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    The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change
    The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change
    The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change
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    The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change

    By Muhammad Qasim Zaman

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    From the cleric-led Iranian revolution to the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, many people have been surprised by what they see as the modern reemergence of an antimodern phenomenon. This book helps account for the increasingly visible public role of traditionally educated Muslim religious scholars (the `ulama) across contemporary Muslim societies. Muhammad Qasim Zaman describes the transformations the centuries-old culture and tradition of the `ulama have undergone in the modern era--transformations that underlie the new religious and political activism of these scholars. In doing so, it provides a new foundation for the comparative study of Islam, politics, and religious change in the contemporary world.


    While focusing primarily on Pakistan, Zaman takes a broad approach that considers the Taliban and the `ulama of Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, India, and the southern Philippines. He shows how their religious and political discourses have evolved in often unexpected but mutually reinforcing ways to redefine and enlarge the roles the `ulama play in society. Their discourses are informed by a longstanding religious tradition, of which they see themselves as the custodians. But these discourses are equally shaped by--and contribute in significant ways to--contemporary debates in the Muslim public sphere.


    This book offers the first sustained comparative perspective on the `ulama and their increasingly crucial religious and political activism. It shows how issues of religious authority are debated in contemporary Islam, how Islamic law and tradition are continuously negotiated in a rapidly changing world, and how the `ulama both react to and shape larger Islamic social trends. Introducing previously unexamined facets of religious and political thought in modern Islam, it clarifies the complex processes of religious change unfolding in the contemporary Muslim world and goes a long way toward explaining their vast social and political ramifications.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateDec 16, 2010
    ISBN9781400837519
    The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change
    Author

    Muhammad Qasim Zaman

    Muhammad Qasim Zaman is Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Religion, Princeton University. He is the author of Schooling Islam: Modern Muslim Education.

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      The Ulama in Contemporary Islam - Muhammad Qasim Zaman

      Cover: The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change by Muhammad Qasim Zaman.

      The Ulama in Contemporary Islam

      Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics

      Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori, Editors

      Diane Singerman, Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics, and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo

      Tone Bringa, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village

      Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics

      Bruce B. Lawrence, Shattering the Myth: Islam beyond Violence

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      Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam:

      Custodians of Change

      The Ulama in Contemporary Islam

      Custodians of Change

      Muhammad Qasim Zaman

      Princeton University Press

      Princeton and Oxford

      Copyright © 2002 by Princeton University Press

      Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

      Princeton, New Jersey 08540

      In The United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

      3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY

      All Rights Reserved

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Zaman, Muhammad Qasim.

      The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change /

      Muhammad Qasim Zaman.

      P. CM. — (Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics)

      Includes Bibliographical References and Index.

      ISBN 0-691-09680-5 (Cloth : ALK. Paper)

      1. Ulama. 2. Scholars, Muslim. I. Title. II. Series.

      BP185 .Z36 2002

      297.6'1—dc21 2002020127

      British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is Available

      This Book has been Composed in Sabon Typeface

      Printed on Acid-Free Paper. ∞

      www.pupress.princeton.edu

      Printed in the United States of America

      5 7 9 10 8 6 4

      ISBN-13: 978-0-691-13070-5 (pbk.)

      For Shaista, Zaynab, and Mustafa

      Contents

      Foreword

      Acknowledgments

      Introduction

      I

      Islamic Law and the ‘Ulama in Colonial India:A Legal Tradition in Transition

      II

      Constructions of Authority

      III

      The Rhetoric of Reform and the Religious Sphere

      IV

      Conceptions of the Islamic State

      V

      Refashioning Identities

      VI

      Religiopolitical Activism and the ‘Ulama:Comparative Perspectives

      Epilogue

      The ‘Ulama in the Twenty-First Century

      Notes

      Glossary

      Bibliography

      Index

      Foreword

      Throughout the Muslim-Majority world, advancing levels of education, greater ease of travel, and the rise of new communications media have contributed to the emergence of a public sphere—some call it the street—in which large numbers of people, and not just an educated, political, and economic elite, want a say in political and religious issues. The result has been increasing challenges to authoritarianism and fragmentation of authority.

      Many of the emerging new voices and the leaders of such movements claim to interpret basic religious texts, and they work in local or transnational contexts to shape religious movements intended to improve the human condition. However, like their counterparts in Poland’s solidarity movement and the liberation theology movements in Latin America, these new intellectuals and interpreters often lack theological and philosophical sophistication. Such leaders have often succeeded in capturing the imagination of large numbers of people, nonetheless.

