the focus in both versions is Muhammad’s interaction with the Bedouin, the version in al-Nasa’i’s collection mentions the reaction of the companions to whom Muhammad had just been speaking: ‘When we heard what the Bedouin said, we turned toward him quickly,’ at which Muhammad reportedly said: ‘I urge anyone who hears me not to leave his place until I give him permission.’ It is after this that Muhammad orders someone to load the Bedouin’s camel with supplies and then gives everyone permission to leave. The additional information shows Muhammad controlling his own response and requiring his companions to do the same in the face of behavior which they felt deserved some kind of retribution. Both versions of this report are found in later works dedicated to proper behavior spanning several centuries, where it is cited as an

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example of Muhammad’s excellent character that others should emulate in pardoning people and restraining anger, as commanded in the Quran (7:199). Among these are Ibn Abi Dunya (d. 894 CE) in his Makarim al-Akhlaq (Noble Characteristics) [30], al-Zamaqshari (d. 1144 CE) in his Rabi‘al-Abrar (Springtime of the Righteous) [143], al-Muttaqi al-Hindi (d. 1567 CE) in his Kanz al-‘Ummal (The Workers’ Treasure) [988], and Shams al-Din al-Shami (d. 1585) in his Subul al-Huda wa al-Rashad fi Sirat Khayr al-‘Ibad (The Ways of Guidance and Integrity in the Biography of the Best Worshippers) [2167].

5.7 Conclusion It is not only Muslims of the past who turn to the example of the Prophet Muhammad as a model for behavior. Muslim engagement with the Sunna of the Prophet evolved and continues to evolve with developments in information technology, that is, with the ways in which information is preserved, stored, accessed, and transmitted. Information about Muhammad and the early community was originally preserved and stored in the memories of his companions and followers who transmitted it orally to their own companions and followers. This process was personal and writing, when it was used, was used to aid memory (Schoeler et al. 2006, p. 67.). When writing materials became more readily available in the ninth century, dictation accompanied memorization in the transmission of Hadith. Over time, books became a primary means of preserving and transmitting Hadith, while memorization remained an important part of formal study. In recent years, the rise of digitization has made a wide variety of Islamic texts readily available to anyone with internet access. Many of the texts cited in this chapter are digitized versions. Digitized texts are not the only way that Muslims engage with and share the Prophetic Sunna today. To limit myself to just one example, Celebrate Mercy is a US non-profit organization that uses the internet and social media to promote a deeper understanding of the Prophet Muhammad (Celebrate Mercy). They have a website, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account, where they host and advertise webinars on issues

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related to Islam. One of their most popular events is ‘Portrait of a Prophet,’ which has been hosted as both in-person conferences and webinars. At these events, participants study and discuss the most intimate details of Muhammad’s life and his interactions with family, friends, and foes alike, details which highlight his function as ‘a mercy to the worlds.’ Videos from both venues are available to the public via their Facebook page. The information about the Prophet’s life comes from the classical Islamic sources, but it is presented and shared in ways that are meaningful and accessible to a contemporary audience of Muslims and non-Muslims alike. The Qur’an and the Sunna of the Prophet as recorded in the Hadith and other Muslim literature provide specific advice, admonishment, and examples of what an Islamic ethic of civility looks like in practice, that is, in the very specific context of the relationships between God and human beings, human beings with one another, and human beings with creation. The concepts of rahma and ma‘ruf, in particular, which are discussed in very general, yet pertinent, ways in both the Quran and Hadith, function together and help to create a framework in which the various commands, prohibitions, and advice found in the Qur’an and the Hadith are used to form an ethic of Islamic civility that is both specific and highly malleable; an ethic that has united Muslims across national, ethnic, and linguistic lines, throughout Muslim history and to the present day.

Note 1. I have used the translation exactly as it appears on Sunnah.com, which includes the customary formulaic blessing written in Arabic calligraphy after the Prophet is mentioned.

Works Cited A Common Word. n.d. https://www.acommonword.com/. Accessed 8 April 2020. Abu Dawud. n.d. Sunan. Sunnah.com. https://sunnah.com/abudawud/. Accessed 16 March 2020.

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Brown, J. 2007. The Canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim: The Formation and Function of the Sunni Hadith Canon. Boston: Brill. al-Bukhari, Muḥammad b. Ismail. n.d.-a. Ṣahih. Sunnah.com. https://sunnah. com/bukhari/. Accessed 16 March 2020. ———. n.d.-b. Al-Adab al-Mufrad. Sunnah.com. https://sunnah.com/ adab/14/45. Accessed 21 April 2020. Celebrate Mercy. n.d. https://www.facebook.com/celebratemercy/. Accessed 14 April 2020. Esposito, J.L. 2005. Islam: The Straight Path. 3rd ed. New  York: Oxford University Press. Ibn Abi Dunya. n.d. Makarim al-Akhlaq. Alwaraq.net. http://www.alwaraq.net/ Core/AlwaraqSrv/bookpage?book=353&session=ABBBVFAGFGFHAAWE R&fkey=2&page=30&option=1. Accessed 5 April 2020. Ibn Kathir. n.d. Tafsit al-Qur’an al-‘Azim. Altafsir.com. https://www.altafsir. com/Tafasir.asp?tMadhNo=0&tTafsirNo=7&tSoraNo=3&tAyahNo=64&t Display=yes&UserProfile=0&LanguageId=1. Accessed 15 March 2020. Jamieson, K.H., A. Volinsky, I. Weitz, and K. Kenski. 2017. The Political Uses and Abuses of Civility and Incivility. In The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication, ed. K.H.  Jamieson and K.  Kenski, 205–218. New  York: Oxford University Press. Lane, E.W., and S.  Lane-Poole. 1968. An Arabic-English Lexicon. Beirut: Librairie du Liban. Musa, A.Y. 2013. Hadith Studies. In The Bloomsbury Companion to Islamic Studies, ed. C. Bennett. Bloomsbury: New York and London. ———. 2015. Hadith as Scripture: Discussions on the Authority of Prophetic Traditions in Islam. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Muslim b. Hajjaj. n.d. Sahih Muslim. Sunnah.com. https://sunnah.com/muslim/. Accessed 10 April 2020. al-Muttaqi al-Hindi. n.d. Kanz al-‘Ummal. Alwaraq.net. http://www.alwaraq. net/Core/AlwaraqSrv/bookpage?book=374&session=ABBBVFAGFGFHAA WER&fkey=2&page=988&option=1. Accessed 5 May 2020. al-Nasa’i. n.d. Sunan. Sunnah.com. https://sunnah.com/nasai/. Accessed 16 March 2020. Nöldeke, T., F. Schwally, and G. Bergsträsser. 2013. The History of the Qur’an. Leiden: Brill. Porath, C.L., A.  Gerbasi, and S.L.  Schorch. 2015. The Effects of Civility on Advice, Leadership, and Performance. Journal of Applied Psychology 100 (5): 1527–1541.

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al-Qurṭubi. n.d. al-Jami‘li-Aḥkam al-Qur’an. Altafsir.com. https://www.altafsir. com/Tafasir.asp?tMadhNo=0&tTafsirNo=5&tSoraNo=3&tAyahNo=64&t Display=yes&UserProfile=0&LanguageId=1. Accessed 15 March 2020. Reinhart, A.K. 2017. What We Know About Ma‘ruf. Journal of Islamic Ethics 1 (1–2): 51–82. Salvatore, A. 2016. The Sociology of Islam: Knowledge, Power and Civility. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Schoeler, G., J.E.  Montgomery, and U.  Vagelpohl. 2006. The Oral and the Written in Early Islam. London and New York: Routledge. Shams al-Din al-Shami. n.d. Subul al-Huda wa al-Rashad fi Sirat Khayr al-‘Ibad. Alwaraq.net. http://www.alwaraq.net/Core/AlwaraqSrv/bookpage? book=3261&session=ABBBVFAGFGFHAAWER&fkey=2&page=2167&o ption=1. Accessed 5 May 2020. al-Tabari. n.d. Jami‘ al-Bayan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an. Altafsir.com. https://www. altafsir.com/Tafasir.asp?tMadhNo=0&tTafsirNo=1&tSoraNo=3&tAyahNo= 155&tDisplay=yes&UserProfile=0&LanguageId=1. Accessed 14 March 2020. al-Tirmidhi. n.d. Jami‘. Sunnah.com. https://sunnah.com/tirmidhi/. Accessed 16 March 2020. Winkler, L.E. 2012. Contemporary Muslim and Christian Responses to Religious Plurality: Wolfhart Pannenberg in Dialogue with Abdulaziz Sachedina. Cambridge: James Clarke Company, Ltd.

6 The Limits of Islamic Civility in India Prashant Keshavmurthy

6.1 Introduction Civility is the codified verbal-bodily acknowledgement of another person in court-space. This is not how any manual of adab in India or elsewhere glossed civility. But all such glosses assume court-space—whether literally that of the court itself or metaphorically by way of the hospice, coffee-­ house, lake-side assembly or living room—as the delimited space or frame within which face-to-face meetings become possible and meaningful. This was true even when meetings actually took place outdoors as the persons involved collectively assumed court-space. When a provincial governor received the Mughal Emperor’s royal decree outdoors, he did so by bodily and verbally enacting the submission due to the Emperor himself in court (Richards 1984). Furthermore, such civility was codified. That is, it was acknowledgement that hewed to longstanding codes of dignified verbal and physical submission, variations on this code resulting in personal, group-based, court-based and region-based styles. In this sense, the practice of adab

P. Keshavmurthy (*) Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 M. Milani, V. Adrahtas (eds.), Islam, Civility and Political Culture, New Directions in Islam, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56761-3_6

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was the embodied recollection of authoritative precedent, mostly experienced as timeless and sometimes as originating in a dateable act of codification. This interaction of court-space and embodied interpretation of code constituted the self ’s recognition of the personhood of another in the same court-space. Thus, personhood itself was daily, and at least partially, both origin and effect of such civility. If personhood was daily affirmed inter-subjectively in such ways that were codified as Islamic across India for the better part of a millennium until English colonialism, then what would a genealogy of such normalized civility look like? What and who, in other words, needed to be excluded in order that such a culture of civility be hegemonic? In Volume 1 of Marshall Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam we already find the rudiments of an answer. Hodgson argued that, whereas major religio-political transformations in Europe, India and China did not lead to a demise of urban elite literacy in Greek, Vedic Sanskrit and Chinese, respectively, the rise of Islam was accompanied by a complete displacement by Arabic, Persian and Turkish of elite literacy in Syriac, Aramaic and Pahlavi (Hodgson 1975, pp. 103; 236). The very definition of cultivation in the citied agrarian societies of Islam entailed engagement with a wholly new Islamic canon of texts that, whatever their non-Muslim origins, were read only in Islamizing Arabic or Persian rewritings. This chapter will largely bear out this thesis with respect to India.

6.2 Adab in Bahār-i ‘ajam Let us begin by considering this entry on adab from a famous dictionary of Persian poetic terms completed in Delhi in 1739. We see two of the aforementioned categories—codification and personhood—explicitly addressed in the following entries from this late phase of adab while the third category—that of court-space—remains implicit: ‘Adab: To keep in view or bear in mind the limit [ḥadd] of each thing. It is used in its figurative sense to mean “a desirable method or mode” and is used with the words “to do”, “to give” and “to receive”, the latter with the sense of “to receive a reprimand”.’ Since the other key term in this gloss is ‘limit’, here

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is the same author’s entry on ‘limit’: ‘Ḥ add [Limit]: Direction and side; plural—ḥudūd: a kind of religio-legal punishment [siyāsat-i shar‘ī] in which sense it is used with the words “to strike” and “to receive” and, with the word “to acquire”, was an implied reference to “reaching perfection”’ (Bahār 2001, pp. 111; 717). Read together, these two glosses from the Hindu Persian litterateur Lālā Tek Chand Bahār’s 1739 dictionary of Persian poetic idioms, Bahār-i ‘ajam (Springtime of the Persian East), let us formulate a generalization: adab is a proceeding towards perfection with a continually corrected sense of collectively assumed limit, whether such correction is self-applied or received from another. This other stands in principle for any other person with the authority to correct the subject’s conduct in that court-space. Though from a late phase in the global history of Islamic civility, Bahār’s glosses echo some of the oldest Umayyad and early Abbasid eighth- and ninth-century formulations of adab. Notice the entwinement in these glosses of the two historically distinct trajectories of norms of comportment that Armando Salvatore traces in the Islamic ecumene: adab or the Hellenic trajectory of habitually inculcated virtue; and shari‘a or the Prophetic trajectory, mediated by hadith or reports on and by the Prophet Muhammad and the Shi‘i Imams, of revealed models of conduct (Salvatore 2019). Bahār evokes this latter when he glosses ḥudūd as ‘a kind of religious-legal punishment [siyāsat-i shar‘ī]’. These were trajectories that had overlapped, assisted by Sufism, in the post-Mongol polities of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries while remaining recognizably distinct. This is what Salvatore calls a ‘fuzzy distinction’ between two mutually limiting sets of norms: We could see the traditions of shari‘a and adab as not building a stale symmetric binary, but as engaging in a continuous mutual accommodation through which each could be constructed as the internal limit of the other: while devotion to the shari‘a and its implementation required the civilizing restraint of adab, adab in turn could not openly contravene shari‘a, not merely due to the latter’s sacredness, but because civility without morality risks becoming an empty shell. (Salvatore 2019)

In the case of the Mughal empire, for whose tradition of civility Bahār was ventriloquizing in these entries, this mutual accommodation of

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shari‘a and adab belongs to a late phase in the evolution of the shari‘a itself in India. This evolution, as Muzaffar Alam has observed, entailed the progressive displacement over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of the strictly juridical understanding of shari‘a by understandings that explicitly accommodated non-Muslim community codes, a Sufi episteme, and Persian poetry as a humanistic practice in which consciousness of religious difference was suspended (Alam 2010, pp.  115–140). The Mughal bureaucracy, the largest India had ever had until then, fostered a civility where these three elements enriched each other over some three centuries. In conspectus, this civility assumed until the mid-nineteenth century an acknowledgement, however token, of the supreme status of the Mughal sovereign; a privileged status for urban over nomadic and rural society; a privileging of consciously Islamic norms of public comportment over non-Islamic ones; the privileging of Persian and Persianate literary practices over those of other languages; and a privileging of masculinity over femininity, this masculinity construed as fierce service to the Emperor in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and then an eighteenth-­century code of gentlemanliness less centred on the person of the Emperor (O’ Hanlon 1999). Both phases of this masculinity involved self-controlled and socially visible artistic connoisseurship, that is, the expert taking of pleasure in poetry and music (Orsini & Schofield 2015, pp. 407–421). But this conspectus of constitutive exclusions characterized Islamic civility in India only in its final late Mughal phase. What of the Turco-­ Afghan Sultanates that ruled much of North India from the late twelfth century until the mid-sixteenth-century Mughal ascendancy? What of the Sultanates of the Deccan until their early to mid-seventeenth-century conquest by the Mughal state? The remainder of this chapter will turn to the beginnings of adab in India, asking what kinds of limits it was articulated with in the Sultanates of Delhi and other regions from the thirteenth to mid-sixteenth centuries. It will then return to a discussion of Mughal adab by expanding on the foregoing conspectus of its limits and then passing by way of adab in the Deccan Sultanates, close with an overview of adab as construed under English colonialism.

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6.3 The Beginnings of Adab in India The earliest sites of adab in India were characterized by social and legal peculiarities that were only exacerbated by the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century. Instructive in this regard are the competing visions of civility in the courtly and Sufi milieus of thirteenth-century Delhi. These Sultanates, like those of contemporaneous Mamluk Syria and Egypt, identified themselves as ‘slave states’. As old as Caliphal power itself was the practice of trafficking in slaves from the Swahili coast and the Horn of Africa as well as from India, Turkic Central Asia and Circassia and raising them as ‘socially dead and natally alienated’ (Kumar 2007, p. 311) militarily skilled individuals whose deracination made their loyalty to one master trustworthy. All the earliest Muslim states of India, states modern scholarship calls ‘the Delhi Sultanate’, were ruled, beginning with Mu‘iz al-Dīn Ghūrī’s North Indian appanage in the 1190s until the fourteenth-century Tughlaqs, by slave dynasties. Mu‘iz al-Dīn was himself a Ghaznavid slave who had usurped the Ghaznavid throne. As Sunil Kumar notes, the Ghurids originated in the remote Afghan valley of Ghur that had been bypassed by the literary splendours of the Ghaznavid court whose most famous poet was Firdawsī. They were pastoralists with little by way of cultural capital. Mu‘iz al-Dīn’s successor Qut̤b al-Dīn Aibeg was one of his bandagān-i khāṣs,̣ an elite corps of slave soldiers within a larger group who swore loyalty to one master, had been manumitted by him in recognition of their long-term service, and who related to each other in egalitarian terms. This meant, already in the case of Aibeg, that his usurpation of his master’s rights was resented and resisted by his peers among the Mu‘izzī bandagān-i khāṣs ̣ and that his accession, like that of his slave Iltutmish after him and those of his successors, was contested and bloody. None of these slave accessions by force were valid according to the Shar‘ia, leading the Sultans as well as those of their peers in the same slave cohort who challenged them, to seek legitimacy in a variety of ways: building congregational mosques, minting coins with their own Perso-­ Arabic royal titles (as well as retaining Sanskrit inscriptions and icons of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, on the inverse), entrenching themselves

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in local power relations through ‘Rana-Malik condominiums’ or alliances with local Hindu lords and seeking Abbasid Caliphal legitimation through a Caliphal proclamation (manshūr) (Kumar 2007, pp.  327; 332; 336). Whether a Sultan promoted his predecessor’s bandagān-i khāṣs ̣ to khāṣs ̣ status and thus deployed them in militarily key positions such as in the Punjab marches against the Mongols depended entirely on the quality of his relations with those individuals and not on merit or prior accomplishments. Indeed, one of the patterns of early state formation was a new Sultan’s decision to induct new slaves altogether to khāṣs ̣ status, thus displacing an older and once deracinated slave cohort who might since have put down roots in local power bases with a newly deracinated and thus more trustworthy group (Orsini and Sheikh 2017, pp. 60–108). All this meant, as Kumar has richly shown, that the very relationship that was constitutive of statehood—military slavery—was fraught with moral ambivalence, was characterized by an asymmetry between social status and cultural capital and was highly personalized rather than subject to the impersonal logics of a bureaucracy (Kumar 2007, p.  304). This meant in turn that the practice of adab was less assured of desired outcomes by way of social security and upward mobility and was more prone to disruption. A canonical literary recognition from this milieu of this sort of contingency and the applications of adab therein is Naṣrullāh Munshī’s book of ethical advice couched in animal fables, Kalīla va Dimna. Munshi adapted his version from an eponymous mid-eighth-­ century Arabic version by Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ and dedicated it, around 1120, to the Ghaznavid monarch Bahrām Shāh (r.1117–1157). At the heart of this book and that of its later prestigious rewritings in Timurid Herat and Mughal North India is a vision of sociality so fraught with competitive deception and accident that no individual action, no matter how well-­ considered, is ever undertaken in full awareness of its consequences. Nor is action ever assured of its desired outcome. Adab, here presented mainly as judicious if often self-serving speech that typically takes the form of storytelling, can seek only to partially control such contingency, not eliminate it (Munshi 2019).1 As Christine van Ruymbeke puts it in her study of Anvār-i Suhaylī, Vā’iẓ Kāshifī’s late fifteenth-century rewriting in Timurid Herat of Kalīla va Dimna, a rewriting that became a model for later Mughal rewritings: ‘The thoughtful reader, at the close of the

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book, now understands that he stands quite alone in life and that others are predators who will approach him with an aggressive agenda they will achieve by all the psychological means at their disposal’ (Van Ruymbeke 2016, p. 353).

