Contradictions and Lots of Ambiguity Two PDF

Contradictions and Lots of Ambiguity:
Two New Perspectives on Premodern

(and Postclassical) Islamic Societies
FRANK GRIFFEL
Yale University | frank.griffel@yale.edu
Shahab Ahmed
What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2016), 609 pp. isbn: 978-0-691-16418-2
Thomas Bauer
Die Kultur der Ambiguitt. Eine andere Geschichte des Islams [The Culture
of Ambiguity. Some Other History of Islam] (Berlin: Verlag der
Weltreligionen, 2011), 462 pp. isbn: 978-3-458-71033-2
ABSTRACT : For a long time, the Western academic study of Islam could not
escape making implicit comparisons between its own religions, culture, and
civilization and that of Islam. One would think that the events of September11,
2001,andthepolarization that followedincluding the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq,
and now in Syriaonly aggravated that situation. But the opposite is true. Among
the generation of scholars of Islam who matured in the West after 9/11 are some
who reached a new level in a project that earlier scholars in their field had already
demanded: trying to understand Islam on its own terms. The two books reviewed
here are thus far the two most outstanding examples of that development. Neither
of them ever uses the word decline. Unlike Ahmed, who only discusses aca-
demic voices, Bauer also deals with popular notions in politics and culture and
hence is a much more polemicaland less well-structured and well-argued
engagement with Western views on Islam than Ahmeds. In the end, however,
Bauer produces a more convincing approach to Islam in its postclassical period
than Ahmed.
KEYWORDS : Islam Muslims Islamic orthodoxy religion culture civilization

secular Salafists
Bustan: The Middle East Book Review, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2017

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2 bustan: the middle east book review
In 1975, in a programmatic article about what is orthodox in Islam, George

Makdisi (19202002) described Islam as, first and foremost, nomocratic
and nomocentric.1 Makdisi had a very distinguished career as a teacher of
Islamic studies on both sides of the Atlantic and expressed the credo of a gen-
eration of Western scholars who were trained in the works of the most influ-
ential Islamicist in the twentieth century, the Hungarian Ignaz Goldziher
(18501921). Goldziher was a philologist who had turned the study of Islam
from the concern of travelers, colonial administrators, and a few historians
during the nineteenth century to the proper study of Islam as a religion. The
Islam Goldziher and Makdisi studied, however, was not the religion that their
contemporaries in Egypt or in Iran practiced. It was, above all, what Muslims
in those centuries practiced that was considered Islams Golden Age. At
its inception, Islamic studies mirrored much of the Wests engagement with
the Middle East. Enchanted by Egyptomania and a collective admiration for
the monuments of ancient Mesopotamia that arrived at the national muse-
ums of their capitals, Westerners of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries could not look at the region dominated by Islam without seeing
decline. The Islamic Empire of Baghdad was considered the last of the great
civilizations of the Middle East and the Abbasid caliphs worthy successors
to the pharaohs of Egypt, the kings of Babylon, and the khosrows of Persia.
But Islamic high culture was considered only a very temporary phenomenon.
In the nineteenth century, Europeans agreed that Islam was a phenomenon
of the past that wouldlike all superstitionsdisappear in the maelstrom
of modernity and its increasing rationalization. As colonial administrators,
Europeans worked to make Islam disappear. Islam had a function in the past;
it did not have one for the future. G. W. F. Hegels Weltgeist was formed by
the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and most of all by the Greeks. It dwelled
only temporarily in Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordoba, and proceeded, in the late
Middle Ages, to Paris, Oxford, and finally Berlin. Westerners had become
convinced that since the moment when knowledge passed from the Muslim
Arabs to the Latin Christians, the story of their own culture (or civilization)
was one of continued progress. Given, however, that the power balance of the
two cultures or civilizations dominating the shores of the Mediterranean
Sea was considered to be a zero-sum game, the progress of Christian Europe
was mirrored by the decline of Islam.
1. . . . car lislam est avant tout nomocratique et nomocentrique. Georges Makdisi,