      Other spokespersons represent a darker side of the fragmentation of authority. Usama bin Laden and his associates in al-Qa‘ida, including the Egyptian physician Ayman al-Zawahiri, are no match for Thomas Hobbes, Martin Heidegger, or Muhammad Iqbal. They have, however, emerged as the leaders of a tiny but lethal minority, and their interpretations of religious texts are heard throughout the world.

      Fascination with understanding these new interpreters has deflected attention from the role in the Muslim world of the ‘ulama, religious scholars with intensive training in religious texts and jurisprudence who have long sustained widespread respect as the guardians of the Islamic religious tradition. Such was their influence that successions of colonial regimes, including the British, French, and Dutch, vigorously sought to circumscribe their influence and curtail financial support for the institutions of religious learning in which they were trained. Autocrats throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia likewise sought to silence or co-opt them.

      The ‘ulama, often misleadingly portrayed as guardians of tradition who play a diminishing role in modern societies and who endeavor to ignore or disqualify anything new, nonetheless play a vital, albeit changing, role in the societies in which they participate. The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change offers a highly readable assessment of that role. Zaman focuses intensively on the role of the ‘ulama in British India and its successor independent states, India and Pakistan, but he also compares their changing role in South Asia with that of their counterparts in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and elsewhere. He shows that the religious and social views of the ‘ulama have as much disparity as the views of religious modernists, Islamists, and secularists. He also demonstrates how Islamic tradition in general, and interpretations of Islamic law, the shari‘a, in particular, are a process shaped through ongoing discussion and debate, rather than a fixed content.

      On the shifts in the context of ‘ulama discourse and practice during precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial rule and after the introduction of print technology, Zaman suggests that the critical question is not whether the authority of the ‘ulama has increased or decreased, but how that authority is constructed, argued, put on display, and constantly defended. Here as elsewhere, Zaman raises seminal questions that offer fresh perspectives on Islam in South Asia and on ideas of religious authority elsewhere in the Muslim world and in other religious traditions.

      The Ulama in Contemporary Islam is the first work to look comprehensively at the ‘ulama and their institutions of learning in both the colonial and postcolonial contexts, as well as at the subtle and nuanced relationships between what the ‘ulama say and do and the changing contexts of religiopolitical activism. In colonial India, the British saw precolonial Islamic and Hindu law as uncertain, unsystematic, and arbitrary—a characterization that might be equally applied to British colonial rule— so they sought to codify it. The results often were ironic. As Zaman shows, the ‘ulama altered shari‘a rules even after British-inspired codification. They also managed to subtly shape British efforts to reform (which in practice meant to control and regulate) the system of madrasa (mosque university) education. A major consequence of British rule was to redefine the function of the ‘ulama, creating the idea of religion as a specialty in which the ‘ulama had a particular authority in linking Islam’s past with the present and increasingly contributing to senses of community that transcend local social contexts.

      Earlier scholars have suggested that the ‘ulama turned away from issues of state and society during the colonial period and shifted their focus to personal moral qualities. The Ulama in Contemporary Islam indicates how this interpretation has deflected attention away from the growth of radical sectarianism that has characterized Pakistani religious life in the last three decades and from the rise of such movements as the Taliban in Afghanistan. As Zaman indicates, religiously sanctioned violence and the growing lists of martyrs contribute as much—though in a negative way— to a sense of community in both rural and urban contexts as do mosques, religious schooling, religious texts, and shared social background and economic interests.

      This highly original book offers fresh insight into the role of Islamic religious scholars in the modern world. It will shape for years to come how we understand religious tradition, sectarianism, religious knowledge and its carriers, and the diverse ways in which religious arguments are created and disseminated. Zaman’s accessible style and persuasive comparison of religious developments in South Asia with other parts of the Muslim world make this book a significant port of entry for anyone wishing to understand Islamic religious tradition and the modern social and political contexts in which it is elaborated and reproduced.

      Dale F. Eickelman

      James Piscatori

      Acknowledgments

      I have incurred many debts of gratitude while working on this book over the past several years. A generous fellowship funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and awarded by the Triangle South Asia Consortium’s Residency Program in South Asian Islam and the Greater Muslim World at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, provided me with the initial opportunity to begin sustained work on this project. Later, a fellowship funded by the Lilly Endowment at the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, enabled me to bring this book to completion in the inimitable environment provided by the Center. I am also grateful to Brown University for much support, especially in the form of a sabbatical leave, a grant from the Faculty Development Fund, and research support from the Robert Gale Noyes Endowment.