6.4 Sufi and Juridical Discourses on Adab Counter-balancing this worldly or adab-based vision of sociality was a Hadith-based one invoked equally by jurists and Sufis. The 188 conversations of Delhi’s most famous Chishti Sufi, Niz̤ām al-Dīn ‘Awliyā, influentially recorded for seven years from 1308 to 1319 by his disciple, convey this counter-vision forcefully. In one conversation on the familiar Sufi topics of ‘contentment and showing moderation in the pursuit of worldly goals’ he relates the teaching of a scholar who noted that whereas dogs trained to hunt were given free rein throughout the hunt, trained cheetahs were set free only when the prey was nearby; and that humans ought to imitate the cheetah rather than the dog. That is, they ought to rest content with what they are given—in the trust that it will be given— and that they keep others around them from ‘improper actions’ just as a cheetah, when slow, is frightened into reacting to a goaded dog, keeping it from misbehaviour. The moral is to trust in God and act swiftly and surely but in moderation, conscious of one’s own and others’ decorum (Awliya 1992, pp. 255–256). Elsewhere, he seems to contradict himself on this latter point when he advises that ‘one’s reliance on God must be so complete that one never pays attention to others. … Indeed, one’s faith is never perfected till one regards all created beings as if they were camel dung’ (Awliya 1992, p. 198). But this contradiction runs through Sufi discourses on adab, an effect of the premise that since God is needless and the Sufi conducts himself in God’s gaze, lapses in decorum should not matter from a divine perspective even as they do matter from a human one. At any rate, both teachings, like others in this collection of his conversations, enjoin trust that God will provide ‘minimal sustenance’—that which one gets by way of food and drink which is necessary for survival (Awliya 1992, p. 199). This trust and the general inheritance of optimism that the human self (nafs) could be moulded or transformed by Sufi adab

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into states and degrees of God-consciousness precluded the sort of complex, accident-fraught visions of human sociality that we glimpsed in Nasrullah Munshi’s afore-discussed alternative worldly understanding of adab. This fundamental trust in God is also why a complex understanding of inter-personal psychology is not among the characteristics of Sufi discourses on adab (Awliya 1992, pp. 137–138; 126).2 Islamic juridical discourses of the early Sultanate also constitute a counter-vision of civility to Naṣrullāh Munshī’s polarity of contingency and cunning. As Yohannan Friedman and Blain Auer among others have shown, ‘There is really no escaping the fact that Shar‘ia laws were discriminatory, in a strict sense that they recognized/established difference between Muslims and non-Muslims and instituted legal rules governing the behaviour of those categories of people’ (Ertl and Kruijtzer 2017, pp. 31–55). At the basis of this generic feature of Sunni-Hanafi compendia of legal rulings (fatāwā), notwithstanding all the ambiguities over how the legal categories of zimmī (protected people) and jizya (tax levied on non-Muslims) were construed at various times and places, is the founding ambition to privilege Sunni Muslims over a variety of Muslim and non-Muslim others and humiliate these others into acknowledging Sunni superiority. Blain Auer argues that these legal categories were means by which Firūz Shāh Tughluq tried to manage the threatening social diversity of his empire whose borders had been extended by his predecessor beyond its administrative means. In the late fourteenth century he succeeded in imposing the jizya in varying rates, the Brahmins managing to negotiate the lowest rate for themselves. But this was a rare instance where Sunni juridical norms actually shaped social reality. In practice, for the most part, such norms were tempered by literary counter-­ norms of love across religious differences and the Sultan’s pragmatism and realpolitik. The Persian poetry of Amīr Khusrow (1253–1325) of Delhi and the Hindavi poetry attributed to him are a canonical example of this Sufi literary counter-norm to the juridical as well as to Naṣrullāh Munshī’s almost amoral vision of adab. It is worth pausing here to explain why Sufism furnished such a counter-norm. While Sufi fraternities (silsilas) were thin on the ground at the beginning of the thirteenth century in North India, by that century’s end they formed a rich presence in the

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social life of even small urban settlements (Kumar 2007, p. 341). These fraternities rose to social prominence and power across the eastern Islamic world during the crisis of Muslim authority produced by the Mongol invasions beginning in the 1220s, invasions that stamped out the Abbasid Caliph and Caliphate, the most valued source of Muslim royal legitimacy. By that century’s end the Sufi shaykh was a locus of authority alternative to the Sultan. Khusrow, son and grandson of men from a group the contemporaneous historian Ẓ iya al-Dīn Baranī neologistically termed mawlā-zādagan, the sons of military slaves who had been set free, was intensely devoted to the Chishti Sufi master, Niz̤ām al-Dīn ‘Awliyā. He may have been, as Sunil Sharma observes, the only poet in Persian literary history to have had a simultaneously Sufi and courtly career (Sharma 2005, p. 28). But the circumstances were propitious for such a double identity since, by the mid- to late thirteenth century when he was in his 20s, a local and politically autonomous culture of Muslim scholarly expertise had matured in North India’s urban settlements (qaṣabāt) that involved the Sufis, the literati (ahl-i qalam like Minhāj-i Sirāj Juzjānī, Ziyā al-Din Baranī, Amīr Khusrow and Ḥ asan Sijzī) and jurists. We may read Khusrow’s leitmotif of slavery (his ghazals alone contain around 85 mentions of the term banda or ‘slave’) as an exploration of slave subjectivity, typically one that Khusrow identifies with his own in the closing distiches where he calls himself ‘the slave Khusrow’ (Khusrow 1972). He and his readers were surely aware of how his poetry was playing on key social identities since the name ‘Khusrow’ invoked the Sasanian monarch Khusrow Parvīz while ‘Amīr’, in the terminology of Delhi’s Sultanates, designated a free military notable and thus the opposite of a slave (Kumar 2009). Furthermore, his plays on the identity label banda drew contradictorily both on the juridical sense of enslavement and on the Sufi sense of it as an ‘obedient servitude’ imbued with ‘free will and political autonomy’ (Kumar 2019, pp.  227–256). In this sense, his ghazals as well as the many autobiographical passages of his masnavīs explore the emotional dynamics of enslavement while implying their divergent social meanings. In his masnavī Āyina-yi Iskandarī (Alexandrine Mirror, 1301–1302), a rewriting of Niz̤āmī of Ganja’s Iskandarnāma (Alexander Book, 1201), Alexander the Great brings home Kanīfū, a

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Chinese woman slave, after defeating the Chinese emperor. But as he courts her in his garden, she enslaves him erotically, her charms described in consistently military metaphors that overturn the meaning of his foregoing conquest. It is part of Alexander’s chastening that he realizes that authentic conquest must involve self-conquest too, lest his victories remain merely external (Khusrow 1977, pp. 61–89). These were so many attempts to distinguish superior enslavement (to God and Sufi preceptor) from inferior (to Sultan or transient worldly power). Khusrow dedicated all his masnavīs both to Niz̤ām al-Dīn and to the reigning Sultan, these two figures of authority standing for the two social spaces between which he lived his career. Both spaces used idioms of enslavement to convey the nature of spiritual or political service, the royal court also using this idiom in a literal juridical sense. In this sense, Khusrow’s lyric, epic and romance explorations of slavery may be read as so many attempts to re-evaluate the dialectic of slavery and freedom (bandagī and amīrī or āzādī) in terms simultaneously political and theological, military and Sufi. For the purposes of this discussion of the limits of adab, what distinguishes Khusrow’s oeuvre, as Alyssa Gabbay has shown, is his general commitment to ambiguating, playing with and, at key points, collapsing the sorts of binary oppositions that characterized the juridical and historical discourses of his milieu (Gabbay 2010). Representative of such juridical and historical formulations of the Muslim-infidel binary is an incident that Ẓ iyā al-Din Baranī relates in his Tārīkh-i Firūzshāhī. Qāẓī Mughis al-Dīn Bayānah argued with Sultan ‘Alā al-Dīn Khalajī for the theological-juridical importance of Hindus willingly submitting to humiliation (monetary and otherwise) at the hands of the Sultan’s Muslim revenue officer (Ertl and Kruijtzer 2017, pp. 43–44). Blain Auer cites this and other earlier formulations of Shar‘ia religious discrimination to argue that legally instituted Muslim triumphalism over non-Muslims was foundational to this Islamic discipline. Drawing on Sufi innovations in eleventh- and twelfth-century Khurasan that scholarship now calls maẓhab-i ‘ishq or ‘the religion of love’, Khusrow’s poetry defies this very legal-­ theological difference in the erotic imagination. Many of his ghazals featuring the Brahmin take up the stylized opposition between the Turk and Brahmin—the former light-­skinned, bellicose and monotheist, the latter dark-skinned, timid and idolatrous—only to end by eroticizing the

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Brahmin. In some ghazals Khusrow the Turkic Muslim speaker becomes the very Brahmin beloved he speaks to or of. His masnavī Nuh Sipihr (Nine Heavens), completed in 1318 and dedicated to Sultan Mubārak Shāh Khalajī, builds up these contrasts between Turk and Hindu or Brahmin in the first two chapters recounting the Sultanate’s triumphal marches on infidel kingdoms only to overturn and collapse them in the third. As Alyssa Gabbay notes, the ghazal concluding this third chapter synthesizes Turkic Muslim self and Hindu Brahmin other into an erotic resolution of Khusrow’s foregoing denigrations of Brahmin infidelity and black inchoateness as well as his celebrations of Brahmin scholarship, Sanskrit, astronomy and philosophy (Gabbay 2010, pp. 66–85). By the end of the thirteenth century the two distinct sites on which adab and Persian literature were practiced across the Persianate world came to characterize Delhi too. Sufi hospices, especially of the Chishtiyya initiatic lineage and their shaykhs or spiritual preceptors, formed a source of sovereignty alternative to that of the Sultan in his court (Kumar, S. 2000, pp. 41–65). By quietly avoiding mention of Sultan ‘Alā al-Dīn Khalajī in his much-imitated malfūz̤āt or discourses, the Chishtiyya Sufi Niz̤ām al-Dīn ‘Awliyā arrogated true sovereignty to world-renouncing and self-conquering Sufis such as himself. As in earlier Sufi discourses, Farīd al-Dīn ‘At̤t̤ār (d.1221) of Nishapur being a model, we see in Niz̤ām al-Dīn an equation of spiritual resoluteness with masculinity and spiritual irresoluteness with gender ambiguity and femininity (At̤t̤ār 1984, pp. 92–94; ‘At̤t̤ār 2007, p. 61).3 Despite remarking that we do not stop to ask, when confronted with a lion, whether it is a male lion or female, Niz̤ām al-Dīn’s social world of exclusively male intimacies, as it comes across in the Morals for the Heart, aligns with the hypermasculinity of Sufi traditions in India and elsewhere. Where they do appear in his discourses, women tend to be morally inferior to and less capable of spiritual transformation than men (Awliya 1992, p. 103).4 (The question of the role of women in Sufism will be further discussed in Chap. 8.)

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6.5 Persianate Adab in India: The Literarization of the Vernaculars A lately well-studied feature of the relations between adab and religion in the Sultanates of Delhi (1200–1526) and the Deccan (1347–1687) is the literarization of languages other than Persian and Arabic. Amīr Khusrow was arguably key to this literarization of the vernaculars. In his Dībācha-yi dīvān-i ghurrat al-kamāl (Preface to the Dīvān of the New Moon, 1286–1293) Khusrow proudly takes credit for inventing a variety of bilingual paronomasia (īhām) across Persian and Hindi (Khusrow 1975, pp. 59–60). In the third chapter of his Nuh Sipihr he lays out his comparisons between Persian, Arabic, Turkish, India’s regional languages and Sanskrit in respect of their linguistic properties and scholarly and literary contents (Khusrow 1949, pp. 175–181).5 Though not a regional vernacular, Sanskrit appears in Khusrow’s linguistic geography as local to India, thus amplifying his elevation of Indian languages to a status on par with the standard Islamic trio of Arabic, Persian and Turkish. Indeed, given his unambiguous if unfulfilled desire to learn Sanskrit, it is probable, as Alyssa Gabbay notes, that Khusrow may have found an impetus for his own paronomastic innovations and wordplay in the Sanskrit practice of sleśa or paronomasia (Gabbay 2010, pp. 37–38; Bronner 2010).6 For all of Khusrow’s efforts, however, it is not clear that literary competence in these Indian languages alone was ever recognized as one of the signs of adab. Rather, it seems that in all cases of Muslim courtly patronage of regional language literature it was mediation by Persian that afforded adab status. What follows is an attempt to discern the multiple forms of this mediation and its exclusions. Scholarship owes recent advances in the understanding of the poetics and politics of the fourteenth- and sixteenth-century premākhyāns—allegorical romances by North Indian Sufis in Avadhi or Hindavi—to studies by Aditya Behl and Thomas de Bruijn (Behl 2016; Manjhan, 2001; De Bruijn 2013).7 Partly thanks to Khusrow’s own pride in multilingual punning and his claims to have composed poetry in the still-­nascent North Indian vernacular of Hindi or Hindavi, the region’s Sufis came to compose poetry in the language by the end of the fourteenth century. A

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member of North India’s native-born Turkish aristocracy and affiliated to the Chishti Sufi order, Maulānā Dā’ūd, inaugurated the premākhyān with his Chandāyān of 1379. He dedicated his poem to Sultan Fīrūz Shāh Tughluq’s provincial governor in Dalmau. Between his poem and Manjhan’s Madhumālati, dedicated to Sultan Islām Shāh Sūrī in 1545, one of North India’s vernaculars received its first major literarization at the hands of Sufis of the Chishtī and Shat̤t̤ārī initiatic lineages who served at the courts of Sultans or their provincial representatives. All of them were men conversant in the conventions of the Persian romance as well as in those of Hindavi-mediated Sanskrit poetry even if they composed nothing in either Persian or Sanskrit. The poetics of the premākhyān, in Behl’s words, took ‘a double distance’ from both classical languages. That is, each such premākhyān invoked the theology of divine transcendence familiar from the prefatory chapters of canonical Persian masnavīs like Niz̤āmī’s (d.1209). It also replicated Niz̤āmī’s vision of the prophet and his dedication to the local Muslim patron. But the genre unit was the narrative or descriptive quatrain (chaupai) followed by a didactic couplet (doha), a genre unit long in use in North Indian Apabhramśa poetry by Jains, while the imagery and imagistic schemas of this genre are derived from Sanskrit models. This double distance from Sanskrit and Persian was key to why these works never counted as adab. For the choice to create works of literature that could only be intelligible and enjoyable regionally was also a choice to commemorate regional political power while trans-regionality, actual or potential, was key to adab. The literarization of Hindavi among the Sufi poets was a result of the crystallization of North Indian political identities in regional terms; and the result of the absence of a strong trans-regional identity such as was the case under later Mughal dominion which expressed such identity in Persian. The Tughluq Sultan’s relatively weak control over the countryside meant that his ‘iqta‘-dārs or governors lived with the possibility—or at least the hope—of becoming independent rulers. This, for example, was the case in the Bengal Sultanate already by the 1200s, regional autonomy there leading to the patronage of an Islamic literature in Bengali. Regional political autonomy in Sultanate Hindustan, Bengal and Gujarat, as also the Sultanate Deccan, went hand in hand with the possibility of Sufi-­ authored Islamic literature in the languages endemic to those regions.

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That is, in each such case, it resulted in the raising to literary status of a self-conscious creole produced in a contact zone of multiple linguistic and religious identities but always in a Persian literary gaze (Behl 2016, p. 13). Furthermore, one of Behl central contentions with respect to the premākhyān was arguably true of all such cases, namely that literarized Hindavi gave Hindustan’s Sufis an opportunity to explore the manifestations of Islam’s transcendent God in terms immanent to their North Indian milieus (Behl 2016, p. 5). They treated the corporeal sensuality of Hindavi poetic imagery as a creative challenge to celebrate the painful pleasures of God’s transcendence in a poetics whose Sanskrit intertexts celebrated a profane worldliness. For the same reasons, neither Dā’ūd nor Jāyasī nor any later author of Hindavi or Persian literature regarded poetic connoisseurship in Hindavi alone as one of the signs of adab. Rather, it was only when Hindavi poetry formed the basis of Persian rewritings or poetic adaptations, especially later in Mughal domains, did such vernacular competence feature in the tazkiras or biographical compendia of Persian language poets and thus as an element of adab ancillary to competence in Persian (Shafīq 1967).8 Another salient way in which Persian mediated vernacular literary status was through its genres. This was the case of the Dakhni or early Urdu ghazal and masnavī in the Sultanate courts of the Deccan (Faruqi 2001, pp. 65–78),9 as well as that of almost every genre of Urdu literature until the rise of the novel and mono-thematic verse (naz̤m) on English colonial models.10 Ḥ āfiz̤ Maḥmūd Sherānī, a literary historian key to the philological identification of the early Urdu canon, argued that Timur’s 1398 invasion of Delhi led to an exodus of its people to Gujarat and thus to the settlement there of key Delhi Sufis who responded like Gujarat’s Sultans to their regional autonomy by composing and patronizing poetry in Gujri, the regional name for what later scholarship identifies as early Urdu (Sherānī 1966, pp.  159–200). We may ask why only Muslims should have fled Delhi and why it should only have been Sufis and rulers who were agents in the creation of early Urdu. But characteristically of early scholarship on Urdu literature, Sherānī fails to distinguish between language and literature. It becomes apparent from his essay that what he means is that the North Indian vernacular Delhi’s refugees brought with them to Gujarat interests him only insofar as it expressed Muslim piety in

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a non-Persianate genre like the jikri and that it was also literarized by influential Sufis and Muslim rulers on the models of Persian genres and Persian idioms even if it used Indic as well as Persian metres. Muslim piety and Persian genre thus form the mutually complementary criteria by which Urdu literary history has identified its own origins. This explains the almost exclusively Muslim identities of Gujri literature (unlike literature in Gujarati which was authored by Hindus and Jains as well as Muslims but which plays no part in Urdu historiography). It also expresses and explains the modern scholarly identification of Urdu with Persianate literary genres, an arguably unique identification in literary studies anywhere in the world.11 Marathi bureaucratic and historical prose was also modelled, though only partially, on Persianate genres (Deshpande 2007, pp. 19–39). This may also have been the case with certain Telugu compositions in Qutbshahi courts—compositions in acca Telugu or Telugu lexically free of Sanskrit and other loan words—on the model of Firdawsī’s (d.1010) Shāhnāma whose Persian made minimal use of Arabic vocabulary (Eaton and Wagoner 2017, p.  212). But in none of these cases did Dakhni, Gujri, Marathi or Telugu—by Muslims or non-Muslims—ever come by itself to be considered an element of adab. Persian mediation also took the form of framing the vernacular with Persian. This is the case of the North Indian ‘Abd al-Quddūṣ Gangohī’s (d.1537) Rushdnāma where Gangohī added Hindavi marginal glosses to the main text of his own Persian Sufi treatise (Digby 1975). In the late sixteenth century Sultan Ibrāhīm ‘Ādil Shāh II of Bijapur in the Deccan authored Kitāb-i nawras, a book of fifty-nine songs in a vernacular close to Braj Bhasha. But it was the Iranian court poet Ẓ uhūrī who authored what became a famous preface for the book in stylized Persian prose, bestowing or seeking to bestow on the regional language songs the trans-­ regional prestige of Persian (Devare 2018, p. 106). Finally, to chronologically round off this consideration of Persian’s mediations of vernacular literatures, let us consider two canonical cases of how it was mainly Persian epitexts and translations that mediated the adab status of vernacular literatures in later Mughal domains. The first is from an early phase of Mughal history: Abu’l Faẓl’s taxonomical recognition of Sanskrit and Hindi poetry in his Āīn-i Akbarī (Institutes of Akbar,

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1590s), the third volume of his encyclopaedic Persian-language hagiography of the Emperor Akbar, Akbarnāma (Book of Akbar) (Truschke 2016). Reminiscent of the stylized archaism of Firdawsī’s Persian in his Shāhnāma (Book of Kings, c.1010), Abu’l Faẓl’s Persian makes little use of Arabic-origin nouns in its overall project to elevate Akbar as the perfect saintly and royal synthesis of Iranian, Turco-Mongol and Hindu kingship. This political theology and the style that went with it, best exemplified in Abu’l Faẓl’s preface to the Akbarnāma itself, was key impetus to the scores of Persian language rewritings of Indic language texts and to the patronage of original Sanskrit and other Indic language rewritings of Persian texts. The second instance is that of Persian language poet of Delhi ‘Abd al-Qādir Bīdil (1644–1720). His poetic oeuvre is an apotheosis of the central Mughal court’s involvement, officially epitomized by Abu’l Faẓl, in Sanskrit poetry and history-writing. This becomes apparent in how scores of distiches from his over 2800 ghazals and the protagonists and poetics of his four major masnavīs are bisemic. That is, they are amenable to interpretation either in terms of Ibn ‘Arabi’s (d.1240) theistic monism of which he was an explicit exponent or implicitly the Hindu monist philosophical tradition of Advaita Vedanta or both (Rizvi and Keshavmurthy 2020). That he wrote exclusively in Persian in a milieu where Braj and Urdu (over both of which he had literary command) had been literarized as Islamic languages points to a linguistic choice. Bīdil and his circle formed a group of Persian-language poets, philologists and historians who tried to bolster the prestige of late Mughal Delhi’s embattled ruling elite by asserting a trans-regional, masculine, hegemonically Muslim solidarity. The choice of Persian over Hindavi or Urdu was the invocation of adab as a trans-regionally prestigious code. Despite being surrounded by Hindu benefactors and students, Bīdil’s student Sirāj al-Dīn Khān Ārzū (d.1755) privileged male, Muslim poets over male Hindu ones in his 1751 biographical compendium Majma‘ al-nafā’is (Collection of Rarities) and made misogynist remarks in it when he mentioned women (Ārzū 2004; Shafīq 1967, p. 80).12 When Bindrāban Dās ‘Khushgū’, Hindu (of the Vaishya caste) student-biographer of Bīdil and student of Ārzū, characterized the itinerant Maratha invaders of Mughal Delhi as ‘despoilers’ (g̠ẖanīm) in his biographical compendium of Persian poets, he was repeating a contempt that his teachers and Mughal