Lislam hanbalisant, Revue des tudes Islamiques 42 (1974): 21144 and 43 (1975): 4576;
at 76; English translation in Hanbalite Islam, in Studies on Islam, ed. and trans. Merlin
L. Swartz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 21674, at 264.
Frank Griffel: Contradictions and Lots of Ambiguity 3
Makdisis view of Islam as nomocratic and nomocentric must be seen in

the larger context of the Western narrative of Islams decline. It is an answer
to the What Went Wrong? question, titling one of Bernard Lewiss latest
books.2 Makdisi and Lewis, together with many others of theirgeneration,
such as Joseph Schacht (190269) or G. E. von Grunebaum (190972), believed
that Islam is, first and foremost, Islamic law. Given the lack of central insti-
tutions in Islam, Muslims may have never agreed on a communal creed, such
as the Nicene one in Christianity, but they agreed on shara, a communal law.
Hence, Islam should be described as being reigned not by orthodoxy but by
orthopraxya desire to do the right thing.
For a long time, the Western academic study of Islam could not escape
making implicit comparisons between its own religions, culture, and
civilization and that of Islam. One would think that the events of
September 11, 2001,andthe polarization that followedincluding the wars
in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now in Syriaonly aggravated that situation. But
the opposite is true. Among the generation of scholars of Islam who matured
in the West after 9/11 are some who reached a new level in a project that ear-
lier scholars in their fieldincluding many in the generation of Makdisi and
Lewishad already demanded: trying to understand Islam on its own terms.
The two books reviewed here are thus far the two most outstanding exam-
ples of that development. Refreshingly, neither of them ever uses the word
decline. Whereas Ahmed might deem it so farfetched that he doesnt even
engage with the suggestion, Bauer argues vehemently against it (see his index
Dekadenz). Unlike Ahmed, who only discusses academic voices, Bauer also
deals with popular notions in politics and culture and hence is a much more
polemicaland less well-structured and well-arguedengagement with
Western views on Islam than Ahmeds.
Thomas Bauers book was published in 2011 and is reviewed here because
it never received the attention it deserved among readers of English. (Its
first English-language review was published after this article was written.3)
In Germany, the book won Bauer, who is a professor of Arabic literature
and Islamic studies at Mnster University, a prestigious G. W. Leibniz Prize,
Germanys highest academic honor. It is the kind of book that matures
with time as its central points are picked up and further corroborated by
others. The very last reference in Shahab Ahmeds What Is Islam (541) is to
2. Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002).
3. Isabel Toral-Niehoff in Al-Ur al-Wus 24 (2016): 18793; available at http://
islamichistorycommons.org/mem/al-usur-al-wusta/
Bauers Kultur der Ambiguittillustrating that the two books offer two sides
of the same coin (Ahmed even says on p. 210 that he noticed it too late for
a full engagement). Others, such as Wael Hallaqs Impossible State, also con-
tribute to this change in perspective.4 It consists in the realization, first,
that premodern Islam was significantly, if not radically, different from the
way Islam is practiced today, and, second, that premodern Islam produced
well-functioning societies, based on norms, patterns, and values that are
significantly, even radically, different from those that dominated premod-
ern societies in the West. The rupture that obscures our understanding of
earlier Muslim societies is, of course, that of modernity, which for most
Muslims arrived in the form of colonialism. This new generation of Western
scholars of Islam has a much more critical position toward the European
Enlightenment and modernity than their predecessors in the field. Whoever
thought that with the reception of Edward Saids Orientalism from the 1980s
to the 2000s the Foucault-ish turn of Islamic studies in Western academia
has ended should read Ahmeds and Bauers books. Their criticism of earlier