      At various stages in the research and writing of this book, many people have shared their wisdom and expertise with me, offering valuable advice, insight, and encouragement. Among them, I would especially like to mention Charles J. Adams, Engin D. Akarli, Zafar Ishaq Ansari, Arthur F. Buehler, Richard M. Eaton, Dale F. Eickelman, CarlW. Ernst, Marc Gabo-rieau, Mahmood Ahmad Ghazi, David Gilmartin, Sumit Guha, Wael B. Hallaq, Bruce B. Lawrence, Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, and John F. Richards. I should also like to thank John P. Reeder, Jr., and other colleagues at Brown University’s Department of Religious Studies for their encouragement, and Gail Tetreault and Kathleen Pappas for their assistance. None of this work would be possible, however, without the crucial assistance I have received from library personnel at a number of places, above all at Brown University, the National Humanities Center, Duke University, Harvard University, and the Islamic Research Institute, Islamabad. I thank all of these institutions and individuals, especially the late Ahmad Zafar of the Islamic Research Institute.

      An earlier draft of the entire book was read with exemplary sensitivity and thoroughness by Bruce Lawrence and David Gilmartin, both of whom, along with Carl Ernst, have been sources of crucial support over many years. Part of the title of this book is also based on a suggestion from Lawrence. The very helpful feedback provided by Dale Eickelman and Muhammad Khalid Masud has made this a better book than it would have been without the benefit of their advice. Mary Murrell, my editor at Princeton University Press, has expertly guided this book through the various stages of review and publication; I am deeply appreciative of her interest in this project and of her wise counsel all along. I also wish to thank Sara Lerner for her supervision of the production process, and Carolyn Bond for her superb work in copyediting the manuscript.

      Portions of the research on which this book is based were presented at conferences and as lectures at Duke University; the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; ÉÉcole des hautes éétudes en science sociales, Paris; Fondation maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris; Institut d’e´tudes politiques, Paris; Harvard University; McGill University; the Carolina Seminar in Comparative Islamic Studies, North Carolina; the National Humanities Center; and theWatson Institute for International Studies, Brown University. I wish to thank the organizers of these conferences and lectures for inviting me to present my work, and the participants for their comments and questions. I also thank Cambridge University Press for permission to include here revised versions of material I have previously published as the following articles: Sectarianism in Pakistan: The Radicalization of Shi‘i and Sunni Identities, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 32, no. 3 (July 1998); Religious Education and the Rhetoric of Reform: The Madrasa in British India and Pakistan, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 41, no. 2 (April 1999); and Arabic, the Arab Middle East, and the Definition of Muslim Identity in Twentieth Century India, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, third series, vol. 8, no. 1 (April 1998). With grateful acknowledgment to the publisher, I also draw on material published in Nation, Nationalism, and ‘Ulama: Hadith in Religiopolitical Debates in Twentieth Century India, Oriente Moderno vol. 21, no. 1 (2002).

      My family has been the source of much strength and comfort during the long gestation of this book. I am most grateful to them, but above all to Shaista Azizalam, for the love, patience, and understanding without which it would have been difficult and perhaps impossible to bring this work to completion. It is to Shaista, and to our children, Zaynab and Mustafa, that I dedicate this book.

      A Note on Transliteration and Spelling

      With the exception of the ‘ to signify the Arabic letter ‘ayn (as in ‘Uth-mani or shari‘a) and ’ to represent the hamza (as in Qur’an), diacritics are not used in this book. The hamza itself is only used when it occurs within a word (as in Qur’an) but not when it occurs at the end (thus ‘ulama, rather than ‘ulama’).With the notable exception of the term ‘ulama (singular: ‘alim), the plural forms are usually indicated by adding an s to the word in the singular, as in madrasas (rather than ma-daris) or fatwas (rather than fatawa). In the interest of consistency, the spellings of Arabic and Urdu words, and of Muslim names, follow the convention used for Arabic consonants by the International Journal of Middle East Studies.

