Abstract
Irfan Ahmad’s (2017) Religion as Critique is a book I wish all pundits writing about Islam, most journalists and their readers in both the West and the “Muslim world,” and my own students would read. It pulls the rug under very common presumptions about Islam, particularly the relation of reason to revelation. Some of these claims about Islam, often repeated after events like the Danish cartoons or the Rushdie affair, are that Muslims respond to critique with violence, that they have not yet internalized Enlightenment reason and the need to question everything including their religious beliefs, which they blindly follow. Of course, as we know from Edward Said’s (1979) Orientalism, the power of this discourse does not lie in its truth; it is sustained by institutions and practices. Proving that such discourses are false, that they do not reflect reality, will not shatter these untruths or change worldviews. But, as a teacher, I cannot be but hopeful, for producing counter-discourses is all what we have, perhaps.
Against this discourse of Islam as opposed to reason and critique (exposed and rebutted in chap. 2), and building on Karl Jaspers’s work, Ahmad excavates another genealogy of critique, one that flourishes in the Axial Age (800–200BCE), rather than in the Enlightenment and its roots in the Reformation and Ancient Greece (chap. 3). It is a tradition anchored in Moses and the various prophets of that Axial Age, like the Buddha and Confucius, where “critique does not oppose religion; instead, it emanates from God” (16). In this tradition of critique, reason is not opposed to heart/body/affect, and it is not limited to scholars. Religion is itself a critique by Prophets of a particular order. Ahmad examines this tradition of critique mostly through the dialogue between the works of Islamic thinker Abul Ala Maududi (1903–79), founder of Jamaat-e-Islami in colonial India (chap. 4) and his “immanent” critics (chaps. 5 and 6). For Ahmad, Maududi’s thought and the responses it has triggered constitute an exemplary site to examine the Axial Age tradition of critique in action.
In this short intervention, I think about what counts as critique in Ahmad’s work, the Arabic and Urdu words that he glosses as critique, and the resonances of Ahmad’s Axial Age critique with Asad’s (1986) notion of orthodoxy in the Islamic tradition. I do so because every theoretical lens allows particular kinds of analysis, so thinking about Ahmad’s choice of using critique, as opposed to naqd and orthodoxy, allows us to see the gains of Ahmad’s notion of Islam as critique but also some of its historical and analytic risks.
Not any engagement, disagreement, or debate counts as critique, according to Ahmad. What “constitutes the basis on which to categorize a specific work as critique” is that it is based on the shariʿa, that is the Qurʾan and the Sunna (84). Thus, a critique is an engagement that speaks from within a tradition rather than claiming truth simply based on reason. It addresses the other as a practitioner of that tradition and seeks to interpellate him or her, by making a claim about the right practice, the right action, and the right character, according to the shariʿa. “The legitimacy, desirability, motive, function, mode, and goal of critique ought to speak to the yardstick of truth, which sharia ultimately is” (84). This kind of critique is easier to see in debates between Maududi and his critics, scholars who even though not always trained in the traditional madrasas, have a deep knowledgeable of the textual tradition. But Ahmad makes the case in his last chapter that this kind of engagement is also one people less versed in the tradition draw on. Thus, when a hawker criticizes the inhabitants of a rich neighborhood for not having a “firm faith in God and [not] following His message of inṣāf (justice) as conveyed to the Prophet Muhammad” (201), he is performing critique.
Beyond anchoring critique in a tradition, Ahmad also seeks to show that critique involves more than a contest of ideas. He boldly proposes to “restore critique to where it rightfully belongs: to life as it is intertwined with death” (19). In chapter 4 where he discusses the critiques of Maududi’s idea of the state, he elaborates on this provocative formulation. He describes how ideas, sentiments, mental conditions, types of knowledge, forms of authority, language capacity, motivations, the (un)sayable, notions about private and public, facial expression, hairstyle, conceptions of home, intellectual suppositions, political power, readings of past and future, tears, joy, and much else inform and are played out on the enterprise of critique…. This array of factors is nothing else but life in its entirety. (121–122)
Because critique in his intervention focuses on the existence of a connection between a view and the tradition and because he aims to demonstrate the presence of critique in Islam, Ahmad is mostly interested in the fact of critique, in the use of argument drawing on the tradition. He does not take us into a historicization of various arguments and their authoritativeness. A critique might stem from a minority or a new reading of the tradition, which might not appeal to the audience to which it is addressed. While Ahmad describes some of the ways critics of Maududi have criticized him and his arguments, Ahmad does not place either argument in relation to those that are already present in the Islamic tradition. While such analysis might not be necessary to prove Ahmad’s point of an Islamic critique, a historicization of these debates in relation to the tradition would help us understand the way these debates draw on the tradition and re-articulate it in the modern conditions under which they operate. Thinking about these modern transformations is not to say that Maududi’s is an “invented” tradition, but rather a refiguring of the Islamic tradition, whereby the same concepts now mean different things, and are used in combination with different sets of concepts.
