Islam as One Thing, Anything, or Nothing

One cannot find a way out of this impasse in the temporal aspects of tradition Asad mentions regarding the past, present, and future. Any discourse will relate to a past, a present, and a future. How could it not? One could say that Islam is distinctive in being very old, being incredibly vast and variegated, and being likely to endure—that is, it has a long past, a massive present, and an open future—but these are merely differences in scope. One might say that Islam is a “long-standing discourse” or even a “megadiscourse.” But discourses are discourses, whether small or large. Reversing the phrase to say that Islam is a “traditional discourse” would solve no problems, since utilizing Asad’s own definition of “tradition,” one would produce the same result that was produced by unpacking “discursive tradition”—namely, “Islam is a discursive discourse.” 

It is crucial to note that Asad speaks of “discourses” using the technical sense established and developed by Michel Foucault and his epigones: “discourse” in this sense does not refer to everyday communications or debates. No one who reads the words “discursive” or “discourse” in the general neighborhood of Foucault should think of the idiomatic meaning of these words; one is dealing essentially with homonyms. Foucauldian “discourse” refers to the assertion of power through language, to mechanisms of control that are disguised as—or appear in the form of—rational practices. Power is the cause; ideas are the effect. “Discursive” refers not to the exchange of ideas qua ideas but to the way in which power constructs ideas—constructing not only this or that idea but also constructing the very subject who is taken to be the originator of those ideas.

Asad wants neither to deny the importance of orthodoxy nor to reduce orthodoxy to a set of doctrines, simplifications that he believes other anthropologists have fallen into. He says, “Orthodoxy is not a mere body of opinion but a distinctive relationship—a relationship of power to truth.” But the power he has in mind is not the power of the ideas qua ideas. Doctrines, teachings, and communications are potentially right, and therefore they can be persuasive or coherent or inspiring or satisfying, but Asad mentions none of these possibilities. Rather, orthodoxy is about the ability of “social, political, economic etc.” power to “regulate, uphold, require, or adjust.” Orthodoxy simply is that relationship of power, and not a body of opinions held to be orthodox. 

Yet Asad also emphasizes that the arguments and ideas in Islam (whatever such things as ideas really are) do not lack nuance and complexity and that traditional orthodoxy is not merely a set of simplistic commands established by a small group of rule makers. He notes that “reasons and arguments are intrinsic to traditional practice” (and here one must assume he means “practices proper to a set of discourses”), and so an anthropologist ought to describe and analyze those reasons and arguments. He goes on, “It is here that the analyst may discover a central modality of power, and of the resistance it encounters—for the process of arguing, of using the force of reason, at once presupposes and responds to the fact of resistance. Power, and resistance, are thus intrinsic to the development and exercise of any traditional practice.”¹⁴ The primacy of power runs through Asad’s overall construction of a concept of Islam, but it is not made clearly because it is marred by the initial redundancy and confusion around the concept of “tradition.”

Asad does not deny something he calls rationality in Islam, and he firmly rejects those who see Islam as “unchanging, repetitive, and non-rational,”¹⁵ but the question arises: What precisely does he mean by rationality? Let us recall the role of power. For Asad, the relevant power relationships are not unchanging, and they are not repetitive, either in the modern West or in the Islamic world. Therefore, one should expect that the subjects who are constructed by those evolving power relationships would not be unchanging or repetitive either—either in the West or in Islam. But change that comes randomly or deterministically is different from change that comes from the free choice of rational beings. Does “rationality” simply refer to the mere existence—the mere fact—of complex, nuanced, contentious arguments existing as things in the world? If so, that bare fact still would not tell us whether rationality was the product of random processes, or deterministic ones, or instead the product of actually free rational agents. One must specify which of those three options it is. Does “creativity” simply refer to the fact that there now exist ideas that did not exist before, or does it mean that a free being thought of something new in light of something old? In short, one must know and indeed always presuppose the answer to the question: What is a human being such that one can distinguish between a person being rational and a person being nonrational? 