      The Ulama in Contemporary Islam

      Introduction

      It has often been assumed that in the face of massive and unrelenting changes in the modern world, the traditionally educated Muslim religious scholars, the ‘ulama (singular: ‘alim),¹ have become utterly redundant, a mere relic of the past, as it were, and therefore of little interest to anyone seriously interested in understanding contemporary Muslim societies. Not very long ago, a somewhat similar attitude was common towards the role of religion in public life as a whole, though movements of religious revival, and not just in the Muslim world, have forced a major rethinking of such attitudes in recent years. The religiopolitical activism of the college- and university-educated, the professionals and the urban bourgeoisie—the Islamists, as they are often called—has now come to receive extensive attention; and thanks to their leadership of the Iranian revolution of 1979, so have the Shi‘i ‘ulama. But old assumptions have remained rather more entrenched in the case of the ‘ulama of the Sunni Muslim world. The new religious intellectuals² emerging in the Muslim public sphere undoubtedly merit close attention, and the contemporary Islamist movements continue to be in much need of sober analyses. The emphasis on relatively new and emerging intellectuals and activists should not, however, obscure the significance of a community of religious scholars that has existed in Muslim societies for more than a thousand years and, in recent decades, has also witnessed a resurgence of great moment.³ As increasingly prominent actors on the contemporary scene in Muslim societies, the ‘ulama—their transformations, their discourses, and their religiopolitical activism—can, indeed, only be neglected at the cost of ignoring or misunderstanding crucial facets of contemporary Islam and Muslim politics. The processes and consequences of social and religious change as they have shaped, and been shaped by, the ‘ulama are the subject of this book. The book focuses primarily on British India and Pakistan, but does so in a comparative framework, with extensive and sustained consideration of religious and political trends in a number of contemporary Muslim societies.

      The challenges and consequences of modernity have no doubt hit the ‘ulama hard. Mass higher education and the impact of print and other media have made deep inroads into the ‘ulama’s privileged access to authoritative religious knowledge,⁴ even as the reflexivity of modernity, that is, the need to constantly adapt existing forms of knowledge, institutions, and social relations to relentless flows of information, poses severe challenges to the credibility of their discourses.⁵ The modern bureaucratic state seeks to bring all areas of life under its regulation. And the transformative forces of global capitalism grow ever more relentless in undermining culturally rooted identities and social relations. How have the ‘ulama responded to these challenges, to the fragmentation of their authority, to the rapidly changing world around them?

      To the French sociologist Olivier Roy, "the ‘Islamic political imagination’ [of the ‘ulama] has endeavored to ignore or disqualify anything new. . . . The atemporality of the mullahs’ and ulamas’ discourse is striking to this day. History is something that must be endured; whatever is new is contingent and merits only a fatwa from time to time."⁶ On this view, the ‘ulama are the representatives par excellence of a religious tradition that is stagnant and, for all their glosses and commentaries on the texts that comprise this tradition, essentially anachronistic in the modern world. Their status might vary a great deal, ranging anywhere between a certain approximation to the social position of Westernized intellectuals on the one hand and the lumpen-intelligentsia on the other;⁷ but there is little evidence to temper the atemporality of their discourse or action.⁸

      Yet the ‘ulama have not only continued to respond—admittedly, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and success—to the challenges of changing times; they have also been successful in enhancing their influence in a number of contemporary Muslim societies, in broadening their audiences, in making significant contributions to public discourses, and even in setting the terms for such discourses. In many cases, they have also come to play significant religiopolitical activist roles in contemporary Islam. The ‘ulama’s institutions of learning have grown dramatically in recent decades. In Pakistan, there were less than 150 madrasas at the time of the establishment of the state in 1947; according to certain recent estimates, there are at present more than 2700 in the Punjab, the most populous of Pakistan’s four provinces, alone. The number of madrasa students in the Punjab has increased from 24,822 in 1960, to 81,134 in 1979, to 249,534 in 2001; that is, their number has multiplied by more than ten since 1960 alone.⁹ In several other contemporary states, both where Muslims constitute a numerical majority and where they are a minority, the ‘ulama in recent decades have grown increasingly prominent in society and politics. The case of Iran is, of course, the most striking example of the ‘ulama’s successful leadership of a revolutionary movement. But in Egypt too, where the millennium-old university, the Azhar, continues to be one of the most prestigious centers of Islamic learning, a new generation of politically activist ‘ulama has made its presence felt in the public arena. ‘Ulama in Saudi Arabia, in India, in Afghanistan, in the southern Philippines, and elsewhere in the Muslim world are a crucial part of the changes sweeping through these societies in increasingly significant, often unprecedented ways.

