Thus, we have to understand the construction of “Islam,” and later the “Muslim world,” as emerging from a struggle over what Christianity is, via negativa. In the modern period, “Islam” continues to be constructed by actors in media, government, and academia to further particular geopolitical ends in the anglophone world. Through this construction, “Islam” is anthropomorphized, becoming an active agent in its own right.

An anthropomorphized “Islam” removes any agency from the adherents of the religion, effacing Muslims from the narrative of Islam. The core meaning of the religion is defined by premodern Arabic texts, often taken at face value without consideration of the historical context or cultural matrix in which they were written. This type of normativity imposed by power has an impact on Muslim conceptions of the self and has caused reform movements to mimic the imperium. Islam becomes a religion without believers. When believers are introduced into the equation, they are often presented as automatons, slavishly beholden to the text, rather than as acting, reacting, thinking, feeling humans who navigate their faith ambivalently through the practical considerations of everyday life. The idea that the actions of Muslims can be predicted by reference to a text is known as scripturalism.¹ It reinforces the notions of imperial discipline and control over Muslims, treating Islam as a determinate blueprint and perpetuating what anthropologist Gabriele Marranci calls “Muslim mind theories” that have penetrated academic work.

This intellectual genealogy is not a description of how professionals in Islamic studies act now. Rather, it is a recognition of the history and structures in which they operate. The historian Marshall Hodgson made the observation decades ago that as scholars we need to be conscious of biases and that “the bias produced by precommitment can be guarded against; the answer to it cannot finally be to divest ourselves of all commitments, but to learn to profit by the concern and insight they permit, while avoiding their pitfalls.”² We must accept that these biases exist and examine them to deepen our work, making these structures explicit and proposing ways to work around, through, and beyond them.

One important intervention worth making at this point is over the role of secularism in these structures. The rationalist discourse that pushed for the emergence of the study of religion out of comparative theology used the formulation of secularism to erase emic notions of religion. We also have to position secularism as an expression of Christianity. Anthropologist Talal Asad reminds us that rather than succeeding religion, secularism has a multilayered history alongside religion, based in modernity (though modernity itself can take religious forms), democracy, and ideas about human rights. It builds upon particular conceptions of the world, is closely linked to emergence of the modern nation state, and defines itself against an “other” that becomes a target for its reformation.³ As Megan Goodwin, engaging with Max Weber, writes, secularism is “the diffusion, rather than the elimination, of religion into the secular state and elements of public and private life, extending Christian assumptions, worldviews, and ethics.”⁴ Secularism, thus, suffers from the same affliction as the study of religion: the appeal to imperial logics as a neutral rationality.

With these biases in view, this essay focuses on the numerous interventions, primarily within Islamic studies, that we believe open new avenues and perspectives for the field.

 

Cultural Studies

Religion scholar Diane Moore argues for the need to situate our inherently partial knowledge (our own and the knowledge we are acquiring) in a sociocultural matrix that can then be analyzed, particularly through the lens of power.⁵ Such an approach to religion allows us to use the tools of cultural studies. For Richard King, who writes about Orientalism and religion, cultural studies offers a “reconceptualization of the notion of ‘religion’ in such a way that it no longer remains bound to the peculiar orientations of Christian theological speculation.”⁶

In its origin, the Birmingham School, most often associated with cultural studies, saw its work as a political project, meaning that it was not just theoretical but tied to the lived experiences of people. Stuart Hall, one of the earliest individuals to formally conceptualize the work of the Birmingham School, argues that “the move to Cultural Studies as a fully interdisciplinary enterprise and the break with ‘the literary’ as its governing discourse was implicit in the injunction to study the society and the culture as ‘lived’ equally with its texts.”⁷ Culture, when viewed through this lens, is an active force in politics and social change, so it cannot remain a passive object simply used for description. Hall writes:

In its different ways, [cultural studies] conceptualizes culture as interwoven with all social practices; and those practices, in turn, as a common form of human activity: sensuous human praxis, the activity through which men and women make history. . . . It defines “culture” as both the meanings and values which arise among distinctive social groups and classes, on the basis of their given historical conditions and relationships, through which they “handle” and respond to the conditions of existence; and as the lived traditions and practices through which those “understandings” are expressed and in which they are embodied.⁸

Hall’s explanation situates culture as part of the social matrix and an intrinsic part of human activity. It pushes us beyond a Marxist materialism, and focuses on individuals and the tension between being and consciousness. However, it also recognizes that culture emerges out of materiality relationships, and more importantly, the responses to those conditions and relationships. Thus, layers of culture bind communities together in different ways, dependent on questions of power and social matrices.

