Theorizing Islam

Disciplinary Deconstruction and Reconstruction

Aaron W. Hughes

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317545934
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The scholarly study of Islam has become ever more insular and apologetic. Academic Islamic Studies has tried to maintain a focus on truth, authenticity, experience and meaning and has effectively avoided discussion of larger social, cultural and ideological issues. Many scholars of Islam have presented themselves to their colleagues, the media and the public as the interpreters of Islam and have done so with an interpretation which tends, almost universally, to the liberal and egalitarian. The ignorance and hostility which the Islamic faith has faced since 9/11 has partly necessitated the taking of such a position. But, as Theorizing Islam argues, the issue remains that only one interpretation of Islam is generally being presented and, as with any interpretation, this has its own assumptions. The aim of Theorizing Islam is to explore the potential for a fuller, more honest and more sophisticated approach to both theory and methodology in the academic study of Islam.

1 The Scholarly Dream of Following Muhammad’s Footsteps

The years since 9/11 have witnessed the publication of a plethora of works examining the life and times of Muhammad, Islam’s prophet. Many of these books, with titles designed to inspire reverence in their readers, such as Memories of Muhammad and In the Footsteps of Muhammad, are less interested in the historical Muhammad and the methodological difficulties associated with reconstructing the early centuries of Islam than they are in writing hagiographies of a seventh-century individual and showing his relevance to contemporary concerns. To legitimate their reconstructions of Muhammad, all of the authors lay claim, in one way or another, to historical accuracy and textual fidelity. However, because they are largely uninterested in the philological or redactional problems associated with creating a, let alone the, historical Muhammad, many of these works present later and problematic sources as eyewitness accounts. In and of itself this might not be a problem: people are free to portray Muhammad in whatsoever ways they see fit (indeed, this is something that Muslims have been doing since Muhammad’s death in 632 CE). What concerns me is that virtually all of the authors of these books implicitly derive their authority from the academic discipline of Islamic Religious Studies and, concomitantly, they imply that those who do not share their views are biased or somehow lack adequate training.

Appeals to larger disciplinary frameworks—be they history or religious studies, including the selective use of their methodologies and objectives—may lend a certain legitimacy to these works, and their authors certainly use this to their advantage. Deriving their authority from their positioning in the field, e.g., their graduate-level training in Islamic studies at prestigious universities, their current institutional affiliations, their knowledge of Arabic and other Islamic languages, these scholars present to a more popular audience (the target audience of these books) the contested as uncontested, the mythic as historical, and the ideological as objective. The end result is that virtually all of these “hagiographies” provide subjective and highly apologetical accounts, but do so under the guise of objectivity. In so doing, these works further add to the largely descriptive and uncritical accounts of Islam currently manufactured by professional Islamicists in the North American academy (for a larger critique of whom see Hughes 2007: 72–92).

Perhaps not surprisingly, all of these works turn on the assumption that the “core” or “essence” of Islam is somehow embedded in Muhammad’s life, teaching, and response to a message signified by later generations as “divine.” By studying Muhammad, walking in his footsteps or tapping into the memories of later generations, as it were, this core or essence can be unlocked for the contemporary reader. This essentialist reading, as we shall see, works on the assumption that all that is good, peaceful, and egalitarian about the tradition (= its essence) derives from Muhammad’s authentic teaching and that this essence subsequently moves throughout history and is something to which later “good” Muslims subscribe. All that does not fit such a virtuous reading of Muhammad’s life and message can be dismissed and quite literally written off, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, as inauthentic or the product of a later interpretation, i.e., corruption, that does not adequately reflect Muhammad’s life as displayed in these biographical portrayals.

Adding to this apologetical agenda is the fact that these books are written for both Muslims and non-Muslims. Presumably, and using support from the authors’ introductory comments, this is to show both audiences that Islam, embodied in the constructed and imagined life of Muhammad (although presented as a faithful historical reconstruction), naturally coincides with modern liberal values. Those types of Muslims—the so-called “bad” Muslims or “terrorists”—not shown in these “authoritative” accounts of Muhammad’s life are, at worst, wrong or, at best, beyond the pale of “true” Islam.

This desire to write for a dual audience—insider and outsider, caretaker and critic—presupposes a shifting or erratic methodology and ultimately produces untenable conclusions. Yet, because both the Muslim and non-Muslim audiences targeted by these scholars are religious and largely non-scholarly, they can escape criticism for ideas and concepts that they could not present, at least in theory, if they were writing for scholars of Islam. Those who contest the largely unquestioned narratives presented in these books can be labeled as Orientalist or Islamophobic and their arguments, to quote Ernst, can and should remain “safely buried in obscure academic journals” (2003: 97). The arguments to which Ernst here refers are not those books that present Muhammad as a “terrorist” or Islam as an inherently evil religion (books that, incidentally, are easy to dismiss), but scholarly articles and monographs that seek to question the chronology of sources and help us rethink the nature and function of the “historical” Muhammad, whosoever he may have been.