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chronicles themselves expressed for semi-sedentary or nomadic and non-­ Muslim challengers to Muslim sovereignty.13 Lacchminārāyan ‘Shafīq’, another Hindu (of the Kāyastha caste) Persian language litterateur, lets us infer a foregrounding and sharpening in the eighteenth century of the caste solidarities that undergirded Persianate adab in India. Writing in the 1760s in the Deccan districts of the Mughal Empire, he was witness to the rise there of the Brahmin Peshwas who took over the Mughal bureaucracy and promoted Marathi in place of Persian, displacing the North Indian Persian-literate Hindu scribes of the Kāyastha and Khatri castes. In defence of what he saw as the imperilled prospects of North Indian Hindu service elites (mostly made up of Kāyastha, Khatri and some Vaishya and Brahmin castes) he undertook an exercise unique in the roughly sixth-century history of the tazkira or biographical compendium. He authored a tazkira entitled Gul-i ra‘nā (The Beautiful Rose) dedicated solely to Hindus who composed poetry in Persian (Anīs 1996).14 His caste-based and Persian-centric motivations for this biographical-anthological exercise become apparent in a digression characteristic of eighteenth-century Indo-Persian tazkiras. He opens his entry on a Hindu Persian poet called Bālmukund “Shahūd” thus: Shahūd: Bāl Mukund is from the qaum [i.e. sub-caste but literally ‘community’] of Sribātsav Kāyasths who mostly occupy the scribal offices in the royal bureaucracies of India’s nobility. However, in the Deccan territories the affairs of the scribes among them were mostly thrown into disorder. This is because ever since ‘a fourth part’ of the taxes of the Deccan were assigned to the despoilers [ghanīm, i.e. the Peshwas] and they came to participate in affairs of state, Deccani Brahmins gained an upper hand for the world was theirs for the taking. … Thus did yet another sect [farīqa] of Deccani Brahmins penetrate the Kingdom of Islam [riyāsat-i islām], rendering obsolete the qaum of Kāyasths and Khatris in all the jurisdictions of the lords and nobles of the Deccan and bringing the bureaucracies and offices entirely under their control—to the point that even the clerks of civil courts [qāẓi-khāna] are Brahmin. With religious animosity [takhāluf-i dīn] and communal fanaticism [ta‘ssub-i millat], they have learned the affairs of the Shar‘ia and pass judgments. (Shafīq 1967, pp. 87–88)

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Notice that this digression formulates a nexus of caste-war, language-war, fiscal prerogative and legal-moral custodianship of the Shar‘ia. Both the Persian-writing scribal castes and the Marathi-writing Peshwa Brahmins claim custodianship of the Shar‘ia which, by this point in Mughal history, meant community-specific laws recognized by the Mughal state and, in this sense, Islamic. Both claimed the right to collect taxes though the former did so in the name of the Mughal state while the latter levied categories of tax peculiar to themselves in the name of the partially coextensive Maratha state. And yet, both invoked the legal-moral code of the Shar‘ia even if Shafīq accuses the Brahmins of ‘communal fanaticism’. It was to resolve this challenge to the religious, caste, linguistic, geographical and fiscal-administrative limits of adab that Shafīq invoked Persian poetry. The authorship of Persian poetry, whatever its quality, was a sign of inter-personal legibility among practitioners of adab and thus of Mughal power.15 This was the very use to which the Emperor Jahāngīr had put Persian poetry in 1607. In his autobiography Jahangir had characterized Rāi Manohar, a Kacchwaha Rajput prince, thus: Rai Manohar, who was of the Shekhawat Kachhwaha tribe, had been shown many favours by my father [i.e. the Emperor Akbar] when he was a child. He knows Persian, and although all the way back to Adam no one could attribute understanding to anyone of this tribe, he is not devoid of understanding and composes Persian poetry. This line is by him: ‘The reason for the creation of shadow is that no one will step on the light of His Majesty the Sun’. (Jahangir 1999, p. 30)

That is, although the Kachhwaha had resisted Mughal sovereignty, their eventual submission to it was evidenced in this Mughal-raised Kachhwaha prince’s command of Persian and especially in his composition of a Persian verse that paid obeisance to Akbar and Jahangir’s self-­ fashioning as bearers of the farr or the God-given radiance in Iranian kings and as descendants of the Hindu solar dynasty. This very verse by Rāi Manohar significantly opens Shafīq’s compendium. Jahāngīr’s great grandfather Bābūr, founder of the Mughal Empire, had made similar use of adab as sign of intelligibility and controllability at once. In his

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autobiography he formulated his characterizations of ethnic groups such as the Jats, Gujjars, Uzbeks and Afghans who were resistant to Timurid or Mughal domination in terms of a history of breaching courtly etiquette (Babur 2002, pp. 314; 321). In his invocations of Persian poetry at the confluence of Mughal domination, Persian’s linguistic domination and Islamic domination, Shafīq was thus working within a central Mughal courtly understanding of adab.

6.6 Conclusion Given the reconfiguration of adab under British colonialism in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India, the Hindu identities of Lālā Tek Chand Bahār, Shafīq, Rāi Manohar and other such participants in Persianate adab become important for modern scholarship in ways they perhaps never did for these men themselves. As David Lelyveld has argued, successive British censuses, beginning in 1847, construed—and led Indians to construe—bearers of adab in terms of ‘a fixed, “caste”-like set meant to encompass higher status patrilineal groups of Muslims, comparable to Hindu twice-born varna and the emerging concept of “Aryan”, Indians whose higher status could be attributed to “foreign” ancestry, often in the distant past’ (Lelyveld 2020; Lelyveld 2003, pp.  27–30). That is, British ethnography and censuses combined to impose a racialized and exclusively descent-based understanding of the ashrāf (plural of sharīf) or those of high social status. But as the foregoing analyses show, patrilineal descent and religiously exclusion were only some of the multiple criteria at work in any given situation where adab was in question. Indeed, the very fact that Rāi Manohar could compose Persian poetry meant that Jahāngīr found him irreducible to his Kachhwaha Rajput identity just as Shafīq commemorated Hindu Persian poets for being students of Muslim Persian poets like Bīdil. As Lelyveld writes: More important than descent was the quality of sharāfat, respectability, which was a matter of cultural style associated with the heritage of the Mughal court, in dress, manners, aesthetics, and above all, language and

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literature. Elaborate politeness formulas, familiarity with Persian and Urdu literary conventions, the art of elegant conversation, all of these marked a person as sharīf. Though rooted in Islamicate ethical traditions, akhlāq, the quality of sharāfat included many Hindus, Sikhs and even Europeans who were in a position to partake of courtly society or to emulate it and excluded the overwhelming majority of Muslims. In the course of the eighteenth century it came to characterize a particular linguistic register of Urdu, which took on the literary heritage of Mughal Persian as the mark of cosmopolitan cultivation. (Lelyveld 2020)

Asadullāh Khān Ghālib (d.1869), canonized as one of Urdu’s greatest poets in the pre-colonial mode even though he spent his life in the heart of British India and dependent on British benevolence, offers us an apt formulation of this earlier Mughal courtly understanding of adab as Islamicate ‘cultural style’. It is an appropriate point at which to conclude this genealogy of adab in India because it was one of the final expressions of Mughal adab at a time when the combination of English colonial ethnography and administration was fast making it unthinkable. Like several of the poets in his milieu, Ghālib composed a Persian preface to his Dīvāns or verse collections in Urdu and Persian. Into his prosimetric preface to his Persian Dīvān, unmistakably reminiscent of Firdawsī and Abu’l Faẓl in its avoidance of Arabic-origin lexemes, Ghālib inserted a verse fragment (qit̤a’) that puts his collection into negative and competitive relations with the major modes of Persian and Arabic poetry before him. Insisting by implication on the purely lyric mode of his ghazals to follow, Ghālib negated a variety of other modes. Declaring his poetry is neither didactic nor historical nor epic nor ascetic nor argumentative, he then adds that he cannot ‘praise Lālā Sūrdās in poetry’ (Ghālib 1967, p. 150). Sūrdās was a sixteenth-century North Indian Hindu poet in the bhakti or devotional tradition of Hindi or Braj poetry. He was known to and celebrated by earlier Mughal literary culture in Persian and the vernaculars.16 Ghālib invoked the trilingual literary field into which he was entering by declaring his superiority, not only to key Persian and Arabic genres and poets but also to the literarized vernacular. He did so with a faintly disrespectful use of the caste label ‘Lālā’, typical in Mughal

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domains for the Hindu Persian scribes of the Kāyastha caste, affixed to Sūrdās (Shafīq 1967, p. 120).17 But it is significant that he felt the need to do so at all. However subordinate, Braj was still enough of an element of his adab for him to feel the need to explicitly negate it. That he did so in an intentionally archaic prosimetric Persian in which he claimed ancestral origins ‘in the frontiersmen of Samarqand’ synthesized the trans-­ regionality associated with adab with the linguistic, religious, caste and class limits that have formed the subject of this essay.18 But this multi-­ criterion invocation of adab was already anachronistic when he made it. What was taking its place, interpellated by colonial ethnography, was a narrowly patrilineal and racialized understanding of the nexus of Islamic civility and religion, an understanding that would be central to the self-­ understanding and nationalism of colonial North India’s Muslim gentry.

Notes 1. Thackston’s introduction contains a useful survey of the many rewritings of this text, European, Timurid and Indo-Persian. 2. Revealing in this regard are Niz̤ām al-Dīn’s teachings on money, teachings that echo those of Farīd al-Dīn ‘At̤t̤ār in his Mant̤iq al-t̤ayr and elsewhere, teachings that enjoin exorbitant expenditure in the faith that God will provide: ‘True comfort comes from expending gold and silver’ and ‘The real purposes of amassing gold and silver is to use it for the benefit of others’ (Awliya 1992, pp. 137–138). The eschatological perspective he adopts elsewhere on money also qualifies its otherwise purely horizontal ethical significance: he relates two versions of a Hadith, one that declares that ‘Permissible earnings would be accepted and interdicted earnings would lead to torment and punishment in the next world’ and ‘Both permissible and interdicted earnings would lead to torment and punishment’, explaining the latter by the requirement that the wage-earner give account of the quality, sources and effects of his earnings (Awliya 1992, p. 126). All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are mine. 3. Germane here is the character of the spiritually irresolute and thus eunuch-like Shibli in Farid ud-Din Attar (At̤t̤ār 1984, pp. 92–94); and

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‘At̤t̤ār’s apologetic remark at the beginning of his biography of the woman Sufi Rābe‘a that ‘as a woman in the way of God Almighty is a man, she cannot be called a woman’ (At̤t̤ār 2007, p. 61). 4. Notice that even in his apparent validation of saintly women in the passage cited here the saint says ‘That woman is a man whom the Creator has sent to earth in the bodily form of a woman’, a statement that echoes ‘At̤t̤ār’s apologetic praise of Rābe‘a (Awliya 1992, p. 103). 5. Especially remarkable for a discussion of adab is Khusrow’s concluding boast in this section that he would praise his Sultan-addressee even in Sanskrit. 6. Because Sanskrit allows internal and external compounding of lexemes it allows paronomasia on a scale grammatically impossible in Arabic and Persian. For a study of such large-scale sleśa see Bronner 2010. 7. For annotated translations of two premākhyāns, see Manjhan 2011; 2001. For a study of the poetics and politics of Malik Muhammad Jāyasī’s Padmāvat, see De Bruijn 2013. 8. This, for instance, is the case of Ānand Rām Mukhlis (d.1750), celebrated Mughal Persian litterateur who translated Jāyasī’s Padmāvat into Persian. It is also the case of the many other Hindu Persian-language poets who Shafīq commemorated in 1768 for their Persian masnavī and Persian prose rewritings of Hindavi and other Indic language texts. 9. The earliest extant literature classified in modern scholarship as Urdu appears in fifteenth-century Gujarat and appears to use non-Persianate genres and Indic metres as well as Persian ones. However, even this poetry in the genre of the jikri (from the Perso-Arabic zikr or oral remembrance of God’s names) by Shaikh Bājan (1388–1506) is identified as early Urdu on the basis of its Muslim piety apart from the fact that its author anthologized it with his Persian prose and verse. But even this mixed generic heritage yields to an almost wholly Persian genresystem beginning in the same century. 10. For an exception to this rule, see Orsini 2010, pp. 142–177. 11. No scholar of English literature would identify literature in English only with a closed set of genres, to say nothing of identifying it only with expressions of Christianity. 12. Bīdil himself characterized one of his many Hindu students, punning on his penname Sabqat or ‘Precedence’, thus: ‘Sabqat holds precedence over

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all those in this age of Hindu origin’, suggesting a religious criterion for literary judgment. 13. That these limits to Khushgū’s adab were shared by other participants in adab becomes evident in the preface to the first volume of Khushgū’s compendium by Ḥ aqīr Durrī, an early Qajar Iranian editor with ­connections to the Qajar court, who characterized Khushgū’s compendium as a precious artefact retrieved from barbaric Bakhtiyārī nomads into whose hands it had fallen. For a discussion of Durrī’s preface and editorial interventions, see Keshavmurthy 2016, pp. 151–173. 14. Most tazkiras of the eighteenth century identify Hindu poets by religion and jāti or sub-caste identities among other criteria like teacher, hometown, ancestry and employer. A later example is Mohan Lāl Anīs’s 1781 Anīs al-ahibbā (Intimate of Friends) which allots separate sections to the Hindu and Muslim students of an Indian poet called Fākhir Makīn (d.1814). 15. But by 1799 when Shafiq completed his Bisāt al-ghanā’im, a Persian language history of the Maratha Empire (with an extensive focus on Shivaji) up to 1761, he seems to have re-evaluated the Marathas as worthier of respect and drew on Marathi language Bakhars as well as Persian sources for his history. That he used the bakhar, a Marathi genre of history-­writing that was itself partly modelled on Persian history-writing, for his own Persian language history suggests a widening of the limits of the historical imagination adab entailed. For a brief summary, see Madhavrao 1958, pp. 365–369. 16. For a discussion of an earlier Mughal laudatory assessment of Sūrdās in Persian, see Keshavmurthy 2016, p. 136. 17. In itself, ‘Lālā’ was an honorific applied to Hindus of this and perhaps other scribal castes. In the 1760s Shafīq wrote that it was the Hindi equivalent to ‘Mirzā’ in Persian and ‘Chalpī’ in Turkish (Shafīq 1967, p. 120). 18. In another of his invocations of the trans-regional (Iran-identified Shi‘i) religious and linguistic prestige of adab he writes: ‘Ghālib, flee Hindustan, the opportunity’s yours for the taking./How pleasant—to die in Najaf and live in Isfahan’ (Ghālib 2007, pp. 314–315).

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Orsini, F. 2010. Bārahmāsas in Hindi and Urdu. In Before the Divide: Hindi and Urdu Literary Culture, ed. F. Orsini, 142–177. Orient Blackswan: New Delhi. Orsini. F and Samira Sheikh. 2017. After Timur Left: Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-Century North India. Delhi, Oxford University Press. Richards, J.F. 1984. Norms of Comportment among Imperial Mughal Officers. In Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam, ed. B. Metcalf, 255–289. Berkley: University of California Press. Rizvi, S., and Keshavmurthy, P. 2020. (Forthcoming in) Journal of South Asian Intellectual History. Salvatore, A. 2019. Secularity through a ‘Soft Distinction’ in the Islamic Ecumene? Adab as a Counterpoint to Shari‘a. Historical Social Research 44 (3): 35–51. Schofield, K.B. 2015. Learning to Taste the Emotions: The Mughal Rasika. In Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India, ed. F. Orsini and K.B. Schofield, 407–421. Open Book Publishers. Shafīq, L.N. 1967. Tazkira-yi gul-i ra‘nā. Hyderābād: ‘Ahd Āfrīn Barqī Press. Sharma, S. 2005. Amir Khusraw: The Poet of Sultans and Sufis. Oxford: Oneworld. Sherānī, H.M. 1966. Gujrī yā gujarātī urdu dasvīñ ṣadī hijrī meñ. In: HM.  Sherānī, Maqālāt-i Ḥ āfiz̤ maḥmūd sherānī, jild-i avval, 159–200. Lahore: Majlis-i taraqqī-i adab. Truschke, A. 2016. Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court. New York: Columbia University Press. Van Ruymbeke, C. 2016. Kashefi’s Anvar-e Sohayli: Rewriting Kalila wa Dimna in Timurid Herat. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers.

7 Islam Divided: The Underlying Political Culture of the Conflict Between the Sunni and the Shi‘a Vassilios Adrahtas and Milad Milani

7.1 Introduction Is Islam divided? This question is meant as a provocation to open up debate about conflict in Islam and also to carefully consider aspects of this conflict by reflecting on specific points of importance in its history. Therefore, this study reconsiders the age-long conflict1 between the Sunni and the Shi‘a in order to clarify a number of questions: (a) the fundamental issues involved in the conflict, (b) the joint evolution of the Sunni and the Shi‘a, (c) the hierophanic basis of their conflict and (d) the historical ramifications of the conflict in terms of identity, performance and

We are grateful to our colleague Dr Aydogan Kars from the Centre for Religious Studies, Monash University, for reading this study and offering his most constructive comments.

V. Adrahtas (*) Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia M. Milani Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 M. Milani, V. Adrahtas (eds.), Islam, Civility and Political Culture, New Directions in Islam, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56761-3_7

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individuality. The exploration of these questions suggests strongly that current conflict theories of religion cannot account adequately for the Sunni-Shi‘a divide and need to be qualified. In particular, the conflict under consideration presents certain peculiarities that put it forward as a prime example of religion as the very source and field of conflict and not simply as the mediator, perpetuator or moderator of social conflict. Turning to the fundamental issues involved in conflict is necessitated by the core question posed with regard to the relationship between conflict and religion: is religion and to what extent a cause of conflict? The present study focuses on such a research question by exploring it from the intersection of historiography and phenomenology, adopting thus a theoretical perspective that constitutes both a historical phenomenology and a phenomenological history. Our main methodological concern is to secure analytically the experiential distinctiveness and the hierophanic irreducibility of the subject under consideration. In this respect, the assessment of permanence and change, as well as the dialectics of interdependency between the Sunni and the Shi‘a, is pursued through a more subtle methodological lens. The latter aims at capturing the collective consciousness of identity, the facticity of sociopolitical performance and the specificity of individuality, yielding thus a more comprehensive, representative and convincing picture of conflict as the driving force of what otherwise looks simply like a sectarian opposition.2

7.2 Levels of Fundamental Difference There are certain questions about fundamental levels of difference regarding what has been dubbed “Islamic sectarianism”—especially the divide between the Sunni and the Shi‘a—that need to be addressed. One important question concerns the why of this difference, while another refers to the how. To start our investigation, three levels of enquiry, namely, authority, interpretation and context, will be explored so as to foreground the distinctive religio-political nature of division within Islam. The issues involved therein basically pertain to the socio-historical developments following the death of Muhammad in 632 CE, which ultimately came to a head in the dual interpretive agendas of the burgeoning community and, by extension, in the legitimation of rule.