 

Discursive Approaches

Talal Asad implicitly bridges the method of cultural studies with Islamic studies. He proposes approaching Islam as a discursive tradition that relates to morality, power, and the production of knowledges. His premises emerge from an attempt to define what Islam is. It cannot be anything that an individual Muslim says it is or is not, so it must be a social phenomenon. Its social units are embedded in time and place, and an analysis of those times and places, through power, is a nod back to the work of cultural studies. Asad grounds his understanding of the discursive tradition through a textual collective. He argues that “an anthropology of Islam should begin, as Muslims do, from the concept of a discursive tradition that includes and relates itself to the founding texts of the Qur’an and the Hadith. Islam is neither a distinctive social structure nor a heterogeneous collection of beliefs, artifacts, customs, and morals. It is a tradition.”⁹ Thus, he bounds the religion via text, but it is that text through which discursiveness happens. The result is a variety of expressions of the religion with a common core. His push to tradition brings us back to an earlier understanding of religion, for, as he reminds us, our understanding of Islam depends on our conception of religion. But in this case, there is more dynamism and less linearity in the continuation of tradition. The discursive approach considers global flows, subject making, the control of populations, resistance, and the production of knowledge.

For Shahab Ahmed, a scholar of Islam, the text is only part of the conversation that binds the community. He posits a threefold system of understanding what “Islam” is that includes what he calls Pre-Text, Text, and Con-Text. He argues that the Text is not the primary source of interaction for Muslim hermeneutic thinking, but rather a product of this world that reflects the “Truth of the Pre-Text.”¹⁰ The Text is simply an expression and pointer to a larger idea of truth in the seen and unseen worlds. He writes:

The crucial fact for us here is that the Revelation to Muḥammad has, as a human and historical fact, been conceived of and engaged with by Muslims, not merely as Revelatory Product (the Text) but also as Revelatory Premise (the Pre-Text); that is, not merely as the event of Text as Revelation-in-the-world to Muḥammad, but also as the phenomenon of Revelation-in the-cosmos that lies behind and beyond the Revelatory event to Muḥammad—a phenomenon that renders the whole cosmos (including the world beyond the Text) a source for Revealed Truth.¹¹

Ahmed thus argues that, for Muslims, the primary site of meaning-making is not the Text, but the Pre-Text. The Text is simply the entry into engagement with the Pre-Text, and that engagement includes both the physical and metaphysical realms.

The struggle for meaning happens through Con-Text, which includes ongoing engagement with the Text and Pre-Text. Although he is critical of Asad’s idea of the discursive tradition, from our perspective, Ahmed offers a refinement and extension of Asad’s ideas. Con-Text is a semiotic system that includes not only textual traditions but also rituals, behaviors, creative acts, and speech. It is the “full historical vocabulary of Islam at any given moment.”¹² Therefore, “Islam” is defined by what “Islam” is; the definitions of “Islam” generated by Muslims are the basis of ongoing definitions of “Islam.” There is a continuity, and concordant bounding, in defining Islam, without letting the definition become static.

Ahmed’s ideas of the Pre-Text, Text, and Con-Text are not linear, but a closed loop. Engagements with Text open possibilities to Pre-Text, which then create new approaches to Text, and all is expressed through Con-Text, which then generates different ways of thinking about Text and Pre-Text. This circularity allows for the importance of a textual tradition without using the text to confine what Islam means, keeping agency and a struggle for transcendent meaning with Muslims.