attempts to understand premodern Islam goes far beyond Saidwho, like
Michel Foucault, is referenced only as a remote inspiration. Writing from a
postcolonial perspective seems so de rigueur in all fields of todays Middle and
South Asia Studies that it no longer needs justification by engaging with the
postcolonial classics.
O R T H O D O X Y A N D T H E R O L E O F R A T I O N A L IS M IN IS L A M
For historians, longevity is a virtue. One has to live long enough to begin
to see at least the rough contours of the picture one wishes to draw out.
Shahab Ahmed was, unfortunately, not blessed with longevity. He passed
away in September 2015 at the age of forty-eight. His previous career had
given rise to much advance praise but few publications prior to this 609-page
doorstop. When Harvard considered his tenure case in 201314, it was even-
tually denied. He had been there since 2005 with appointments at the uni-
versity (Committee on the Study of Religion) and the law school. Earlier, he
held the position of assistant professor at the American University of Cairo
(19982000) and post-docs at Harvard as well as at Princeton, where he got his
PhD in 1999, supervised by Michael Cook, with a thesis on the different views
held by Muslim scholars on the Satanic verses incident during Muammads
4. Wael B. Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernitys Moral Predicament
(NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2014).
lifetime. The work that we now hold in hand was already under review by
publishers when Ahmed went up for tenure in 2013. There are still two other
books that we can expect from him. In these cases, however, Ahmed was not
able to walk the manuscripts through the publication process. One is the
first part of his long-awaited study on the various reactions to the Satanic
verses episode,5 the other a book triggered by incidents of religious persecu-
tion in seventeenth-century Istanbul, authored in collaboration with Nenad
Filipovic (Neither Paradise Nor Hellfire: Understanding Islam through the Ottomans,
Understanding the Ottomans through Islam).
All three of Shahab Ahmeds book projects deal with the question of
orthodoxy in Islam, the very question that triggered Makdisis comment
on a nomocratic and nomocentric Islam. In the 1970s, Makdisi attempted
to challenge the dominant view in Western Islamic studies that Sunni
orthodoxy was represented by the theological school of Asharistes.
Makdisi attacked Goldziher for spreading this view and accused him of
having an understanding of Islam that is formed by how things work in
Catholic Christianity.6 Makdisi observed that Goldziherand with him
almost everybody who worked in Islamic studies during the mid-twentieth
centurybelieved in what he called an official Islamic orthodoxy, which
after around 1100 CE was Asharism, a school engaged in a distinctly ratio-
nalist project of interpreting revelation. Makdisi maintained that the real
orthodoxy in (Sunni) Islam was not Asharism but the anbalite movement
and its veneration of the salaf. For Makdisi, orthodoxy in Islam lay with
the scriptualists and antirationalists who rejected the influence of Greek
philosophy. For him, the rationalism of the Asharites was merely a short
interlude at the end of Islams Golden Era. He thought that after the twelfth
century, Asharites were in the minority, forced out of institutions by the
anbalites and their sympathizers. Those Muslim institutions, most impor-
tantly the madrasa, were dominated by the study of law and offered neither
a home for rational theology (kalm) nor for the so-called ancient sciences
(al-ulm al-awil) of philosophy, astronomy, and the natural sciences. At
some time around the twelfth century, Islam gave up not only on philoso-
phy but also on theology and became a religion of sacred lawnomocratic
and nomocentric.
Makdisis position on the collapse of Islams rationalism became widespread
in the 1980s and it is the background against which Shahab Ahmed wrote
5. Shahab Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses in Early Islam (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2017).
6. Makdisi, Lislam hanbalisant, 65, Engl. trans. 25456.
his book. Not all Westerners subscribed to these theses as enthusiastically as

