Mind the Gap — The Textual, The Social, and Anglophone Islam

In Shahab Ahmed’s 2015 book, “What is Islam? — The Importance of Being Islamic”, he begins with a series of juxtapositions. How is it Islamic that Muslims not only drank wine, but valorised its drinking too — despite its prohibition? Is there anything Islamic about Mansur al-Hallaj’s statement, “I am the Truth”, a statement so blasphemous he was put to death for it, but nonetheless celebrated throughout history as an ultimate act of Islamic devotion? He continues in this vein, opening up through contradictions one of the most important works of Islamic Studies in recent decades.

I too, intend to begin with a juxtaposition.

When I was writing my own doctoral thesis, I drew heavily on the work of Clifford Geertz. I used his interpretive approach that focused on meaning and significance, but I also found his writing style valuable. He is, undoubtedly, amongst the great ethnographers, but he was also a scholar of Islam, and one whose studies are praised by Edward Said as an example of scholarship on Islam that is not Orientalist. He wrote about religion and rituals from the perspective of the the meaningful and the accessible. He spoke about the deep grammar that made the most peculiar practices intelligible. I was, and remain, an admirer of his work.

Shahab Ahmed however takes to Geertz more critically. He writes that in Geertz’s work on Indonesia and Morocco that “one is hard pressed to find in it any evidence that Geertz has actually taken into serious consideration a single written text from the intellectual tradition of either of these two countries” (2015, 249). Texts, for Shahab Ahmed, are not just “products” of a society, or luxuries for educated elites. They are the means by which Islam is. They are the ways in which people communicate who they are with each other. They are the bedrock of meaning. They are what make society possible.

Islam is, according to Ahmed, discursive engagement with the text, pre-text, and con-text. The reappearance of the word should tell how seriously he takes the idea of texts.

It is an important criticism he makes of Geertz, and social scientists more widely. How full, true, and substantive are Geertz’s descriptions and theorising of Islam if it doesn’t take into the account the texts Muslim read, teach, and share? Is it possible to comprehend contemporary America without also comprehending the formation, history, and application of its sacred constitution? Would a study of communism and socialism, in any of its complex manifestations, be taken seriously if the scholar hadn’t at least considered the role of Das Kapital? And can we pretend to know British Muslims unless we also look to their texts, not just the Quran, but the translations being read? The textbooks children study in mosques? The Islamic literature through which ordinary Muslims learn their religion?

I’d hope we would agree that the answer is, “no, we cannot”, but that the more relevant question is, how and to what extent?

But before allowing Shahab Ahmed’s criticism to pass, I must also turn the accusation around. In Ahmed’s magnus opus, which covers almost every aspect of Islam, law, philosophy, spirituality, the notion of religion, colonialism, linguistics, and more, in which he makes substantial claims and arguments about Muslims today, there is not a shred of evidence he undertook even a single day of fieldwork. He makes claims about how Muslims manifest their Islam, how they understand, how they know, how they talk, how the eat, drink, live, and die, how societies operate, about the everyday, and yet he does this solely off their texts. I’m sure his conversations, observations, and his living amongst Muslims influenced his ideas, but he did not at any point interrogate his experiences, reflect on them as a scholar, apply rigour and analysis to them in the same way a social scientist does of their days spent in the field.

This too is a serious methodological omission.

This is the gap then, a large one, between textual scholars of Islam and ethnographic ones. It is a gap that is reproduced in our scholarship across the board.

By way of brief illustration, I want to draw on last year’s British Association of Islamic Studies Conference. You could, like I did, attend a talk titled “Lost Property? God’s Speech as Divine Action in al-Māturīdī’s Kitāb al-tawḥīd” by Dr Ramon Harvey, followed by “The Mipsterz debate: Muslim women’s online self-representation” by Laura Mora.

What middle-ground is shared by these two talks? Both are about Islam, sure, but is that enough? Simply their topic? What is the wider scholarly project to which these two works contribute? One emerges out a textual approach, theologically minded, a revival of an interest in kalam. The other is sociologically grounded, using qualitative methods and concerned with the empirical realities of life.