Here we believe Asad offers a powerful connection to the implications of Ahmed’s theorizing. Ahmed says, “a Muslim lives in Con-Text: s/he lives in the complex of meanings that is the elaborated product of previous hermeneutical engagement with Revelation.”¹³ The believer is in a historical moment, entering into ongoing conversations that have been defined by the local community, the scholastic class, and other meaning-generating actors. This state of being inherently generates diversity of understanding and expression. It is this diversity that we find has resonance with Asad, who states:

[ . . . ] traditions should not be regarded as essentially homogenous, that heterogeneity in Muslim practices is not necessarily an indication of the absence of an Islamic tradition. The variety of traditional Muslim practices in different times, places, and populations indicate the different Islamic reasonings that different social and historical conditions can or cannot sustain. . . . widespread homogeneity is a function, not of tradition, but of the development and control of communication techniques that are part of modern industrial societies.¹⁴

Here, we read Asad and Ahmed both arguing for a diversity in ways of being Muslim that is constrained by a larger “Islamic tradition,” which allows space for generative Muslim traditions. It is the acknowledgment of a core that needs human beings to define it, and those humans, those Muslims, generate diverse interactions with that core.

 

Humanistic Being

Other scholars emphasize the affective and humanistic dimensions when defining what it means to be Muslim and constructing ideas of Islam. Among them is Islamic studies scholar Vernon Schubel, who takes exception to an overtly textual emphasis. Schubel points to Orientalism as a dehumanizing discourse, as it both denies Muslims the ability to share in human experience and defines Islam primarily as a legalistic/textual tradition. He says that historically the great works of the humanities lie in the West, and it is those works that teach us to be human, whereas the cultural output of Muslims highlights difference, marking them as “other,” and not capable of being human.¹⁵ Ethnomusicologist Michael Frishkopf argues that “political Islam began to invert the duality of bāṭin [internal] and ẓāhir [external], clinging to the external as essence, imagining that power necessitates outward unity, forgetting that it was not the unity of Islam’s sensible but rather of its spiritual aspects, along with localization of the sensible, which generated its tremendous élan.”¹⁶ In his analysis, Frishkopf points out that certain Muslim traditions have become more textually oriented, fighting for an outward, universal understanding of the religion. His move toward the spiritual and local echoes Schubel’s earlier arguments on the humanistic aspects of Islam, which remind us that much of what “political Islam” considers as part of its project mimics ideas of what “the Modern” is from former colonial powers.¹⁷ Those conceptions of modernity include learning about what Islam is through Orientalist lenses and the consumption of imperial media, so that political Islamists understand “Islam” as a caricature and pastiche of textuality. This circularity of dehumanization does not change biases about Muslims.

Schubel’s key intervention is to note the affective traditions of Muslims, providing a specific type of Con-Text for Muslims. He argues:

[The] affective tradition is especially evident in the numerous vernacular and popular expressions of love and devotion to holy persons including the Shiʿi Imams and Sufi “saints,” that many Muslims see as essential to their religious lives. Many of these may at first glance seem only tangentially connected to those texts, but, as we shall argue, are nonetheless fully Islamic in that they are ultimately rooted in love for God and the Prophet Muhammad even if they may make no specific reference to textual statements at all. . . . Islam, for most Muslims is rooted in love; love not only for God, but also for humanity. Furthermore, it is within this affective tradition, where we most clearly see the outlines of Islam as a humanistic religious tradition.¹⁸

Love as the primary affective approach shows up in a variety of devotional expressions. Although Schubel correctly points out that many devotional expressions do not make specific reference to a textual archive, that does not mean the archive is absent. The idea of a text as something that is written is a limitation of the English language. The Qur’an sees itself as both reading and recitation: book, collection, and aural-oral text. It is studied and embodied, and it is an integral part of the soundscape of Muslim cultures. The generative spaces are based on the black text and the audible sounds, but emerge from the white spaces and the silences.

One of the exemplars of Muslims’ expression of love is the Persian poet and scholar of the Qur’an, Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, and his work The Mathnawi which was called the “Qur’an in Persian.”¹⁹ While the corpus does make explicit references to the Qur’an, the first word of The Mathnawi has no explicit connection to it. The power of it is only present if one is familiar with the Qur’an, and the silence the Qur’an demands to make The Mathnawi possible.

Muslims believe the first revelation of the Qur’an to be “اقرا” meaning “Recite!”²⁰ It is an imperative form that commands that something be said out loud. Rumi begins his masterpiece with “بشنو” or “Listen!” It too is an imperative in response to the Qur’anic revelation. While it begins a lovely line of poetry, the resonance is with the unsaid and the unmarked, assumed knowledge of the Qur’an. As the Qur’an begins with the equivalent of the letter “a,” The Mathnawi begins with the equivalent of the letter “b.” It is the same letter that opens all but one chapter of the Qur’an, declaring that God is compassionate and merciful. This first word of The Mathnawi already is a commentary on the Qur’an. Both commands rely on notions of a known text bound in an aural-oral tradition, not a printed one. This introductory reading demonstrates that text, in the broadest sense, is integral to Muslim traditions and does not mean Islam is a textualist tradition in the Orientalist construction of the religion.

