Metaphysical Institutions: Islam and the Modern Project (forthcoming from SUNY Press March 2024)

Preorder available: https://sunypress.edu/Books/M/Metaphysical-Institutions

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: Institutions

Chapter 1: What Kind of Thing is Islam?

Chapter 2: The Nature of Institutions and Shared Thinking

Section I: Necessary and Universal Parameters

Section II: Empirical Variation

Section III: The Outside of Institutions

Part II: Metaphysics

Chapter 3: The Metaphysics of Antidualism

Chapter 4: The Metaphysics of Meaning

Chapter 5: The Metaphysics of Paradox

Part III: Islam and the Modern Project

Chapter 6: The Language Analogy

Chapter 7: Project and Tradition

Chapter 8: One Islam, Many Islams, or No Islam?

Conclusion: The Sighted Men and the Elephant

Introduction

What is real, possible, and good when it comes to human beings sharing thinking about the real, the possible, and the good? In this book, these ultimate questions will be explored on their own terms, and will be made particular through a question that is often limited to history, anthropology, and religious studies, namely, “What is Islam?” This latter topic continues to attract a great deal of scholarly attention oriented toward establishing a “useful concept” of Islam or a guideline by which to judge something “Islamic,” but it has deep metaphysical implications far beyond this definitional question’s relevance to any particular research program. At root, the work at hand is both a philosophical treatise about shared thinking that uses the encounter between the Modern Project and Islam as an illustrative example, and also an exploration of the conceptualization of Islam in light of the metaphysics of consciousness and meaning.

The most common and consequential concepts scholars use to explore and conceptualize Islam are religion, culture, civilization, and tradition, but what are they? Islam itself is said to be one or more of them. They are the most basic, underlying ideas used to classify things as Islamic or not, yet one finds little consensus across the relevant fields in the humanities and social sciences as to what belongs in what category. Is some practice religious or cultural? Is some idea Islamic religion or Islamic civilization? Is Islam as a whole better thought of as a tradition or a religion? Disagreements about such questions are the rule, and convergence the exception. Furthermore, one cannot get around such divergences by resorting to more well-theorized versions of ideas like culture, religion, civilization, and tradition in the academic disciplines that are devoted to them, because one finds that these ubiquitous and essential ideas have remained undefined and seemingly undefinable (or have too many definitions, which amounts to the same problem) for well over half a century, with no clear path forward for how to improve the situation.

This definitional problem reveals deeper philosophical questions. When human beings in the modern world want to name their most ultimate sense of belonging, or their collective state of wisdom and maturity, it is these ideas they reach for, yet even in academic scholarship the concepts culture, religion, civilization, and tradition remain at the level of folk-knowledge and are not well-defined, partly because these kinds of realities are much more mysterious than commonly assumed, and partly because of a certain reticence to explore the deepest reasons why they are so hard to define. Not only can “we” not conceptualize Islam, “we” have yet to properly conceptualize the “we” that is doing the conceptualizing or to come to grips with the very nature of that collective act of conceptualization. What we all need, therefore, is a consistent, coherent, and comprehensive way of theorizing the nature of human beings in their act of thinking together and living as a conscious “we.”

This book develops a comprehensive theory of the institution (a surprisingly under-theorized concept itself) that incorporates the metaphysics of consciousness and demarcates both the necessary and empirically variable features of all institutions. It then expands this concept’s scope to include a category called metaphysical institutions: realities that constitute the social dimension of human beings navigating ultimate questions of what is real, what is possible, and what is good. The result is a universal rubric — the first time that this has been attempted — that enables one to navigate the conceptual space of the religious, the cultural, the civilizational, and the traditional. A persistent theme of the book is that many of the ambiguities and difficulties in existing theorizations of these ideas arise first and foremost from the way that we answer that most ultimate of questions: What is a human being? More specifically, how is the social element of human consciousness conceived?

The new model is put to use to analyze how the Modern Project thinks about Islam, touching on the relationship of authority and autonomy, rationality and imitation, the universal and the particular, and other important questions. The overall approach of the book is to delineate the parameters and dimensions of the conceptual space in which such questions can be systematically and transparently explored, by tackling universal problems of what it means for human beings to know, reason, create, and choose together, and makes these themes concrete by exploring the case of navigating the “Islamic” in the humanities and social sciences. Its central method is logical and conceptual, taking important terms that have been poorly theorized, or whose theorizations are irretrievably contested, and placing them into a framework that will allow us to situate them against a larger horizon, rather than trying to stop using them (which is unlikely) or adding even more definitions to the pile (which is pointless), thus enabling greater understanding of social reality as well as greater sophistication and clarity for work in various fields.

