What Makes Something "Islamic?"

The inadequacy of traditionalism and revivalism for creating meaningful Muslim thought

Introduction

While working on and thinking through my much longer and more meaningful piece on what I’m tentatively terming “ethical elasticity” – something that I think will be the cornerstone of my thought for some decades – there are a series of connected but ancillary or preliminary discourses that need to be fleshed out to lay the groundwork of the larger concept. As always, when I need to think through something, I write about it and post it on Substack. Why? I’m not entirely sure. There’s a kind of intellectual voyeurism at play, I’m sure, but there is also the feeling of urgency for seriousness when one writes for an audience rather than scribbles notes for oneself – and urgency, rather than necessity, is the mother of all invention, good or bad.

The very idea of Islamic-ness is the first of these things that must be explored before a larger theory of ethics can be entertained. That is, if I am to claim that Islam and its intellectual tradition – at least within the Sunni school – is not a moral absolutist tradition but a morally pragmatic one, I must first answer the question “what makes something Islamic in the first place?” That is, even if I am able to demonstrate the working of an ethical elasticity to the Islamic tradition, what makes that elasticity and its methodology normative?

I don’t intend to engage with Shahab Ahmad’s or Talal Asad’s or Sherman Jackson’s or any other academic’s discourse on the Islamic-ness of ideas and histories. This is simply because I find their works mostly irrelevant to the very people they study – Muslims. The defining feature of the psychology of Muslim-ness (as opposed to Islamic-ness) is the obsession over salvation – something shared with their Christian cousins, to be sure, something that I term “salvific anxiety.”

This is not because Muslims must feel an acute salvific anxiety to be Muslim – rather, it is because the final argument in the vast, vast majority of Muslim discourse is one of salvation. It occupies such an oversized place in both the Muslim consciousness – both collective and personal – that it can very safely be said to be the defining feature of the Muslim mind.

Salvific Anxiety

One of the defining features of Islamic theology – other than the absolute oneness of God and the centrality of His final Messenger (SAW) – is the concept of the akhirah (the afterlife). The fact that it is both faith and good works that save is the basic framework that creates so much anxiety around action in the Muslim mind. Correct action are not simply moral arguments that can be ignored if one can avoid temporal consequence; rather, legal, moral, social, political, and governmental arguments are often seeded with an anxiety around a central question: if we were to behave in this manner, would that lead to salvation?

That is, if I were to miss prayer, or talk to an opposite gender classmate, or disobey my parents, or walk past a person in need without helping them, or supported a political candidate who advocates for things I believe are expressly forbidden by God; will these increase or decrease my chances for salvation?

How many have abandoned their desire to marry the love of their life or their dream careers because they believe that obedience to parents is necessary for their salvation? How many have refused to vote for otherwise excellent candidates because they believe God would not forgive their support for something He has forbidden? How many have broken their backs in works of public good or simply sat with a random person in a terrible state of need because they feared for their own souls?

And, yet, this central question of salvation – the question which animates so much of the Muslim consciousness and is the untapped repository of socio-cultural reinvigoration for world wide Muslim society – it is this question that is entirely absent from any serious discourse even within Muslim intellectual spaces. Instead, the intellectual discourse decenters the very thing centered by the collective Muslim mind and replaces it with an insidious obsession sometimes guised in salvific language: an overwhelming sense of inferiority.

The Muslim Obsession with the West

Defeat is such a powerful psychological phenomenon that it overwhelms the mind. Ibn Khaldun is oft quoted as saying that the conquered imitate their conquerors in their entirety. There is much more nuance to this, of course, as even a cursory glance at history would indicate; but, his statement reveals a certain psychology to defeat that is difficult to deny. Defeat creates such an intense disruption of self-imagination – both communal and personal – that the resulting restlessness is pointed towards the renegotiation of self-imagination in such a way which removes the feeling of defeat.

Domination of the self by an other is enactment of violence on the very foundations of personal and communal self-imagination – what can be termed, in a very ugly way, as identity. It requires explanation, and the explanation must be such that it removes or creates a pathway to the removal of the perception of domination. This, by the way, is also something that takes place in personal relationships – and the patterns of negotiation identified in this piece can also be applied to cases of social and personal domination.

I have identified three major modes of reacting to domination, but there are likely far more and need to be spelled out and explored in later pieces. The three major modes that I have observed, however, are capitulation, invigoration, or rejection.

Capitulation is to simply reimagine what the self means. If my self is imagined as Muslim or Indian or Arab or Scandinavian, and I am dominated by not-Muslim or not-Indian or not-Arab or not-Scandinavian, then capitulation is to contort my self in such a way as to reduce the difference between my self and the other until my self is subsumed into the other. If I am the same as him who dominates, then I am no longer dominated. This impulse is justified in many ways, such as the moral or scientific or rational failures of the self – which then act as a narrative that justifies the elimination of the distinctions that are necessitated for an act of domination.

Rejection is to utterly reject the act of domination itself. It is to retreat into Nietzsche’s slave morality to assert the moral superiority of the dominated. It is to claim space in Chatterjee’s “spiritual domain” – the domain of culture and morality and society – and hand the material means of domination to the not-self. The self, from this moment onwards, is not interested in who it is in itself based on its own logic; it is only ever defined as an antithesis to the other. The irony of this mode of being is that it is just as dominated as the capitulated self. It does not seriously resist domination; rather, it internalizes the narratives created about its self by the other and perpetuates them as some kind of act of resistance which is, in fact, as much a reconfiguration of self as any of the other modes of being.