      The ‘Ulama and the Islamic Religious Tradition

      No categories require more careful handling these days, the ethicist Jeffrey Stout observes, "than tradition and modernity."¹⁰ Not long ago, contrasts between tradition and modernity were a convenient shorthand way of explaining what particular societies had to get rid of in order to become part of the modern world. Increasingly, however, such dichotomous constructions have given way, in academic writing at any rate, to a recognition that tradition is not a monolithic entity any more than modernity is; that appeals to tradition are not necessarily a way of opposing change but can equally facilitate change; that what passes for tradition is, not infrequently, of quite recent vintage; and that definitions of what constitutes tradition are often the product of bitter and continuing conflicts within a culture.¹¹

      With such caveats, can the concept of tradition be rescued from the role Western modernization theorists of an earlier generation¹²—or Muslim modernists, for that matter—assigned to it? Can it serve as an analytical tool in examining some of the competing discourses and conflicts in the Muslim public sphere, in listening to debates on issues of religious authority, in trying to understand how perceptions and imaginings of the past shape articulations of identity in the present? As a way of introducing some of the themes of this book, I propose to explore briefly the meaning and implications of this concept, both to show how we might try to understand major trends in contemporary Islam with reference to it and to suggest its relevance for our understanding of the ‘ulama, the Muslim religious scholars who are the subject of this book.

      Historian of religionWilliam Graham has argued that traditionalism ought to be seen as a defining feature of Islamic thought. This traditionalism consists, he says, not in some imagined atavism, regressivism, fatalism, or rejection of change and challenge, but rather in the conviction that a personally guaranteed connection with a model past, and especially with model persons, offers the only sound basis . . . for forming and reforming one’s society in any age.¹³ The traditionalism Graham considers characteristic of Islam is rooted in styles of authenticating the statements attributed to the Prophet Muhammad (or statements about his conduct and teachings as reported by his companions) by affixing to each of these statements a chain of transmission that goes back to him or to one of the other early authorities. Western scholars have usually characterized these discrete statements (hadith) as traditions of Muhammad. But the traditionalism of which Graham speaks is something broader in scope and significance: it is the recurrent effort by Muslims to articulate authority and evaluate claims to such authority by positing and reaffirming a connectedness to the past. Graham acknowledges that anchoring authority in efforts to establish a link with the past is not unique to Muslims, but he argues that this effort is nowhere more pervasive than in Islam, and that it is institutionalized here to an unparalleled degree. For instance, the emphasis on a personally guaranteed connection to a model past has, for centuries, remained the fundamental principle of validating the transmission of religious knowledge; it underlies genealogical claims to social standing; it is at the heart of the Shi‘i belief in the authority of the rightly guided and infallible imams; and it is the basis on which institutionalized Sufism, with its lineages of masters and disciples, rests.¹⁴

      Yet, while Graham shows how traditionalism informs religious authority in Islam, he does not give much attention to the concept of tradition itself.¹⁵ For that, we must turn to the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, whose conception of tradition, especially as mediated to Is-lamicists by the anthropologist Talal Asad, offers a potentially fruitful way of approaching and understanding Muslim institutions and discourses in the complexities of their development, change, and continuity.¹⁶

      To MacIntyre, tradition is, quite simply, an argument extended through time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined in terms of two kinds of conflict: those with critics and enemies external to the tradition who reject all or at least key parts of those fundamental agreements, and those internal, interpretative debates through which the meaning and rationale of the fundamental agreements come to be expressed and by whose progress a tradition is constituted.¹⁷ Traditions may be more or less successful in asking new questions or satisfactorily answering old ones, in meeting the challenges posed to their adherents and in adapting to change; but what remains key to their constitution as traditions is a history of argument and debate over certain fundamental doctrines in shared languages and styles of discourse.¹⁸

      The intellectual positions held by the adherents of a tradition can only be understood, MacIntyre insists, in the context of that tradition. There are no texts, theses, or conceptions—of justice and rationality, for instance—in themselves; they exist, and can be evaluated, only as part of this or that tradition, and so far as their criteria for evaluation are concerned, the different traditions are incommensurable.¹⁹ For all the disagreements within a particular tradition, there remains a broad agreement on which differences are the critical ones and how, or within what limits, to argue over them. There is, however, no such agreement between traditions, and even to understand a rival tradition presupposes that one be immersed in the language of that tradition. This position is at the heart of MacIntyre’s quarrel with contemporary liberalism.

      The view that texts and authors can be approached, translated, and evaluated according to some universal principles of rationality is a liberal myth, MacIntyre believes, and one characteristic of modernity, whether conservative or radical.²⁰ To him, this view is deplorable, but not only because it leads us to gravely misunderstanding traditions other than our own.²¹ The liberal view also underlies a hegemonic discourse where intellectual positions from other traditions are decontextualized in translation and those at odds with liberalism are rendered innocuous by being recast as debates within liberalism, putting in question this or that particular set of attitudes or policies, but not the fundamental tenets of liberalism. . . . So so-called conservatism and so-called radicalism in these contemporary guises are in general mere stalking-horses for liberalism: the contemporary debates within modern political systems are almost exclusively between conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals.²²