At root this work is a philosophical treatise about ultimate questions, but one which simultaneously contributes to certain theoretical debates in various fields in the humanities and social sciences, as it engages existing viewpoints while offering its own solution to questions about the relationship of subjectivity and objectivity, essentialism and anti-essentialism, dynamism and change, and the interests of power versus the motives of purpose. In part it does this by drawing upon certain logical and metaphysical insights from within Islamic thought into a broader conversation, while also knocking down arbitrary walls between philosophy and the humanities and social sciences especially as far as Islamic studies is concerned. Being “interdisciplinary,” as that term is used today, already presupposes a certain division of intellectual disciplines in the modern world that is a reflection of a deep fragmentation of human thought resulting from a series of philosophical decisions that began in the early modern period in Europe and which now is a defining feature of the Modern Project. The interdisciplinarity of this book taps the spirit of Islamic intellectual culture at its height, where historians write about the spiritual life, philosophers write Quran commentaries, jurists write mystic treatises, theologians explore logic, mathematicians write poems, and poets teach law. One should wander the landscape as if there were no borders when one can, since those boundaries are only where we imagine them to be.

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Chapter 1 (“What Kind of Thing is Islam?”) discusses the definitional hurdles related to the terms religion, culture, civilization, tradition, and institution, and brings out the underlying logical and metaphysical ambiguities that have plagued these concepts and the academic disciplines devoted to them for generations.

Chapter 2 (“The Nature of Institutions and Shared Thinking”) is a comprehensive presentation of the nature of institutions. Its three sections are meant to address the conceptual shortcomings described in Chapter 1. Section I sets out the necessary or invariant features of all institutions; Section II lays out the nature of the empirical or contingent variation that can exist within those invariant parameters; and Section III focuses on what institutions are not, namely, those realities that resemble some features of institutions but which must be distinguished from them.

Chapter 3 (“The Metaphysics of Antidualism”) is the first of three metaphysical chapters of Part II of the book. The chapter’s central theme is antidualism as a general metaphysical stance — sometimes referred to as materialism, physicalism, naturalism, or scientism — which makes the proper understanding of social reality impossible. This chapter begins to address the metaphysically laden concept of structure as well as the nature of basic validity claims related to rationality.

Chapter 4 (“The Metaphysics of Meaning”) turns to the nature of meaning and examines it in light of the model of institutions established in chapter 2, demonstrating that a conceptualization of human beings thinking together that attempts to remain within the strictures of antidualism can only be incoherent and self-undermining.

Chapter 5 (“The Metaphysics of Paradox”) discusses the nature of genuine paradox as it relates to consciousness and extends this to the nature of shared consciousness. The central theme of this chapter is that the difficulties of theorizing consciousness at the individual level do not disappear in the social domain, and that analytical clarity at the social level must take into account the difficulties of conceptualizing consciousness in the first place.

Chapter 6 (“The Language Analogy “) begins Part III of the book, taking the general picture established by Parts I and II and turning to the encounter between Islam and the Modern Project. It is an extended meditation on the nature of one language studying another, insofar as that encounter can be used as a template for understanding the relationship of metaphysical institutions with each other.

Chapter 7 (“Project and Tradition”) continues some of the themes of the language analogy from Chapter 6 by incorporating the question of how metaphysics bears upon the encounter of the Modern Project with Islam, and specifically how the Modern Project’s apex communities conceive of themselves as uniquely universal and how this self-image undermines its understanding of Islam and of itself.

Chapter 8 (“One Islam, Many Islams, or No Islam?”) brings the discussion to the academic humanities and social sciences. Against the backdrop of the conceptualization established in earlier chapters, it is a survey and evaluation of some of the most influential or representative attempts by modern scholars to conceptualize Islam.

The Conclusion (“The Sighted Men and the Elephant”) reflects upon how the ideas in this book can be used in the future, and how consideration of ultimate questions of the real, the possible, and the good must be a part of any useful discussion of human beings thinking together.