Invigoration is to neither reject nor assimilate – not entirely. It is presented as resistance, a pathway to reclamation, a project of revival that ends in liberation. But for all its pomp and luster, all its claims of grandeur, it is as much a reformulation of the self as the other modes of being. Invigoration at its core is to stand somewhere between the logic of assimilation and rejection. It is to accept the narratives of capitulation and the ethos of rejection. It is to say that we were correct to be dominated because we were morally or intellectually or spiritually weak; but, that, if we simply learn the moral and rational and spiritual from our dominators, we will be liberated.

In the Muslim world, modernism is the first; traditionalism the second; and revivalism the third. At their core, however, they are all devoid of salvific anxiety, and, so, the projects they create are entirely a-Islamic (as opposed to anti-Islamic).

Traditionalism and Revivalism as Incomplete Salvific Projects

Both traditionalism and revivalism are incomplete in their salvific outlook. This is because each ignores crucial elements that are necessary of Islam’s greater assumptions about the interplay between the temporal and eternal, the realistic and the idealistic, the kingdom of earth and the kingdom of God.

While traditionalism claims a salvific emphasis – its core logic is an Islamization of “leave unto Caesar” – it ignores two important elements of its own claim. The first, that power and the pursuit of power is an essential element to a project of salvation, will be dealt with in a larger piece dedicated to specifically to that topic. It will be sufficient for our purposes here, however, to simply mention that the source texts of Islam are explicit about the link between power and the project of salvation. To ignore power and its pursuit is to neuter the project of salvation as it is presented in both the Quran and sunnah.

The second, however, is traditionalism’s obsession with the pre-modern Islamic tradition’s observations and theories as the “correct” mode of being Islamic. Ghazali’s psychology; or Ibn Khaldun’s sociology; or Ibn Sina’s medicine – these are rebranded as “Islamic” versions of psychology and sociology and medicine. The implication is clear: that which exists prior to and in contrast with “the West” is authentically Islamic. Contrasts are often emphasized while parallels are downplayed. More importantly, however, the findings of modern psychology or medicine or sociology are excluded from any inclusion in what is truly “Islamic.”

There is much to say about this subject, but it requires a much larger exploration in a standalone piece dedicated to understanding what is inherent to Islam and what is capable of change in the Islamic tradition. The extremes of both are entirely incorrect; neither is the entire tradition inherently Islam, nor is the entire tradition eligible for interpretation.

For revivalism, however, the problem is often much worse than for traditionalism. Projects like those of Maududi and Qutb understand neither Islam nor contemporary disciplines of knowledge and modes of being. What is often defended as essential “Islam” is not essential to Islam at all; what is often derided as essential to “modernity” is not essential to it at all. Even a cursory reading of the works of revivalists reveals superficial knowledge of the Islamic tradition, contemporary Western disciplines, understandings of how the modern world actually functions, and a whole host of subtle shifts in conceptual frameworks that render their projects more “Western” than “Islamic” in any meaningful sense.

Later projects like the Islamization of Knowledge faired no better. If traditionalism was to live in rejection and contrast to the West, Islamization of knowledge was to take a Honda Civic, remove the Honda sign, replace it with a big Ford emblem, and claim that the car is now intrinsically American. It was to slap a crescent and star on a textbook and claim that the sticker made the book Islamic.

At their core, both suffer from the same logic: identity politics guised as a defense of Islam.

What Makes Something Islamic?

If obsession with Western thought and its opposition is incomplete Islamic-ness, then what makes something Islamic at its core? To answer this question will require a greater elucidation of ethical elasticity, which is the piece I am still working on, but there are three major elements of Islamic-ness in any act or discipline of knowledge:

1. It contributes to a greater project of salvation, not just differentiation from “the West.”

2. Its moral, communal, and personal objectives are derived from the source texts of Islam

3. It uses empirical observation and the Islamic tradition as references for achieving the moral objectives as identified by Islamic source texts

At its core, for something to be Islamic, it must entirely abandon a project of comparison with any culturally specific production of knowledge. The Islamic is not a contrast to the Western or the Chinese or the African; the Islamic is a category in and of itself that can encompass and borrow information and methods from all these traditions while deploying it for its own salvific and moral, personal, and communal objectives.

To put it simply, Islamic-ness (Islamicality, if I want to be extremely obtuse) is not a set of facts; it is a question: how can I further a project of salvation by advancing the moral, communal, and social objectives of Islam by making use of the information and methods discovered by humanity at large. Salvation is the objective; data is the means; Islamicality is purely the method.

When applied to psychology or sociology or economics, it becomes Islamic when its raw data and methods are put in the service of salvation. It does not become Islamic because it quotes Ghazali and Ibn Sina; it does not become Islamic because it is written in Arabic or Farsi. It only becomes Islamic when it is simultaneously grounded in reality and put in service of a project of salvation.

The current fields of Islamic <insert field here> almost all fail at this basic test. This is because they are trying to recover the Islamic as if discovering an island; when, in truth, to be Islamic is to simply sail the sea.

Further Articles Needed to Flesh This Out More:

• A methodology for methodology

• Is power necessary for salvation?

• A methodology for understanding what is necessary and what is not within the Islamic tradition

• Is empiricism an ownership of the West?

• The sociology of the sunnah

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