Shahab Ahmed

A great example of what passion and knowledge can accomplish, even when hindered by the horrors of contemporary academic-theory prose: What is Islam? should be read by everyone who cares about world affairs. It won't, because that contemporary academic-theory prose stuff is more than a little off-putting (random example, certainly not the worst case: "I would suggest that the creative energy that is invested and worked into the decoration and ornamentation of these implements of everyday lives of Muslims is precisely expressive of the diffusion of Islamic meaning through society in and as Con-Text--and as such is symptomatic of a particular valorization of everyday life as meaningful"). Ahmed's early death is grievous in and of itself; the fact that he might have written a shorter, clearer version of this book that, e.g., policy wonks and army generals could read makes it damaging to our world.

In short, this book is a reminder that 'Islam' need not be limited to the legalistic, fundamentalist, textualist 'religion' that many people understand by the name. Since Muhammad, Ahmed argues, Islam has mostly, and most often, been a project of interpretation--of Islam, of one's self, of one's fellow Muslims, and of the world at large. It interpreted all these things through the Koran, yes, but also through the cosmic order, and through the histories of Islamic societies. This means that the great Sufi poets, the great rulers, and the great philosophers are just as important and just as 'Islamic' as the great legal scholars and Koran commentaries and collections of Hadith. If everyone knew more about the 'Balkans-to-Bengal complex,' as Ahmed calls it, we would know this. Muslims would know more about Avicenna. Non-Muslims would be less bigoted. Both would be good things.

Now, the more purely academic stuff: we also gt a pretty good explanation of why you don't want to stress just structure or just agency when discussing social forms, because individuals and social structures create each other, and neither are analytically or ontologically primary. And a good explanation of why you can understand something by understanding the tensions and contradictions that make up that thing, rather than thinking that if a thing is contradictory it must be more than one thing.

The structure of the book is clear enough: introductory section, asking "is x Islamic?"; long middle section attacking other scholars' conceptions of Islam; concluding section explaining Ahmed's view at length and using it to interpret some Islamic artifacts and states of affairs. I heartily recommend everyone borrow this from the library and read the introductory section, and chapter five, where Ahmed lays out his own theory.… (mais)