Notes: Sawyer Seminar with Carl Ernst on Islam in South Asia

October 15, 2009

Carl Ernst presented and discussed his draft paper “Reconfiguring the Relation between Religion and World in South Asian Islam since the 18th Century”

He spoke about the challenge of interpreting Islamic intellectual history since the 18th Century in South Asia, and sited the Coral Rosary (sp?), an essential text regarding the intellectual tendencies of South Asian Islam during that period.

He emphasized the the paper in its current form was a draft, and that he’d recently presented it at a conference in Berlin which was about civil society (hence the civil society bit).

• The civil society part was not well integrated into the rest of the paper (according to Carl)
• The paper fits well with our class themes of division and conformity

The “norm of civil society” is itself Orientalist, based on the European model of civil society..

The Coral Rosary gives us a snapshot of the world as the author saw it: India is cast as the cultural center of the world, while the Middle East is the intellectual/religious center.  Coral Rosary is valuable for 4 main reasons:

1. References to India in the Hadith
2. Adam comes to earth in India; Inda = site of culture, art, science, etc.
3. Biographies of the most important Indian Islamic scholars of all time.
4. Rhetoric and prose of Indian literature and poetry (he translates lit/poetry to Arabic and compares with Middle Eastern literature)

Non-Arabs (especially Persians and Indians) are cast as the true source of islamic culture/knowledge (but Arabs get credit for literary history); also underlines the strength of science and literature in India at this time.

Carl talked briefly about Arabic poetry, and the numerical equivalents of each letter (ie: أ = 1; ب = 2; ت = 3; etc.) and gave the example that Arab poets might come up with a flowery phrase to say that the King was triumphant in the year 1702 (and the letters in the phrase would add up to that number)

Haji Imdad Allah invoked the theme of jihad (and his disciples were particularly oposed to anything that seemed Hindu (ie: visiting shrines)

Belgramy ignored the existence of European powers while alive, but they discovered him.

• Interesting note: the earliest issues of  Asiatic Texts feature 4 articles of Belgrany

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Alyse led the discussion after Carl’s talk and she and other attendees made the following points:

• The civil society bit should be scraped; underdeveloped (Alyse)

Professor Seck asked about Sufism and civil society.  In Senegal, politicians are linked with Sufi groups (which are sometimes excluded from civil society (in the Western sense)

Ernst responds: Many people argue that there is no civil society in Muslim cultures, but others disagree

Next question: Imdad Allah represents an increase in lack of acceptance of divserity because of European attitude (ie: European judgement of cultural diversity as threatening –> a decrease in acceptance of diversity in other parts of the world

Class dimmensions are interesting as well: Carl highlighted the tension between leaders and their disciples here.

Study of the Hadith is used by historians to construct biographies (question of whether that is an appropriate use of the Hadith?)

The way we arrange biographies about important people says a lot about the qualities we value in people.  The writing of a bio is a way of constructing a world.  Intellectual biographies are no different, and highlight the intellectual values that were important at the time.

Belgramy does this (above) in a patriotic way that casts India as the center of culture, science, philosophy, and art.

The genre itself (biography) is what you’re comparing over time; perhaps Carl should argue that these two (Imdad Allah and Belgramy) are good representations of the genre at that time, therefore their highlighted qualities represent generally valued qualities in Muslim society in South Asia at that time.

“Adam’s Peak” in India, and the giant footprint site (where Adam is supposed to have arrived on Earth) are sites of pilgrimmage (for Sufis + Hindus and Budhists).

Civil society did not exist in Europe at this time either (really)

Belgramy’s work (in Arabic) was read only by a few highly educated scholars

Imdad Allah’s work was destined for a much broader readership

 

September 10, First Sawyer Seminar: Ahmed El Shamsy, “Orthodoxy and Deviance in Premodern Muslim Societies”

Here are my relatively disorganized notes from Professor El Shamsy’s talk, which was intended to compliment, not overlap, his article that we read, “The social construction of orthodoxy”:

-how did Muslims reconcile and sustain heterodox and mutually irreconcilably (and contradictory) systems both within Islam and between Muslims and non-Muslims?

-inherently paradoxical: fusing the universalist truth claims of Islam with multiculturalism

-on practical level, the premodern Islamic state is ‘compartmentalized’ system

-“Constitution of Medina”: post-622; first document attempting to reconcile multiculturalism; stress on mutual solidarity (between Medinese Jews and new Muslim community); could have formed precedent but didn’t, as the system broke down

-Abu Bakr- told fighters to spare non Muslim peoples; said “let them bring tribute”

-poll tax (jizya) was cornerstone of relations between Muslims rulers and non-Muslim ruled

-freedom for communal self rule = the main characteristic of Muslim rule

-extended to Zoroastrians and Hindus (not just dhimmi)

-Arab conquerors = ethnically homogeneous; result of Umar”s order for garrison towns

-second phase, post 750: introspection, the “phase of optimism”

-optimism that all questions/disputes could be settled

-but in 9th/10th centuries, multiplication of problems because of no central authority weakened this sense of optimism

-third phase: “phase of maturity”- pragmatic acceptance of difference

-many cities had representatives of all four schools (Shafi’i, Hanbali, Zahiri, and Jariri) of jurisprudence, thus 4 different legal systems

-heterodox thinkers sought refuge in schools, took cover behind their school

-Sufism = another category with accepted realm of belief and practice

-Why did extreme multiculturalism characterize Islam?