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7.2.1 T  he Question About Religious and Political Authority The available documents do not allow us to state that Muhammad elected a successor; at least not unequivocally. Was it because he had fulfilled his duty to the community (Q 5:3) and wanted for them to manage their own affairs? Relatedly, verse 5:3 outlines quite specifically the parameters of religion, yet there is nothing anywhere in the Qur’an or Hadith (at least not with consensus within the latter) about succession in the same direct manner. This problem in the sources undoubtedly reflects a problem in the past. In particular, the authority question relating to the sources pivots around one Qur’anic verse (5:67), which is the prefix to an announcement for a sermon in which Ali ibn Abu Talib (d. 661 CE) is especially praised. The event is captured in the hadith of Ghadir Khumm (The Sermon by the Pond), which recounts Muhammad saying that “Whoever’s master I am, Ali is his master”. In another hadith, Muhammad is reported as having said: “Indeed I am leaving you with two things of great import (thaqalayn)… you will not go astray as long as you hold fast to them: the Book of God and my family” (cf. Sahih Muslim 2408). These two hadiths, even combined, are hardly conclusive, and it is not the least surprising that Sunnis and Shi‘ites have upheld starkly opposing interpretations of them. For Shi‘ites the two hadiths constitute compelling evidence regarding the intention of Muhammad to bequeath Ali (and his progeny from Fatima) with leadership; yet Sunnis treat these very same hadith as encouragement to honor the Family of Muhammad (ahl al-bayt), an obligation which they uphold to the present day (Brown 2018). Nevertheless, when placed in the wider pool of the Hadith, the same language is attributed to Muhammad in praising leading companions such as Abu Bakr and Umar, implying their place for leadership. It is reasonable to assume that the authority question is pivotal to the fundamental difference in the interpretation of sources, but equally so it is clear that these interpretations are driven and shaped by political motivations associated with the question of the rightful heir to the Ummah (Bengio and Litvak 2011). On the one hand, authority for the Shi‘a is based on correct knowledge of religion and only secondarily condoned by public

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recognition (Dakake 2014). On the other hand, for Sunnis authority is put forward by election, which is indicative of, but not necessitated by endowment of religious knowledge (Halverson 2010). In light of the above, one can at the very least appreciate the difficulty in discerning a definitive interpretation, since neither the fact that “Ali is Master” (man kuntu mawlahu fa-ali mawlahu) nor the fact of showing reverence for the Prophetic Family entails successorship.

7.2.2 The Interpretive Issue It would be unscholarly to assert that the intentionality of Muhammad regarding the issue of successorship is historiographically verifiable. Conversely, what can be said is only what is surmised from the evidence at hand, which in turn—if anything—highlights the difficulties faced by early Muslims in their attempts to reconcile varying opinions about their religion and authoritative rule (cf., Shoemaker 2011). Furthermore, it is precisely the discursive space opened up by these difficulties and differences that became the condition of possibility for transforming the authority question into a continuous and highly contested interpretive issue. In the ensuing years, Islam would provide “the central drama of urban social life”, that is, “a drama in the course of which Arab immigrants, non-Arab converts, and the descendants of both created a new society simply by trying to determine how best to live as Muslims” (Bulliet 1994, p. 98). Indeed, such an existential condition allowed for the eventual medieval philosophical explorations of Islam as meaning (beyond the formal boundaries of tradition) and the pursuit of the lexicographical quest of what it means to be Muslim—all precipitated by the Hellenic-­ inspired contemplative approach to religion.3 In the absence of Muhammad, Muslims found solidarity in the specific communal habits (sunna) and the guidance of respected individuals from places such as Medina, Kufa and Isfahan. This situation led early on to the first divisions defined by approach as pertaining to a followership: of hadith (ahl al-hadith), of critical reasoning (ahl al-ra’y) and of speculative reasoning (ahl al-kalam).4 Among the three competing groups, the ahl al-hadith—notwithstanding a number of trials and tests they had to face,

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such as the Mihna and the compromising agendas of Ash‘arism and Maturidiyya—would eventually become the most prominent, mainly due to an indispensable fact about Islamic religious consciousness: even though all Muslims would agree that the Qur’an holds the highest status among the sources of Islam, it had to be conceded that it was the figure of the Prophet that occupied the heart of religious experience (cf. Brockopp 2010). What proved invincible in debates advanced by the people of hadith—in particular, al-Shafi‘i—was that Islamic religious practice could not be possible without knowledge of the Prophetic example and hence the way to access the latter was, in principal, through the Hadith. The preoccupation with the Hadith—from about the mid-eighth century CE onward—bolstered the existing tradition of Sunna, facilitating the rise of the collective dominant trend of the ahl al-sunna (Burton 1994). In a sense, all Muslims were “of the Sunna”, and it was the Sunna which shaped the interpretation of the Qur’an and gradually overshadowed the latter as text by placing the Prophetic example at the center of Islam. Prior to this, as well as during the time of the great scholars Malik ibn Anas (d. 795), Abu Hanifa (d. 767), Ibn Hanbal (d. 855) and al-­ Shafi‘i (d. 820), concurrent developments occurred in Shi‘a jurisprudence through the efforts of Ja‘far al-Sadiq (d. 765), who also advocated reliance on the Hadith. However, in his case what we see is the implicit preference of hadiths from the Imams as the recognized inheritors of the Prophet’s knowledge and authority. As a consequence, whereas the majority come to rely heavily on sanad (substantiated documentation) in order to demonstrate the representative link to the Prophet, the persisting ahl al-Shi‘a had already determined the centrality of the Imam not only as heir to, but more pointedly as the true representative of the Prophet (Newman 2000). For Shi‘ites the living Imam at any given time is the sole and genuine source of interpretation; a luxury and convenience that the Sunnis—due to options utilized in the formation of their own religio-political agenda— do not have. Moreover, it seems that in general what has been decisive in determining the interpretive process of Islamic religio-political thought is the overwhelming influence of the Prophetic legacy upon the destiny of Muslims. In an odd twist of fate, Islam as the “religion of the book” par

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excellence has not been derived directly from the Qur’an, the espoused book-source of revelation, but instead has been constructed through the mediating factor of tradition (Sunna and the Hadith). In this respect, what makes the Sunni and the Shi‘a “sectarianism” irreconcilable is tragically the no longer available possibility of accessing the Qur’an free from traditionally bound interpretive reading—to phrase it differently, it seems that the authority issue and the interpretive issue are but sides of the same coin.

7.2.3 Socio-historical Aspects Our knowledge of the socio-historical aspects of Islam’s development has greatly improved in recent years. Initially Islam was seen within academia—and more generally within the West—as a monolithic phenomenon with an explicit creed from which deviant groups could be then defined. This was an accident of reliance on the sources available during the Orientalist era, sources which were predominantly Sunni. Needless to say, the translation of the opinion of medieval Sunni ulama presented an image vastly at odds with modern scholarship. Indeed, the portrayal of Sunni Islam as the true interpretation of Islam relegated all other variations of the faith to deviations from the “straight path”, dubbing them heresy (ilhad), innovation (bid’a) and unbelief (kufr). On the other hand, the Shi‘a were also complicit in the dissemination of their own propaganda by posing themselves as true Islam based on their own interpretation of the past. To complicate things more, they too came to disagreement among themselves, further dividing into a number of major communities such as the Ithna‘asharis (Twelvers), the Ismailis (Seveners) and the Zaydis (Fivers). Overall, we take the experience of being Islamic as something defined by both a historical and human phenomenon—namely, “Islam”—that is, encompassed by the richness and complexity of meaning (Ahmed 2015, p. 5). In this way, the Sunni and the Shi‘a distinction reveals two divergent trajectories of the same point of origin: the Muhammad-Event (see below). Significant is the fact that the Shi‘a evolved first and they did so

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initially as a minority partisan movement that increasingly gained political clout (and eventually theological distinctiveness) from within the body of the Muslim community that collectively saw itself as ahl al-­sunna. The official Sunni position emerged second and was bolstered in the face of the politicized partisan threat from within. It is therefore not until the year 1000, with the rise of the Seljuks, that a “Sunni revival” rivals and so dashes the hopes of Shi‘ite dynastic ambition (Bulliet 1994, p. 101)—as the latter were specifically embodied by the Fatimids and Buyids. In the face of Shi‘a ascendency, Sunni propaganda portrayed Shi‘a partisanry derogatively as tantamount to religio-political dissension. With regard to the Sunni production, it is worth quoting Richard Bulliet (1994, p. 145) in full: Sunni Islam is commonly portrayed as a comparatively uniform religion built around the Quran, an agreed upon corpus of hadith, an all-­ encompassing legal tradition … [and] the notion that much of this uniformity goes all the way back to the early community around the Prophet Muhammad in Medina … Uniformity is viewed as primordial rather than achieved, not so much because of an ignorance of history as because of the inherent need of all people who root their authority in tradition to regard that tradition as everlasting and unchanging, or at least anchored in the ways of the greater founder.

In what follows we shall present the socio-historical trajectories of the Shi‘a and the Sunni from a phenomenological history point of view, since the aforementioned authority question and interpretative issue were part and parcel of broader developments that embodied both of them in very specific ways. In other words, the divergent interpretive answers given to the fundamental authority question presupposed and at the same time generated the socio-historical circumstances that manifested a division/ conflict intrinsic to Islam. Although the relationship between the authority question and the interpretive issue, on the one hand, and the concomitant socio-historical aspects, on the other, give the impression of a predetermined vicious circle, in actual fact what one can trace are subtle yet innovative and creative ruptures within the continuity of Islamic

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history. To phrase it in Aristotelian terms, the absence of the Prophet might have formally predetermined everything, but it did not materially anticipate everything.

7.3 Trajectories and Transformations 7.3.1 The Shi‘a The designation of the Shi‘a as a minority Muslim “sect” is problematic. Numbering around 200 million, the Shi‘a have contributed to the entire course of Islamic history, shaping the social, political, intellectual, as well as the artistic achievements of Islamic civilization (Daftary 2013, pp. 2–3). Thus understanding the Shi‘a sheds light on the richness, diversity and complexity of Islam as a civilization, a major world religion and a political culture. Also, in some ways, the study of the Shi‘a is not just a study of diversity in present-day Islam, but more so an attempt to glean at the origins of that diversity in early Islam. More specifically, “Islam” and “Muslims” are formulations that reflect the religious imagination of various factions (Daftary 2013, pp.  3, 4–5), an imagination that was refined time and again through and in-between two particular factions, namely, the Sunni and the Shi‘a. Early Islam, therefore, presents a picture of fluidity of identities and doctrinal positions in an “effervescent ambience” (Daftary 2013, p.  3) consisting of vigorous discourse and inter-­ group mobility. While they were never bound by or limited to specific schools of thought (something still the case nowadays), these early groups gradually acquired distinctive identities and theological perspectives which were further consolidated by political allegiances. As far as political loyalties are concerned, those who came to be designated as the Sunni recognized the historical caliphate and the emergent power institutions in society, while others such as the Shi‘a and the Kharijis “aspired toward the establishment of new social orders and leadership structures” (Daftary 2013, p. 3)—in either case distinct political cultures came into being. From this early diversity to medieval Islam and beyond, Shi‘ism has proved capable of producing a sustainable and competitive alternative to Sunnism (Knysh 2011, p. 159). As such, the Shi‘a have been seen by the

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worldwide majority Sunni community as the principle rival, both politically and religiously. All things considered, the Shi‘a success made them the prime target for Sunni theologians, thus placing the Shi‘a always on the back foot and in the defensive with regard to their political and ideological positions. Notwithstanding that, the Shi‘a interpretation has developed over a long period of time. The early Shi‘a was comprised of the pro-Alid movement—“the party of Ali” or Shi‘a t Ali—whose explicit cause was to back the succession of the family of Ali and see to its reinstatement to power. Yet from the beginning there were internal disagreements around what it meant to be loyal to Ali’s family, a fact that led to the movement’s splintering over matters pertaining to the identity of the rightful imam, the principle goals of the group and how to achieve them, as well as delicate theological differences that remain to this day contentious, if not irreconcilable.

7.3.1.1  Phase I: A Protest Movement The genesis of the division between the Shi‘a and the Sunni is located in the very early period. The proto-Shi‘a or the Alid party were technically supporters of the caliphate of Ali and his descendants, while the proto-­ Sunni were the supporters of the caliphate of Abu Bakr, Umar and Uthman and “who later accepted Umayyad rule as ‘the lesser evil’” (Knysh 2011, p.  159). The question of the rightful imam or “leader” of the Islamic polity was not only prevalent among Shi‘a partisans, but was ultimately the cardinal factor that underpinned the difference between the Shi‘a and the Sunni. Moreover, the Sunni perspective was informed by optimism: this world, however imperfect, was still the best of possible worlds, since it was a manifestation of the Divine Will. Having the Qur’an and the Sunna as the foundations of the Muslim community, all who were part of it and abided by the injunctions of the divine law (sharia) maintained by the ulama had the guarantee of justice in this world and salvation in the next. This Sunni outlook brings the Shi‘a Weltanschauung into sharp focus and provides insight into the nature of the earliest Shi‘a as a protest movement.

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The fact that the noun “Shi‘a” has stuck is a linguistic accident. It suggests that the Shi‘a was a prominent outlier that literally survived the Sunni accumulation of orthodox identity. Yet what the Shi‘a in fact represented was a formidable protest movement. The partisans of Ali and his family were defined not by their partisanship (since this was the norm of the early Islamic community), but rather their rejection of Sunni optimism. They held the Sunni in contempt as “misguided and opportunistic renegades” (Knysh 2011, p. 163), who were willing to barter justice and truth for injustice and falsehood. The spirit of Shi‘a protest was reinforced by their view that the fallen state of the world could only be restored by the imam al-mahdi (“the divinely guided leader”), whose arrival would bring the triumph of good over evil, truth over falsehood. Shi‘a protest aspirations came to an end with the tragic assassination of Ali and the subsequent martyrdom of the remaining line of his male descendants. Having no hope of fulfilling the promise of rectitude in this world, Shi‘a scholars pinned the hopes of their community on the prevailing doctrine of “occultation” (ghayba) with regard to the twelfth imam, who was expected to return at a time known only to Allah. This forward-projected eschatology is the basis of Shi‘ite political culture and has sustained the advocates of the imams throughout failed revolutions and the demise of the elect during the Abbasid period. In addition, Shi‘a scholars developed the creed of hidden knowledge (‘ilm) that is contained within the Qur’an and the Sunna of the Prophet and which is accessible only to the elect of Allah: the Shi‘a imams and their endowed disciples.

7.3.1.2  Phase II: A Revolutionary Movement Abbasid history is rooted in the early Shi‘a protest movement (Marin-­ Guzman 1990), but not in the elitist line that makes up the Twelver or Sevener groups. Their genealogy is from the wider remit of Shi‘ite and pro-Shi‘ite groups that were especially active in southern Iraq and who bitterly opposed Syrian and Umayyad rule in common. These revolutionary groups were made up of two types—the moderate and the extremist Shi‘a—and were bolstered by non-Arab Persian support known as mawali. The mawali were a product of a “problematic” Islamization process, since

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they kept alive elements of their ancestor religion that informed their version of Shi‘a Islam. The Abbasids emerged following the death of Ali’s son by the Hanafi woman (Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyya), who was known as the “Mahdi” and a great leader of the Shi‘ites. After his death (700 CE), his followers split into three groups, one of which supported his son Abu Hashim Abd Allah and was known by the name “Hashimiyya”. After Abu Hashim died (716 CE), his followers split into several groups, one of which held that Abu Hashim had selected his successor in Muhammad ibn Ali ibn Abd Allah ibn al-Abbas (736 CE). The ambitious al-Abbas utilized the movement to build the Abbasid revolution in the name of restoring justice. Once in power, though, maintaining their rule became the main objective, and this meant defending against potential threats of rebellion and foreign war. To this end, the Abbasids made two strategic moves: firstly, they transferred the capital from Damascus to Baghdad, and secondly, they cut their previous ties with the extremist Shi‘a. Thus, although the Abbasid Empire was built through the active force of revolutionary Shi‘a in the first half of the eighth century CE, subsequently they outgrew their Shi‘a affiliations in the course of their rise to greatness.

7.3.1.3  P  hases III–IV: From Establishing a Polity to Institutional Disillusionment Shi‘a history continued to develop in two distinct but important ways. The first was related to that branch of the Shi‘a movement which culminated in the Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt in the tenth century, becoming thus an economic and military competitor to the Abbasids in Baghdad. The second was associated with the ongoing influence of the line of Ali and Fatima; it more or less practiced political quietism under Abbasid rule and, finally, gave rise to the unofficial doctrine of disengagement and dissimulation (taqiyya).5 The latter led to the Twelvers adopting an apolitical stance that lasted for approximately 700 years, until the coming-to-­ prominence of the Shi‘a under the Safavids.

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7.3.1.4  Phase V: Ideological Shi‘a The formal prominence of Shi‘ism starts with the Safavids. Although Shi‘ism, that is, the doctrinal systemization of principle Shi‘a beliefs such as the imama (divinely guided leadership) and ghayba had already begun prior to the Safavids, it was institutionalized under them through a lengthy process of bloody conversion across Persia. More specifically, Safavid history goes back to a mystical order based in Ardabil, north-­ western Iran, which took its name from the charismatic Sufi patriarch Safi al-Din (1252–1334) who claimed lineal descent from Ali. Shah Ismail (1487–1524), the founder of the dynasty, was the last grandmaster of the Safaviyya order and proclaimed himself the Mahdi and Ali incarnate. The success of the Safavids came through the consolidation of powerful Turkmen tribes, primarily the Qezelbash “redheads” (since they wore red turbans), and was timed by the end of the Mongol reign in Iran and the fall of Timur Lang. Much about the early history of the Safavids remains unclear, but they were for certain frontier tribesmen who lived according to beliefs combining mystical and millenarian aspects that had little correlation with Twelver Shi‘a orthodoxy. Their military ambitions and religious vagaries brought them closer to extremist Shi‘a (ghulat) who themselves had shamanistic and animistic proclivities that corroborated the Turkmens’ religio-military penchant. We refer to this phase of Shi‘a history as “ideological Shi‘a” because it saw the Shi‘a becoming a distinctive system of ideals attached to public perception and official policy. It was through the efforts of the Safavid kings that Iran was transformed into the land of the Shi‘a. Like the Abbasids, the Safavids looked to Shi‘ism for political expedience, but unlike them they kept Shi‘ism at the very least the official religion of the empire. What is important to remember is that the Safavids continued the Iranian legacy of the divine right of kings, seeing themselves as blessed with the light of divine presence (khvarr or farr). This was the ancient Iranian ideal that kings ruled as just men on earth. Though these Iranian kings were considered unbelievers, Muslims from early on held that the realm could survive unbelief, but not injustice (Shepard 2009, p. 130). The point of connection is that the kingly ideal further embedded the

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imama within a rich cultural context with historical precedence that valued the ceremonial bloodline of just rulers. Nevertheless, while this helped validate the Safavid claim to rule, it was the ulama who held the actual sway over the populace.

7.3.1.5  Phase VI: Political Shi‘ism Ideological Shi‘ism retained its course for over four centuries under various Iranian dynastic kingdoms (1501–1979; from the Safavid to the Pahlavi dynasty). In 1979, Islam came on the world stage under the auspices of the politicized Ruhullah Khomeini. A prominent ‘alim (learned Muslim scholar, Persian col. mullah), Khomeini progressed to the highest rank of his class becoming the Ayatollah (“sign of Allah”) and, posthumously, “the Imam” beloved. Khomeini’s revolution was a religious one that sought to fuse the religious and the political, that is, to bring the religious back into the political sphere. Until his time, politics was shunned upon by the mullahs, and political activity was deemed not the domain of the religious. Khomeini’s theological innovation challenged the status quo and secured the crucial revision of traditional Shi‘a quietism. His Shi‘ism held that it was necessary for the jurists to be involved in political affairs and to guide them—and not just as advising counsel. Rather the nation should be led by the most respected jurist qualified for the role of the highest office in building an Islamic government by virtue and responsibility of “the mandate of the jurist” (velayat-e faqih) (Algar 1981). This unprecedented and radical shift in the history of Shi‘a Islam brings us to the present-day manifestation of the prominent Twelver Shi‘a. It represents the rise to power of the ulama, who now take over temporal power and do not just assume the power and privileges they had historically enjoyed in the employ of their kingly overlords. It is in this period that one can truly speak of Shi‘ism proper and not simply about the Shi‘a.