This disciplinary gap can cause whiplash, as it did for me as I walked between these two lectures. I had to ask myself, why did I attend these two talks? How does this relate to my own scholarship? One answer might that they are two distinct interests. As a confessional Muslim, I had an interest in the textual, the historical, the theological. As a social scientist, I had an interest in the contemporary, the lived-realities of Muslims today. But this wasn’t a satisfactory answer, because in so far as I could tell, my interest in these two talks wasn’t separate. They both related to the same scholarly project for me.

In this talk, I’d like to argue that it is in fact possible to outline a concept that allows for a recontextualization of textual and social scholarship in relation to each other, and at the same time provide an agenda of study that can reveal more to us than current concepts in operation. The concept I’d like to introduce is that of Anglophone Islam.

To understand what I mean by Anglophone Islam, we have to return to Shahab Ahmed, and his own concept of the Balkans to Bengal Complex.

Is it Ramadan or Ramzan? Siyam or roza? Salah or Namaz? Jannah or Behest? Jahannum or duzuk? Despite Arabic being the language of the Quran, countless Muslims will use Persian-origin words to express key Islamic concepts. From the Balkans to the Bengal, and even further, to South East Asia, the influence of the Persian language is felt. This is visible too when you look at scholarship. Ghazali’s ihya ulum ad-din was written in Arabic, but kimiya-yi sa’ādat was written in Persian. Few Arabic poets are as celebrated as Rumi or Hafiz who, again, wrote in Persian.

For centuries, the lingua franca of Islam was not Arabic, it was farsi. Hodgson calls this civilizational expanse “Persianate”. Shahab Ahmed calls it the “Balkans to Bengal Complex”. Ahmed calls upon the notion of a paideia — a Greek term for the “syllabus” or “curriculum” in which a person is raised. Islam is, according to Ahmed, found in how these Muslims expressed, communicated, disagreed, and disavowed each other. Operating within a shared paradigm that was mutually intelligible. It is how he reconciles the contradictions of the Islamic “Gunpowder Empires”. It is not that Muslims in the Balkans to Bengals Complex recited poetry about wine, celebrated artists, and valorised Christian, Jewish, and Hindu saints in spite of their Islam, as Hodgson implies with his religion/culture distinction of Islamic and Islamicate, but because of their Islam. Ahmed’s conclusion is to forgo a strict creedal or normative understanding of Islam in favour of one that looks at processes, drawing on a discursive understanding of the tradition developed initially from Talal Asad.

Ahmed notes that the inhabitants of the Balkan to Bengal Complex would be raised on poetry of Layla and Majnun (star crossed lovers that make Romeo and Juliet look timid). The image of Majnun, devoted in the extreme to his Layla, is a repeated motif in art, prose, literature, and architecture. The story of Layla and Majnun also provided insight into how denizens of the Balkans to Bengal Complex understood love. But their readings also included philosophy, and so Ahmed observes how a poem recited by farm-workers would casually refer to Avicennan philosophy, Neo-Platonic emanationism, and Suhrawardian Illuminationism. This was part of their intellectual repertoire. He argues too, that the Balkans to Bengal Complex was a world where Sufism was the norm.

He challenges the trite orientalist trope of Sufis, spiritual but not religious types, as a minority who argued against the dogmatism and literalism of the legal elites. It was the complete opposite in the Balkans to Bengal Complex. Sufi antinomianism was the status quo, and the impassioned dogmatism of the legal scholars is the voice of a minority trying to place limits on what they saw as the religious excesses of the masses.

But what connected all of this was farsi.

Here, it’s important to emphasise, a linguistic primacy didn’t entail a geographic primacy. The Persian speakers in Turkey, Hindustan, the Maldives, never looked towards the Seljuks or Shiraz as somehow more sacred. Persian was not a foreign language, it was their own. Sheldon Pollock observes that there was more Persian literature produced during the Mughal Empire than from Persia itself during the same period.

So what I’m arguing is that perhaps, English presents a similar “field”. In Wales the term “Anglosphere” is used, usually disparagingly, to refer to the public sphere of English language. I’m suggesting something similar but broader. I am not the first to do so either, Sadek Hamid and Philip Lewis’ suggest the same: writing “for a new global generation of Muslims, English is the language for communication and knowledge transmission — or, arguably, the new Persian”

So what is Anglophone Islam? If we build on Shahab Ahmed’s argument, and Hamid and Lewis’ contention, then Anglophone Islam, to have parity with the Balkans to Bengal Complex, must be more than just a geographic and temporal arena in which English is spoken by Muslims. It must be a “a common paradigm of Islamic life and thought by which Muslims (and others) imagine, conceptualise, valorize, articulate, and give mutually-communicable meaning to their lives in terms of Islam”, one that manifests in a “discursive cannon, embedded in which is a conceptual vocabulary, an array of expressive motifs, and other mutually-held and/or mutually-translatable modes of valorization and self-articulation” (Ahmed 2015, 75).