An integral part of the human experience is the struggle over power, whether that be through competing interpretations, competing orthodoxies, or competing authorities. In Muslim history, these contestations invariably lead through textual corpuses and include struggles over which corpuses are legitimate.

 

Muslim Studies

A key theme in all of these approaches is the focus on Muslims as actors and agents. The religion of Islam is expressed through the actions of Muslims, who are not acting in a void but are brought together and bound by their beliefs in something ineffable in traditions that have formed over centuries. In part, we are indebted to the scholars of the volume Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism, who insist on:

. . . a serious engagement with the full spectrum of Islamic thought and practices. There can be no progressive Muslim movement that does not engage the very “stuff” (textual and material sources) of the Islamic tradition, even if some of us would wish to debate what “stuff” that should be and how it ought to be interpreted. The engagement with the weight of the tradition might be uneasy at times, occasionally inspiring, now and then tedious, and sometimes even painful. Still, we believe that it is imperative to work through inherited traditions of thought and practice.²¹

Their approach is broadly inclusive of what it means to be Muslim, eschewing normative decisions in favor of being in the “messy middle where real folks live and breathe.”²² It is this messy middle, between text and practice, cutting through time and space, that turns us toward a proposal of a Muslim studies.

As a discipline that has long sought to bridge the yawning gap between what people say (belief) and what they ultimately do (practice), anthropology also offers us a tool kit with which to build Muslim studies. Among the anthropologists of Islam who influence our work is Samuli Schielke, who argues that Islam is not just about discourse and power but about people’s existential, pragmatic, everyday sensibilities and motivations. He sees a focus on Islam as reproducing the Islamist goal of privileging the religion as the supreme guideline in all life fields. For him, Islam is not a concrete “thing,” per se, but part of people’s lives, thoughts, acts, societies, histories. It is a moral idiom, a method of self-care, a political ideology; it is hope, it is an identity, and, depending on whom you ask, it is an enemy.²³

According to Schielke, a study of Islam should begin with the ambiguities in Muslim lives, which are not exceptions from what is normal but are normality themselves. Studying Islam as something overlooks the ways in which it actually matters in believers’ lives and how situational it is. He argues that even focusing on moral and pious subjectivity, as anthropologist Saba Mahmood did, ignores the wider picture in which religious experiences are formed. He reminds us that Islam has a significant sensory presence in Muslim life and is meshed with secular sensory experiences. He suggests we begin our focus with the immediate practice of living life and considering the existential concerns coloring it. The pragmatic considerations informing this are based in, but not to be reduced to, traditions, powers, and discourses that legitimize some concerns over others. Instead of focusing on what Islam says, Schielke would instead have us ask, “What makes a direction attractive in a specific situation?” Instead of taking Islam for granted as a religion, we might conceptualize it as a grand scheme that is actively imagined and contested, gives different paths and meanings to different people, and connects with other grand schemes, such as capitalism and love—each offering its own set of hopes, anxieties, and promises.²⁴

Like Schielke, Gabriele Marranci, in The Anthropology of Islam, calls for a study of Islam that begins with Muslims, for it is Muslims who shape Islam. He argues that emotion should be central in studying the religion, to see how humans make sense of the “map” called Islam and how they engage in discourses about Islam, power, and the meaning it has in their lives. While Islam is obviously rooted in networks and shared meanings, he says, universal concepts such as jihad are the result of interpretations affected by personal identity, emotions, and environment more than of any rational textual determination or orthodoxy. Focusing on “Islam” over Muslims, then, misses relevant processes of individual and community identity formation, which can disclose the dynamics of Muslim life, however informed they are by Islam.²⁵

Many other anthropologists have centered Muslims in their study of Islam—indeed, too many to name. For instance, Heiko Henkel shows how Muslim ways of doing things transform secular spaces in Turkey into Islamic ones. Peter Mandaville asks us to consider what politics influence Muslims’ negotiations with Islam; he focuses on “traveling” Islam, in which Muslims adhere to neither home nor host country but navigate between different political and cultural formations in an imaginative journey. Saba Mahmood argued that the infamous Danish cartoon controversy was framed as a matter of Islamic blasphemy, but it is more helpful to think about it in terms of the affective and embodied practices by which Muslims relate to the prophet Muhammad, and thus feel injured when he is disrespectfully depicted.