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7.3.2 The Sunni Tracing the historical trajectory of the Sunni in the detailed manner we just did for the Shi‘a is not really necessary. Firstly, because the Sunni “story” is better known and documented, and secondly, because in light of the transformations mentioned with regard to the Shi‘a, it has become clear enough that certain corresponding aspects of change did take place in the case of the Sunni. However, what is really necessary is that we emphasize two conditions: (a) that the Sunni-Shi‘a divide has developed through a constant and consistent dialectics between these two hierophanic experiences of Islam, meaning that the historical evolution of Islam has been basically determined through the opposition and conflict of these two claims to authority and hegemony; and (b) that whatever came to be articulated and institutionally embodied as Sunnism and Shi‘ism owed much of their identity and integrity to the challenges that the one posed to the other. In this respect, the Sunni historical trajectory went through distinct phases, which we could delineate as follows. Phase I for the Sunni would comprise the undertaking of the caliphate project or, in other words, the acquisition of power as far as the Umayyads and Abbasids were concerned (up to the tenth century CE). Phase II would refer in turn to the emergence of a mainstream Islamic tradition via the social consolidation of the ulama, whereby sheer power was translated into normative power6 (around the turn of the first millennium CE). During Phase III the caliphate project and the tradition project had basically created the conditions for what we could call the Sharia project (eleventh to thirteenth centuries), which involved a general implementation of the legalistic codification of the agenda of the fuqaha.7 Phase IV would see the Sunni being further and substantially transformed into an ideology—whereby we can strictly speak of Sunnism for the first time— rather by default under the Seljuks (eleventh to twelfth centuries), but much more intentionally under the Ottomans (from the fourteenth century onward). Finally, we would have to conclude this periodization with Phase V, which more or less spans across the modern (from the eighteenth century onward) and the present-day period. In this last phase Sunnism has been pursuing either a revisionist or a revolutionary agenda in the

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guise of pan-Islamism and fundamentalism or more often than not hybrid formations between the two. At this point some additional remarks are necessary. Although the Sunni and the Shi‘a are two distinct hierophanic experiences of Islam irreducible to one another, their respective trajectories are interdependent in the sense that their specific features are what they are through and thanks to the very historical tension that Islam encompasses. In particular, Phases I–II of the Shi‘a trajectory would not have been about protest and revolution in the first place, if Phase I of the Sunni trajectory had not been set upon the acquisition of power. The Shi‘a adventure from establishment to disillusionment (Phases III–IV) in effect presented itself as the best possible opportunity for the Sunni to bring to fruition their exploration of power through tradition and law making (Phases II–III). The ideological stage of development with regard to the Sunni and the Shi‘a, Phase IV and Phase V, respectively, was nothing less than a head-on confrontation of the two trajectories. And, lastly, the unequivocal revolutionary nature of political Shi‘ism (Phase VI) comes as a steadfast response to the Sunni oscillation between revolutionary and anti-revolutionary avenues for socio-political engagement (Phase V).

7.4 Phenomenological Reflections The study of differentiation within Islam should not be treated as yet another trendy way to be scholarly or, if you prefer, politically correct, that is, to comply with postmodern sensitivities concerning difference. Instead, it should pertain to the very core of Islam as a historical phenomenon—even more so, to the fact that this core is about a division stemming from a fundamental tension within Islam or, to phrase it otherwise, a fundamental tension of Islam with itself: how to accommodate experientially both the presence and the absence of the Prophet. This is precisely what the authority question, the interpretive issue and the socio-historical aspects discussed above presuppose and refer to. Thus the Sunni and the Shi‘a have been realized as the two most comprehensive answers with regard to the resolution of this tension, and, although this dual categorization has involved multiple historical particularities,

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cultural registers and social dispositions, all these conditions amalgamated into discrete entities thanks to the fundamental possibilities inherent to the foundational Event of Islam. In this respect, one could assert that the Sunni and the Shi‘a have been fleshed out by a kind of socio-historical necessity—the entelechy of a predetermined potentiality! Is one better than the other? Is one more Islamic, so to speak, than the other? Can one be(come) without the other? Such questions do come to mind as soon as one thinks of the Sunni and the Shi‘a as the major and minor “branches of Islam”, respectively, an approach that still remains rather unchallenged in the scholarly study of Islam. However, in the present exploration, our answer has from the very beginning to be definitely negative. In one way or another, both of them have been operative immediately after the death of the Prophet, albeit tacitly, inconspicuously or even unwittingly. The Sunni was from the very inception of Islam present as the pursuit of Muslim unity, whereas the Shi‘a was equally present as the manifestation of Islam’s uniqueness. Termed differently, they were about two different ultimate criteria: one being about who Muhammad was (the Shi‘a perspective), and the other about what Muhammad did (the Sunni perspective); in other words, they referred to the integrity and the effectiveness of Islam, respectively. Nevertheless, the former was to be in conflict with the latter. But why? Did not both of them relate to Muhammad? Definitely, but they were only parts or, to be more precise, stood for parts of the Muhammad-Event. And the problem has always been that these parts posed as the whole! But, once again, one might ask: why should that have been the case? If there is an answer to be given to such a question, the present study suggests that it lies in what we could call the socio-political exclusivity of Islam. It should be clear that what the Sunni-Shi‘a divide evokes is a set of two different hierophanic experiences of Islam. What perhaps is not so clear is how these two experiences should be delineated. The fact that within the first 50 years after the death of the Prophet—one could say still in the first generation of Muslims—three savagely fought battles took place with regard to the question of leadership is a good enough indication that the underlying problem was how the charisma and the accompanying authority of the Prophet were supposed to be perpetuated in light of his absence. For the Sunni the position of leadership came to

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be understood in terms of commandership and administration, whereas for the Shi‘a the leader was envisioned as a teacher and revealer. Undoubtedly, in both cases, legitimation on the basis of charisma is pronounced, but the cardinal difference is that strictly speaking the former comes under the charismatic, whereas the latter embodies the charismatic itself. In Weberian jargon, we see here a certain opposition between personal charisma and institutional charisma as ultimate sources of authority (Weber 1964). The Sunni perspective—probably in face of the charismatic emphasis on individual piety by the Kharijis—stressed the prominence of the Qur’an in lieu of the Prophetic Event, while the Shi‘a—again, probably, as a corrective to the individualistic overtones of Kharijite piety—stressed Muhammad’s family as a repository of the Prophetic Event.8 Basically the fundamental difference between the Sunni and the Shi‘a hierophanic experiences of Islam is one that pertains to the priority or not of structure over against agency.9 In other words, is the Prophetic Event still present and in what manner? Is it through and thanks to the what of the Prophet (i.e., the message-medium) or the who of the Prophet (i.e., the message-as-messenger)? For the Sunni the absence of the Prophet could only be rendered a presence via the all-comprehensive medium of the text, firstly taken as the Qur’an and subsequently bolstered through Hadith. For the Shi‘a the absence of the Prophet could only be rendered a presence through his own family and descendants as the all-­ comprehensive messengers-interpreters, forming thus a solid and exclusive line of succession. It is in this respect—and at the same time quite paradoxically—that the Sunni started up by facing consciously and consistently the absence of the Prophet and ended up in affirming the self-­ sufficient presence of the text, whereas the Shi‘a due to the total exclusivity of the Prophet’s bloodline turned their own experience of presence into a virtual absence in history. Consequently, while the Sunni could claim actual history for themselves, the Shi‘a had to safeguard themselves for the sake of a history-to-be.10 The above reflections have certain implications for the issue of individuality, namely, the question of how the Sunni and the Shi‘a fundamentally different hierophanic experiences of Islam translate into types of performed individuality and concomitant modes of praxis. This is a question that relates equally to both types of experience, regardless of the fact

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that the Sunni perspective is focused on structure rather than agency. Structure, that is, the structure of a textual tradition, requires and entails relations, and thus it definitely gives rise to the performance of individuality. More specifically, in light of the Sunni experience, the pursuit of unity found its fixed, final, definitive and authoritative articulation through the Qur’an-Hadith medium, which has lent itself more often than not to a totalized socio-political order; in this case, both the medium and the order recognize an ultimate and sole transcendent I that necessitates submission. Apart from this Big-I—which is, properly speaking, the only I—there are all these little-Is (the Sunni Muslims) that tend to a praxis we could justifiably call a totalizing-I-condition, according to which the performance of human agency aspires to an all-encompassing simulation of sameness and homogeneity.11 To phrase it differently, the socio-political level—whatever and wherever that might be—is supposed to mirror the Big-I (Allah) through the realization of the Divine Will. On the other hand, in light of the Shi‘a experience, the realization of Islamic uniqueness found its solid, tangible, genuine and exclusive expression through the imama doctrine of messengers, which in one way or another has favored a socio-political order embodied in instantiations of totality; in this case, the instantiations of order point to the perpetuation of an immanent I that bestows the very condition of possibility for submission, namely, Divine Grace. The Big-I is still supremely operative but only insofar as it is occasioned via an exclusive type of individuality, a virtually Big-I (the Imam) as the recurring presentation of the Prophetic Event. This gives rise to a praxis we could term—in juxtaposition to the aforementioned totalizing-I-condition of the Sunni experience—a totality-­ I-condition, according to which the performance of human agency aspires to consolidate a homogeneity that remains faithful to the call of otherness. To put it in other terms, the socio-political level—always very specifically circumscribed—is supposed to symbolize the presence of the Big-I through the lively expectation of the ultimate instantiation of Divine Grace (the mahdi).

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7.5 F urther Reflections on Historicity and Conflict Theory Given the above analysis, one can only concede that there is a division/ conflict at the very heart of Islam. The Sunni and the Shi‘a hierophanic experiences of Islam are not just different approaches to what Muslims regard as the Sacred, but more to the point irreconcilable modes of being-­ in-­history. The types of authority they stand for correlate with certain types of individuality performance and socio-political praxis within history, and by extension with certain types of historicity or historical consciousness. It seems that there are three main parameters determining this fundamental tension at the heart of Islam: (a) the total-exclusive social/ cultural/political aspirations of Islam, (b) the eschatological-final orientation of Islam within the process of history and (c) the identification of the Divine Message with either the medium-text (Qur’an and Hadith) or the medium-person (Prophet and ahl al-bayt). The combination of all these parameters as evidenced in the case of the Sunni and the Shi‘a render Islam’s historicity an unequivocal totality which in turn involves a certain total-part relationship, in the sense that in any given instance Islam’s historicity is about a total(ity) being imposed onto and through its parts. As a consequence, it seems that this cannot be done but through constant alternation in terms of conflict. The latter pertains to self-subversion, which in the case of Islam means that one hierophanic experience of Islam (the Sunni) subverts the other (the Shi‘a) and vice versa. It is this self-imposition of Islam onto its constituent par-totalities that has kept them going on and thriving in their joint exclusivity. The understanding of Islam’s historicity that emerges through the aforementioned reconsideration of the Sunni-Shi‘a divide allows us, among other things, to readdress conflict theories of religion.12 The latter are basically premised upon the Marxist assumption that in the case of religion—especially in that case—the true nature of societal conflicts is concealed through false consciousness, that is, social conflicts are taken to be something other than what they really are. In this respect, the nature of conflict remains unknown, either because it is sublimated (as a divinely ordained status quo, for instance) or repressed (and subsequently

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expressed) as rebounding tension/violence), one might say (Bloch 1992). Undoubtedly, there is such a phenomenology of conflict in Islam, but the conflict evidenced in the Sunni-Shi‘a divide is about something different. Here the nature of conflict is not only known, acknowledged and appreciated for what it is, but more to the point it is pursued and intensified. It is not incidental, circumstantial or temporary—although the factors triggering it are such—but essential, necessary and permanent. In other words, the Sunni and the Shi‘a are dependent upon one another in the historical process of Islam’s becoming. Thus being-in-conflict is the most pertinent condition of being—being of the Sunni or being of the Shi‘a. If there is a certain false consciousness involved therein, it is only a consciousness that holds that the Sunni can be without opposition to the Shi‘a and vice versa. Consequently, this type of historical condition is neither simply about conflict ad extra, nor about conflict ad intra, as is the case with the relationship between religion and societal conflict in general. It does take place within Islam and between discrete entities, but at the same time this happens precisely because the conflict is constitutive of the entities involved (i.e., the “parts”) and of Islam (i.e., the “whole” or “total”). More specifically, because Islam is political in an extremely integral manner, it is never really confronted with any kind of tension regarding its relationship with the world: the world belongs or is supposed to belong to it! This is the reason why Islam’s conflict (either on the part of the Sunni or the Shi‘a) ad extra is only procedural, in the sense that it does not pose a problem to Muslim identity, while Islam’s conflict (either within the Sunni or the Shi‘a) ad intra does not need to be sustained via a false consciousness, for it is manageable in light of the religion’s broader eschatological drive: it is temporary and will eventually be overcome at the inevitable Day of Judgment (yawm ad-din). Interestingly, though, Islam as a tension-less worldly enterprise does exhibit a sui generis tension, a tension that rebounds within Islam by consuming and/or subsuming anything that defies or threats its comprehensiveness and universalistic propensity and that “anything” can only come in the form of the alternative possibilities of Islam’s historical realization. This is how the Sunni-­ Shi‘a relationship has been played out from the very start.

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It is a misunderstanding to regard the conflict of the Sunni-Shi‘a divide as just another case of intra- or inter-religious conflict. Such a misunderstanding is of course understandable since the violence involved in the Sunni-Shi‘a divide has an aspect that has been conspicuous, consistent and clear-cut in its intention, as one can see in the first and second fitnah (civil strife, conflict), the revolutionary spirit of the early Abbasids, the contentiousness of the Fatimid Caliphate, the socio-political context of taqiyya, the ethno-religious rivalry between Ottomans and Safavids, the paradox of the Iranian Revolution and the Iran–Iraq War, to name just a few prominent instances. Nevertheless, it is a different aspect of the abovementioned violence, one garbed in intricate theological discourse, which underlies and informs all these manifest expressions and causes of conflict. The proper understanding of this situation seems to require a double shift in conflict theory, firstly, from materialist to hierophanic dialectics13 and, secondly, from societal structures/functions/interactions to religious ruptures/tensions/discrepancies.14 To put it as concisely as possible, the conflict between the Sunni and the Shi‘a is based on the inherent dialectics of the Prophetic presence and absence within Islam, which in turn brings about religious ramifications that can only regard their partiality as a totality. It is this reification (Verdinglichung) of the Sunni or the Shi‘a “parts” as the Islamic “total” that constitutes the false consciousness that lies at the very heart of the suspended Prophetic Event.

7.6 Conclusion The present reconsideration of the Sunni-Shi‘a divide has attempted to show that conflict occupies the very heart of Islam. In this sense Islam is genuinely and highly dialectical, for the Sunni and the Shi‘a, although interdependent, are at the same time irreconcilable.15 More to the point, these two hierophanic experiences of Islam are indispensable to one another as to the emergence, formation and perpetuation of their identities, precisely because they oppose one another. This opposition has been realized consistently through the trajectories of their historical development and has been exemplified in distinct types of individuality performance, socio-political praxis and, by extension, historicity or historical

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consciousness. Conflict—and, for that matter, differentiation, division and opposition—is indeed so much part and parcel of Islam’s constitution that current conflict theories of religion have to be reviewed so as to incorporate and elaborate on notions of religion as the prime source of socially constructive and transformative conflict. Ultimately, such a prospect should allow one to appreciate the relationship between religion and conflict beyond the former’s seemingly limited role as mediator, manager or alleviator of social conflict. Put simply, the Sunni and Shi’a are historically as well as experientially a product of necessitated oppositionality in the mirror of the Islamic.

Notes 1. Throughout the present chapter, the term “conflict” refers not only to observable instances of social violence, but more so to deep-seated differentials that bring about a variety of dialectical oppositions, of which social violence is just one example. Consequently, by no means do we intent to present religion solely as a source of what is usually perceived as sociopolitical conflict; more to the point, what we aim at emphasizing is that, even when religion ends or overcomes a certain level of conflict, this is achieved on the basis of some other, more profound, level of conflict. 2. Although the sectarian opposition is a comprehensive one in its own right, since it encompasses (deviation) both (in) beliefs and (in) practices, it does so at a sociopolitical level that mobilizes only part of the conflict spectrum involved and not the whole spectrum. In other words, the sectarian disagreement/opposition as to who embodies authority is one thing, while the fundamental existential differentiation that determines it is quite another. 3. For an overview regarding the last comment, consult Black (2011). At this point we do not imply that Islam was not already meaningful with its first converts, but what we want to indicate is that, pecisely because— as later tradition would have it—the beginnings of Islam were the most meaningful moment, the subsequent Islamic pursuit of meaning could only have taken place by envisaging that moment as a point of reference. 4. For details on these groups/tendencies/movements, see Brown 1996; also Melchert 1997.

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5. For details on the development of taqiyya, see Clarke 2005. 6. For a discussion of the concept of normative power in comparison to other forms of power, see Diez 2013. 7. For the developments that created the backdrop of this agenda, see Hallaq 2005. 8. For some pertinent remarks concerning Kharijite pietism, which formed the basis for their accentuated individualism, see Donner (2010, pp. 162–167). 9. We speak about priority and opposition, for on the one hand structure is anything but absent in the Shi‘a experience and the same is true for agency with regard to the Sunni experience, while on the other hand the complementary coexistence of structure and agency in both of them has to be distinguished from the oppositional function of those two aspects when seen in a comparative perspective. Furthermore, the dialectics of structure and agency in Islam are not limited to the Sunni-Shi‘a divide, but are played out in other internal differentiations of Islam as well, such as the legalistic/mainstream vesus the mystical/Sufi. For a further theoretical and methodological exploration of this dialectics, with a focus on Sufism, see Milani and Adrahtas 2018. 10. It is perhaps in such a phenomenological perspective that one can better account for the fact that historically Islamic eschatology—and other cognate phenomena, such as messianism and millenarianism—has persisted in a more vivid and explosive manner within the Shi‘a experience. For a comprehensive overview of Islamic eschatology, see Günther and Lawson 2017; for Shi‘a eschatology, see, for example, Badakhchani 2010. 11. In our understanding, this is how one could put the theological doctrine of Divine Unity (tawhid) into socio-political terms. 12. For such theories, see Schlee (2008); Eynikel and Ziaka (2011); Kurtz (2012, pp. 279–318). 13. A shift from materialist to hierophanic dialectics should not be seen as an opposition to materialism, but rather as a more nuanced understanding of materialism—an understanding that appreciates the multilayered-­ ness of materiality and focuses on the experience of the latter’s being as something beyond its mere essence. In this respect hierophanic dialectics is about a consciousness-imbued materiality. When materiality is approached in this way, then the conflict perceived within it takes on broader and deeper aspects than just observable instances of violence.

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14. By bringing to the fore of the study of conflict religious ruptures/tensions/discrepancies, one basically aims at bringing within the orbit of scholarly attention the indeterminacy that breaks in the regularity of societal structures/functions/interactions and renders them capable of lending themselves to change, alteration and transcendence. 15. Of course by this remark we do not want to disregard the existence and importance of whatever attempts have been historically to reconcile the Sunni and the Shi‘a hierophanic perspectives at the level of theology and/or spirituality.

Works Cited Ahmed, S. 2015. What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Algar, H. 1981. Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini. Berkeley, CA: Mizan Press. Badakhchani, S.J. 2010. Shi‘i Interpretations of Islam: Three Treatises on Theology and eschatology. New York, NY: I. B. Tauris. Bengio, O., and M. Litvak, eds. 2011. The Sunna and Shi’a in History. Division and Ecumenism in the Muslim Middle East. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Black, A. 2011. History of Islamic Political Thought. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bloch, M. 1992. Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brockopp, J.E., ed. 2010. The Cambridge Companion to Muhammad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, D.W. 1996. Rethinking Tradition in Modern Islamic Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, J. 2018. Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and the Modern World. London: Oneworld. Bulliet, R.W. 1994. Islam: The View from the Edge. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Burton, J. 1994. An Introduction to the Hadith. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Clarke, L. 2005. The Rise and Decline of Taqiyya in Twelver Shiʿism. In Reason and Inspiration in Islam: Theology, Philosophy and Mysticism in Muslim Thought, ed. T. Lawson. London & New York: I. B. Tauris.

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Daftary, F. 2013. A History of Shi‘a Islam. New York, NY: I.B. Tauris. Dakake, M.M. 2014. Writing and Resistance: The Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Early Shi‘ism. In The Study of Shi‘i Islam: History, Theology and Law, ed. F. Daftary and G. Miskinzoda. London & New York: I. B. Tauris. Diez, T. 2013. Normative Power as Hegemony. Cooperation and Conflict 48 (2): 194–210. Donner, M.F. 2010. Muhammad and the Believers at the Origins of Islam. Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press. Eynikel, E., and A. Ziaka. 2011. Religion and Conflict: Essays on the Origins of Religious Conflicts and Resolution Approaches. London: Harptree Publishing. Günther, S., and T.  Lawson, eds. 2017. Roads to Paradise: Eschatology and Concepts of the Hereafter in Islam. Leiden: Brill. Hallaq, W.B. 2005. The Origins and Evolution of the Islamic Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halverson, J.R. 2010. Theology and Creed in Sunni Islam: The Muslim Brotherhood, Ash‘arism and Political Sunnism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Knysh, A. 2011. Islam in Historical Perspective. Boston: Prentice Hall. Kurtz, L.R. 2012. Gods in the Global Village: The World’s Religions in Sociological Perspective. London: Sage. Marin-Guzman, R. 1990. Popular Dimensions of the Abbasid Revolution: A Case Study of Medieval Islamic Social History. Pueblo, Colorado: Passeggiata Press. Melchert, C. 1997. The Formation of the Sunni Schools of Law, 9th–10 Centuries CE. Leiden: Brill. Milani, M., and V.  Adrahtas. 2018. Modern Talking: Sufi Socio-Political Discourse. Journal of Religious and Political Practice 4 (2): 175–194. Newman, A.J. 2000. The Formative Period of Twelver Shi‘ism: Hadith as Discourse between Qum and Baghdad. Richmond, Surrey, UK: Curzon. Schlee, G. 2008. How Enemies are Made: Towards a Theory of Ethnic and Religious Conflict. Oxford & London: Berghahn Books. Shepard, W. 2009. Introducing Islam. London: Routledge. Shoemaker, S.J. 2011. The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad’s Life and the Beginnings of Islam. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Weber, M. 1964. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Translated by A.M. Henderson and T. Parsons. New York, NY: The Free Press.