Readers can consult the end of each chapter to find a synopsis of the main points of that chapter.

Update:

I have decided to take the synopses at the end of each chapter and include them below. They mark the main claims and conclusions of the book’s argument.

Chapter 1: What Kind of Thing is Islam?

· The primary terms used to define Islam conceptually are religion, civilization, culture, and tradition. One or more members of this tetrad remain ultimate in all significant conceptualizations of Islam.

· In the several fields that have been devoted to their study, none of these four terms have an agreed upon definition, neither on their own nor in relation to each other.

· A lack of formal definitions for important ideas is not intrinsically wrong and is inevitable, but one should not use such unclear terms to make other ideas (such as Islam) more precise. Definitions are only as good as their most ambiguous term.

· Culture, civilization, religion, and tradition, which are the most central terms used to define Islam, remain folk concepts whose definitions at best serve to register received opinion by certain scholarly authorities.

· The existing definitions for this tetrad do not help scholars to classify phenomena into the categories of religion, culture, civilization, and tradition. They fail to include or exclude on their own but are changed on an ad hoc basis in keeping with a given scholar’s views.

· In light of this general definitional chaos, scholars need a general rubric or concept that allows one to discuss this tetrad (and related terms) in a way that overcomes previous definitional obstacles. That rubric will be the concept of the metaphysical institution.

· The concept of the institution itself remains poorly defined and under-theorized but is still useful because it brings one to the right domain of ideas and is neutral to many of the normative commitments that plague the terms of our tetrad.

· The realities we call institutions are much more paradoxical and mysterious than they may at first appear, which is why they persistently defy attempts to define and conceptualize them.

· To call an institution “metaphysical” is akin to calling a science “natural,” meaning it pertains to the metaphysical but is not itself metaphysics, which in all cases has become a difficult word to define and work with even though no better options currently exist.

· Metaphysics concerns ultimate questions of what is real, what is possible, and what is good — the domain of first principles, or ultimate presuppositions, or what one is always already always doing as a conscious being.

· Institutions of all kinds, in order to be correctly conceptualized, must be studied metaphysically, meaning, in terms of ultimate questions of what is real, possible, and good. Otherwise, one will remain mired in the same generations-long definitional dead-ends.

· Different modes of ambiguity have plagued previous definition of our tetrad of concepts. Such conceptualizations have either been too simple, too complicated, or poorly demarcated.

· One must therefore strive for theorizations of religion, culture, tradition, and civilization that are rich, clear, and targeted, not to replace these ideas by a single mono-concept but to make existing discussions more clear and future ones more fruitful.

Chapter 2: The Nature of Institutions and Shared Thinking

· While shared thinking has no separate faculties of its own apart from the individual thinkers that make it up, it is misleading to treat each human being as an atom that could exist without the sharing that is essential to any individual’s thinking.

· No I can be or become an I without also consciously participating in a we (in many different ones, in fact), and there can be no we except by virtue of the many realities in it who say I.

· The first of three rudimentary definitions of an institution is the following: An institution is an instance of shared thinking in a relationship of community, practice, and legacy.

· A community is a group of people defined by being those who know the right things and who do things the right way.

· A practice is defined by inheriting and bequeathing the right things and by being carried out by the right people.

· A legacy is that which is bequeathed and inherited by the right group of people doing things the right way.

· The three elements of community, practice, and legacy are mutually irreducible, mutually distinct, and mutually implicative — in a way that is conceptually akin to the three dimensions of bodily space.

· Mutual irreducibility means that all three terms are necessary to cover the conceptual space. Mutual distinctness means that the three do not conceptually overlap. Mutual implication means that each presupposes and implies the others.

· The second of three rudimentary definitions of an institution is this: An institution is an instance of shared thinking characterized by stability, dynamism, and purpose.

· Stability means that shared thinking is remembered, communicated, accessible. Dynamism means that shared thinking is created, changed, adapted, and intelligible in different contexts. Purpose means that shared thinking depends on moral authority, is tended, and is valued.

· An institution’s stability presupposes and requires dynamism and change; its dynamism presupposes and requires stability and purpose; and its purpose presupposes and requires stability and dynamism.

