Browsing by Author "Moosa, Ebrahim"

With the revival of Imāmī or “Twelver” Shīʿa Islam in the Safavid Empire (1501- 1722) of Iran, histories of its clerical elite have emphasized the overt juridical mechanisms that they erected in support of their imperial project. Alternatively, many have also argued that gnostic counter-currents emerging in the same milieu reflected a wider disinterest in political activism. This dissertation provincializes the experience of the Safavid heartland to ask how Iranian émigré scholars working among the royal courts of the Deccan Sultanates (1490-1687) engineered an elite scholarly culture through alternative intellectual rubrics that were simultaneously gnostic in character and overtly political. Drawing on unstudied Arabic and Persian manuscripts trafficked within the Quṭbshāhī Sultanate of Golkonda-Hyderabad (1518-1687), I recover the intellectual career of one of these émigré scholars, Niẓām al-Dīn Aḥmad Gīlānī (b. 1585, d. after 1662), who forms the centerpiece of a nearly two-century story of evolving Shīʿī scholasticism in service of the state. Gīlānī’s intermittent sojourns between his homeland of Gilan, the academies of Safavid Iran, various courtly spaces in Mughal India, and his long-term home in the Deccan make him the perfect subject to refashion these territories into a contiguous intellectual terrain. In six chapters, I show how various medical, natural philosophical, and occult sciences practiced and theorized by Gīlānī and his colleagues as “Shīʿī naturalists” were not only legitimated by Muslim scripture, but were heavily patronized by Muslim rulers as a cornerstone of their political theologies. It demonstrates, furthermore, how Gīlānī’s mode of naturalist inquiry builds upon a speculative and

affective intimacy with non-human and non-Muslim others.

This dissertation explores the phenomenon of “religious doubt”, which has emerged in recent years as a pervasive concern in American Muslim communities and discourses. The dissertation takes a two-pronged approach: an analysis of American Muslim public discourses, and an ethnographic analysis of Muslims in Boston. Firstly, I analyze how the growing sense of a “crisis of faith”—and a framing of people’s ambivalence, uncertainty, and doctrinal dissent as a problem of “doubt”—can be traced to the convergence of American secularity and Muslim discursive constructions of “faith”. Secondly, through the narratives, reflections, and exchanges of my ethnographic interlocutors, I examine how faith and doubt are experienced and navigated by individuals. Through my attention to lived experience, I argue that there is a far more ambiguous relationship than has been generally assumed between two distinct senses or dimensions of “faith”: on the one hand, people’s mental conviction in authoritative doctrines; and on the other hand, a more general sense of religious commitment, as a moral-devotional relationship and aspiration. Standard assumptions about religion typically operate with a deeply intellectualist and reified model of religion that presumes a thoroughly heteronomous subject. Such models assume a linear movement in religious subjects, from mental conviction in the foundational claims of a religion, to assent in the myriad doctrines and precepts presumably demanded by the religion, to a commitment to live faithfully in accordance with these doctrines and precepts. What my ethnography ultimately highlights, however, is that people live out their sense of faith in a far more complex and messy fashion, such that their moral and devotional commitments to Islam do not so neatly line up with doctrinal affirmation in the way these linear models of religion assume. Finally, I argue that what is central to people’s navigation of faith is personal experience and experiential knowledge, which serve as the inescapable prism through which conviction, judgment, knowledge, and commitment are shaped.

This dissertation examines the construction of gendered legal subjects in the influential legal works of the eleventh century Ḥanafī jurist, Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Sarakhsī (d. 483 A.H./1090 C.E.). In particular, I explore how gendered subjects are imagined in legal matters pertaining to sexual desire. Through a close reading of several legal cases, I argue that gendered subjects in his legal work al-Mabsūṭ are constructed through an ontological framework that conceptualizes men as active and desiring and women as passive and desirable. This binary construal of gendered nature serves as a hermeneutical given in al-Sarakhsī’s legal argumentation and is produced through a phallocentric epistemology. Al-Sarakhsī’s discussions of desire and sexuality are mediated through the experience of the male body. While the dissertation endeavors to show the centrality of the active/passive binary in al-Sarakhsī’s legal reasoning, it also highlights the dissonances and fissures in the text’s construction of gendered subjects of desire. By tracing the intricacies of al-Sarakhsī’s legal reasoning, I note moments in which the text makes contradictory claims about gender and desire, as well as moments in which al-Sarakhsī must contend with realities that seemingly run up against his ontological framework. These moments in the text draw our attention to al-Sarakhsī’s active attempt at maintaining the coherence of the gendered ontology. I thus argue that the gendered ontology in al-Sarakhsī’s text is a legal fiction that both reflects his assumptions about gendered nature but is also constructed to rationalize legal precedence.