      MacIntyre’s notion of the incommensurability of traditions has been criticized for its many perceived inadequacies, as indeed has his conception of tradition itself. Critics have observed, for instance, that if a tradition were so utterly incommensurable as he supposes, one could not comprehend any of its ideas; yet MacIntyre’s own writing about other traditions intelligibly and at length seems to suggest otherwise.²³ Rival traditions, even in MacIntyre’s sense, do, in fact, often share many basic assumptions;²⁴ conversely, certain disagreements within what MacIntyre characterizes as a single tradition of liberalism are so fundamental as to qualify for his label of incommensurability.²⁵ Liberal critics have also discerned authoritarian implications in MacIntyre’s views of tradition and of tradition-centered criteria of rationality, fearing that MacIntyre is in the grip of a world view promulgated by authority rather than reason [and] . . . is using this view to justify perpetuating authority at the heart of human life and, indeed, at the heart of human reason.²⁶ MacIntyre has not answered all his critics to their satisfaction. And he has continued to not only insist on tradition-specific criteria of moral valuation but increasingly to write self-consciously in a way that foregrounds his own commitment to a particular tradition—Roman Catholicism, specifically Thomism.²⁷ Yet he has also continued to affirm the possibility, in principle at least, of debate and interaction with other, rival traditions. His condition is, however, that one be willing and able to learn the language of the alien tradition as a new and second first language²⁸ in order for such interaction to be possible, and that only then can one tradition seriously try to remedy its weaknesses by creative engagement with a rival.

      We need not, however, agree in all respects with MacIntyre to see the relevance of his concept of tradition for our purposes here. Drawing on the work of MacIntyre, Talal Asad has underlined the relevance of the concept of tradition, as a discursive tradition, to the study of Islam. To Asad:

      A tradition consists essentially of discourses that seek to instruct practitioners regarding the correct form and purpose of a given practice that, precisely because it is established, has a history. These discourses relate conceptually to a past (when the practice was instituted, and from which the knowledge of its point and proper performance has been transmitted) and a future (how the point of that practice can best be secured in the short or long term, or why it should be modified or abandoned), through a present (how it is linked to other practices, institutions, and social conditions). An Islamic discursive tradition is simply a tradition of Muslim discourse that addresses itself to conceptions of the Islamic past and future, with reference to a particular Islamic practice in the present.²⁹

      This discursive tradition is constituted and reconstituted not only by an ongoing interaction between the present and the past, however, but also by the manner in which relations of power and other forms of contestation and conflict impinge on any definition of what it is to be a Muslim. Such a view of Islam, Asad suggests, helps avoid essentialist constructions that strive to judge all facets of Islamic thought, ideals, and practice in terms of how they relate to (or, more often than not, fail to relate to) Islam’s foundational texts, even as it seeks to steer clear of the temptation to reduce the variety of religious and cultural expression to different, local islams.³⁰

      But if Islam in general ought to be approached as a discursive tradition, I would argue that particular facets of this tradition can also be viewed in a broadly similar way. The shari‘a is the preeminent example of a tradition and, indeed, of a discursive tradition. Often translated as Islamic law, the shari‘a is more accurately characterized, as the anthropologist Brinkley Messick has argued, as a total discourse, viz., a set of institutions and practices that pervaded and shaped varied aspects of people’s lives in premodern Muslim societies (see chapter 1).³¹ But many other facets of the intellectual and religious history of Islam are also discursive traditions in their own right. Classical Islamic historiography, for instance, has its own continuities of conflict³² even as it also reveals a broad consensus on how, say, the earliest history of Islam is represented— a consensus that baffles and exasperates modern historians as they try to reconstruct Islam’s origins. This historiography, too, is a tradition, shaped by arguments within the earliest community as well as by disputations with outsiders.³³ One might similarly characterize institutionalized Sufism or the career of Hellenistic philosophy in Muslim societies as discursive traditions. The etiquette, styles of argumentation, and modes of transmitting knowledge that informed Islamic higher learning, and the institutions with which such learning was often associated, comprise another example of a multifaceted Islamic tradition—a tradition whose modern transformation is the subject of this book.