· A third of three rudimentary definitions of an institution is this: An institution is an instance of shared thinking constituted by certain accounts, heuristics, and norms

· Account is a technical term that can include descriptions, representations, facts, premises, axioms, presuppositions, or assumptions. Accounts are the institution’s know-what.

· Heuristic is a technical term that can include methods, templates, guidelines, techniques, theorems, procedures, processes, logics, recipes, or rules. Heuristics are an institution’s know-how.

· Norm is a technical term that can include values, standards, imperatives, maxims, purposes, goals, ideals, exemplars, or objectives. Norms are an institution’s know-why.

· Accounts, heuristics, and norms can be seen as analogous to a group of travelers 1) sharing knowledge of the journey’s terrain, 2) sharing the ability to navigate its route, and 3) sharing a sense of its worthwhile destination.

· These three definitional triads can be combined into a conceptual ennead in such a way as to maintain the qualities of mutual irreducibility, mutual distinctness, and mutual implication, even after each triad is refracted through the others.

· This multi-dimensional model of an institution is complex, coherent, and demarcates the relevant domain, and can scale from simple to complex institutions while maintaining the same logical principles.

· The full formulation of the features of an institution is thus the following: An institution is an instance of shared thinking in a relationship of community, practice, and legacy; characterized by stability, dynamism, and purpose; constituted by accounts, heuristics, and norms.

· Each of the nine necessary features of institutions is also a parameter that can vary empirically from institution to institution. All institutions have these features, but institutions vary empirically along many parameters.

· Within the parameter of community, institutions vary in terms of the kind of hierarchy they embody, ranging from relatively egalitarian to relatively elitist.

· Within the parameter of practice, institutions vary in terms of the balance between old and new expressions.

· Within the parameter of legacy, institutions vary in terms of the modality — the media or substrate — by which the legacy is bequeathed and inherited.

· In the case of institutional stability, the relevant variation is longevity and resilience.

· In the case of institutional dynamism, the relevant variation is how rigid or flexible the range of possibilities is.

· In the case of institutional purpose, the relevant variation is the kind of sincerity, solicitude, and prioritization people have for that institution, and its place in the entire lived life of human beings.

· When it comes to the triad of accounts, heuristics, and norms, the variation to be considered is between “showing” and “telling,” or between communicating by example and by instruction.

· Institutions must also be distinguished from what they are not. Other notions lie at the conceptual borders of institutions. These are nine ideas which are close to the ennead of concepts but which are not part of what makes an institution.

· A community disconnected from a practice and legacy is only an identity. Identities, unlike communities, do not place moral or intellectual conditions on the people who constitute them.

· A practice is done by the right people according to the right inheritance, but when severed from authority and legacy one has at most a routine or mere behavior.

· A legacy that is not legitimized by a practicing community is only a relic or an heirloom. Heirlooms, unlike true legacies, can only change hands and are not truly inherited or bequeathed as part of a practice.

· Stability in an institution, severed from its dynamism and purpose, is mere ossification or the inability to do anything else.

· Dynamism in an institution, severed from its stability and purpose, is pure plasticity, hoarding, metastasis, or a compulsion toward change.

· Purpose in an institution, severed from stability and dynamism, is nothing more than motives or incentives of various kind — either tyranny, egotism, greed, or another kind of impulse.

· Accounts severed from an institution’s heuristics and norms are mere assertions or passive biases.

· Heuristics severed from an institution’s accounts and norms are mere reflexes or compulsions.

· Norms severed from an institution’s accounts and heuristics are mere demands.

· Given the nature of this model, the term “institution” itself is contingent and can be replaced by any other placeholder. The key to the model is not the idiomatic sense of institution but the logical relations between its constituent concepts.

· Institutions can be nested or overlap in one or more of their features. One institution can be found entirely or partially within another, and when properly analyzed the combination of one institution into a larger one does not violate the conceptual rules of the rubric.

· Because of the way the three triads relate, using one of the triads instead of the full ennead retains many of the virtues of the definition. Each simple triad is a useful heuristic that enables one to access the entire complex multi-dimensional model.

· A culture, civilization, religion, or tradition is an instance of shared thinking with respect to ultimate questions, existing in a relationship of community, practice, and legacy; characterized by stability, dynamism, and purpose; and constituted by accounts, heuristics, and norms.

Chapter 3: The Metaphysics of Antidualism

· It is important to explore not only the analytical features of institutions but the metaphysical reality that makes them possible as real things in the world.