This dissertation asks how Moroccan scholars understood Islam's relationship to national territory in the twentieth century. It demonstrates how a genealogy of scholars adapted expansive theories of premodern Muslim imperial realms to the circumscribed Moroccan national territory that emerged in the early twentieth century. In the colonial period, Islamic law became a tool through which Muslim scholars argued for independent Moroccan sovereignty. It traces these discourses as they evolved into Morocco's postcolonial effort to incorporate neighboring territories, including Mauritania and the Western Sahara. It argues that this modern irredentism was part of a wider effort to frame the Moroccan nation-state by repurposing the Islamic political norms through which premodern Muslim empires governed in the region. This dissertation concludes by examining the decade after Morocco's 1975 occupation of the Western Sahara. This period saw the unfolding of a series of debates about the Moroccan king's gender and divinity. It shows that the king's body had become a metonymy for territory; and these debates were attempts to reconfigure the relationship between religion, land, and power in Morocco.

Contrary to later Muslim tradition, the first Muslims initially looked favorably upon assimilating Jewish and Christian religious and cultural practices. As Muslim collective religious identity conjoined with political power, Muslims changed their religious policy from imitation to distinction; they began to define themselves both above and against their arch-religious rivals. They visibly and publicly materialized their unique brand of monotheism into a distinct religious community.

This dissertation is the first attempt to map the Muslim religious discourse that expressed this deliberate turn away from Jews, Christians, and others across pre-modern Islamic history. First, I argue that this discourse functions as a prism through which to view the interplay of religion and politics; a key function of both empire and religion in a pre-modern Muslim context was to uphold hierarchical social distinctions. Next, I show that Muslims imagined these distinctions in very concrete terms. In contrast to conventional studies that emphasize the role of abstract doctrine in making Islam a distinct religion, this study highlights the aesthetic mediation of Muslim distinction through everyday quotidian practice such as dress, hairstyle, ritual, festivals, funerary rites, and bodily gestures - what Sigmund Freud has called, "The Narcissism of Minor Differences." These acts of distinction illustrate that Muslim religious identity was not shaped in a social and cultural vacuum; its construction overlapped with that of ethnicity, gender, class, and the even the human. What this study reveals, then, is how Muslims attempted to fashion more than just a distinct religion, but an ideal moral order, or social imaginary. In this robust Muslim social imaginary, human beings were mimetic creatures; becoming, or subject-formation, was inextricably related to belonging, being part of a community. Despite the conscious attempt of religious scholars to normalize Muslim distinction, this study contests that both elite and ordinary Muslims continued to imitate, and ultimately assimilate, foreign practices within a Near Eastern cultural landscape of sharedness.

Drawing upon approaches from religious studies, history, and anthropology, this interdisciplinary study foregrounds both text and theory. It interweaves theories of difference, imitation (mimesis), power, embodiment, semiotics and aesthetics with a broad range of Arabic literary texts spanning theology, law, Quranic exegesis, prophetic traditions, ethics, mysticism, historical chronicles, and biography. More specifically, this study highlights the critical role of prophetic utterances (hadith) in shaping the Islamic discourses of Shari'a and Sufism. It foregrounds the contributions of two pre-modern Damascene religious scholars in their historical contexts: the controversial Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), and the underappreciated Najm al-Din al-Ghazzi; (d. 1651), who authored a remarkable encyclopedia of mimesis and distinction hitherto ignored in both Euro-American and Islamic scholarship.

This dissertation examines the shape, substance, and staging of Muslim orthodoxy in British India, concentrating on how orthodox theologians survived colonial modernity by deploying sociological, discursive, psychic, and hermeneutical strategies. This dissertation is organized around Ashraf `Ali Thanvi (1863-1943), a leading Muslim theologian, mystic, and jurist of colonial India. Thanvi authored hundreds of original treatises, compiled texts, and works of commentary on doctrine and ritual, mystical experience, communal identity, and political theology. His collected letters, recorded conversations, and sermons were published within his lifetime and continue to instruct many contemporary South Asian Muslims. I closely read Thanvi's texts and situate them within two frameworks: the history of Indo-Muslim thought and the socio-political history of colonial India. Thanvi's hundreds of published treatises and sermons, continued citation within South Asian Islam, and widespread sufi fellowship make him one of the most compelling case studies for analyzing some of the key thematic concerns of Muslim orthodoxy, such as religious knowledge, self-discipline, sublimation of desire, regulation of gender, and communalist politics. My analyses demonstrate how orthodox scholars proliferated their theological, legal, and mystical teachings in order to make tradition relevant and authoritative in the public and private lives of many South Asian Muslims. Orthodox Islam not only survived colonial modernity, but also thrived in its ideological and social contexts.