theGerman Tilman Nagelwho gave his 1988 monograph on the Asharite
al-Juwayn (d. 1085) the subtitle triumph and failure of Islamic rationalism
yet Makdisis positions on Islams orthodoxy had and have a wide influence
both inside and outside of the academy. Inside, they merged with Straussian
notions of a persecution of philosophy in Islam; outside they supported pop-
ular ideas of a barbaric and violent Islam that date back to the Crusades and
military confrontations with the Ottomans and Muslim corsairs during the
early modern period. The West always had a very antithetical if not contra-
dictory view of Islams rationalism. On the one hand, it acknowledged Islams
innovations and its scientific achievements, expressed in such Arabic calques
as chemistry, algebra, or algorithm. On the other hand, it does not think of Islam
as a religion of reason. To reconcile these two contrasting aspects of Islam,
Western scholars have developed the narrative of a religious orthodoxy that
at one point began to persecute freethinking philosophers and scientists,
causing widespread intellectual decline. With such a premise, it was never
difficult to find confirming evidence in the vast body of Islamic writing that
has accumulated over the centuries.
SI X C O N T R A D I C T I O NS IN P R E M O D E R N IS L A M
What for othersincluding this reviewermay be contradictory elements in

a not (yet) fully developed understanding of Islam are for Shahab Ahmed real
contradictions intrinsic to the object of knowledge. He begins his book (573)
by pointing out six of those contradictions. The first asks what is Islamic
about falsafa, the philosophical system of Avicenna (Ibn Sn, d.1037), given
that the Asharite al-Ghazl (d. 1111) decided to eliminate three of its most
fundamental teachings out of Islam and declare them unbelief (1213). The
second contradiction points to Sufism and asks to what degree the Sufi tra-
dition is Islamic, if at times it belittles revelation, denies the universality of
shara, and pokes fun at Gods authority. Ahmed points to recent scholarship
on antinomian Sufism, which he would rather characterize as para-nomian
or supra-nomian (96). The third contradiction is an offshoot of the earlier
two and asks how the two traditions of Illuminationalism and Akbarism
which combine falsafa and Sufismcan be such popular expressions of
Islam given that they blatantly question (destabilize) the authority of
Muammads revelationand, one might add, given that the founder of one
of them, al-Suhraward (d. 1191), was executed for heresy. The fourth contra-
diction asks how the homoerotic Persian poetry of fi (d. 1389) fulfills so
many religious functions in Islam. The fifth contradiction asks how, in light
of a legal iconoclasm, pictures (mostly miniatures in books) can play such an

important role in Islam. Finally, in a sixth question, Ahmed asks how, in light
of a similar prohibition of alcohol, there is a celebration of drinking and of
drinking culture in so much of Persian literature.
One can either say that these six contradictions are trivial or marginal
(73), or that they do not concern the religion of Islam and are only an
expression of culture. For Ahmed, however, these six questions mark out-
right contradictions (72) that Islam produces, particularly in what he calls
the Balkans-to-Bengal complex (73). The latter is the kind of Islam that
was practiced from 1350 to 1850 in the region that stretches from southeast
Europe to the border of todays Myanmar and that was unified by the elites
use of two languages, Arabic and Persian. Ahmeds book is exclusively con-
cerned with the practice of Islam within the Balkans-to-Bengal complex. He
justifies this by claiming that it represents an (if not the) historically major
paradigm of Islam (82). Ahmed wishes to counter an Arab-centric view of
Islam that focused on Arabia, Syria, Egypt, and North Africa. In comparison,
the Balkans-to-Bengal complex has scale, centrality, duration, maturity,
articulation, and capaciousness on its side, and makesif only for being dif-
ferent from the Islam of the centerfor a much better object of study to
answer the question: What is Islam? (83). The first chapter of the book ends
in nine programmatic pages (1019) on the complexity of that question and
the problems in answering it given that the object of knowledge seems to
escape behind a veil of contradictions that forbid unified characterizations.
Ahmeds goal is no less than a reconceptualization of Islam that will be able
to identify the coherent dynamic of internal contradictions (109).
A L O N G L IS T O F F A L S E W E S T E R N
C O N C E P T U A L I Z A T I O NS O F IS L A M
Ahmeds rejection of a distinction between Islam as a religion and Islamic

culture is grounded in arguments developed by contemporary scholarship in
religious studies. Some, but not all of it, is referenced mostly by quotations
from Talal Asad. Our obvious inability to define what religion is and hence to
distinguish it from other phenomena that look quite similarfor instance,
dietary prohibitions based on nutritional science, the veneration of symbols
of the nation state such as flags, or the performance of rites such as the sing-
ing of anthemslead to a breakdown of convenient distinctions between the
political, the cultural, and the religious. The argument, for instance, that in
the absence of a clear scriptural mandate, veiling among Muslim women is
a cultural habit rather than a religious duty, requires a distinction between
religion and culture that simply does not pass muster. Similarly, to say that
Islamic terrorists act upon a purely political understanding of Islam that
can be contrasted to a religious one, which would prohibit such violence, is
unconvincing and rather ludicrous.
Ahmed responds to this scholarship by refusing to acknowledge that Islam
is a religion. The second, third, and fourth chapters of his book (113297) are
a detailed engagement with previous attempts to define Islam (conceptual-
izations) and to distinguish it from other phenomena that characterize its
societies. Ahmed goes through a progression of authors who, according to
his view, simply got their answer to What is Islam? wrong. He starts with
what arein his opinionthe most obviously misleading attempts to con-
ceptualize Islam and proceeds toward suggestions that are better, ending at
those that almost get it right. As an author, one would definitely prefer to be
quoted on the latter pages of these three middle chapters in Ahmeds book.
The first group of scholars Ahmed engages with is those who understand
Islam mostly as Islamic law.
The notion of Islam that gives normative and constitutive primacy

to legal discourse is, I venture, the default conceptualization of the
majority of scholars today (even if it is often unacknowledged by them),
and is certainly the habitual one in the popular consciousness of the
majority of contemporary Muslims and non-Muslims alike. (117)
In addition to Schacht and von Grunebaum, whom I have mentioned earlier