· Modern views towards consciousness are most precisely characterized as antidualist as opposed to monist, physicalist, materialist, or naturalistic when it comes to the reality of consciousness.

· Antidualism is a stance that is not doctrinally monist but rather stands against the possibility of any reality that stands outside the domain of whatever it is scientists study and deem to be real — often euphemistically called “material” or “physical.”

· The first of two kinds of antidualism is ontological or objective antidualism, which is an explicit description of human thinking as one ripple in a pattern of physical interactions, an arbitrary part of a larger structure.

· The second kind of antidualism is psycho-sociological or subjective antidualism, which sees human thinking as determined and constructed by cultural and social conditions à la Heidegger’s “Language speaks us.”

· Some philosophers have recognized the epistemic implications of antidualism and have attempted to formulate certain necessary validity claims for truth and meaning, but these almost always stop short at rejecting the metaphysical claims of antidualism.

· Antidualism must be abandoned and rejected in order to make any sense of the actual experience of shared thinking. The coupling of metaphysical antidualism and a methodological or folk dualism must be recognized for its consequential incoherence.

Chapter 4: The Metaphysics of Meaning

· In the various permutations of antidualism, “meaning” amounts to a hidden structure beneath the visible structure of expressions like human language, constituting a “structure-behind-structure.” Nothing outside this system can first “mean” or later “understand.”

· The relationship between the underlying structure called “meaning” and the apparent structure of expressions is either deterministic, random, or a combination of those two causal patterns. No other possibility exists within antidualist constraints.

· This structure-behind-structure metaphysics of consciousness renders all the necessary features of institutions impossible, because no deterministic/random causal nexus between meaning and expression can explain meaning and understanding.

· Ambiguity is a necessary and unavoidable feature of the acts of meaning and of understanding, and yet this ambiguity is in fact sufficiently overcome, which antidualism cannot explain.

· Context is usually cited as that which overcomes ambiguities, but context is a tapestry of meaningful forms that requires disambiguation, and thus it does not help us to overcome the logical dead-end of structure-behind-structure metaphysics.

· The structure-behind-structure model, and its deterministic and/or random causal nexus, cannot explain how institutions remain stable, how they change, or how they are oriented toward a purpose.

· Antidualism as a metaphysics and a method must be rejected in favor of a metaphysics of consciousness and a methodological stance that is neither antidualist/monist nor substance dualist, i.e., which neither reduces thinking to bodies nor consciousness to mere thinking.

· Institutions exist in a realm — a cross-section of reality — that is more than mere bodies but less than the total reality of consciousness, while at the same time presupposing the existence of both and being metaphysically dependent upon both.

Chapter 5: The Metaphysics of Paradox

· Consciousness is intrinsically puzzling and difficult to conceptualize, and inevitably accounts of it resort to paradox and mystery. Many well-known paradoxes related to consciousness continue to occupy philosophers in the modern world.

· Most accounts of the soul and its analogues in different traditions have focused on what this reality can do as opposed to what it is, but antidualism claims to have closed this gap and treats its own conceptualization of consciousness as filling in details.

· Despite its optimism, even the totalizing conception of antidualism recognizes difficulties such as the “hard problem of consciousness.” In the social realm, however, such philosophical difficulties are treated as unimportant or nonexistent.

· The paradoxes or difficulties that are recognized in serious conceptualizations of consciousness do not disappear at the social level but become even more consequential and intractable as one introduces the fact of human beings thinking together.

· One purpose of the logical principles of the model of institutions — mutual irreducibility, mutual distinctness, mutual implication — is to mitigate the logical hurdles of conceptualizing consciousness both at an individual and at a collective level.

· Against the background of an antidualist stance towards understanding social reality, terms like religion, culture, civilization, and tradition turn out to be figures of speech that mask certain irreducible ambiguities.

· Our model of institutions is thus a heuristic for disambiguating such figures of speech, since in actual use they necessarily refer to irreducible individual elements that can never be conceived of simultaneously.

· One reason that large institutions have been so difficult to conceptualize is that they remain modeled after outdated notions from physical science, especially the heuristic that large aggregates are more intelligible and predictable than their constituent unpredictable elements.

· Social sciences invert the practice of physical science by treating theorized entities such as metaphysical institutions as if they were directly experienced deterministic systems that provide empirical data from which extrapolations are made.