This dissertation is an account of how contemporary Pakistani ulama grapple with their political realities and the Islamic state of Pakistan. The central conceptual question that scaffolds my dissertation is: How do Pakistani ulama negotiate tradition, authority and sovereignty with the Islamic Republic of Pakistan? In engaging with this issue, this dissertation employs a methodology that weds ethnography with rigorous textual analysis. The ulama that feature in this study belong to a variety of sectarian persuasions. The Sunni ulama are Deobandi and Barelvi; the Shia ulama in this study are Ithna Ashari.

In assessing the relationship between Pakistani ulama and their nation-state, I assert that the ulama's dialectical engagements with the state are best understood as a dexterous navigation between affirmation, critique, contestation and cultivation. In proposing this manner of thinking about Pakistani ulama's engagements with their state, I provide a more detailed and nuanced view of the ulama-state relationship compared to earlier works. While emphasizing Pakistani ulama's vitality and their impact on their state, this dissertation also draws attention to the manners in which the state impacts the ulama. It theorizes the subject formation of the ulama and asserts the importance of understanding the ulama as formed not just by the ethico-legal tradition in which they are trained but also by the state apparatus.

This dissertation is a critical exploration of certain authoritative discursive traditions on the limits of Islam in 19th century North India. It investigates specific moments when prominent Indian Muslim scholars articulated and contested the boundaries of what should and should not count as Islam. This study does not provide a chronological history of Islam in colonial India or that of Indian Muslim reform. Rather, it examines minute conjunctures of native debates and polemics in which the question of what knowledges, beliefs, and practices should constitute Islam was authoritatively contested. Taking 19th century Indian Muslim identity as its object of inquiry, it interrogates how the limits of identity and difference, the normative and the heretical, were battled out in centrally visible ways.

The set of illustrations that form the focus of this dissertation come from an ongoing polemic that erupted among some members of the Muslim intellectual elite in colonial India. At the heart of this polemic was the question of how one should understand the relationship between divine sovereignty, prophetic authority, and the limits of normative practice in everyday life. The rival protagonists of this polemic responded to this question in dramatically contrasting ways. One the one hand was a group of scholars whose conception of tradition pivoted on establishing the exceptionality of divine sovereignty. In order to achieve this task, they articulated an imaginary of Prophet Muhammad that emphasized his humanity and his subservience to the sovereign divine.

They also assailed ritual practices and everyday habits that in their view undermined divine sovereignty or that elevated the Prophet in a way that shed doubts on his humanity. One of the chief architects of this reform project was the early 19th century Indian Muslim thinker, Shâh Muhammad Ismâ`îl (d.1831). His reformist agenda was carried forward in the latter half of the century by the pioneers of the Deoband School, an Islamic seminary cum ideological formation established in the North Indian town of Deoband in 1867. Another group of influential North Indian Muslim scholars sharply challenged this movement of reform.

They argued that divine sovereignty was inseparable from the authority of the Prophet as the most charismatic and authorial being. In their view, divine and prophetic exceptionality mutually reinforced each other. Moreover, undermining the distinguished status of the Prophet by projecting him as a mere human who also happened to be a recipient of divine revelation represented anathema. As a corollary, these scholars vigorously defended rituals and everyday practices that served as a means to honor the Prophet's memory and charisma. This counter reformist movement was spearheaded by the influential Indian Muslim thinker Ahmad Razâ Khân (d.1921). He was the founder of the Barelvî School, another ideological group that flourished in late 19th century North India.

This dissertation describes these rival narratives of tradition and reform in South Asian Islam by focusing on three pivotal questions of doctrinal disagreement: 1) the limits of prophetic intercession (shafâ`at), 2) the limits of heretical innovation (bid`a), and 3) the limits of the Prophet's knowledge of the unknown (`ilm al-ghayb). It argues that these intra-Muslim contestations were animated by competing political theologies each of which generated discrete and competing imaginaries of law and boundaries of ritual practice.