In addition to the anthropology of Islam, clear antecedents to our work can be found in ReOrient: A Forum for Critical Muslim Studies. The authors’ description of their project indicates their commitment to a critique of Eurocentrism, a suspicion of positivism, an exploration of the interplay between power and knowledge, and an embrace of postcolonial and decolonial thinking.²⁶ We share this starting point in our thinking on what the focus of Muslim studies could be, but we differ on the focus and outcomes. In the introduction, they write that theirs is an approach that “places at its heart the ‘wretched of the Earth’ and follows the consequences of this placement for an understanding of the emergence of the current world order and investigations of obstacles to its replacement.”²⁷

While deeply sympathetic to a philosophy that seeks to point to the subaltern as a primary site of inquiry, we also hold that to recognize agency among Muslims is to celebrate what it is they have wrought. It is possible to recognize both the subjugated positionality of the colonial subject and the myriad ways of being beyond being colonized. Our approach to cultural studies recognizes and engages with all possibilities of being. Furthermore, as it relates to investigating the current world order, our concern is more with the production of knowledge, and subsequent constructions of power.

Our project is to rethink Islamic studies so that it is centered more on Muslims and less on texts, without eschewing the importance of a textual corpus, whether the Qur’an, the Ahl al-Bayt, or a silsila of shuyukh. Here again we find agreement with the aim of critical Muslim studies to create a space of “critical and interdisciplinary discussion across a diverse range of disciplinary debates, interventions, and critiques.”²⁸ This too is a part of our vision. Islamic studies is not one thing. It is multidisciplinary; it is always dynamic.

Anthropologist Daniel Varisco notes that it is beneficial to “chart how beliefs and ideas are put into practice; not how they are supposed to be but how they unfold in observable manner in one place at one particular time.”²⁹ He reminds us that only Muslims can observe Islam, therefore an anthropology of Islam has to “observe Muslims in order to represent their representations” accurately.³⁰ Certainly Varisco’s thought can be applied in any discipline beyond anthropology, by anyone who seeks to understand Islam.

Along these lines, Americanist Edward E. Curtis IV notes, regarding the diversity of Muslim practices: “Once a scholar’s perspective shifts from observing Islam mainly from the perspective of theological, doctrinal, and legal discourses of a certain class of Islamic scholars to those of the lived realities of all Muslims, whether scholars or not, one can then identify norms and ideals that, sometimes contrary to doctrine, cut across binaries such as Sunni/Shi‘a, poor/rich, men/women, orthodox/heretic.”³¹ This is our goal: to shift perspectives, not just among scholars, but among those who care to know how to think about the world. This shift demonstrates how dichotomies are constructed, and who is included in conversations. And here we point to our own failings. Islamic studies tends to rely on men’s voices. The voices come from our sources and what we consider important, and they come from citational practice. As Islamic studies scholar Kecia Ali has noted several times, women are not cited in Islamic studies.³² This essay does not come close to parity in citational practices, in gender or race. And we point this out as an invitation to do the work of noticing voices, both those present and those absent. This essay is part of a larger project in which we include a greater diversity of voices, but first we must ask why the voices defining Islamic studies as a field tend to be male-presenting.

These kinds of questions are not limited to Islamic studies. We consider this to be a humanities project that focuses on Islam, because Muslims are seen through an imperial lens and not as part of the human experience. Our goal is to center people in the work that we do, whether in the past or in the present, and to bring the fullness of what it means to be a person into our explorations.

Hussein Rashid, MTS ’98, GSAS ’10, is assistant dean for religion and public life at Harvard Divinity School. His research focuses on Muslims and US popular culture.

Huma Mohibullah is a faculty member at Renton Technical College and specializes in anthropology. Rashid, Mohibullah and Vincent Biondo are editors of Islam in North America: An Introduction (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).