· Social science should begin from the fact that they deal first and foremost with mysterious entities (human beings) and build paradox and mystery into their conceptualizations of large collectivities. The “structure” metaphor should be abandoned.

Chapter 6: The Language Analogy

· Language is a particularly helpful example of an institution that can be used as a template for understanding certain key features of larger, more complex institutions such as religions.

· One can think of the “What is Islam” or “Is it Islamic?” question in light of two ways of exploring the question, “Is some utterance English?” namely, judging something’s correctness within an institution (is it good English?) versus identifying which institution it belongs to (is it English or German?).

· The definitions of words in any single language are irreducibly complex conceptualizations that cannot be reformulated as a single concept, and neither can one formulate a concept for sorting utterances into different languages.

· Choosing which language in which to locate an utterance is a completely different procedure from establishing its correctness in its language. Is an utterance bad English or is it German?

· Whether one is establishing Englishness as an attribute of correct utterances or as the fact of being an English utterance, one always relies upon the legitimizing moral authority of English speakers themselves (or those of another language).

· In living languages, the conceptualization of correct use is itself an instance of correct use, unlike the case with a dead language. Using language correctly implies using it creatively, and being creative in language use presupposes one is being correct.

· A language like English is characterized not by a single hierarchy of authority or a single elite, but multiple overlapping hierarchies such that “whose authority matters?” when determining correct use changes depending on the nature of the expression.

· By analogy to language, a metaphysical institution like the Islamic tradition can be examined such that “Islamic” refers both to correctness and to the fact of something being Islam as opposed to some other thing such as Christianity or the Modern Project.

· “Islamic” as an attribute is a highly ambiguous term that functions as a catch-all for a large spectrum of highly sophisticated evaluative categories that exist in Islamic law, theology, ethics, and spirituality.

· “Islamic” is also used interchangeably with certain modern terms such as “orthodox,” “mainstream,” “heretical,” “antinomian,” “heterodox,” “canonical,” “authoritative,” “conservative,” “sectarian,” which do not map well onto Islam’s own normative measures in various disciplines.

· All potentially Islamic things judged on their correctness must always be theorized individually, and thus their conceptualizations are irreducibly complex and fit into no single analytical definition.

· Both identifying the correctness of a potentially “Islamic” thing as well as identifying its place in Islam as opposed to in another institution presupposes the role of reliable authority, namely, the population designated as standard Muslims.

· To be correct in Islam requires being creative, and being creative is conditioned by being correct. Islamic intellectual, artistic, social, and spiritual life offers many examples of creativity disciplined by correctness and correctness sustained by creativity.

· Rather than being constituted by a single rigid hierarchy or an absence of hierarchy, the tradition has always had multiple overlapping hierarchies each of which is relevant to the various dimensions of the tradition.

· The conceptualization of “what is Islam?” can be thought of as an input-output procedure whose first input is the behavior of the population of standard Muslims and whose output is a concept such as “Islamic” or “un-Islamic.”

· The identification of the standard Muslim is at the root of any attempt to conceptualize Islam, regardless of whether the conceptualizer realizes this fact or not.

Chapter 7: Project and Tradition

· The identification of the standard Muslim can never be accomplished by any purely analytical procedure, but requires a pre-theoretical judgment of trust in the authority of certain human beings — namely standard Muslims themselves.

· The true logical form of all conceptualizations of a thing’s Islamic-ness is: What would a standard Muslim human being do with respect to this particular thing?

· Because one is necessarily conceptualizing certain human possibilities when conceptualizing Islam, the enterprise of conceptualizing Islam is in part a metaphysical question whether the conceptualizer realizes it or not.

· The Modern Project fails to understand that it is one metaphysical institution studying another because of its own idiosyncratic approach to ultimate questions and the nature of its own apex communities who deal with them.

· In Islam the apex communities dealing with ultimate questions (in kalām, uṣūl al-fiqh, taṣawwuf, ḥikmah/falsafah) are overlapping hierarchies with significant overlap in their practices and legacy.

· In the Modern Project, the apex communities of Science, Philosophy, and Art/Culture are discrete hierarchies that insist on the importance of separate legacies and practices for each community as a part of the autonomy of each.