8 The Paradox of Gendered Holiness in Islamic Mysticism Milad Milani and Marley Krok

8.1 Introduction The prominent role of women in Islamic history, in particular its early history, is well known. Consider, for example, the role of Khadija during the initial phase of Muhammad’s revelation. She is the first to “convert” and the first to recognise the “sign” of God in what transpires, about which Muhammad himself (according to the Sira) is ignorant (Guillaume 1955, pp. 106–107). Of great and educated women there are plenty to speak of, but they are not readily known, remaining behind a veil, as it were, of what ultimately becomes (after the Prophet’s death) increasingly and a steadily growing male-dominated world of religion. (Indeed, this being true of the relative obscurity of Khadija in traditional Islamic spirituality.) The focus of M. Milani (*) Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] M. Krok School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 M. Milani, V. Adrahtas (eds.), Islam, Civility and Political Culture, New Directions in Islam, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56761-3_8

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this chapter will be limited to that of women figures of importance in classical Islam, in particular, those that are of a Sufi persuasion. The aim is to assess their circumstance in relation to men as practitioners of religion and their status as having achieved spiritual enlightenment in their own right. Moreover, this study specifically seeks to determine the severity of gendered bias in each case, and its impact overall, in order to determine whether Sufi women in Islam were in fact conforming to the masculine ideal (as a rule of their being in a time and place defined by patriarchal values), or if there were indeed instances of liberation from, or deviation to, the masculine standard that might be identified. This historiographical study explores attitudes towards sexuality in the Islamic world. It seeks to problematise the notion of holiness as predominantly male-centred, according to which the woman is typically demonised at worst, or marginalised at best. What is encountered time and again in Islamic literature is an attitude that conceptualises the woman almost always in relation to temptation, and as such as a barrier to holiness. Nevertheless, the Sufi tradition presents the paradox of gendered holiness in Muslim historical consciousness. In order to discuss it, one has to navigate the general mood of the position on women from the perspective of tradition. There are nuanced readings of scripture out of which the traditional point of view is fashioned. These complex layers of understanding contain both a literary and literal exposition on women. On the one hand, the idea of women becoming like men when they attain to spiritual heights is more Islamic than it is Christian. In the latter, women who are considered as having attained to the heights of spirituality are thought of as saints, which, nevertheless, is not altogether uncommon in Islam. This is especially so in the case of women that secure a lofty reputation in the imagination of religious tradition, such as the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima al-zahra (“the shining one”), or his third wife, Aisha umm al-mu’minin (“mother of believers”)—yet, these two exemplars are literally the exception. On the other hand, the idea that women are diabolical is more Christian than Islamic. Though not to the exclusion that certain traditional readings of Eve in the Qur’an can lend themselves to the former view quite easily (Spellberg 1996); and of course, Islamic thought is not entirely without such attitudes towards women as being demonic, in particular in its literary genre (Burton 1963). This chapter,

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therefore, contains certain Christian and Islamic comparisons that are unavoidable given the nature of the Islamic faith as being linked to that of the Christian. This is not least because of a commonly shared heritage, but also because Muslims have had much interaction of polemical nature with Christians through the course of the medieval period, especially. Muslim attitudes towards women are generally reflective of the civilizational context in which they are found. Whilst these are not necessarily (or always) the official position of the religious institution or its creed, they are indeed grounded in interpretations of scripture. We argue that the relationship of holiness to gender is not delimited by traditional religiosity, but by the restricted possibility of thinking about religiosity in an un-gendered way. The historically focused approach here will be helpful in drawing parallels between the past and present modes of thinking, showing just how much modern thinking is wedded to, or at the very least inspired by, the romance of Muslim antiquity. The politicisation of gender has certainly made it a real issue for social action, but it has also served as a catalyst to rephrase gender bias in a newly formed, and politicised, setting. The debate and activism around gender has, as such, produced its own political culture where it has become difficult to discern lip service from genuine concern (Waylen et al. 2013). That women are to be seen as equally capable of achieving the heights of the spiritual and mystical standard seems to go against the grain of conventional wisdom. Even where women are allowed to thrive in terms of religious education (be it in a modern or historical context), their advantage cannot be publicly realised unless “she” is seen as “he”. This appears to have been a genuine solution to the problem of gender in the classical Sufi era, as we will see, but it remains still the symptomatic response in grappling with the same issue even now. There is perhaps no better time to consider a need for a paradigm shift in thinking about the role of gender in Islam, and to do so by piercing the veneer of the prevailing, and very much gendered, political discourse. Islam, a real-world phenomenon, like its sister religions, is gendered. So, the starting point has to be from a place of admittance, not denial. We leave aside the populist discourse on gender and Islam because the issue is not just as an add-on to modern Western values of women’s rights—Muslim women activists are already making strides on this front in everyday life—rather, it is a

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question of the right of women to be free in the religious setting in which they belong. As such, this study is not about the emancipation of Muslim women per se, but rather concerning how they have been situated in relation to holiness because of their sexuality. More precisely, we investigate the androcentric interpretation of religion as the basis of the fiction of holiness that wrote women in as the inferior sex. Religiously prejudiced views about the woman as the source of (a man’s) temptation—as well as the main obstacle to (their) destined sanctity—has been the predicament of being a woman in a man’s world.1 There is something more than cultural, and certainly behind the political, that is found at the core of the religious discourse that needs to be examined. This chapter does just that.

8.2 Theoretical Framework This study is not a Marxist feminist analysis of Islam. Nor is it one that pertains to the specialist field of women in Islam. It is, rather, a historiographical and reflexive study on the correlation of gender and holiness in Islamic mysticism. The theoretical framework is based on Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology. This is so as to avoid the circular conundrum of empiricist and colonial/anti-colonial frameworks of analysis. A Heideggerian approach, in this case, we feel, avoids the putatively formed references to neutrality when discussing the problem of gender types as a means of working through religious content. It also avoids the unnecessary problematics of cultural linguistic limitations of thinking about religion in a gendered sense.2

8.3 Contextualising Women in Islam 8.3.1 Interpreting Eve To begin the investigation into the position of women in Islam, it is necessary to first understand where they have been placed historically by the Islamic tradition. Chronologically speaking, this places the companion of

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the first man and the mother of mankind, Eve, as the primordial prototype for discussion. What follows is a short study in the interpretation of Eve from the Islamic written and oral traditions and will circumstantiate the customs surrounding the framing of femininity and womanhood in Muslim culture. In the Qur’anic text, Eve (Hawwa) is never mentioned by name, rather she is mentioned only in passing, and always with reference to her counterpart Adam. By remaining nameless, Eve stands in similitude for all women and as such the way that she is interpreted within Islam greatly affects the discourse on women within the tradition. The following study of Eve will attempt to unpack the duplexity of Eve, paradigmatically inherited by all women. The story of Eve’s creation in the Qur’an diverges considerably from the narratives offered in the Jewish and Christian traditions. Where the latter tell a story of Adam forced into a mystical sleep and God removing a portion of his rib to create his helpmeet, the Qur’an explains that man and his mate were created from the same soul. Eve was made from Adam’s soul that ‘he might live with her’ (Qur’an 7:189). Though the sentiment of innate connectedness is shared among the two versions, the Qur’anic foundation for the creation of women, arguably places them in greater equality with men. The two share of the same essential substance, and by extension then, they stand equal before Allah. Perhaps the greatest departure from the Judeo-Christian narrative regarding Eve is the Qur’anic telling of Adam and Eve’s fall from paradise. In the Qur’an, this story focuses on Adam’s interactions with both God and Satan (Iblis). Eve is only ever mentioned in the plural form in conjunction with Adam, but it is Adam who is singled out by name. Adam is commanded on behalf of the couple by Allah not to partake of the tree. Adam is approached and beguiled by Satan. The references to Eve are scant in the Qur’anic narrative; she is only ever hinted at by the use of the plural “you” and “they”. Nowhere in the Qur’an is Eve is the instigator of the Fall. In fact, Adam receives the blame and is personally identified as the one who ‘disobeyed his Lord and erred’ (Qur’an 20:121). While the couple act in unison throughout the various iterations of this narrative, Eve is never condemned alone as is the case in the Genesis account (Genesis 3:16). The Qur’anic Eve is nothing but a loyal wife, participating in both the act and the punishment alongside her husband,

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and never straying out to act on her own. Similarly, the next story told of Eve in the Qur’an highlights her role as the paradigm of wifehood. She is the passive participant in the creation of humanity, with the text stating that Adam ‘covered her resulting in her burden’ (Qur’an 7:189). This telling of the first conception between husband and wife places Adam and Eve within their respective roles within a marriage. They begin the verse separate and by the end are joined in their invocation of Allah. However it is clear that the character of Eve has been corrupted since her introduction in the Qur’an. In the modern Islamic tradition, Eve has been condemned to a similar position that she holds in Judaism and Christianity (Spellberg 1996). She is the “crooked” part of Adam, easily tempted and the source of Adam’s transgression (al-Bukhari 1969, p. 161; Ibn Maja 1980, pp. 174–175). However, this is not the way she is portrayed in the Qur’anic literature. Somewhere between the time of Muhammad and the compilers of the hadith, she has been rewritten in the Islamic mind and all women alongside her. The three stories mentioned above are drastically altered in the hadith. Eve is painted as the source of all of Adam’s tribulations. She is brutally condemned in the tradition as the archetypal woman, incapable of reason, the source of all deceit and temptation, and the reason behind the need for the perpetual ritual cleansing of all women. Eve is the first woman, the one by which all others are modelled, and it is from the narratives surrounding her that the definition of womanhood in the Islamic consciousness is formed. Consequential to her creation in the hadith, Eve is painted fragile, warped and something which Adam must shelter within his dominion. Analogously all women must receive the same level of care, provided for by men, because Eve could not be trusted on her own. In the hadith, Eve is portrayed as naive, deceitful and incapable of rational thought (Spellberg 1996, p. 316). Her promulgation of the Fall substantiates that she was incapable of submitting to God. The revised account of her motherhood has Satan compromising her further. She is tempted into making a deal with Satan proving yet again her inability to stay faithful to Allah. By extension, all women have inherited this same characterisation; they are irrational and untrustworthy, and therefore a step below men before God.

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Adam and his wife are considered the parents to all humanity, with even the prophets only coming into existence as a consequence of their marital act. Eve’s role as the first mother establishes her and the act of sex as fundamental to Islamic history (Spellberg 1996). Sex and motherhood can then be viewed as the ultimate telos of all women. They possess within them a means to create life. It is in women that the act of sex occurs, Adam was said to have covered Eve, in the formation of their offspring. Eve is the submissive half in the sexual equation. Somehow this representation has been corrupted to the point where the anatomy of women is a constant source of temptation to men. The onus however is never placed on the man to control his desire, but rather that a woman in her aforementioned frailty must cover her femineity. She must be kept out of sight from anyone other than her husband; her mere presence in the civil tableau is deemed a source of temptation and conflict in Islamic countries. Since Eve was the catalyst for shame, the forms of all women remain a source of both eroticism and the associated turpitude. Intrinsically coupled with this dichotomy is the perception of ritual uncleanliness implicit in the depiction of women in Islam. Eve was punished for her immorality to suffer the degradation of menstruation. Blood defiles, and by circumstance of creation, women consistently suffer this desecration. They require ritual cleansing on a monthly basis merely to participate in society (Spellberg 1996, p. 313). But this corruption doesn’t begin at puberty, rather it is something innate to women. From birth females must be cleansed because, unlike men who were formed from the clay, women were created from flesh and blood (Ibn Maja 1980). This violent parturition bisects the genders from conception. Eve is the vexatious source of all female uncleanness, and unsurprisingly all women will receive the same congenital condemnation. Clearly the Islamic Eve’s legacy does not match the narrative first received in the Qur’an. This is evidence of outside influences redefining the later commentaries of the Prophet’s message. The discrepancy here within the portrayal of Eve highlights the influence Jewish and Christian sources has on the early written interpretations of Islam. Officially, such practices were rejected; nonetheless, this drastic retelling of the creation of women, their role in the Fall and their perpetual punishment seems to tell another story (Spellberg 1996). Men wrote the narrative as it now

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stands, it was their hands which actively selected the sources used for the basis of the hadith narrative. While the motivation behind such decisions may never be brought to light, the effect has been the continual subjugation of an entire sex.

8.3.2 Woman in Islamic Thought The woman in Islam presents a conundrum for modern analysis. It would seem that the eschatological impulse of the religion during the time of the Prophet was more aligned with the basic freedoms of women, and the woman had a respected, if not (almost) equal place next to the man, both as believers before God. Still, the overall tone in Islamic writings was favourable to men. It is recorded that the Prophet said: ‘I was raised up to heaven and saw that most of its denizens were poor people; I was raised into the hellfire and saw that most of its denizens were women’ (Bulliet 1994, p. 87). Medieval Islamic civilisation was a not a classless society. In many respects, it mimicked the old Arab aristocratic customs. Once on the seat of newly conquered territories, the Muslim elite would also look to the ancient customs of the Persians and Byzantines as a guide on how a Muslim woman should conduct herself in society. The habit of head covering was appropriated through the “interpretation of specific verses of the Qur’an” and practised by urban and elite women when leaving the home (Bulliet et al. 2015, p. 223). Women were free agents within their own quarters (wearing whatever dress or jewels they liked; even listening to music and playing chess), but they were barred from public office (Bulliet et al. 2015, p. 223).3 Becoming literate and having the opportunity to study was only possible with relatives, where they were able to avoid contact with unrelated men (Bulliet et al. 2015, p. 223). By comparison to Christian and Jewish women, ‘Muslim women fared better legally under Islamic law’ (Bulliet et al. 2015, p. 223). A Muslim man could have numerous concubines and marry up to four wives, but the weight of financial burden to support a family was legally placed on the man (the law ensured married women were taken care of ) (Bulliet et al. 2015, pp. 223–224).

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There are several problems in any study of women in the early history of Islam. The lack of writings that speak to us about women as written by women has meant that most of what we do know is derived from male authors. The seclusion of women in the urban setting having become commonplace early on has also made those with ambition a target of negative assessment by Muslim men. The example of Aisha, Muhammad’s favourite wife, is a case in point. Since she was quite young when she married Muhammad, she lived through the first 50 years of post-­prophetic Islam. Early sources also attest that she was Muhammad’s favourite, the only virgin he married and the only wife to have seen the archangel Gabriel (Bulliet et al. 2015, p. 225). Despite this, there are two events that have her at the centre of sectarian intrigue. The first is that of accusations of her being untrue to the Prophet—even though she was later vindicated by a revelation from God—on account of her travelling through the night, as a young girl, with a man who found her alone in the desert after she had been separated from the caravan. The second is her involvement in rallying Muslims as well as taking the field in the Battle of the Camel. The incidents show that Muslim men of status greatly feared adultery and political interference from women who had power and influence (Bulliet et  al. 2015, p.  224). Fatima is given an almost metaphysical status in Shi’a theology, which tends to suggest Shi’a thought has, at least in theory, a more favourable ‘attitude towards women than Sunni Islam’ (Momen 2011). She is the daughter of the Prophet, wife of the first Imam and mother of other Imams that complete “the pleroma of Fourteen Immaculates [chahardah ma’sum] in Shi’ite mystical philosophy” where she is also key as a redemptive figure on the Day of Judgement ‘and women in particular call on her in this capacity’ (Momen 2011). Her status as the “sacred feminine” in Shi’ite cosmology, which is absent in Sunni Islam, is comparable to Mary in Catholic and Orthodox Christianity. Indeed, going so far as Fatima having ‘acquired some of Mary’s titles, such as “virgin” (batul) and perhaps even “mother of her father” (umm abiha)’ (Momen 2011). Her insistence on her right to inherit from her father (in opposition to Abu Bakr’s decree) has set the precedence for improved rights of women in Shi’ite Islamic law (Momen 2011).

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8.3.3 Women in Islamic Law Although Islamic law essentially codified equality of the genders before God, any of the advancements this may have brought about for women were ultimately dissolved in practice by the largely patriarchal society of the Arabian Peninsula. This movement towards gender equality extended certain obligations to men, but fundamentally it did not usurp their dominant position in society. Women retained secondary status in perpetuity. The generic male terms are used when referring to “people” and “whoever” within the legal discourse, leaving women sorely underrepresented. A narrow reading of the law would provide men alone the obligation to obey, with no thought as to the instruction of women. This leaves two options for women under the legal framework: either they are to take on the attributes of men and by consequence their legal obligations, or by virtue of their gender, women have no embodiment within Islamic law. Effectively this has relegated women to the background through a combination of the determinations of the patriarchy and the continuation of socially conditioned gendered assumptions, rather than through the systematic application of hermeneutic procedures (Spectorsky 2010). The Qur’an can be said to define personhood in gender-neutral terms, with members of both sexes possessing the same obligations and legal entitlements from birth. However legal capacity is determined on a person’s mental and physical capacities, meaning that it may be suspended or altogether absent contingent on various factors. Classical sources list menstruation and post-partum bleeding as two such factors which are considered to diminish the legal capacity of a person, essentially legislating the demonization of the female sex as incompetent and impaired, despite her legal obligations equalling that of a man (Azam 2015).