(the book does not engage with Makdisi), Ahmed refers here to the works of
Wael B. Hallaq, Gottheld Bergstrsser, Hamilton Gibb, Brinkley Messick, and
Jacques Waardenburg. Ahmeds key argument against this group is its inabil-
ity to explain the Islamic nature of Avicennas philosophy or of many expres-
sions of Islamic art. Unfortunately, Ahmed seems unaware of a long-standing
debate among scholars of Avicenna over whether his philosophy is Islamic
and not merely Arabic. In his 1988 monograph, Dimitri Gutas portrayed
Avicenna as a thoroughly Aristotelian thinker with scant relations to Islam.7
Later, in 2002, Gutas argued forcefully that the tradition of Avicenna is
Arabic philosophy and not an Islamic one.8 All this is, unfortunately, not
7. Dimitri Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition. Introduction to Reading Avicennas
Philosophical Works (Leiden: Brill, 1988); second revised edition 2014.
8. Dimitri Gutas, The Study of Arabic Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: An Essay
on the Historiography of Arabic Philosophy, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies
29 (2002): 525, at 1718. The argument is picked up by the editors of The Cambridge
discussed by Ahmed, who based on his first chapter takes the Islamic nature
of Avicennas philosophical system for granted. While he will find sympa-
thy among the younger generation of scholars who now work on Avicenna,
this point would have merited a much closer discussion. For Makdisi and his
followers, falsafa held a position in Islam similar to Mutazilism: It was aban-
doned, only to be rediscovered by Orientalists in the nineteenth century.
Ahmed quotes Mohammed Fadel as saying that the political theory of
Avicenna and al-Frb did not influence Sunni Islam (127). That, however,
cannot explain why the full corpus of Avicenna, al-Frb, or al-Suhraward
is available to usthe latters ikmat al-ishrq in hundreds of manuscript
copieswhereas a great number of Mutazilite books were no longer cop-
ied and disappeared. Many of todays experts on the study of falsafa follow
A.I.Sabras suggestion of an increasingly progressive absorption of the Greek
sciences into Islam.9 Their translation into Arabic and the close engagement
with them by the likes of Avicenna is now seen as an appropriation of
Greek philosophy. In a second step, through the works of al-Ghazl (d. 1111)
or Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) and many other undoubtedly Islamic writers, these
sciences were naturalized so that the Avicennan nature and the ultimate
Greek origins of, for instance, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyas (d. 1350) teachings
on the human soul are no longer visible. Avicenna, whose philosophical sys-
tem tries to make sense of Aristotle from within Islam and to explain Islam
with the help of Aristotelianism, was an important reference point and an
inspiration for many Muslim thinkersSufis, kalm-theologians, and legal
scholarsduring the period 13501850.
Given the centrality of Islamic philosophy for his overall argument, Ahmed
is surprisingly uninformed about the pros and cons of the Islamic nature of
falsafa and the debates within the relevant subfield. His engagement with the
position that Islam is primarily Islamic lawa position that he acknowledges
as being dominant todayis also astonishingly short. He finds iton the
grounds of the Islamic character of falsafareductionist nonsense (122).
For Ahmed this position is not only incorrect but also violent:
The assumption of a legal-supremacist conceptualization of Islam/