When Asad defends Muslims against accusations of rigidity, imitation, repetitiveness, and ossification, it seems inescapable, in light of his own conception of discourse and traditions, that his argument amounts to this: “Islam’s constructed-by-power ideas are just as dynamic, varied, and sophisticated as the West’s constructed-by-power ideas.” One might agree with Asad about the comparability of the two civilizations’ dynamism, variation, and sophistication, but that is quite separate from the question of what constitutes ideas and arguments. And this is no trivial matter, since no version of Islam in any of its historical manifestations could accept the metaphysical presuppositions about human nature, knowledge, and morality embedded in Foucault’s notion of “discourse.” Would any Muslim, at any time in history (before the twentieth century, at least), accept that his rational and moral commitments were the result of power relationships in society constructing subjects who then form those commitments as a function of that power matrix and that that is all those commitments can be?

Can Islam Simply Be Whatever Muslims Do? 

Both Asad and Ahmed disavow the idea, common in academic Islamic studies, that “Islam is whatever Muslims do,” and they seem to recognize its incoherence (and, as we saw above, Hodgson makes statements both for and against such an idea, although most of what he says otherwise would not support such a notion). As Asad notes, 

The idea [Michael Gilsenan] adopts from anthropologists—that Islam is simply what Muslims everywhere say it is—will not do, if only because there are everywhere Muslims who say that what other people take to be Islam is not really Islam at all. This paradox cannot be resolved simply by saying that the claim as to what is Islam will be admitted by the anthropologist only where it applies to the informant’s own beliefs and practices, because it is generally impossible to define beliefs and practices in terms of an isolated subject. A Muslim’s beliefs about the beliefs and practices of others are his own beliefs.¹⁶

Yet both Asad and Ahmed salvage this fallacy’s essential impact, however unwittingly, by creating frameworks that render the fallacy not a fallacy in the first place. Their conceptions of Islam have the effect of merely changing the rules of the game, such that the fallacy of “Islam is whatever Muslims do”—that Muslims knowingly contradict each other in what counts as being normatively Islamic—no longer remains an obstacle to overcome.

Ahmed accomplishes this rule change by incorporating his expansive sense of “contradiction” into the very essence of Islam. The “inherent contradiction” of Islam means that the fact that different Muslims believe that other Muslims are wrong no longer matters, and indeed such opposition between Muslims serves as an affirmation of the fact of contradiction being inherent to Islam. “Islam is whatever Muslims do” can be recast, as informed by Ahmed’s conceptualization, as “Islam (with its dynamic of 'inherent contradiction') is whatever Muslims (who contradict each other about Islam) do.” There is no logical problem in saying that a dynamic of contradiction results from contradictory claims. In fact, contradiction is exactly what one would expect, and therefore there is no reason to even consider coherence as a factor.

Asad also changes the rules and rescues “Islam is whatever Muslims do” by casting all points of agreement and disagreement (and hence contradiction) as functions of power relationships. If orthodoxy is defined as these relationships of power, he argues, then the apparent disagreements are not really contradictions; rather, they are articulations and narratives that fulfill the needs of power and resistance. Power relationships are the province neither of agreement nor disagreement; power neither agrees nor disagrees. Rather, power is met with resistance in a push-and-pull struggle. One could call a certain collision of powers a “disagreement” but that would have to be understood through the lens of the concept of a “discourse.” Defining Islam as a “long-standing struggle of power and resistance by means of ideas” (which is what “discursive tradition” amounts to) thus paves the way for Islam to be thought of as the aggregate outcome of those relationships of power and resistance between human beings. Asad’s objection is less to a contradiction and more to what he terms oversimplification, the failure of anthropologists of Islam to account for the full nature of the power relationships and how they are expressed multifariously as “discourses.” For Asad, the manifestations of orthodoxy—which simply are those relationships of power—remain complex and nuanced. When one set of power relationships encounters resistance from other sets of such power relationships, it gives rise to formulations and narratives that themselves collide with each other, and this process, in turn, often gives rise to articulations that are extremely sophisticated. We commonly see those collisions of power and resistance as objective “disagreements” about right and wrong in which conceptions of truth and the good can have content that is not fully determined by relationships of power, but the concept of a “discourse” shows this stance to be naive. 