The goal of this chapter is to group together and consider several of these recent books with the word “Muhammad” in the title. Written by diverse authors—from Karen Armstrong to Tariq Ramadan to Carl Ernst—these books seek to locate in Muhammad everything from the “real” Islam to spiritual teachings to guide humanity in the present to the antidote for interfaith misunderstandings. In what follows, I read and analyze these books as a genre in order to reflect upon their first principles, as such, and their unchecked assumptions and motivations.

The Hero as Prophet and the Prophet as Hero

Many of these works, whether they admit it or not, are predicated on the “great man” theory of history that was developed and made popular in the nineteenth century. In the opening pages of his On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, published in 1841, Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) writes

For, as I take it, Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world is, at bottom, the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world; the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these. (1993 [1884]: 1)

According to Carlyle, “great men” are largely responsible for driving history. Above and beyond their immediate historical moments, these great men, in the words of Robert Segal, “do not ultimately impose their will on history. They subordinate themselves to history, the course of which is set by God” (2000: 2). Closer to God, seeing reality for what it is, great men are the ones who have the capability to save society from itself and from the forces of evil or anomie that threaten it. Interestingly, Carlyle devotes a chapter in his seminal work to Muhammad. In “The Hero as Prophet,” he identifies Muhammad as an excellent example of the great man as a prophet:

Such a man is what we call an original man; he comes to us at first hand. A messenger he, sent from the Infinite Unknown with tiding to us. We may call him Poet, Prophet, God; —in one way or other, we all feel that the words he utters are as no other man’s words. Direct from the Inner Fact of things; —he lives, and has to live, in daily communion with that … God has made many revelations; but this man too, has not God made him, the latest and newest of all? The “inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding:” we must listen before all to him. (1993 [1841]: 40)

The works under discussion here, I argue, differ little from Carlyle’s discussion. Certainly they come from a different age and, as such, reflect a different understanding of Muhammad’s prophetic career than that of a nineteenth-century non-Muslim. However, like Carlyle they often foreground Muhammad, removing him from his immediate social and cultural milieux, and seek instead to show him as a “great man” of history, someone who paradoxically exists beyond its mere mundane or quotidian flow. History, in other words, cannot confine the perceived spiritual truths of Muhammad and this is why appeals must be made to ambiguous terms such as memory (in the case of Safi and Afsaruddin) or footsteps (in the case of Ramadan and Ernst). These ambiguous terms should immediately alert us to the fact that these authors are not interested in historical reconstruction, but in something else, something much more illusive and, as such, less historically verifiable. It seems to me that if these authors would admit that they are engaging in creative myth-making all would be fine. However, the fact that they claim to be offering scholarly treatments of Muhammad that fit with the sources of his life demands a critical response.

Yet, the “great man” of history, for the books under review here, extends far beyond even the lofty position that Carlyle had set for him. Muhammad now becomes a man unshackled by the historical, existing beyond history, a man whose teachings, to quote Ramadan, reveal “timeless spiritual teachings,” whose life is “strewn with events, situations and statements that point to the deepest spiritual edification” and whose biography “points to primary and eternal existential questions, and in this sense, his life is an initiation” (2007: x).

Muhammad: The Historical Paradox

The fact of the matter is that we know next to nothing about Muhammad. The main sources that we have for understanding his life emerge from the Qur’an and the subsequent biographical tradition. Yet, even these sources are highly problematic. Although the Qur’an—at least, according to the master narrative of the Islamic tradition—may offer us a set of insights into Muhammad’s life and times, it provides very few specifics. Within this context, it is also worth noting that modern scholars debate the dating of the final recension of the Qur’an. The biographies of Muhammad, as mentioned in the previous chapter, present a different set of problems. Primary is the fact that they were written roughly 150 to 200 years after his death. As a result, they are often highly stylized and largely uninterested in what we today call “history.” It is, thus, quite impossible to know how accurate they are. In addition to these biographies, there exists a body of literature comprising various sayings and deeds attributed to Muhammad, the so-called hadiths, but once again scholars contest how historically useful or accurate this material is.

There also exist several accounts of Muhammad that are found scattered in various Greek, Syriac, Armenian, and Hebrew sources. Again, however, most of these come from a later period (see Hoyland 1997). Despite the existence of such Arabic and non-Arabic sources, it is still virtually impossible to create a historically reliable biography of Mohammad. One scholar of Islamic origins sums up this situation accurately:

At present, the study of Muhammad, the founder of the Muslim community, is obviously caught in a dilemma. On the one hand, it is not possible to write a historical biography of the Prophet without being accused of using the sources uncritically, while on the other hand, when using the sources critically, it is simply not possible to write such a biography. (Motzki 2000: xiv)

This epistemological impasse, however, does not stop many scholars from trying to read these later sources back onto the earliest period. The majority opinion in Islamic Religious Studies, for better or worse, is to contend that even though the earliest sources of Islam may come from a later period, they nonetheless represent reasonably reliable accounts of the matters which they comment upon or describe. The biography (Sira) of Muhammad, for example, which dates to a couple of generations after his death, is held up as a reliable account of his life and times. Hadiths (the sayings of Muhammad) are accordingly considered to represent authentic accounts of the earliest period.