-very diverse area: crossroads of Asia, Europe, Africa

-1890s, Heinrich von Treitschke: “enslavement” was driving force behind multiculturalism; Ottomans willing to let minorities control own affairs because they were infidels

-men are equal due to shared rationality

-but in phase of maturity this universalist approach was abandoned, but replaced now with relativism but divine revelation

-unnatural does not equal impermissable

-Why demise?

-adoption of nation-state model

-based on vision of nation as single organism with common law for all; precludes notion of compartmentalized communities within Muslim state

Discussion:

-von Treitschke: Ottoman Empire was “accumulation of national fragments welded together by force”

-“universalization of ethical expectations”

-before nation-state system, these expectations were different by sect, class, etc.

-parallel sides of life that are radically different

-universalism =/= uniformity

-multiculturalism is not dead in nation-states, but there is single core of ideals which didn’t exist in Islamic premodern societies

-issue of space and sovereignty in premodern vs modern (ie nation-state)

-orthodoxy is claim, not objective fact

September 3: How we got here (Gelvin, The Modern Middle East)

Our reading this week was UCLA professor (and Zeynep’s advisor!) James Gelvin’s survey The Modern Middle East.  As per Prof. Shields’ request, everyone brought one passage or concept that struck them.  Here they are:

-Defensive developmentalism: new term for many of us and a central part of Gelvin’s thesis.  Basically, defensive developmentalism is when “rulers or would-be rulers of states outside Europe copied European methods of governance and imposed them on their domains…because those methods seemed to provide the most effective means to protect themselves and mobilize the energies of their populations” (71).  The end goal was, obviously, military reform.  But for military reform, rulers needed to “expand the sources of revenue under their control, their ability to coordinate the activities of their populations, and their ability to discipline their populations” (74).  To collect the taxes that would support these newly created armies, rulers had to expand “access to education…[and promulgate] new legal codes”.

-Gelvin’s conception of modernity, 2 components: world system economy and a world system of nation states (the first of which begins to emerge in the 17th century, the latter in the 19th)

-Chapter 9 (‘Secularism and Modernity’): does secularism mean modernity in Gelvin’s understanding?  No; Gelvin talks about how some thinkers define modernity by the secularizing tendencies that accompanied modernization in Europe.  However, “the prominent role religion plays in politics and political discourse of Middle Eastern states does not mean these states are not modern; rather, it means these states follow an alternative form of modernity” (132; bold mine).

-The tension between westernizing forces and Islam; Islamic modernists and traditionalists

-p. 141/2: industrialization and the economic crisis that it brought to much of the world in the late 19th century (the Depression of 1873).

-import substitution?  Someone also threw out the acronym ISA; we also compared the experience of Ataturk in Turkey and Reza Shah in Iran during this discussion

-Gunpowder Empires: new way of conceptualizing world systems/world history in the early modern period for some of us

-World War I as a crucial turning point in the development of both the nation-state system and world economy (two components of modernity)

-modernity: usually associated with ideals or concepts (e.g. secularism), but Gelvin defines is based on structures and systems

-along with this, Zionism as colonial project (in particular, Nathan found Gelvin’s description of the Israel/Palestine conflict as a ‘real estate dispute’…interesting)

-The idea of osmanlilik, and how the effort to create an Ottoman identity relates to issues of modernity and Islam

-Two opposing conceptions of osmanlilik: the first, beginning with Mahmud II and Tanzimat, is a secular notion of citizenship on the French model; the second is based on Islam and was prominent during the long rule of Abdul Hamid II (though not always the official narrative)

-Gelvin’s putting the Middle East in a global context, through his use of world systems theory

-people often assume that the Middle East is apart from the rest of the world, divorced from the reality other regions face and has a unique set of issues and problems; Gelvin, by highlighting global phenomena like the crisis of the seventeenth century, disabuses us of this notion

-agency vs. victimhood; Professor Shields found Gelvin’s effort to bestow agency on Middle Eastern peoples in telling their history admirable, but not always historically accurate.  Sometimes there are victims, as in the case of Iraq, 2001-2003 (ex. was Iraq really a free agent making choices that affected its future during these years?)

-finally, the text itself as a ‘top down’ history; some people challenged the assumption that you must know the top down history before reading bottom up accounts (e.g. Wasif Jawhariyyeh’s diary), but we didn’t really pursue this topic

Here are some of my notes (condensed!) from the rest of our discussion:

-The nation-state system was not an inevitable development; this was the part of discussion most focused on Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (I think I have the author and title right on that, though I haven’t read it), so I wasn’t able to follow most of the arguments.  Also in the context of our nationalism discussion, the claim most debated was whether nationalism is truly ‘never authentic, never organic’ (as one person in the class put it) and always a false construction.  We talked a great deal about osmanlilik during this part, and about how osmanlilik was never a fixed project: the emphasis varied between Islam and inclusion/univeralism at different historical moments

-exceptionalism, and how it is often used to oppress.  I honestly don’t remember in what context this came up, but I wrote it down!

-Finally, Sarah posed an interesting question: would the inclusion of different geographic/thematic considerations change Gelvin’s narrative?  This came out of Char’s point that our class is about the Muslim world, but Gelvin’s book focuses on the Middle East, lacking any discussion of Central or Southeast Asia or other Muslim communities across the globe.

See you all at the Seminar Thursday!