Does such a “common paradigm” exist? I believe so, but to truly explore and answer that question requires a multidisciplinary approach, grounded in the textual and the social.

Anglophone Islam is, geographically speaking, spread across the English-speaking world, defined as those places in which English is the first language (Britain, North America, Australia) or spoken in some other capacity. This of course includes much of Europe, where literacy in English is high even when it is not a recognised language, but importantly, it also includes much of the Commonwealth. Anglophone Islam is the legacy of the British Empire, just as the Balkans to Bengal Complex owes much to the Mongol Empires.

The pull of the Anglosphere can be seen in the emphasis on translation. And here I use the term in its broadest sense. The movement across linguistic boundaries.

Dr Riyaz Timol, our local Tablighi Jamaat expert, has explored how a movement such as the Tablighi Jamaat has flourished in a new, British, context in his PhD. Haroon Sidat, just submitted, looks at the Deobandi Dars-i-Nizami syllabus and its journey (and change) as it reached the British Isles. International Muslim scholars of repute often invest in ways to make themselves accessible to English-speakers. Whether by learning English, like Muhammad al-Yacoubi, or by adopting an English-speaking protégé, like Abdullah Bin Bayyah and Hamza Yusuf. The investment of Muslim philanthropists into British universities studying Islam, whether the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World at Edinburgh, or Yousef Jameel and the Centre for the Study of Islam in the UK here at Cardiff, or Azman Hashim and his funding towards the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, underscores the pull of the Anglophone Islam — to be relevant to the Islamic world today needs one to be relevant in English.

Perhaps one of the most idiosyncratic features of Anglophone Islam is the digital. It can be accessed anywhere, and by anyone, through online content. And that too brings us to an interesting aspect. While the lecture and sermon has regularly featured as a part of Muslim practice, the digital age has allowed it to be preserved, recorded, redistributed, and consumed in an entirely new way. Do we have any doubt that Ibn Taymiyyah’s fiery sermons in Damascus, in which he descended the stairs of the pulpit emphatically stating “just I descend these stairs, so too does God descend from the heavens in the night”, a statement considered heretical by some, would have gone viral if only YouTube was around? This argument, about the digital oral practice of Islam, is something Laura Jones is exploring in more detail in her doctoral study on Ramadan, and features, in my view, as a unique dimension of Anglophone Islam. The world of online religion, studied by scholars such as Stephen Pihlaja, Gary Bunt, and most recently in an insightful, and at times unsettling, book by Hussein Kesvani, reminds us how fundamentally important “public spheres” are to religious practice. A current PhD by Laiqah Osman similarly takes to exploring religion online, but in particular, the construction of authority amongst Muslim women.

I am advocating for a study of “Anglophone Islam” over other alternative terms (such as American Islam, British Islam, European Islam etc…) because it more readily applies a meaningful boundary. The porous boundaries of the digital age especially undermine pre-existing nation state boundaries, but language remains a more concrete barrier. Is there much of a substantive difference between British Muslims and American Muslims? I struggle to see it. Because even when they disagree, they disagree on the same terms, within the same paradigm, the operate in the same complex. But is there a difference between the Anglophone Islamic paradigm and say that of South East Asia, I feel there is, though that argument would need to be made another day.

If we are to look for Anglophone Islam, then where to begin?

The emergence of a “discursive cannon” is a beginning. Ahmed calls this a paideia, but a simpler expression is to ask, what is the reading list of the Anglophone Muslim? What books or key texts do English-speaking Muslims learn Islam from? The exciting thing about this question, I believe, is that it is still emerging. The canon is being set and determined at this moment.