Let me illustrate with an example. Maududi, explains Ahmad, saw “critique in full flower in the socio-political order presided over by Prophet Muhammad and his immediate successors. Of the many distinct features of that polity, an important one was ‘the complete freedom of critique [tanqīd] and freedom of expression’ for it was an ‘elected caliphate’ permeated with the ‘spirit of democracy’” (86). One of Maududi’s critics, which Ahmad describes in the next chapter, suggests that “Maududi’s idealization of the caliphate was overenthusiastic: The election of the first caliph, Abu Bakr was imperfect. He should have drafted a constitution” (143). In both accounts, Ahmad does not comment on these characterizations of the early Muslim rulers’ selection process as elections, and the rule of the Companions as democracy—terms that Muslim scholars of the postclassical age might have either not used or used in a very different meaning. Such reformulations of the tradition in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are common among Muslim reformers across the world, and a simple noting of these transformations and resonances across space (as expounded by the vast literature on modern Islam) would help put this critique in its historical context. Not only would such a historicization add a dimension to the tradition of critique (not only do Maududi and his critics disagree, they also reinterpret the tradition) and allow us to better understand Islamic tradition today, but it forces us to historicize the meanings of the terms “tanqīd” and “naqd,” which Ahmad renders as critique, in order to think of the way they themselves have been reconfigured in that period, in conversation with the Enlightenment tradition. 1
In Arabic, as Ahmad notes (83), naqd is defined as the “assaying (tamyīz) of coins and the extraction of the counterfeit ones.” To engage in naqd with a certain person (nāqada) is to debate them (nāqashah) (Lisān al-ʿArab). In the medieval period, Naqd was most famously associated with literary criticism (naqd al-shiʿr) and was predominantly concerned with the identification of genuine from spurious ancient Arab poetry. It was also extended to Hadith criticism, the process of sieving authentic from inauthentic sayings attributed to the Prophet (Heinrichs, 2012). In the realm of law, Muslim scholars in the medieval period penned many an epistle beginning with naqd, like Ibn Taymiyya’s Naqd Marātib al-Ijmāʿ (Distinguishing the Degrees of Consensus), where he comments on Ibn Ḥazm’s Degrees of Consensus. In this epistle, Ibn Taymiyya quotes passages from Ibn Hazm’s book with which he disagrees and provides a rebuttal to these points in the dialogic form of “He says/I say.” Here, Ibn Taymiyya is accepting Ibn Hazm’s assumptions and not subjecting the terms of the debate to critique (by for instance rejecting the notion of consensus), but rather disagreeing with Ibn Hazm on some claims. Therefore, Naqd Marātib al-Ijmāʿ would better be rendered in English as Distinguishing the Degrees of Consensus rather than a Critique of the Degrees of Consensus. While naqd in the medieval era appears to be mostly used in the sense of sieving, the main terms used for works engaging an opponent’s intellectual contributions are naqḍ (with a strong ḍ and not a soft d) and radd, refutation, rebuttal, and response. It is in the twentieth century that the term naqd comes to acquire a salience in titles of books and is used in the sense of Enlightenment critique. 2 Naqd, in modern use, is therefore not a term that represents an incommensurable tradition of critique.
I wonder then whether we could think of Ahmad’s Axial Age critique as equivalent to Asad’s notion of orthodoxy. Elaborating on an approach to the anthropology of Islam as a discursive tradition, Asad (1986) notes that: “Wherever Muslims have the power to regulate, uphold, require, or adjust correct practices, and to condemn, exclude, undermine, or replace incorrect ones, there is the domain of orthodoxy” (15). Asad’s emphasis here is, unlike Ahmad’s, on practices (like prayer or the refraining from gossip) rather than theories of the Islamic state or gender roles (the two main axes of critique of Maududi that Ahmad tackles) as he is trying to expand the notion of orthodoxy beyond the notion of a body of doctrine (elaborated by scholars). But Asad (1986) emphasizes that even trying to “win someone over for the willing performance of a traditional practice requires the use of argument and reason” (16). The arguments between Maududi and his critics are arguments about the correct interpretation of particular texts (in addition to the correct etiquette of critique, and the correct way of living as a Muslim, as I elaborate above). They are hence arguments about orthodoxy. Such a framing brings back the Axial Age mode of critique to a language of tradition and “religion,” reminding us that critique stems from a foundation. It allows us to remain attuned to the particularity of religious traditions, anchored in revelation and distinct from other social traditions. Calling Axial Age critique orthodoxy avoids collapsing religious critique with other forms of critique, which are not concerned with the good life of man, such as those concerned with uncovering the exercise of power or deep-seated assumptions (e.g., Foucault 1984). However, calling Axial Age critique a debate over orthodoxy would not pack the same political punch, and in this moment, such a political move might be the most responsible one.
Indeed, given the current climate of islamophobia and populist nationalism worldwide and especially in the subcontinent, Ahmad’s book shines light on the important contributions of Muslim thinkers and peoples to the making of what became India. It thus decenters Hindu nationalist constructions of India that imagine an original Hindu population in a national space that has existed since time immemorial. Like Anand Taneja’s Jinneology: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi (2017), it recovers a very different past than that imagined in post-partition India. For this, and for expounding an Islamic tradition of critique that provincializes Enlightenment reason, Ahmad’s Religion as Critique is a timely intervention of great political import.