From a historical point of view, this is extremely problematic. The social and political upheavals associated with the rapid spread of Islam fatally compromise the earliest sources, according to many scholars who work in this period. These sources were written so long after the fact and with such distinct ideological or political agendas that they provide us with very little that is reliable or with which to reconstruct the period that they purport to describe (e.g., Wansbrough 1977a, 1977b; Crone and Cook 1979; Hawting 1999).

None of the books under analysis here is particularly interested in these debates over sources. How can they be when their operating assumption is to uncover the authentic Muhammad and establish his life as the paradigm for Muslim, and indeed non-Muslim, life today? To ward off “the improbable and idiosyncratic nature of a number of the conclusions arrived at by revisionists” (Afsaruddin 2008: xix), by whom she means those who are skeptical of reconstructing the early period, she opines that

There is no reason to prevent us from regarding this corpus of material as less than a largely reliable reflection and reconstruction of actual events in their own time as well as their later perception … despite the assertion of the minority rejectionist camp, which has based its contrarian position on its own rather tendentious reading of the sources and unsubstantiated speculations. The majority of careful and responsible scholars have not found this camp’s position unassailably convincing and the scholarly consensus remains that the traditional historical, biographical, and prosopographical works together constitute an invaluable and indispensable source for the study of the formative period of Islam. (xx; my italics)

Despite such a bold statement, however, Afsaruddin herself presents no compelling evidence to back up her claims. She is certainly correct to posit, what the works under review here support, that scholarly consensus regards these sources as historically accurate. This consensus, however, is based more on lethargy, on maintaining the status quo, and on apologetics than it is on solid evidence. Because they attempt to break out of the status quo, she labels those who disagree with her cynical “rejectionists,” whose “contrarian” nature is based on a series of “tendentious” readings. Cynicism, rejectionism, and contrarianism are, however, the hallmarks of sober scholarship and they neither emerge from nor reduce to tendentiousness.

To bypass the difficulties of reconstructing the early community of Muhammad, the works under discussion here employ a hermeneutic that replaces historical aporia with reading as many sources as possible. For example, Safi “consult[s] the widest range of sources about Muhammad” (2009: 17), Afsaruddin reads the later sources with “careful, judicious scrutiny” (2008: xx), Ramadan presents an account that “is strictly faithful to classical biographies (as far as facts and chronology are concerned)” (2007: xi), but nowhere mentions that these classical biographies date to much later generations. But even wide-ranging, judicious and/or faithful readings cannot miraculously transform later sources into early ones.

Surprisingly, though, given the fact that so many of these books either have the word “memory” in their title or invoke it, none of their authors is specifically interested in how memory not only carries Muhammad, but actually creates him. Rather than argue, for example, that the only Muhammad that now exists does so solely in the memory of later generations, these works persist in pursuing the goal that, in the words of Safi, “the reader has every right … to be assured that the Muhammad presented and confronted here is authentic, real, and recognizable” (2009: 32).

Such assumptions impede nuance and analysis. One would think that the trope of memory would encourage these authors to eschew any attempt to reconstruct a period that is for all intents and purposes largely unreconstructable, and instead focus their energies on the intellectual work that Muhammad performs for subsequent generations. Memory, in other words, is not a historical source that aids in the reconstruction of the earliest period. It is, on the contrary, a collective mechanism that creates a series of Muhammads—often rival Muhammads who are themselves created in the image of rival Islams on display in the generations after Muhammad’s death.

Imagining the Historical Muhammad

Explicit in all of these attempts to write the “spiritual autobiography” of Muhammad is the desire to show the human face of Islam. In a Euro-American world that many perceive to be increasingly hostile to Islam and Muslims, the overarching goal of all these volumes is to normalize Islam, to make Muslims not so “other.” Again, I have no quarrel with this goal. I do, however, have a problem with the rhetoric employed in this endeavor and the fact that it is being done using “academic” authority.

In Tariq Ramadan’s In the Footsteps of Muhammad, for example, we encounter the following:

Because Muhammad’s life expressed the manifested and experienced essence of Islam’s message, getting to know the Prophet is a privileged means of acceding to the spiritual universe of Islam. From his birth to his death, the Messenger’s experience—devoid of any human tragic dimension—allies the call of faith, trial among people, humility, and the quest for peace with the One. (2007: 7)

Such phraseology—appeals to Muhammad’s experiences, his faith, his spirituality, his message of gender egalitarianism—is one of the hallmarks of this literature. The problem with such statements is that they ring loudly with theological overtones and they set the stage for a highly apologetical program. They are not objective accounts for the simple reason that we have no ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Islam and Religious Studies Post-9/11
• 1. The Scholarly Dream of Following Muhammad’s Footsteps
• 2. Another Painting on Islam’s Early Canvas
• 3. John Esposito and the Muslim Women
• 4. Toward a Reconfiguration of the Category “Muslim Women”
• 5. Reflections on Ernst and Martin’s Rethinking Islamic Studies
• 6. From Islamic Religious Studies to the “New Islamic Studies”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Name Index