Students are educated on a range of translated texts, from Taleemul Huq and Behesti Zewar (Tablighi Jamaat staples) and original works such as “Islam: Beliefs and Teachings” by Ghulam Sarwar or “Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources” by Martin Lings. But to comprehend texts in practice, we need to broaden our horizons and include also the numerous pamphlets and booklets produced by Salafis, readily available and aimed at a lay audience, or the evangelical material of Zakir Naik or Ahmed Deedat. They may not be considered robust works of scholarship, but they are read, shared, consumed, and reproduced by Muslims. Likewise, they influence the parameters and conceptualisations of Muslims themselves. The influence of dawah material, for example, in shaping a “rationalist” approach to Islam amongst some Muslims, is notable. When Muslims say, for example, “modern science confirms Islam”, they’re revealing much about their epistemological world view. Anglophone Islam is not exclusively rationalist, but certainly it is an important part of the whole.

What else is being published though? There was a time that to study Islam deeply required learning a foreign language and going abroad. Increasingly, it is possible to embark on a study of Islam right here in the UK, and at times, without anything but rudimentary Arabic. Shaykh Abdal-Hakim Murad, aka Timothy Winters, makes such a point in his lecture “What is Islamic about Islamic Studies?” So alongside the introductory texts, browsing the shelves of the Islamic bookstore, you will find more advanced works. The writing of Wael Hallaq, Khalid Abu Fadl, Tariq Ramadan, or Sherman Jackson. The significance of these texts is that they express original, noteworthy, and substantive advances to Islamic thought and thinking, but do so primarily in the medium of English. Anglophone Muslims do not receive this scholarship second-hand through translation, but have immediate primary access to it. It is what was once called the “Muslim world” which must wait for the translation.

And what about a vocabulary? A tongue-in-cheek post by Hisham Mahmoud lists English words “monopolised” by Muslims. “Circumabulate” is top of the list, “supererogatory”, “ablution”, “revert”, “unit of prayer”, and even the “verily”. These English language terms but are becoming part of the lexicon of Anglophone Muslims. The humour in the post however conceals the emergence of a specific register used by Muslims to communicate religious ideas.

Another important term, and a very Anglophone one, is “religion” and “culture”. These two terms are central to Anglophone Islam’s self-conceptualisation. “That’s cultural, not religious”, or “I’m a Muslim religiously, but culturally British”. Speak to a Muslim with no English-language knowledge, and they would struggle to comprehend, let alone make, the same distinction. The “religion” and “culture” axis is a product of European secularisation of religion and modern categories, but it has been adopted by Anglophone Muslims as an important way to express their diverse identities.

Beyond a discursive cannon and an emerging vocabulary, we can also begin to explore the “common paradigms of Islamic life”. Foremost amongst this is certainly the experience of migration, the need to reproduce Islam in a new context, the dynamics of being a religious minority, and often living amongst their former colonisers.

My own research looks at the congregation. Nancy Ammerman argues that “wherever religious communities are in diaspora, something like a congregation can stand alongside families to sustain a religious tradition that gets little support from the rest of culture” (2009, 564). It is in some ways the simplest form of communal religious organisation possible. They typically are local (though the internet is challenging this), multi-generational, voluntary, hold wider affiliations but with the loci of authority within the congregation itself, they will also meet in some pre-determined way, according to some rhythm and calendar (religious or otherwise). I like, sometimes, to summarise it as “people doing religion together”, though importantly, much of what congregations do might not appear particularly religious (coffee mornings, meals out, movie nights). The congregation has a less pronounced role in the Middle-East, or South Asia, where other forms of religious organisations and institutions have prominence. But in the lands of Anglophone Islam, the congregation is the key communal mechanism by which religion is done, communicated, taught, and reinforced (with the exception of the family).

In the Balkans to Bengal Complex, the primary way of doing religion together was the tariqa. It was a form that emerged in the Anatolia in the 12th century according Hussein Yilmaz; and Shahab Ahmed traces the Balkans to Bengal Complex as being a paradigm that was in operation from 1350–1850, the two are, in my view, inextricably linked.

Whereas the tariqa is not a strong feature of Anglophone Islam, as our Islam-UK doctoral candidate Ayesha Khan explores; in Britain, “post tariqa Sufism” or “unaffiliated Sufis” are an emerging feature. These groups meet, organise, and behave much more like congregations than the tariqa of the past.