In short, Ahmed overcomes the fallacy of “Islam is whatever Muslims do” by baking contradiction into Islam, in essence arguing, “Not only is it Islam despite being contradictory; it is Islam because it is contradictory.” Asad overcomes the fallacy by dissolving the very concept of contradiction in a solvent of power relationships; he transcends (really, subverts) the dichotomy between contradiction and coherence altogether. Asad’s and Ahmed’s conceptualizations are logically equivalent to the formula “Islam is what Muslims do” because they both make it impossible to exclude anything a Muslim does from the category of Islam. (The necessary implication is that “Nothing a Muslim does isn’t Islam”—which is logically equivalent to “Islam is what Muslims do”—is also true.) 

This inability to exclude or set limits brings us to the absence of permanent moral and rational content in Islam. Rendering it impossible to exclude anything a Muslim does from Islam is an implicit declaration that Islam has no principles, and no permanent moral or rational substance, because not only is Islam whatever Muslims say it is—and Islam is whatever Muslims say it is for any reason or for no reason at all. Ahmed’s “inherent contradiction” is tantamount to a disavowal of all rational or moral principles, since principles have to include and exclude, and Ahmed’s conception excludes nothing. For Asad, the reasons are not reasons but the mere push and pull of power and resistance. Power neither has nor lacks principles; it is simply the wrong concept, like asking whether algebra is hot or cold. There is nothing independent of power that could be permanent or constant.

Antiessentialism 

Whatever restraint or caution about the fallacy of “Islam is whatever Muslims do” that one finds in authors such as Asad and Ahmed pales in comparison to Kevin Reinhart’s Lived Islam, which takes the antiessentialist approach to the question “What is Islam?” to its furthest extent. Not only is Islam not treated as the domain of the believer to decide its ideal or metaphysical form (Hodgson), and not only is it not a discourse (Asad), and not only is it not something to which contradiction is inherent (Ahmed), but it simply does not exist. Reinhart claims that it is a mistake to believe that “this set of practices and even creedal commitments that we call Islam constitutes a real object in the world.”¹⁷ One is confronted with “the variety of Islamic practice that confounds any kind of essentialism.”¹⁸

Reinhart presupposes the existence of a Muslim population but provides absolutely no criteria by which people can be included or excluded from this population other than the fact that these people feel they belong together, or that Reinhart does. He allows no objective criterion outside their own intuitions about being Muslim, saying things like “Muslims believe the term ‘Islam’ to be a profoundly meaningful one, and that the term ‘Muslim’ has an actual referent.”¹⁹ For him “Muslim” does not have such a referent, even though Muslims believe it does. Reinhart doesn’t say that Muslims believe in a divinity that doesn’t exist, but rather that they hold a set of beliefs that doesn’t really exist. They believe in a belief. Astonishingly, he believes that for Muslims, “the idea of a ritualized life is more potent than the actual prescriptions of the normative Islamic life.”²⁰ Muslims “imagine” themselves to be “religious kin,” and Islam is “conceived of as a set of symbols, principles, and practices.” Notice the distancing here: Islam is not a set of such things but at best is conceived of as such a set. This argument is akin to saying that English speakers speak English by virtue of “conceiving of” English as a language they all speak, not by virtue of actually being able to communicate with each other as speakers of the same language. 

In short, for Reinhart, Islam has no content (indeed no ontology), and it is enough that Muslims conceive of it as having content in order for them to belong together under the appellation “Muslim.” The only defining factor is that people should feel or imagine themselves to be a Muslim or believe that Islam exists and they all somehow belong to it. (They cannot even believe in some common thing. Rather, at most they all believe in the idea of a common thing.) What procedure might Reinhart use to determine that people “conceive of” Islam this way, or that they merely imagine themselves to be religious kin? What is the difference between “religious” kin and other kinds? It seems that Reinhart simply makes an assumption about who Muslims are and imputes to them these subjective states as a way of justifying his intuitions.