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8.4 Complexity and Controversy of the Woman in Islam In several places, the Qur’an states that man and woman are of equal value in the eyes of God (e.g., 3:195, 49:13). It conveys that the soul is held to account and not gender, both in this world and the next: We shall recompense the steadfast according to their noblest deeds. Be they men or women, to those that embrace the Faith and do what is right We will surely grant a happy life; We shall reward them according to their noblest deeds. (16:97) [T]he believers who do good works, both men and women, shall enter Paradise. (4:124)

Yet the following verse is also mentioned to convey the standing of the sexes in relation to each other in a social setting: Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them, forsake them in beds apart, and beat them. Then if they obey you, take no further action against them. Surely God is high, supreme. (4:34)

And here we have our paradox. But we do not stop there with what seems to be the conflict of gender at the heart of the religion. The main concern is that in Islam holiness is, in fact, gendered. A believing woman may have the right to a happy life and entrance into Paradise, but they are beholden to what is deemed the inferior sex within a patriarchal society. Moreover, they are listed as a source of major impurity for men (4:43; 5:6). Of course, janabah is applicable to both men and women who come into contact with semen (during intercourse), but the insinuation in the relevant verses is that a man becomes impure through the (sanctioned) act of sex with a woman and thus must perform full ablution (ghusl) to be restored. Even where there may be objections to placing emphasis on

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holiness as linked primarily to the spiritual welfare of a man, it can be said that it is unavoidably present in both the sentiment and the written word of the Book. Modern Islamic readings will be sure to de-emphasise this aspect and to underline the neutrality of ritual impurity regarding sex—especially from a legalistic perspective—but it is again a task that has to ignore some of the more basic aspects of how the matter of carnal desire and spiritual morality is brought together in both the religion and its culture. It is true Islamic culture has been historically well-disposed towards sexuality, in that ‘human sexual activity’ is generally considered ‘to be a natural and necessary facet in the divine design’ (Burton 1963, p. 28). In this, the Islamic attitude towards the feminine is comparable to the Old Testament style as found in The Song of Songs. And in both, the aim of exhibiting erotic literature is to promote ‘healthy sexual attitude and practice’ in married life (Burton 1963, p. 31). Indeed, in Islam, ‘the ideal is monogamy’, whereas in Christianity, ‘celibacy is the strictest religious ideal’ and that ‘monogamy is a concession to human nature’ (Burton 1963, pp.  31–32). Yet that same prejudice that is externalised in Christianity is internalised in Islam, as will be shown. A candid account of this complexity pertaining to the Muslim attitude towards women and sex is preserved in the sixteenth-century manual on lovemaking, titled The Perfumed Garden (al-rawd al-atir), by Muhammad ibn Muhammad Nefzawi. Nefzawi explains that the work was commissioned by the vizier of Tunis, asking that it expounds on sexual intercourse and all related matters on the bodily functions and care of bodily parts (Burton 1963, pp. 77–78); he also tells us—and this pertains to the matter at hand in this study—that ‘[e]ach chapter relates to a specific subject, be it physical, or anecdotal, or treating of the wiles and deceits of women’ (Burton 1963, p. 78). In fact, the text opens by entreating the reader that it was pleasing to God to fashion man and woman so that they find sexual satisfaction each in the other (Burton 1963, p. 73). And though they are indeed equal in ‘the mutual operation’ (i.e., coitus), they are yet differentiated as to their sex, so that it is said: He [God] has not endowed the parts of woman with any pleasurable or satisfactory feeling until the same have been penetrated by the instrument of the

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male; and likewise the sexual organs of man know neither rest nor quietness until they have entered those of the female. (Emphasis mine)

This wording is subtle, but Nefzawi further clarifies the dilemma: ‘all men, weak or strong, are subjected to the weakness for the love of woman’ (Burton 1963, p. 75). Whilst the purpose of the manual is to educate both sexes in the virtues of, as well as pleasures in, heterosexual intercourse, it does set clear terms for the procedure, as Nefzawi believes, in accordance with what is pleasing to God.4 The graveness of the matter of carnal desire and its correlation with spiritual morality is then elucidated by Nefzawi in two chapters in particular. Chapter XI titled ‘On the Deceits and Treacheries of Woman’ opens with the admonition that ‘the stratagems of women are numerous and ingenious’ and that their ‘tricks will deceive Satan himself ’ (Burton 1963, p. 210).5 The chapter contains seven cautionary tales for men about the tricks of women, and all of them end with two sets of phrases: ‘Learn from this the deceitfulness of woman, and what she is capable of ’ (ending two stories) and ‘Appreciate, after this, the deceitfulness of women, and what they are capable of ’ (ending five stories). Chapter XII titled ‘Concerning Sundry Observations useful to know for Men and Women’ strengthens the admonitions of the previous chapter by testifying against womankind (as being ultimately a base sexual and emotional creature) by way of the testimony of a woman. This woman, Moarbeda, ‘was considered to be the most knowing and wisest person of her time’ (Burton 1963, p. 226). Contrast the above with the example of the thirteenth-century female saint Aisha al-Mannubiyya, who lived three centuries prior to Nefzawi, at the dawn of Hafsid rule of Tunis. It is an interesting comparison, because as she was at the dawn of the Berber dynasty, Nefzawi was at its dusk. She was one of the few women about whom a hagiography was written and whose reputation as a leading figure of women’s sainthood in Islam is widely accepted. She has two shrines devoted to her in her hometown, La Manouba, now a suburb of Tunis, which were visited by the Beys of Tunis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as part of the circuit of shrines in the city on the Night of Power during the month of Ramadan. She is said to have been a disciple to one female and three mystic figures of great repute.6 She is attributed numerous miracles that were usually in discord

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with public opinion—which gives the impression of her Sufi style as that of those who seek blame (ahl al-malama), that is, ‘those that went around transgressing social norms on purpose’ (Boissevain 2013). Legend portrays her as ‘a hyper-feminine figure’ who in contrast had performed ‘the very archetype of a masculine miracle’, that is, ‘after her father had slaughtered a bull at her request, she cooked it, distributed its meat to villagers, and brought it back to life in order to reveal her sainthood’ (Boissevain 2013). Like many women saints, she refused to marry, but unlike them she had religious learning, which was typically reserved for men. What also makes her unique is that she was not a recluse—instead she would frequently be in public and not refrain from keeping the company of men, be they from the lowest of the social order to the highest; indeed, she spent time with the drunkard as she did with Sufi masters, and even the sultan himself, so it is said—therefore ‘she was a saint whose reputation oscillated between that of a woman of loose morals and the incarnation of purity’ (Boissevain 2013)—no doubt, it should be added, from the point of a man. To return to the point earlier made, it is not at all surprising that whilst the Islamic tradition celebrates sexual intercourse within the bounds of monogamy, it bears an inherent repulsion to the act of bodily gratification. The assertion is that this is precisely because of the implicit inequality of the sexes, which is developed into a range of biases against women over time. This view is further supported by the predominating perception of the woman—in relation to the sexual desire of men—as effectively diabolical. As such, it might be said that the act of sexual intercourse can be construed in the Islamic setting—and not unlike the medieval Christian attitude—as a “necessary evil”, from which a man who has had sex with a woman can emerge unscathed through the holy act of repentance and ablution.7

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8.5 The Woman in Sufism The dark cloud that hangs over the literary history of Sufism is that the entire corpus of Sufi biographical tradition contains only a fraction on women. For instance, there are 34 biographies of Sufi women in Jami’s Nafahut, which are mainly brief and variants of the same, the longest one belonging to Tuhfa in relation to Sari al-Saqati. Even then it appears that far from ‘a contribution of women in Sufism’, Jami is ‘stretching his limited resources, as if under pressure to include the biographies of women’ (Mojaddedi 2001, p. 208). On the other hand, Attar’s memorial of Sufi saints, tadhkirat al-awliya, though not technically counted a biographical tradition, celebrates only one female figure, a singly devoted entry on Rabia al-Adawiyya (713–801) (Arberry [1966] 1983, pp. 39–51). There are other references to women in the tadhkirat, but again only in passing, often anonymously, or in relation to a man.8 Rabia is nevertheless a giant among the mystics of the classical period (Smith 1928). Yet she had earned her noteworthiness on account of her having been permitted among the ranks men, because she was essentially thought of by men as an equal in religion due to her having attained the heights of mystical realisation. She was, therefore, only then given the great honour of having achieved the status of being a “man”, since in truth the realm of spiritual attainment at that time (a view that still predominates today, even if on a mere unconscious level) was the domain of men. This is the most reverent status that could have been given to a female figure in Islamic mysticism, so it seems (more on this below). There are of course other female Sufi figures who remain obscure to scholarship as they only receive passing mention or on whom there is scant information like the ninth-­ century figure of Fatima of Nishapur, the alleged teacher of the great Nubian mystic Dhul Nun al-Misri (796–859), or the female teacher of a young Ibn Arabi (Fatima bint al-Muthanna or Fatima or Córdoba), all of whom remain yet to be studied at length. One other well-known female figure is the Sufi scholar of a well-to-do family in Damascus by the name of Aisha al-Ba’uniyyah (d. 1517) who had penned a Sufi guidebook as well as a series of poems recently discovered and translated (Homerin 2014). Not dissimilar to Rabia, she was basically seen as a “man”—that

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is, not treated as a woman—out of respect by other men who engaged with her and read her work and even learned from her (Qualey 2014).9 More will be said on these figures below. For now, the obvious question is why have women been historically treated as not being worthy of spiritual status in terms equal to a man, unless of course otherwise being treated as a man? Taking on board the cultural, political and scriptural complications noted above, the short answer is was a man’s (man’s) world. The Sufi view was no less tainted by the same misogyny, but it was tempered by a stronger mood of ambivalence towards the female sex. For instance, Sufis believed that ‘“animal quality” prevails in woman’, which was linked to the view in Sufism that women were equated with the nafs (the lower soul), a term that in Arabic is feminine (Schimmel 1975, pp. 428–429). The Sufis were strongly persuaded by masculine virtues that coloured their religious outlook and shaped what it meant to be holy; not to mention, how this was to be achieved—‘[t]he ideal of the Sufi was always the “man”’ (Schimmel 1975, p. 426).10 Those masters that favoured celibacy, “indulged in describing the horrors and dangers of married life”; some mystics were “absolutely antagonistic to or disinterested in women, even to the point that they would not touch food cooked by a woman” (Schimmel 1975, p. 428). For those that encouraged novices to get married instructed them on the merits of enduring the afflictions of a “nasty” wife so as to lead them to God, for married life was, for some, ‘a substitute for the hellfire’. Related to this is the ascetical tendency (common to both early Sufism and medieval Christianity) to identify the “world” with a woman. The descriptions of a seductress of men, ‘a lecherous prostitute’ who was cruel and faithless inside, and in reality, behind her countenance, an ugly old hag, was in all likelihood a technique for abstinence.11 Ironically, however, the reverse was also true: the idea of the holy in Sufi consciousness was in many instances hypostasised as feminine.12 The grammatical knowledge of Ibn Arabi, for example, allowed him to express the matter in opposite terms whereby the female represented the feminine “essence” or al-dhat (the term in Arabic being feminine), which for him was the feminine element in God. This was the outlier sensibility, but one that promulgated the respect for women of piety (such as the daughter and wife of the Prophet already mentioned). In Persian Sufi

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literature, the figure of Zuleikha was the ‘symbol of the soul, purified by ceaseless longing in the path of poverty and love’ and Mary, ‘the immaculate mother who gave birth to the spiritual child Jesus’ (Schimmel 1975, p. 429)’. It was especially true of the Sufi imagination that the ideal of the female was visualised in artform. Muslim culture that was influenced by Sufism not only appreciated the idea of the holy as correlative to the female, especially in terms of beauty, but also that of her being representative of the sacred godhead too; often, there was the need on the part of men to hear the heavenly voice through the song of a woman.13 The story of the sheikh of San’an, appears in Attar’s mantiq at-tayr, explains that ‘the eternal beauty reveals itself once more in feminine form’ and offers an experience ‘so deep as to change the whole course of “normal” orthodox life into sheer surrender in love’ (Schimmel 1975, p.  432). Extending from this imagery, the minstrel holding (or pouring) the jug of wine is now a famous trope in Persian poetry and miniature painting. This artistic portrayal of the divine feminine can be said to be a combined mystical and cultural sensitivity prevalent among the Sufis of Persia, a phenomenon mostly absent (even strongly opposed) in pietistic Sufism. In the sphere of everyday life, Sufism also offered women more opportunities to participate in religious as well as social life. For instance, women played the role of benefactors to ‘Sufi masters or institutions or of whole groups of dervishes’, endowing Sufi places of worship ‘with food and money’, as in the case of Bibi Fatima who financed the Sufi lodge of Abu Sa’id Abi’l Khayr (Schimmel 1975, p. 433). The source of this virtue in such women must be located in the example of Khadija and her supporting role in Muhammad’s life. At a superficial level, the perception of women as “lower” was a given (as it still is today as a culturally accepted norm), but at a deeper level Islamic religiosity held the potentiality of the reversal—and this is seen (on occasion) in Sufism. The Sufi tradition presented a way for a woman to transcend her social status by becoming a mystic, and, by virtue of that, a man. Though what appears to be a solution to patriarchal chauvinism cannot but be seen as a backhanded compliment in essence. This is something that a modern Sufi may wish to moderate; but one might ask to what degree would it be successfully based on traditional learning?

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8.5.1 Sufi Women Javad Nurbakhsh, the late pir of the Khaniqahi Nimatullahi tariqa, had compiled a small book on Sufi women by that title. Drawing on samples from a variety of Sufi manuals, including the biographical tradition, he pontificates on the question of ‘whether any women among the Sufis have attained the station of insan-i kamil, the Perfect human Being’ (Nurbakhsh 2004, p. 9). To note, his compilation has a listing of 130 entries, which while seeming to be substantial, is again a recurrence of the dilemma in Jami’s collection. Because, of the 130, 37 are anonymous entries, while the remaining 6 are semi-anonymous (i.e., they are not named but they are identifiable in relation to a known male Sufi figure, e.g., ‘The Sister of Hallaj’). The book’s dedication opens with a poem from Attar’s khusraw-nama: ‘she was no mere woman … but a true spiritual man’ (Nurbakhsh 2004). Nurbakhsh’s commentary is, of course, his own predilection for a modern reading of classical source materials; though notwithstanding, it does have the benefit of holding the ambiguity at the core of the issue as demonstrated in the dedication verse. He thus interprets the passages where the Qur’an mentions men and women believers as signifying faith over gender (e.g., 33:35). Furthermore, he cites the tradition that states ‘God does not look at your forms’ as denoting ‘that on the path toward the Truth, the heart’s work ultimately is weighed, not this corporeal form of flesh and blood’ (Nurbakhsh 2004, p. 10). Moreover, he extols the virtue of Sufi masters in having held the conviction ‘that any woman who engages in the Path of Divine Love is not to be deemed “female” … but rather is to be judged solely by her humanity’ (Nurbakhsh 2004, p. 10). Thus far, it sounds as though Nurbakhsh has exonerated the woman from being embedded in the patriarchal conceptualisation of her. Yet, he quotes a popular maxim of the Sufis that he claims has “for centuries” served as a testament to the value placed on the woman: ‘“The seeker of God is masculine” (talib al-mawla mudhakkar)’; but this only confirms the contrary: ‘anyone who seeks God is a man-of-the-Way’ (Nurbakhsh 2004, p. 10). He then references Attar’s citation of Abbasa Tusi (a figure mentioned in passing in Attar’s entry on Rabia because of a saying

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attributed to her): ‘Men! Mary [the mother of Jesus] will be the first among people on the Day’ (Attar 2003, p. 76),14 which avoids gender specific descriptors in honouring Mary. Perhaps Nurbakhsh wants to impart a point in confidence, but that he has to first confirm the obvious: ‘women who seriously set foot on the path toward Reality are in exactly the same position as men who do so’; in saying this—as well as quoting tradition—he asserts his main point: ‘since in the Ocean of Divine Unity (tawhid) neither “I” nor “you” exists, what possible meaning can “man” or “woman” have?’ (Nurbakhsh 2004, p. 10). This certainly underlines the folly in gender differentiation where spiritual matters are concerned, at least. But it does, in a way, avoid the issue at hand. There is a well-known tradition in Sufism that a Sufi should not observe his or her surroundings because they are meant to be entirely focused on God.15 On the one hand, this would be relevant to Sufi attitude when men and women are in the presence of each other, but the implication of such stories is that it is something the man struggles with because of their temptation. There is a well-known story of Bayazid who discussed mystical matters with a particular married woman, which ends abruptly one day when she realises that he has noticed the henna on her hand.16 Nevertheless, the Sufi attitude in its classical sense, and as it carries over into the modern, is still driven by an undercurrent of masculine anxiety about the woman. These traditions do point to a possible interpretation that Sufism has embodied in its most abstract sense: a man and woman who are blind to their own self (nafs) are indeed aware of the sacred beyond themselves (i.e., beyond their sex and sexuality) when in the presence of each other. This aside, does gender simply disappear? Are women to be invisible to the eye? Is that not the point of veiling? Do then Sufis demonstrate their spiritual prowess by disregarding conventional religious norms deliberately? Which of course is reminiscent of Matthew 5:28–29 where Jesus is said to have instructed about the spiritual value of abstinence: if you have thought it, you have sinned; if you have sinned with your eye then pluck out your eye. * * *

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It would be pertinent to draw this section to a close, by way of a brief comparative observation of the literary production of Nefzawi and Nurbakhsh. Each conveys the sentiment of the time on the matter of women and spirituality. The former reflects the normative sentiment of sixteenth-century patriarchal impression of the female sex. The latter reflects a guarded expression of twenty-first-century opinion on the matter. As such, Nurbakhsh’s interpretation is skewed towards a modern rendition of classical texts that sought to transcend stereotypes. His citation of the passage from al-futuhat al-makkiyya relates, in my opinion, his wish to allow Sufism to resonate with a modern sensibility, but that in fact this might not at all be germane to the classical stance (Nurbakhsh 2004, p. 10): One of the masters was asked concerning the true number of abdal existent in the world. “There are altogether forty”, he answered. “Why not say: forty men?” they asked. “Because there are women among them as well”, he replied.

8.6 Conclusion In the first instance, this chapter has posed the question of women in Islam in terms of gender, chiefly because, up until the eighteenth century, everything about women was mentioned in relation to men.17 Secondly, the entire question of the status and role of women in Islamic societies has been contextualised historically as mostly ambiguous and occasionally controversial.18 Importantly, this has been to show that the issue of gender has been located on the fault line of the debate about Islamic socio-cultural and religio-political identity. In many ways, the woman has for the most part been collateral to the dominance of patriarchal ethos, leading to the often-stated question: is it Islam or patriarchy? Rather than following this binary line of questioning, the present study has instead pursued the broader point about “Islam” in the mirror of civilisation.19 The question of gendered religiosity is pertinent because it reveals the weakness in the religion’s ability to resolve a much more fundamental question: can a woman be seen as equal to that of a man

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religiously? And by extension, can a woman attain to the heights of spiritual glory? The Islamic answer—albeit, at times clouded by ambiguity and controversy—has consistently been one of exceptionalism. This has meant that Muslim opinion on holiness has been overwhelmingly androcentric. And, as such, the attainment to holiness overshadowed by misogynist outlook. The issue cleverly disguised in civil dialogue was that women were deemed as both incapable and unworthy of holiness. That women were generally objectified and thus sexualised in what was unequivocally a patriarchal society, is a given. What additionally becomes evident is the base motivation behind the subjugation of women: men’s effort to find a way around temptation. This male fiction of spirituality and holiness was closely tied to their struggle with sexuality as a prevalent and (still) persistent mode of religious pathology. So entrenched was the pervasiveness of the male experience of religion that it had remained invisible until very late in Islamic history. The bitter pill is that Islamic tradition at worst reflects women as religiously corrupt and at best spiritually compromised. The cultural attitude seems to have been particularly influenced by antiquated views about women as essentially diabolical, or intellectually ineffectual, or simply dangerous to the man. The idea of the woman as subordinate is rooted in medieval anxieties of male-centred holiness, rooted in the taboo of carnality. It would seem not even the greatest of mystics could escape the gravity of this fundamental rationale instilled at the very core of religious piety, even when they are at their most liberal. Attar opened the door to womankind through the example of a woman-made-man; and while Ibn Arabi asserted conjugal sex with a woman as endowed with spiritual merit, it was no less a (meta-)physical marvel in man’s quest for God. What is brought to the fore in all of this is that it is in fact religion that is objectified and sexualised because of the dominating male bias in reading religion in terms of the conquest of sexual desire. Since this psychosis is classically associated with the way the woman is conceptualised by men, it gives rise to what is outlined in this chapter as the problem of gendered fiction that situated women through the masculine lens.

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Notes 1. See Renee Geyer’s 1974 version of the lyrics from the album “It’s a Man’s Man’s World” released by Bill Armstrong Studios, RCA Records. 2. On a general discussion on the methodological value of hermeneutical phenomenology, consult Dreyfus (1980). 3. Under the reign of the second caliph, Umar, women were made to pray in a separate room of the mosque lead by their own imam. In the following century, religious authorities strictly prohibited women from mosques, having justified their contrary stance to the Prophet on the issue on the grounds that ‘public spaces were unsafe for women’. Many Islamic countries consider the presence of women in public ‘to be a source of temptation and conflict’; they are, as such, ‘always separated during Muslim religious observances’ (Esposito 2020). 4. Nefzawi is clearly aware of variant forms of pleasure such as fellatio and cunnilingus are omitted, as are homoerotic and homosexual activity and pederasty. He does this, the translator muses, as to maintain the expectation of decorum (Burton 1963, p. 72). 5. Citing chapters 12:28 and 6:38 of the Qur’an, Nefzawi asserts clear proof of the matter. 6. The female mystic Rabia al-Adawayya al-Qaysiyya; Abu’l-Hassan al-­ Shadhili who founded the Shadhili Sufi order; Adb al-Qadir al-Jilani the namesake and patron of the Qadiriyya; and al-Junayd a Shafii scholar of Persian origin. 7. To reiterate what was earlier mentioned, whilst Islamic jurisprudence maintains neutrality in placing legal judgement on the act, the Qur’anic language is quite clear in its admonition to men who have ‘had intercourse with women’ (5:6). 8. In the section on Rabia, Aisha is mentioned and Abbasa Tusi as well as Maryam the mother of Jesus. In another section on Abu Hanifa there is mention of Aisha bint Ajrad. There are seven additional references to women, all of them anonymous (Attar 2003). 9. This is due to the fact that many ‘Muslims do not believe that women have the capacity to teach men’. Women that do have religious training ‘may only serve the needs of other females’ (Esposito 2020). 10. This is to exclude the peculiar and isolated example of certain groups of dervishes whose ‘appearance was deliberately feminine—long flowing hair, clean-shaven faces, earrings, bracelets, little bells, etc.’ (Papas 2011).