· The autonomy and freedom from constraints at the core of the self-image of the Modern Project comes at the cost of trifurcating its apex communities, practices, and legacy from each other.

· The self-image of the Modern Project sees its practice and legacy as uniquely universal. Modern thinkers think, while Muslims think Islamically.

· The Project typically fails to see that its own allegedly universal practices and legacy are determined by provincial apex communities.

· When it comes to Islam, the Modern Project’s apex communities take it as axiomatic that the Project is not Islam, but these same communities (scientists, philosophers, culture creators) are never those who can or do “conceptualize” Islam.

· The academic subproject whose role in the Modern Project is to conceptualize Islam is constrained by their apex communities’ prior designation of who “we” are and that “we” are not Muslims. They have no power to change this status.

· The humanities and social science subproject functions, intentionally or otherwise, to maintain the universal-particular and superior-inferior imbalance in relation to Islam that the Modern Project sees as a defining trait and consequence of its unique universality.

· Sometimes Islam is conceptualized as less rational, less ethical, less imaginative than what is modern, but in other cases Islam is conceptualized as naively or tyrannically upholding the ideas truth, rationality, and goodness against the postmodern sophistications of the Project.

· In general, the Modern Project falsely sees itself as a meta-metaphysical-institution in relation to other such realities like Islam, akin to a chimerical meta-language (really only a special code within an existing language) with pretensions of being outside of natural language.

Chapter 8: One Islam, Many Islams, or No Islam?

· Marshal Hodgson’s demarcation in his The Venture of Islam between the Islamic and the Islamicate is a manifestation the intuitive folk-boundary between religion/tradition on the one hand and civilization/culture on the other.

· Shahab Ahmed’s What is Islam? relies on several profound misunderstandings about the nature of paradox and contradiction, rendering his conceptualization unusable, since one can call anything Islamic for any reason or for no reason at all.

· Talal Asad’s notion of Islam as a “discursive tradition” is circular since “tradition” is defined as “a set of discourses,” a conception that he applies to Islam unjustifiably by relying on Foucault’s ideas about the nature of knowledge and power.

· Both Asad’s notion of “discursive tradition” and S. Ahmed’s notion of “inherent contradiction” turn out to be different versions of the “Islam is whatever Muslims do” fallacy, despite the fact that both authors wish to reject that notion.

· Kevin Reinhart’s approach in Lived Islam is a thoroughgoing anti-essentialism that treats Islam as an object with “no ontology.” Islam is that which Muslims believe unites them i.e., Muslims do not believe the same thing but only believe that they do.

· Anti-essentialism, like relativism and skepticism, is never a real practice but is a form of performative self-contradiction whose very rejection of essences presupposes the very thing it claims to deny.

· The anti-essentialist claim with respect to Islam is also empirically self-undermining, since scholars must and in practice do presuppose and even describe a certain “core” that abides in various manifestations of Islam.

Conclusion: The Sighted Men and the Elephant

· Asking whether Islam is an institution is akin to asking whether a human being is a body. In one sense the answer is yes, but in another, clearly no. It depends on one’s ultimate assumptions about what human beings are and what the world is.

· For human beings to be already always situated in a metaphysical institution only leads to relativism when understood through a certain metaphysics. One’s metaphysics constitutes the very conditions for conceiving of anything real, possible, or good.

· How human beings living together reach the “destination” or state of civilization, culture, tradition, or religion is understood against the background of the metaphysical and historical picture in which this change or realization is believed to occur.

· Tradition and traditionalism differ from most contemporary interpretations in its view of metaphysics and history, which is based in the presence of the absolute and a notion of human fulfillment that is meaningful only in light of the presence of the sacred.

· Resorting to untranslated Islamic terms such as millah, ummah, niḥlah, dīn, and sunnah will not overcome the conceptual problems with our tetrad of terms, owing to the interconnected nature of global intellectual culture dominated by the Modern Project.

· The conceptualization in this book offers a heuristic for defragmentation, whereby one can see particular objects of study as aspects of larger institutional realities.

· It also offers a heuristic for disambiguation, whereby modifiers like religious and cultural are recognized as idioms that encompass many irreducibly complex realities.

· Finally, it offers a heuristic for metaphysics, whereby it reminds us of the role of ultimate assumptions as well as helping to displace misleading images such as “structure” and other misapplied metaphors from physical science.