Anticipating the most obvious objection to this line of reasoning, he says, “To say, glibly, ‘Islam is universal, because Muslims all believe in the Qur’ān,’ is to miss the fact that the Qur’ān is variously understood and appropriated. It is affirmed by all Muslims and that affirmation unites Muslims, but it is also, like South Indian or South Alabaman English, locally inflected.”²¹ The statement of fact that all Muslims believe in the Qur’an cannot be dismissed as “glib.” To say that “the Qur’an is variously understood” and is “locally inflected,” which Muslims know already, and which has been known for centuries by anyone with even a passing knowledge of tafsīr (systematic Qur’an commentary) is one thing. But it is quite another matter to infer that this multivalence means the Qur’an fails to be universal for Muslims. Many passages of the Qur’an have been understood in a multitude of ways, while other passages have been understood in only a limited number of ways, and still others have been understood in one way only.²² This range of ranges of opinion—spanning unanimity and different degrees of disagreement—belies any assertion that the Qur’an can be understood in just any way whatsoever, which is a proposition that the antiessentialist must commit himself to. If one believes the Qur’an cannot mean certain things, then one has just espoused an essence. The Qur’an cannot mean simply anything, and even if some people wish to say it can, no one actually believes it can, including those who utter that claim. Reinhart himself essentializes the Qur’an when he speaks of its “austere God.”²³ Can “austere” mean whatever anyone wishes it to mean? 

Reinhart in fact points over and over to an essence—albeit a rather skimpy one in his view. He sees certain “core” Islamic practices and beliefs that “structurally give rise to, provoke, and create a space within which the rich dialect features of local Lived Islam can thrive.”²⁴ How can something that does not exist provoke anything? And if it “gives rise to” something, then it must precede, either temporally or logically, the thing to which it gives rise. Even so, Reinhart is mindful to emphasize how paltry “the Islam of texts” really is. He calls it a “religious Lean Cuisine” that is “really quite sparse.” Its “ritual thinness” is so thin, in fact, that it results in a “featureless plain” around which people can happily fill right in.²⁵ Textual Islam is “thin gruel,”²⁶ and a “lowest-common denominator.”²⁷ Whether these evaluations of cosmopolitan Islam’s “thinness” and “sparseness” hold up to the slightest scrutiny is beside the point, because they show that the antiessentialist assumes some stable core, however insubstantial it is imagined to be. That is all that is necessary to puncture antiessentialism. “The core is very small” is decisively different from “The core does not exist.”²⁸

Who Gets to Say, and Why? 

Despite often impressive erudition and empathy, Western academics attempting to “conceptualize Islam” fail, not usually on factual grounds (although that happens) but, crucially, on logical and even metaphysical ones. They miss something significant: that the only analytically tenable starting point (or at least necessary condition) for “conceptualizing Islam” is to identify the group of Muslims one takes to be standard—either globally or locally—and to theorize their practice and their legacy. This is not an insider-outsider question but a matter of understanding the nature of the realities idiomatically called religions, civilizations, cultures, or traditions. By their very nature such metaphysical institutions can only be fully theorized by identifying the authoritative community and how its members transmit a legacy through their lived practice—much the same way a living language’s correct use relies ultimately on the normative speakers of that language and not on any outside authority. What the approaches discussed above have in common are different degrees of avoidance of the unavoidable—namely, reliance on a standard community of Muslims to conceptualize Islam, however broadly or narrowly one conceives of that community. This avoidance is coupled with a presupposition that Muslims lack the ability to adequately conceptualize themselves and need to have it done for them by outsiders. 

This situation is akin to an English speaker conceptualizing German and also presuming to adjudicate correct and incorrect German, not by relying on some German-speaking authority but by articulating a “theory.” Not only is it logically impossible to theorize something called “Islam” without reference to what one considers a standard Muslim, but it is also highly questionable to presume that after fourteen hundred years one can come along and “conceptualize” it successfully where all others—especially Muslims themselves—have failed. English speakers tend not to have generations-long debates about the correct way to conceptualize German because they assume—and why would they not?—that the Germans have conceptualized their own language just fine. That Islam is believed to stand in need of being conceptualized at all, and for the purposes that are implied, thus raises serious intellectual and moral questions.