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11. It was first expressed in the sermons of the pietist Hasan al-Basri, and then also taken up by later Sufis such as al-Ghazali, Attar, and Rumi (Schimmel 1975, p. 428). 12. The best-known example being that of Ibn Arabi’s view the divine is seen ‘more perfectly in woman than in man’ (Schimmel 1975, p. 431). 13. On the woman as the representation of the divine, in terms of both the face and voice of God, the story of Layla and Majnun is of note. 14. My translation. 15. Nurbakhsh offers a story to this effect from legends about Bayazid al-­ Bistami. In this story, Bayazid served Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq as his disciple and was asked one day to bring him a book from the bookshelf and he replied ‘What shelf?’ The Imam, astonished, said ‘you have been coming here for six years and still don’t know where the bookshelf is?’ To which Bayazid replied ‘I come here for God’s sake, not for the sake of anything else’ (cited in Nurbakhsh 1996, p. 87). 16. There are various ways the story is told, but it is related to Fatima of Nishapur (d. 849), who is said to have “consorted” with Dhu’l Nun and Bayazid as well as ‘guided her husband [Ahmad Khidhruya] in religious and practical matters’ (Schimmel 1975, p. 427). 17. For further discussion, consult Shepard (2014, pp. 342–368). 18. For further discussion, consult Knysh (2017, pp. 323–340) 19. For further discussion, consult Milani (2018, pp. 38–63).

Works Cited al-Bukhari, M.i.I. 1969. Sahih al-Bukhari. Cairo: s.n. Arberry, A.J. [1966] 1983. Muslim Saints and Mystics: Episodes from the Tadhkirat al-awliya (Memorial of the Saints) by Farid al-Din Attar. Trans. A.J. Arberry ed. London: Routledge. Attar. 2003. Tadhkirat al-awliya. Javad Salmasizadeh ed. Tehran: Movasseseh Farhangi Andisheh Darogsar. Azam, H. 2015. Sexual Violation in Classical Islamic Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boissevain, K. 2013. al-Mannubiyya, Aisha. In Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE. [Online:] http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.uws.edu. au/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_24813. Accessed May 7 2020. Bulliet, R.W. 1994. Islam: The View from the Edge. New  York: Columbia University Press.

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Bulliet, R.W., et al. 2015. The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History. 6th ed. Stamford: Cengage. Burton, R. 1963. The Perfumed Garden of the Shaykh Nefzawi. Trans. Sir Richard Burton with an Introduction by Alan Hull Walton ed. London: Granada Publishing. Dreyfus, H. 1980. Holism and Hermeneutics. The Review of Metaphysics 34 (1): 3–23. Esposito, J. Women and Islam. 2020. In Oxford Islamic Studies Online. [Online:] http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/article/opr/t125/e2510. Accessed 7 May 2020. Guillaume, A. 1955. The Life of Muhammad. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Homerin, T.E. 2014. The Principles of Sufism: Aishah al-Ba’uniyyah. New York: New York University Press. Ibn Maja, M.i.Y. 1980. Sunan Ibn Maja. Beirut: s.n. Knysh, A. 2017. Islam in Historical Perspective. 2nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge. Milani, M. 2018. Sufi Political Thought. Abingdon: Routledge. Mojaddedi, J.A. 2001. The Biogrpahical Tradition in Sufism: The Tabaqat Genre from al-Sulami to Jami. Richmond: Curzon Press. Momen, M. 2011. Women iii. In Shiism. In Encyclopaedia Iranica. [Online:] https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/women-shiism. Accessed 7 May 2020. Nurbakhsh, J. 1996. Discourses on the Sufi Path. London: Khaniqahi Nimatullahi Publications. ———. 2004. Sufi Women. London: Khaniqahi Nimatullahi Publications. Papas, Alexandre. Dervish. 2011. In Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE. [Online:] http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.uws.edu.au/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_ COM_25986. Accessed 7 May 2020. Qualey, M.L. 2014. An Interview with Editor-Translator Th. Emil Homerin. [Online] https://www.fromthesquare.org/an-interview-with-editor-translator-th-emil-homerin/#.XrQQjS-r23c. Accessed 7 May 2020. Schimmel, A. 1975. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Shepard, W.E. 2014. Introducing Islam. 2nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge. Smith, M. 1928. Rabi’a The Mystic and Her Fellow-Saints in Islam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spectorsky, S. 2010. Women in Classical Islamic Law. A Survey of the Sources. Leiden: Brill. Spellberg, D.A. 1996. Writing the Unwritten Life of the Islamic Eve: Menstruation and the Demonization of Motherhood. International Journal of Middle East Studies 28 (3): 305–324. Waylen, G., K. Celis, J. Kantola, and S.L. Weldon. 2013. The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

9 Conclusion: The Prospect of an Eschatological Civility Vassilios Adrahtas

9.1 Introductory Remarks The study of Islam and, perhaps more generally, the study of Islamicate societies cannot avoid the question of the relationship between modernity and non-modernity. It cannot avoid the question of dealing with the challenge, tension and/or paradox of the encounter between a civilizational condition that has more or less become the common denominator for everyone, on the one hand, and a civilizational condition that one way or another has been claiming for everyone a state of exceptionalism, on the other. To be sure, this is not a problematic limited to Islam as a religious tradition and a socio-cultural habitus, but it seems that in the case of Islam it has taken up disproportionate dimensions that bespeak of a real problem: the very preconditions and assumptions upon which Islamic Studies in general have been pursued. To put this in other words would entail addressing head-on questions such as the following: is Islam compatible with modernity? Can Islam—presumably as “the East”— work with “the West”? How do these questions translate concretely in

V. Adrahtas (*) Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia © The Author(s) 2021 M. Milani, V. Adrahtas (eds.), Islam, Civility and Political Culture, New Directions in Islam, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56761-3_9

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terms of law, governance, agency, gender relations and whatever is taken for granted when the political is evoked? Ultimately, it seems, that this whole problematic—in which academia is entangled—comes down to being part or not of what it means to be civilized; being inspired or not by the spirit of civility, even when this does not involve being inspired by “the spirit of capitalism”. To deal with these issues, namely, with the extent and ways in which an entire “sacroscape”—along with all its dependent and at the same time concomitant “scapes” (“ethno-”, “techno-”, “media-”, “finance-” and “ideoscapes”)1—relates to the whole range of practices, sensibilities and aspirations that make up the constitution of the individual—their agency and subjectivity—in our contemporary times, is undoubtedly something that requires more than just the rhetoric of political correctness or the backup of antiquarian expertise. This demands a systematic, well-­ designed, comprehensive and pertinent agenda of intellectual engagement that might deal with the aforementioned issues in a reliable, convincing and viable manner. This is precisely the direction towards which the present volume has aspired to orientate its reader. The contributions herein—in the light of the various, complementary and interacting perspectives they encompass—have dispensed with wishful thinking approaches and/or easily produced generalizations, opting instead for rigorous critical explorations of the theoretical, as well as the practical, manifestations of the Islamic in the past and the present that established themselves as the best candidates for a cross-civilizational discussion such as the one that “civility” and by extension “political culture” necessitates. At any rate, of course, this is not the first attempt of its kind and it certainly will not be its last; if the latter may be realized not just because it is inevitable, but basically because the studies in the present volume shall make it desirable, then this publication will have served its purpose.

9.2 Comparing Distinctive Hierophanic Experiences Any scholarship that wants to hold on to a minimum requirement of scientific reliability and value must turn to and engage in comparisons. There is no other way! However, at the same time, academia is by now

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mature enough to be able to consider multiple forms of comparison, one of which is comparison based on difference rather than similarity. Comparison based on difference is essentially a form of comparison whereby the examination does not start with a preconceived criterion of comparison, but moves towards such a criterion; the only preconception—or, perhaps better, postulate—is that finally there has to be comparison, and if the latter is not to be produced by deduction, then it has to follow in the steps of induction. The particular examples in the present volume for an induction conducive to the purposes of articulating a modern—or even a more-than-modern—discourse regarding Islamic civility come from the Chapters by A. Salvatore (partly), by P. Keshavmurthy and by A. Musa. However, no overall systematic presentation could account fully and representatively for the phenomenon we have been discussing throughout the pages of this book, if one had not been provided with some insights regarding the distinctive experiences that lie at the basis of civility as known in “the West”, on the one hand, and what could be regarded as an alternative civility of “the East” (in our case, of Islam), on the other. This is the very objective of the Chapters by the editors of the present collective work, as well as the Chapter by B. Turner. Although a rather hasty reader might get the impression that some of the investigations in this volume put forward the idea that civility is not an Islamic reality, nothing can be further from the truth. The critical idea put forward about the relationship between Islam and civility in some sections of the present book is that civility is not and should not be understood as a homogenous reality. One has to contextualize the discussion about civility with specific reference to pre-modernity, modernity and post- or late modernity, and even more so in relation to the nature of the life-forms that constitute “the West” and “the East”, so as to be in a position to appreciate what can and should be stated regarding civility vis-à-vis Islam and/or as an Islamicate reality. In this connection, the present volume does bring for the first time into the scholarly discussion the phenomenological perspective, shedding thus light on the fundamental differentiation between the experiential conditions of possibility for the emergence and development of civility. In this manner, the peculiarly Western character of civility is attested, the Islamicate corresponding realities are properly understood, and the possibilities of interaction or even transaction between these two fields of experience are perceived. To be sure, this research agenda many a

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time broadens up so much the field of investigation that one might believe that the tree has been lost within the forest. But the forest is indeed needed if we are to make sense of the tree as such. In light of the last remark one can understand why in the contributions of the present volume the authors time and again get involved into the discussion of such broad themes as historicity, temporality, transcendence, immanence, secularization, eschatology, authority and power—to name just a few and, probably, the most cardinal. It is only within the perspective of such topics that the background presupposed in the case of civility can be utilized towards a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding. Besides, the discussion of civility in relation to Islam has been placed within such a wide and profound context thanks to the thought-­ provoking work of A. Salvatore (2016). Moreover, this broad contextualization is the very reason that the present volume opted for looking at civility in conjunction with political culture, since the former is in effect a particular realization and expression of the latter. By the same token, civility in this volume—perhaps for the first time so explicitly—is posited not only in its specific humanitarian sense, but also in its wider existential sense, yielding thus not only a more comprehensive picture of the sociality involved, but also some distinctive and original features that go along with the hierophanic experience of Islam.

9.3 B  enevolence, Status, Gender and … Jihad? The distinctive and original features that the hierophanic experience of Islam brings into the modern exploration and experimentation with the realities of civility, civil society and political culture have their own considerable merits. From the praise and pursuit of benevolence to the affirmation of social status and the ambiguity of gendered roles to the compelling notion of a jihad that is undertaken for the sake of the integrity of the religious experience itself—especially when that integrity is questioned on sectarian grounds—all these comprise potential civil life-­ forms of a different order. If in “the West” civility has come to be identified as social politeness and furthermore as political correctness, the

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Islamic life-world presents one with a variegated experiential field with its own virtues and vices: on the one hand, a more humane, open and malleable bent and, on the other, a more unsympathetic, closed and rigid structure. Although the potentiality of an Islamic civility to enrich and cultivate Western forms of civility must be emphasized, it should be kept in mind that an Islamic civility is no panacea to the problems of Western sociality and political behaviour. If the Islamicate life-world can produce both positive and negative effects, that is, more-than-Western and less-­ than-­ Western civil interpersonal conditions of Being, then what is required is that at least academic scholars remain as critical and meticulous as possible. Arguably, social status and gendered roles within the confines of the historical Muslim life-world are the breaking points or, if you prefer, the limitations of what could be called an Islamic civility. Nevertheless, even these, since they have been witnessing drastic change for some time now, can be of analytical help; they may enable academic scholarship to be more selective, more dialectical and eventually more constructive by avoiding what not only “the West” but also “the East” disavows as far as the future paths of civility and political behaviour are concerned. Evidently, the topic of a potential Islamic civility should not be approached simply with an agenda of renewing the Western model, for the Islamic “East” is not some kind of philosopher’s stone that has salvific properties; even if Islam did have such a potential, the latter would involve the adoption and adaptation of much more than Islamic civility patterns on the part of “the West”. More specifically, it would involve having full recourse to something that the Islamic life-world still does not possess: a philosophy of its own.

9.4 Closing Thoughts I would like to conclude the final part of this volume with three thoughts; three thoughts that I regard as crucial for the ongoing discussion of the topic of Islamic civility. The first is about the real agents of a truly Islamic civility, which cannot be created but by those whose life is—to put it boldly—at stake, namely, the Muslim faithful. Academia can and has to

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contribute to this enterprise—presumably for its own reasons as well— but it is only from the inside that a genuine and viable Islamic discourse of civility can come forward. Secondly, if this new development is to take place in a trans-active type of relationship with “the West”, it should be articulated through a dialectics with the most familiar Other that “the West” can present to Islam—an Other that is so much of the same substance as “the West”—and that is Christianity. What I am proposing is that the ongoing Christian-Muslim dialogue should be broadened and explored towards directions such as civility and political behaviour. Because Islam, from a civilizational point of view, has all along been dealing—in its historical development—with issues cognate to those that Christianity had to face and is still facing, they can benefit from one another in respect to civility as a prime example of being-in-the-world. Last but not least, due attention has to be paid to what has come forth in this volume under the terminology of “eschatological civility”. If civility is about being-in-the-world and if the secularized orientation of “the West” has entrapped, so to speak, civility and politics in general within the confines of a world without the possibility of renewal through the genuine freedom of transcendence, then the option of an “eschatological civility” might function, if anything, as food for thought for some kind of breakthrough.

Note 1. For this terminology, see Appadurai (1996). For the notion of “sacroscape”, I am particularly drawing upon Tweed (2006).

Works Cited Appadurai, A. 1996. Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy. In Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, ed. A. Appadurai. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Salvatore, A. 2016. The Sociology of Islam: Knowledge, Power and Civility. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Tweed, T.A. 2006. Crossings and Dwellings: A Theory of Religion. Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press.

Index1

A

Adab, 19, 23, 24, 31, 43, 45, 51–55, 58, 59, 61, 65, 66, 68, 70, 73, 75, 89, 91, 96, 98, 99, 105–125, 126n5, 127n13, 127n15, 127n18 Amplification, 70, 81–83 An-Naim, Abdullahi Ahmad, 6, 14, 18, 31, 33–37, 40n18, 41n19, 41n20, 41n21, 41n22

Civility, 1–14, 17–37, 43–51, 53, 55, 56, 58–62, 65–67, 75, 78–81, 87–101, 105–125, 181–186 Civis, 20 Conflict theory, 149–151 Courtesy, 52, 65, 66 E

B

Being-in-the-world, 186 Brotherhood, 54, 57–60, 62 C

Civilis, 18, 44

Elias, Norbert, 46–48, 50, 55, 61, 70, 79, 80 Eschatological civility, 31, 32, 37, 40n16, 181–186 Eschaton, 1–14, 20, 21, 25, 26, 30, 69 Etiquette, 52, 65, 74, 75, 81, 123

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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188 Index F

Falasifa, 8, 23, 30 Falsafa, 2, 67 G

Gender, 3, 4, 115, 159, 160, 163, 166, 167, 174–176, 182, 184–185 Gentleness, 88, 92, 97 Good behaviour, 65–83 H

Hadith, 23, 34, 43, 51–55, 61, 69, 73, 75, 87–101, 107, 125n2, 133–137, 147, 149, 162, 164 Hermēneia, 25, 39n11 Hierophanic experience, 20, 144–147, 149, 151, 182–184 Hierophany, 10, 20, 28, 38n3 History, 1, 3, 6–9, 12–14, 17, 19–32, 34, 41n20, 50, 60, 70, 73, 75, 79, 80, 82, 92, 94, 95, 101, 107, 113, 119, 121–123, 127n15, 131, 132, 137, 138, 140–143, 147, 149, 157, 165, 171, 177 Hodgson, Marshal, 1, 8, 55–61, 66, 74–76, 106 Holiness, 3, 157–177 I

Ibn Khaldun, 2, 8–10, 12–14, 26, 32, 40n13 Indo-Persian, 121, 125n1 Informalization, 70, 81–83

Institution, 35, 36, 43–62, 72, 78, 82, 138, 159, 173 Interpretation, 14, 19, 23–25, 47, 67, 71, 87–101, 106, 120, 132–136, 139, 159–161, 163, 164, 175, 176 Islam, 1, 17–37, 49, 66, 88, 106, 131–152, 158, 181 Islamicate, 2, 8, 17, 24, 53, 54, 66, 74, 124, 181, 183, 185 Islamic civility, 18–19, 23, 29, 31, 33, 36, 37, 43–62, 87, 101, 105–125, 183, 185 I’tidal, 19, 31, 34 K

Kosmos, 26 L

Lapidus, Ira, 2 Leniency, 88, 92, 97 M

Macro-history, 8–10 Maghazi, 88, 96 Manners, 1, 8, 19, 26, 28, 46, 47, 65–70, 72–74, 76–81, 89, 91, 96, 97, 123, 133, 144, 147, 150, 153n10, 182, 183 Marriage, 68, 72, 74, 77, 78, 83, 162 Ma’ruf, 88, 90, 91, 93, 101 Maslahah, 19, 31, 34 Mizan, 19, 31, 34 Modern, 3, 4, 6, 7, 13, 14, 17, 23–25, 27, 29, 31–33, 36, 37,

 Index 

44–46, 48–51, 54, 58, 59, 62, 66, 70, 79, 82, 92, 109, 119, 123, 126n9, 136, 144, 159, 162, 164, 173–176, 183, 184 Modernity, 2, 5, 6, 13, 14, 17–37, 46, 47, 49–51, 181, 183 Moses, 2, 10–14, 26, 72, 92 Mughal India, 108, 110, 124 Muhammad, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10–14, 26–30, 52, 72, 74, 88–90, 92–95, 97–101, 132–134, 146, 147, 157, 162, 165, 173 Muqaddima, 10, 26, 40n13 P

Phenomenology, 3, 6, 21, 132, 150, 160, 178n2 Physis, 20 Piety, 22, 65, 67, 68, 70, 75, 79, 81, 82, 118, 119, 126n9, 147, 172, 177 Politēs, 20 Political behaviour, 185, 186 Political culture, 1–3, 38n1, 131–152, 159, 182, 184 Politics, 6–8, 10, 20, 21, 26, 27, 30, 67, 73, 81, 116, 126n7, 143, 186 Purification, 26

189

152, 152n1, 157–160, 164, 167, 168, 171, 176, 177 Righteousness, 66 S

Sainthood, 169, 170 Salvatore, Armando, 2, 17, 19, 24, 44, 49–51, 53, 55, 57–60, 75, 87, 88, 107, 183, 184 Second Coming, 69–73, 76, 78 Sex, 76, 77, 80, 82, 160, 163, 164, 166–170, 172, 175–177 Sexuality, 77, 78, 158, 160, 168, 175, 177 Shariah, 12 Shemot, 10, 11 Shepard, William E., 3, 142 Shi‘a, 131–152 Shi‘ism, 138, 142–145 Shura, 19, 31, 34 Sira, 10, 12, 88, 96, 157 Societas, 18, 44, 49 Sufi, 2, 39n10, 48, 54, 55, 58–62, 108, 109, 111–119, 142, 153n9, 158, 159, 170–176, 178n6 Sufism, 39n10, 107, 112, 115, 153n9, 171–176 Sunna, 88, 89, 100, 101, 134–136, 139, 140 Sunnism, 138, 144

R

Rahma, 88–91, 101 Religion, 4–8, 10, 12, 22, 29, 30, 43, 51, 53, 56, 57, 61, 62, 67–69, 71, 75, 76, 78–80, 82, 116, 125, 127n14, 132–134, 137, 138, 141, 142, 149, 150,

T

Tafsir, 88, 96 Taha, Mahmoud Muhammad, 2–6, 13, 14, 33, 35, 36, 41n22 Tanzimat, 19

190 Index

Tasawwuf, 19, 31, 75 Tawhid, 22, 38–39n7, 53, 67, 153n11, 175 Temptation, 158, 160, 162, 163, 175, 177, 178n3 Turner, Bryan S., 2, 70, 76, 82, 83, 183 U

Ummah, 19, 29, 31, 133

Urdu literature, 118 W

Waqf, 19, 23, 24, 31, 60, 75 Weber, E., 80 Weber, M., 47, 48, 50, 57–59, 61, 69, 147 Women, 41n21, 67, 68, 70, 76, 83, 115, 120, 126n4, 157–177, 178n3, 178n8, 178n9