Languages of din: Place,history,and paths

One evening in 1921, a young man sat in a small boat as he traveled along the Golden Horn in Istanbul. It was Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, and he was returning home from an iftar with friends and acquaintances in the district of Eyüp. Looking south, he gazed at the ridge of Istanbul, its skyline defined by a sequence of imperial mosques whose domes and minarets marked the city's political and religious status.

Yet this city of Islam – which was also a city of Christians, Jews, Communists, refugees, migrants, pilgrims, revolutionaries, and more – was in a state of upheaval. Istanbul, capital of the Ottoman Empire for more than four centuries, had been occupied by French, British, and Italian forces in 1918 (Criss, 1999; Mills, 2017). The young man reflected on his peers’ misguided enthusiasms – ‘if they have a spiritual condition (halet-i rûhiyye), it's that they don’t know what it is to love and be loved’ – and wrote of a renewed commitment to Islam: ‘I [now] see the world of Islam's beautiful traditions (İslâm âleminin güzel adetlerini) more truly and I [will] spend my love only for them’ (transcribed in Erçetin, 2018: 37). Ahmet Süheyl Ünver would go on to become one of 20th century Istanbul's most important cultural historians and masters of the ‘traditional’ Turkish and Islamic arts (Hammond, 2022; Sayar, 1994). As I was reading James Sidaway's (2023) article, ‘Beyond the Decolonial: Critical Muslim Geographies’, I returned to Ünver. How might Sidaway's arguments help us to understand Ünver's life and sense of self in a different way? And how does understanding Ünver's life take Sidaway's arguments in new directions?

For critical Muslim geographies: Self-critique and new configurations

In his wide-ranging intervention, Sidaway makes a number of contributions. I found two especially valuable. First, Sidaway calls our attention to the Orientalist assumptions built into Henri Lefebvre's work, particularly Lefebvre's discussions of the Alhambra in The Production of Space and the posthumously published Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment. He critiques Lefebvre's easy equation of Islam and the ‘traditional’ in ways that help us provincialize Lefebvre's theorization of the urban. In the process, the article adds to a body of scholarship analyzing how Algeria's war of independence impacted intellectual culture in France during the 1950s and 1960s (Goodman and Silverstein, 2009; Le Sueur, 2001). Although it seems clear that Lefebvre supported the cause of Algerian independence (Kipfer and Goonewardena, 2014: 94–95) and supported anticolonial politics (Kipfer and Goonewardena, 2013: 84–87), Sidaway's article opens the door to further discussion about the absences that underpin Lefebvre's work. Echoing Derickson's (2014: 653) discussion of urban theory, this calls us ‘to expose and undermine the way even “critical” knowledges rely on and are productive of an “other” as its constitutive outside’.

Alongside challenging us to rethink how and why we draw on Lefebvre's work, the second important contribution of ‘Beyond the Decolonial’ is to expand our world of possible citations. To sketch out possibilities for ‘Critical Muslim Geographies’, Sidaway's article reads widely across languages, disciplines, continents, and eras. Among Sidaway's references are figures ranging from the 10th century scholar al-Biruni to the 11th century jurist and philosopher al-Ghazali to the 20th century writers Jalal Al-e-Ahmad and Abdélkebir Khatibi, to name only four. Even though many of these writers might not necessarily have understood themselves in relation to the same tradition of Islam, there is something generative about the project of bringing these figures together. Moreover, bringing this constellation of writers into conversation with recent discussions of Black and decolonial geographies serves as an exciting point of departure for future scholarship. Although geography's disciplinary engagement with Islam is somewhat broader than Sidaway's article suggests (e.g. Bonine, 1990, 2009; Wheatley, 2001), he nevertheless pushes geographers to imagine different kinds of intellectual configurations and possibilities. What might those configurations and possibilities look like? In what follows, I ask two questions that might contribute to such a project.

The place of language

First, what is the place of language in critical Muslim geographies? Sidaway argues that ‘a first step in decolonizing Muslim geographies is to problematize the category of Islam as a religion’, an argument that he develops by challenging the equivalence between ‘religion’ and ‘din’. Because the range of meanings associated with din is ‘both specific and expansive’, Sidaway suggests that the term ‘cannot be reduced to compartmentalized fields’ and may also ‘signify a path or way of conduct and choice’. But if din can be both specific and expansive, how do we – whether as scholars, Muslims, or people – arrive at a shared understanding of what the term means? The meaning of din is situated, embedded, and embodied in the places and times where people use it (Gardet, 2012). While Sidaway is absolutely right to look to other concepts that tend to exist outside of a Eurocentric episteme, our engagements with these concepts and traditions need careful development. Din is at once a word whose meaning spans vast distances of time and place and one whose meaning revolves around the instances and contexts in which it is used. Even as we turn to rich and expansive terms, it is crucial to situate their use in specific times and places.

Sidaway's turn to Arabic also raises a second, linked issue: the implicit primacy assigned to Arabic as a language of Islam. Sidaway's article is characterized by a nuanced use of terms like madinah, sirah, and ghuluww. However, all these terms emerge out of an Arabic-language corpus. If we only focus on Arabic to make sense of critical Muslim geographies, we risk reinscribing certain assumptions about which languages matter most to the practice of Islam. Arabic is, of course, a central linguistic reference for Muslims. It is fundamental to devotional practice, provides a reservoir of loan words and meanings, and stands as a key part of a legal and philosophical tradition.

