Browsing by Subject "Islamic studies"

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 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.

The politics of Muslim sainthood has been a joint enterprise between anthropology and history. Scholarship specifically investigating the political stakes of Sufism has manifested itself in theoretical models of the politically-activist Sufi developed in anthropology, which are often taken up in history. In history, this has given rise in particular to a rich body of scholarship across several geographical contexts, offering substantive work on the role of particular Sufi orders, institutional arrangements, personalities, and doctrinal dispositions to motivate political activism. Geographically, historical scholarship on Sufism and politics in the modern period has primarily drawn from colonial case studies, offering rich insights from Muslim South Asia in the British colonial context, and from the Islamic Maghrib and West Africa in the French colonial context. Yet this body of literature is largely synchronic in its scope; while it offers major contributions to the study of Sufism in a narrow geographical context and time period, it rarely offers connections between geographies or historical periods.

My dissertation instead offers a diachronic study of the politics of Sufism, using the contemporary period (modern Syria) to offer deeper interventions into the history of Sufism beyond Syrian borders. Using the tools of ethnographic history, I ultimately argue that the historiographies of two otherwise distinct regions (Syria and the Maghrib) should be viewed as deeply interconnected. Through ethnographic fieldwork with Syrian Sufi scholars in exile, across three field sites (Morocco, Jordan, and Turkey), I investigate the involvement of a particular tradition of Syrian Sufism, the Shadhili-Fasi tradition, in the 2011 Syrian Revolution. In particular, I focus on the movement of the Damascene Shadhili master Shaykh Muhammad Abu ʼl Huda al-Yaqoubi, the first of the Syrian religious scholars to support the Revolution in 2011. Then, combining ethnography with archival research using an array of materials collected from these scholars’ private libraries – including biographical sources, unpublished litanies, and poetry – I trace the historical trajectory of this tradition from its roots in colonial Algeria and Morocco. I employ mobility as a theoretical architecture to explore how this tradition, despite having been properly indigenized in Syria since the late 19th-century, continues to invoke distinctly North African spiritual tropes to inspire political activism. More specifically, I argue that Syrian Sufis mobilize geographical proximity to the Prophet Muhammad, an otherwise North African spiritual trope, as a basis of spiritual and political authority. While otherwise committed to restraint and incrementalism, Syrian Sufi currents turn to revolutionary thought from their Maghribi ancestors in moments of crisis.

In the history of Christian-Muslim relations, the rise of Islam and its encounter with Christianity is often characterized as the competition between two missionary religions, but this is a narrative formed by Western Christianity’s engagement with Islam long after Islam’s formation. It represents an anachronistic understanding of how Christians and Muslims viewed and related to one another in the formational period of Islam. In particular, it neglects the history of Syriac Christians who lived amidst Muslims in the first centuries of Islam’s existence, and therefore a significant part of the earliest engagement between Muslims and Christians has effectively been a lost history. When works on Islam recognize the presence of Syriac Christians (Eastern, non-Chalcedonian Christians), it is generally confined to two areas: their work in translating philosophical and scientific texts into Arabic during the golden age of Islam, and their status as ahl al-dhimmah (protected people). There remains a gap in our understanding of the relationship they had with one another and how this may have shaped each religion’s self-understanding as they navigated a new form of religious pluralism. This study examines the Church of the East and its relation to Islam in the 7th to 9th centuries CE. This will help flesh out our understanding of Christianity’s early relationship to Islam through the lens of the Church of the East with the hope that it may help inform relational possibilities between followers of these religions today.