To explore and capture and understand the phenomenon of Anglophone Islam, if you agree with me that such a thing even exists, is naturally an inter-disciplinary project. It requires social scientists to consider the role of texts and their readings in the everyday lived experiences of Muslims. Likewise, it requires textual scholars to more readily engage qualitative and ethnographic methods when working with their texts.

So to return to the contradiction I opened with, what is the common thread between Mipsterz and Maturidi? They are both explorations of Anglophone Islam. Whether by excavating the theology of the past and making it accessible in English, as Ramon Harvey did, or by mining the ways in which Muslim women take ownership of their self-identity and representation, as Laura Mora did.

Likewise, both are engaged, indirectly, with the social and political challenges facing Muslims in the Anglophone context. Harvey’s re-visiting of kalam and early Muslim philosophy has value to Muslims contending with postmodernism, and Mora’s study of agency and femininity is an interrogation of existing caricatures of Muslim women in Western thought.

By configuring studies within the broader world of Anglophone Islam, I would hope it is possible to contextualise a broader range of scholarship on Islam in relation to each other, to see their common thread. Such a project doesn’t require a radical readjustment of what is already happening, but simply dispensing with some categories and instituting some new ones.

Likewise, I’d argue that by considering Anglophone Islam as a field relevant to understanding contemporary Islam and religion, we can be more attuned to important developments as scholars of British Muslim studies, and forgo increasingly irrelevant dichotomies such as Islamic and Islamicate, the Muslim World and the Western World, “minority fiqh” or “diaspora studies”, and embrace a concept for understanding Islam that is grounded in the empirical.

To close, I’d like to end with what I think is the strongest evidence that there is such a thing as Anglophone Islam.

The ghazal, a poetic form, can be found wherever Islam makes itself home. Originally Arabic, it became Persian, Turkish, Bengali. It is the Islamic form of poetry.

Its presence in English has been extremely limited, and often poorly executed. That is beginning to change however, as more Muslims take up English as their primary medium of expression. Agha Shahid Ali, in my view, has written one of the best English language Ghazals, one that continues the spirit of the originals, and illustrates my point well. It’s short, so I would close with it. The ghazal is titled “Tonight”.

Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight?
Whom else from rapture’s road will you expel tonight?

Those “Fabrics of Cashmere — ” “to make Me beautiful — ”
“Trinket” — to gem — “Me to adorn — How tell” — tonight?

I beg for haven: Prisons, let open your gates —
A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight.

God’s vintage loneliness has turned to vinegar —
All the archangels — their wings frozen — fell tonight.

Lord, cried out the idols, Don’t let us be broken;
Only we can convert the infidel tonight.

Mughal ceilings, let your mirrored convexities
multiply me at once under your spell tonight.

He’s freed some fire from ice in pity for Heaven.
He’s left open — for God — the doors of Hell tonight.

In the heart’s veined temple, all statues have been smashed.
No priest in saffron’s left to toll its knell tonight.

God, limit these punishments, there’s still Judgment Day —
I’m a mere sinner, I’m no infidel tonight.

Executioners near the woman at the window.
Damn you, Elijah, I’ll bless Jezebel tonight.

The hunt is over, and I hear the Call to Prayer
fade into that of the wounded gazelle tonight.

My rivals for your love — you’ve invited them all?
This is mere insult, this is no farewell tonight.

And I, Shahid, only am escaped to tell thee —
God sobs in my arms. Call me Ishmael tonight.

The final couplet does what every good Ghazal should do, introduce the name of the author. He is Shahid, his given name, but he also insists “Call me Ishmael tonight”. This line, like much of his Ghazal, refers back to the English literary canon. In this case, the opening lines of the most famous of English language novel, Moby Dick. But there is a second meaning too, the author reaffirms his identity, heritage, and religion as a Muslim. Call me Ishmael, the son of Abraham through which the Prophet Muhammad traces his lineage, and a spiritual ancestry that leads back to the Arabian Prophet, a lineage that is shared by the ghazal too.

This line, for me, is an example what Muslims in the Anglophone world are currently doing. They are drawing upon the literary, linguistic, historical, philosophical, political, and religious resources of the Anglophone world in order to produce something entirely of their own, their own expression of who they are.

This is, I believe, a seismic shift. A new chapter of Islamic history which we are witnessing, and likewise, a worthy project for scholars of religion, all of disciplines, to turn their attention too.

Thank you.