But the equation between Arabic and Islam is considerably more complicated. For example, Cemil Aydin shows how Muslim reformers during the 19th century sought to produce a new idea of the ‘Muslim world’, a project that often involved ‘discount[ing] vernacular Muslim practices that, historically, were as integral to the meaning of Islam as was textual scholarship’ (2017: 9). Shahab Ahmed's What Is Islam? (2017) is notable in part because its ‘Balkans-to-Bengal’ complex was also negotiated through Persian, not just Arabic. Moreover, even though most Muslims use Arabic as part of their devotional practice, their understanding of Arabic as a language is considerably more complex. One concrete example is that of the Fatiha – the opening verse of the Qur’an and a fundamental part of daily prayer – in contemporary Turkey. Most Muslims in Turkey know how to recite the phrase, but they do not necessarily ‘know’ what the words mean were written out on a page.Languages in practice take many forms.

In short, critical Muslim geographies ought to grapple with the place of language in ways that move beyond reference to words in Arabic. These concepts are embedded in traditions, histories, and places. Their meanings emerge through embodied practice and the material circulation of texts, objects, and bodies. Although Arabic will always be a common thread through the fabric of these Muslim geographies, it is equally important to attend to the other weavings through which these geographies are articulated and understood. Such approaches align with Sidaway's longstanding work to conceptualize area studies frameworks no longer bound to colonial and orientalist assumptions.

In what sense Muslim geographies?

Second, in what sense are these critical Muslim geographies Muslim? As Sidaway notes, ‘a critical mass of scholars from Muslim backgrounds has barely emerged within Anglophone geography. Moreover, few Muslim geographers writing in/from Africa and Asia are read by the wider discipline’. While Sidaway's observation asks us to consider the uneven geographies of disciplinary knowledge production, it also raises an important question: Are critical Muslim geographies those produced by self-identified Muslims? Or are they geographies that explore the situated practices through which people simultaneously articulate a sense of being Muslim and understand the worlds of which they are a part, research that requires engaging with the traditions of Islam in a new way?

Both projects are important and valid. Neither are these projects mutually exclusive. However, they work in slightly different ways. In the former sense, ‘Muslim’ could function as an identity, an ethical position, a relationship to a tradition of Islam, a political commitment, or some combination thereof. But being ‘Muslim’ is not necessarily a self-evident position, nor do all scholars from Muslim backgrounds understand their positions in the same way. Being Muslim necessarily depends upon shared understandings and practices that span time and place, but there are also differences. Extending Banu Gökariksel's discussion of veiling's ‘intimate politics’, being Muslim is embedded within an ‘ever-shifting constellation of forces, practices, and objects’ that ‘reveals a multiplicity that belies attempts to delineate clearly bounded spaces, subjects, and ideologies’ (2012: 4).

The latter sense, I think, may be closer to Sidaway's goal. Understanding Muslim geographies is not simply a project of studying ‘Muslims’ using geography's familiar concepts and approaches. Rather, I take Sidaway's critiques of Islam as a ‘world religion’ and of inherited architectures of ‘area studies’, and his call to further link Black geographies and decolonial geographies, as crucial points of departure for rethinking the concepts and approaches – such as Lefebvre's work – that sit at the center of many geographers’ scholarship. This project aligns with a question I’ve asked elsewhere (Hammond, 2023: 25–26) about geographers’ recent interest in stories and storytelling (Cameron, 2012). Although there has been considerable discussion of stories, there has been relatively less discussion of what ‘stories’ look like in the Islamicate world. What would it look like if we examined the acts of transmission and storying that have given shape to the world of Islam? Thinking in terms of riwâya (events transmitted orally, but with a meaning that can be linked to stories, rumors, or tales) (Leder, 2012), qisas al-anbiya (stories of the prophets) (Nagel, 2012), or any number of other genres would greatly enrich how many geographers are already thinking about stories.

Here, however, we may encounter the tension between the diverse ways that Muslims articulate their sense of being Muslim and the different ways that scholars study those practices. This tension – between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ perspectives – is not unique to our discipline; nor is it something that can be adequately discussed here. But reading Sidaway's contribution, I was reminded of Shahzad Bashir's recent project, A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures (2022). There, Bashir refuses to privilege between ‘Muslim’ and ‘non-Muslim’ ways of knowing Islam, arguing instead ‘that Islam is made by Muslims and non-Muslims alike’. The digital project – a constellation of different essays open to many possible figurations – thus seeks to make visible an argument that Islam ‘is represented best by positing links that come into being and dissolve rather than as a system amenable to mapping’ (Bashir, 2022: Introduction). Perhaps a critical Muslim geographies might be imagined in a similar spirit: neither only critical geographies produced by self-identified Muslim scholars nor just reflexive geographies about Muslims produced by scholars who don’t necessarily identify as Muslim but as a case of both/and, formed through links and partnerships that are woven into a tradition of Islam without insisting on a single form.

Here, I was also reminded of Taymiya Zaman's (2020) incisive critique of the gendered absences in Shahab Ahmed's What Is Islam? Rather than obsess over the ‘correct’ version of the past – an obsession that tends to exclude already marginalized voices and experiences from the history of Islam – she argues that ‘the multidimensionality of the past means that excellent historical work is possible without requiring an airtight definition of Islam to propel its analytic trajectory’. Zaman maintains that ‘studying pasts’ and, I would argue, geographies, ‘on their own shifting terms allows analytic categories to emerge from our sources and to remain open to reinterpretation, introspection, and reframing’ (2020: 216).

By way of conclusion

When he passed away in 1986, Ahmet Süheyl Ünver was, among other identities, an artist, doctor, writer, teacher, and Muslim. But his Muslim identity – that geography of self and faith – was neither fixed nor stable. Being Muslim was not the result of simply being born in Istanbul nor was it some essential quality of ‘Turks’. Ünver's Islam was worldly, at once situated in his time and place and drawing its strength from connections to other wheres and other whens. Sidaway's article has helped me to think of Ünver's Muslim geography in new conjunctions and new conversations, and I hope that this commentary has pointed out more paths that may be walked.