      Though Asad does not say so, the concept of tradition is helpful not only in studying the history of discursive practices but also in tracking and understanding the significance of the ruptures in that history. No rupture is greater in the history of Islam than that brought about by the impact of Western modernity. As Marshall Hodgson observed at the end of his magisterial history of Islamic civilization, modernWestern societies have managed to retain a much deeper, more coherent, and more integral relationship with their traditions than have Muslim societies: the former are far more traditional in this sense than the latter. In the Western philosophical tradition, for instance, from the Scholastics to Descartes to Hume to Kant to Hegel to Huü sserl to the Existentialists, the philosophical dialogue has been continuous. By and large, the old books continue to be read, and some of the same terms continue to be used, even if in transformed contexts.³⁴ Alasdair MacIntyre would no doubt respond that, so far as Western intellectual history is concerned, what we have is not one continuous tradition but several incommensurable ones. Moreover, the notion that one can approach the great books without much attention to the particular traditions in which they are embedded is, for MacIntyre, a characteristic liberal fallacy.³⁵ Yet Hodgson’s point here is different: in question for him is not the issue of how the classics of the Islamic intellectual and religious tradition are to be studied, but whether, with the rupture that modernity has entailed, those reared in modern, Westernized systems of education retain any significant link with the tradition such classics once constituted.

      The rupture with the past has also meant sharper divisions within Muslim societies. Those schooled in modern secular institutions have often continued to regard Islam as an important, even fundamental, part of their identity, but typically in a very different way from how the ‘ulama have done so. Two of what might very broadly be characterized as the major intellectual and religiopolitical trends that have successively emerged in the Muslim world since the late nineteenth century—modernism and Islamism—have both been largely rooted in modern, Westernized institutions of education.³⁶ Modernist Muslim intellectuals have sought, since the nineteenth century, to find ways of making Islam compatible with what they have taken to be the challenges of the modern age. And their proposed reforms have encompassed virtually the entire spectrum of life in Muslim societies. The intellectual vigor with which these reforms were proposed, and the success with which they have been carried through—often in alliance with the postcolonial state—has varied from one Muslim society to another, as have the precise ways in which different thinkers among these modernists have viewed the Islamic intellectual and religious tradition and defined themselves in relation to it. More often than not, however, the effort has been to retrieve the teachings of true Islam from the vast and oppressive edifice that centuries of sterile scholasticism, blind imitation of earlier authorities, and the intransigence of the religious specialists had built. In general, the modernist project is guided by the assurance that once retrieved through a fresh but authentic reading of the foundational texts, and especially of the Qur’an, the teachings of Islam would appear manifestly in concord with the positions recommended by liberal rationalism.³⁷

      In terms of cultural authenticity and religious authority, however, as well as in view of the failed promises of liberal, socialist, and nationalist regimes, the cost of the effort to find a concordance between Islam and Western, liberal rationalism has, seemed too high to many in the latter half of the twentieth century. These Islamists, as they are often called in Western scholarship, are typically also products of modern, secular educational institutions but are drawn to initiatives aimed at radically altering the contours of their societies and states through the public implementation of norms they take as truly Islamic. To them, such norms need no justification in terms ofWestern liberal thought; the sole rationale for their implementation is that they express the will of God. Yet, while the Islamists position themselves towards Western thought and institutions in ways that are starkly different from the Muslim modernists, Is-lamist activists and intellectuals are themselves nothing if not modern, and as historian of religion Bruce Lawrence has argued, they are inconceivable in any but the modern age.³⁸ This is so not only because they rail against the epistemological assumptions of Western Enlightenment rationalism and the ideologies based on such assumptions, or against the overarching powers of the nation-state, or against global capitalism—all of them part of the experience of modernity.³⁹ Nor is it only because they are dexterous in their use of modern technology in disseminating their oppositional message.⁴⁰ They are also modern in that their intellectual positions are often formulated in terms heavily indebted to the discourses of the modern age. For instance, in his conception of social justice, Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966), one of the most influential Islamist thinkers of the twentieth century, is far more indebted to modernWestern ideas than he is to the Qur’an.⁴¹ And as political theorist Roxanne Euben has observed, Qutb’s reification of Islam, the understanding of social systems in terms of dynamic, social processes, the incorporation of an idea of progressive (if contingent) historical change . . . the dialectical vision of history, and the very concept of modern jahiliyya [a new paganism] all exemplify the influence of the modern world against which Qutb was so vociferously preaching.⁴²