Islamic by Western analysts and modern Muslims alike does the worst
sort of Procrustean violence both to the phenomenon at stake and to
Companion to Arabic Philosophy, ed. Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005); see the introduction, pp. 34.
9. A. I. Sabra, The Appropriation and Subsequent Naturalization of Greek Sciences in
Medieval Islam: A Preliminary Statement, History of Science 25 (1987): 22343.
our ability to understand it: it effectively lops off various limbs of the
istorical body of Islam so as to box in into a theoretical Islam of our
h
own mis-manufacture. (129, emphasis in the original)
Next in Ahmeds list of misconceptions is the view that there is not one but
many Islams (12953). This denies the sense of communal unitythatMuslims
perceive and force the Western observer to assume an imagined commu-
nity (141). This sense of shared existential and semantic location, of a
shared inflection of existential predicament, is, in my view, one of the most
important facts that must be recognized when asking the question What is
Islam? (148). For Ahmed, difference, diversity, and disagreement is an
intrinsic part of Islam and it cannot simply be turned into many different
and distinct phenomena.
Ahmeds third adversary is the distinction between Islam as a religion
and as a culture or civilization, represented in the works of Ahmet
T. Karamustafa (15257) and Marshall G. S. Hodgson. Ahmed dismisses it
on the grounds that it cannot offer criteria that distinguish religion from
culture. Karamustafa is . . . making a purely nominal and not a substan-
tive differentiation (156). However, the position he attacks is defended
widely, beyond merely Karamustafa, and still undergirds many publications
on Islams role in the politics of the Middle East, as well as the name of the
Islamic art section in New Yorks Metropolitan Museum, which includes an
overlong list of topographical and temporal references. Opposition to the
understanding of Islam as a religion versus the culture of its societies
pops up throughout Ahmeds book (the Mets decision is criticized on p. 48).
The view is rooted in a secularized understanding of religion that Ahmed
also attacks. Elsewherehe clarifies that any application of the word secular
before the seventeenth century (and even then only with respect to Europe,
one might add) is nonsense (21116). It is, however, such a dominant nar-
rative, particularly in popular culture, that one needs more convincing
arguments to rebuff it than to say it is merely nominal. Ahmed returns to
this point in his fourth chapter, leaving somewhat loose ends in his second
chapter.
A significant place in his refutation of earlier attempts to conceptualize
Islam is devoted to Hodgsons suggestionmade in his 1974 three-volume
history The Venture of Islamto distinguish Islamic from Islamicate (157
75). Hodgson reserved Islamic as an adjective related to religion, faith, and
piety, whereas the neologism Islamicate refers to phenomena that appear
within a society shaped by Islam. Hodgsons distinction is one, Ahmed sug-
gests, between the private and the public, a sort of fundamentalism of
personal piety, assuming that personal piety is most Islamic whereas
its social ramifications are less Islamic to the eventual point of becoming
Islamicate (162). Again the litmus test is philosophy and art, which for
Hodgson are Islamicate rather than Islamic, despite the fact that,
according to Ahmed, literature, art, and philosophy are precisely expres-
sions, elaborations and explorations of the kind of inner religiosity that
Hodgson accepts as Islamic. Hodgsons position is for Ahmed the projection
of a Quakerist understanding of religion upon Islam (162, 170). Rejecting the
distinction between Islam and Islamicate, however, forces Ahmed to assume
that the Jewish philosopher Maimonides (d. 1204), who was fully socialized in
Arabic-speaking, Islamic societies, was himself Islamic (17475). One of the
implications of Ahmeds use of Islamic is to assume that Maimonides was
an Islamic Jewish thinker, but not a Muslim one (448).
The third chapter (176245) deals with the intellectually most challenging
false conceptualization of Islam, namely that of Islam as a religion. It starts
with familiar points about the differences between Islam and Christianity (no
Church in Islam, etc.) but soon reaches the main argument, namely that the
category of religion always comes together with the secular:
When we conceive of Islam as religion we are ineluctably entering into a

conceptual order(-ing)into a taxonomy of ideas, actions, and objects
that assumes the universality of the Modern Western religious-secular
binary. (197, emphasis in the original)
In short, religion is a concept that was formed in post-Enlightenment