      Modernists and Islamists differ very considerably within their ranks in their attitudes to the Islamic tradition. Contemporary Arab modernist thinkers like the Moroccan Muhammad ‘Abid al-Jabiri (b. 1936) and the Egyptian Hasan Hanafi (b. 1935) have delved deeply into the Arab-Islamic heritage (turath) to discover the roots of the intellectual, social, and political malaise of the modern Arab world and, in Hanafi’s case, to explore ways of selectively mustering the resources from this heritage in the service of an intellectual and political revival.⁴³ Muhammad Shahrur (b. 1938), a widely read Syrian civil engineer who calls for a radically new reading of the Qur’an, rejects sources of law other than the Qur’an and the normative example of the Prophet (sunna). He is sharply critical of the premodern jurists for misunderstanding the legal import of the Qur’an and seems more indebted to the natural sciences in his contemporary rereading of the Qur’an than to premodern Islamic exegetical or juristic discourses.⁴⁴ By contrast, Fazlur Rahman (d. 1988), a Pakistani modernist thinker, while sharply critical of the ‘ulama, emphasizes a sustained constructive engagement with the historic formulations of Islam—juristic, theological, spiritual in the course of reinterpreting Islam in the modern world.⁴⁵

      Islamists likewise display widely different orientations in their attitude toward the Islamic tradition. The radical Islamist Shukri Mustafa (d. 1977), whose Society of Muslims advocated a complete withdrawal from the existing iniquitous society (hence its designation by the Egyptian media as the Society of Excommunication and Emigration) was contemptuous of much of classical and medieval Islamic learning, arguing that one needed little more than a dictionary to explicate any possible complexities in the otherwise plain words of God.⁴⁶ On the other hand, the Egyptian Islamist ideologue Sayyid Qutb acknowledged that there was much to value in the writings of the medieval jurists and scholars⁴⁷ even as he insisted that Islam does not countenance any priesthood that would mediate between ordinary human beings and God.⁴⁸ And Abu’l-A‘la Mawdudi (d. 1979), the influential Pakistani Islamist thinker was often (though not invariably) even more laudatory than Qutb of the riches of medieval Islamic civilization:

      If . . . people earnestly and dispassionately study the achievements of their ancestors in the field of jurisprudence . . . [t]hey will come to know that during the last thirteen centuries, their forefathers had not been engaged in fruitless controversies: on the contrary, they have left a very vast and priceless treasure of knowledge . . . for the posterity. They have built for us quite a considerable portion of the edifice; and what a folly it would be if, out of sheer ignorance, we insist on demolishing what has already been built and start constructing all anew.⁴⁹

      While there are varying attitudes towards the Islamic intellectual and religious tradition within the ranks of the modernists and the Islamists, what is often shared among them is a certain sense that one does not necessarily need that tradition to understand the true meaning of Islam,⁵⁰ and that one certainly does not need the ‘ulama to interpret Islam to the ordinary believers. That authority belongs to everyone and to no one in particular. So far as the rich and varied history of, say, classical and medieval exegesis or medieval legal debates or premodern theological speculation are concerned, most modernist and Islamist intellectuals— even those who might, in principle, acknowledge a certain attachment to that tradition—usually have only the most tenuous of links to it. This remains true even when certain older discursive modes—for instance, commentaries and study circles—are retained.⁵¹ For if the goal is, for example, to study the Qur’an not in the light of the long record of agreements and disagreements about how to read it, but as if "the Book had been revealed to us, as if it had come for our own generation . . ., and as if the Prophet had died only recently after bringing this Book to us"⁵² then such formal continuities as those constituted by the commentary or the study circle can barely conceal the reality of the fundamental rupture with the past.⁵³

      The ‘ulama, as I show in this book, are hardly frozen in the mold of the Islamic religious tradition, but this tradition nevertheless remains their fundamental frame of reference, the basis of their identity and authority. They differ widely in the extent of their actual acquaintance with this tradition. As the cases of the Egyptian reformer Muhammad ‘Abduh, and the later rector of al-Azhar university, Mahmud Shaltut, suggest, moreover, boundaries between the ‘ulama and modernists can become blurred, just as they sometimes do between the ‘ulama and the Islamists.⁵⁴ Yet, in general terms, it is a combination of their intellectual formation, their vocation, and, crucially, their orientation viz., a certain sense of continuity with the Islamic tradition that defines the ‘ulama as ‘ulama; and it is this sense of continuity that constitutes the most significant difference between them and their modernist and Islamist detractors.⁵⁵

      What makes the ‘ulama of the modern world worth studying is not merely that they have continued to lay claim to and self-consciously represent a millennium-old tradition of Islamic learning, however. Their larger claim on our attention lies in the ways in which they have mobilized this tradition to define issues of religious identity and authority in the public sphere and to articulate changing roles for themselves in contemporary Muslim politics. The ‘ulama’s tradition is not a mere inheritance from the past, even though they often argue that that is precisely what it is. It is a tradition that has had to be constantly imagined, reconstructed, argued over, defended, and modified. All this has entailed highly significant changes in the world of the ‘ulama, and it is some of these changes— which constitute a critical part of the history of modern Islam,

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