Europe, in the context of an increasingly secular society and like the secu-
lar has no place in premodern Islam. mile Durkheims distinction between
sacred and profane, which is constitutional for the Western project of
religious studies, does not apply to Islam either. Ahmed heavily polemicizes
not only against nineteenth-century colonialists such as Ernest Renan (215),
but also against Ira M. Lapidus and Patricia Crone, who assumed the exis-
tence of secular states in premodern Islam such as the Seljuq Sultanate
(21623). Religious is a term that Ahmed puts aside as actively unhelpful
in the conceptualization of Islam (223).
Given that religion has been kicked out of the boat already, the fourth
chapter (24697) attacks the distinction between Islam and culture.
Ahmed engages with Clifford Geertz, Jacques Waardenburg, Kenneth Cragg,
William Cantwell Smith, and Talal Asad. The further one delves into Ahmeds
book, however, the milder his criticism becomes. The deeper into the book
an author is quoted, the greater he or she is appreciated. With Smith and
Asad, we reach those scholars who guide Ahmed toward his own definition of
Islam. Asad regards Islam as a discursive tradition (270), which finds favor
with Ahmed were it not for Asads addition that Islam is whatever Muslims
say authoritatively. The authoritatively refers to an idea of orthodoxy (or
orthopraxy) that is ill placed in Islam. Asad assumes that Islam is a discur-
sive tradition that aims at the production of orthodoxy. While the first part
of that assumption is true, the latter, according to Ahmed, is not. The poetry
of fi and of Saad, the Sufism of Ibn Arab, and even the philosophy of
Avicenna are, in Ahmeds view, not producing orthodoxy. Quite the opposite,
they are producing contradictions. Islamic literature of the period 13501850
is remarkably not looking for the orthodox. Ahmed culls the quote from the
Ottoman intellectual Ktib elebis (d. 1657) Balance of Truth (Mzn l-aqq):
the intelligent person contemplates and observes all the longstanding dis-
agreements that exist among Muslims. He will, however, not be so stupid
as to hope to decide a dispute of such long standing, and neither will he
attack anybodys tenets or dispositions (277). Ahmed clarifies that he is
not denying the presence of an orthodoxizing trajectory in Islamic history.
Rather, he wishes to caution against the analytical consequences of the
tendency to over-emphasize prescription and orthodoxy in the conceptu-
alization of Islam (281). Al-Ghazls recommendation that one should be
prepared to defend three different positions (singl. madhhab) on any given
issueone for the masses, one for ones peers, and the third comprising
that which a person believes within himself, drawing upon that which he
has discovered by his own investigation (283)is a recipe for societies that
are not based on common convictions about what is true and what is right
but on different beliefs for different people allowing an intellectual elite the
pursuit of their investigations in an atmosphere of freedom, unaffected by
the expectations of the populace, the state, or the religious establishment.
Al-Ghazl is usually seen as someone who persecuted heterodoxy in Islam.
Yet even these figures show a remarkable ability toward religious tolerance.
Another example is the Ottoman chief mufti Eb-s-Sud (d. 1574)known
for his persecution of Shiis, kzlba, and Yezidiswho nevertheless admit-
ted that knowledge of God is a limitless ocean, guarded by the jurists at its
shore: The great Sufi masters are the divers in that limitless ocean. We do
not argue with them (289).
IS L A M IS H E R M E N E U T I C A L E N G A G E M E N T
WITH THE PRE-TEXT, TEXT, AND CON-TEXT
After more than three hundred pages of criticism, any reader of Ahmeds
book will be relieved when he or she is finally confronted with Ahmeds own
definition of Islam. As a class of beings, Islam does not belong to religions but
to hermeneutical engagements, which means it is an engagement by an

actor or agent with a source or object of (potential) meaning in a way that
ultimately produces meaning for the actor by way of the source (345, emphasis
in the original). If that engagement is with the pretext, the text, or the con-
text of the Muslim revelationhere understood as Quran and adththen
we are talking about Islam. This implies that Islam is not, as is commonly
and narrowly assumed, squarely delimitedly the text of the Quran (and the
Hadith)that is to say: it is not scripture alone, or scripture in itself (346).
Rather, if Muslim philosophers develop the idea that teachings in their field,
which are established by rational arguments, are represented to the popu-
lace through divine revelation, using metaphors, parables, and other literary
means, then they are engaging with what Ahmed calls the Pre-Text of rev-
elation. Reason is, for all practical and knowable and conceivable purposes,
the Pre-Text from which the Text issues and of which the Text is a ratio-
nally and semantically inferior instantiation (348). Similarly, the project of
Sufism is ultimately concerned with accessing the Truth of the Pre-Text of
Revelation which lies beyond and behind the Truth of the Text (349). The
same applies to fiqh, which aims at establishing or reconstructing the rules
according to which God rewards or punishes human actions (in this world
and the hereafter) on the basis of how He talks about it in Revelation. Kalm,
on the other hand, is somewhat caught in the middle: (I)ts practitioners
seek truth about the Pre-Text . . . but by and large confine that (rational)
search to hermeneutical engagement with the Text. That has no effect on
the Islamic nature of kalm, as any hermeneutical engagement either with
pretext or text (or with the context) is Islam. Con-Text is the centuries-old
city of Islam, a great and sprawling city consisting of various edifices for the
various purposes of living by Muslims of bygone and present time (358).
To context belong the Arabic language, the history of Islam, and educa-
tional institutions that teach the pretext, text, and context but also stories
about love, such as Majnn Layla, that reflect on what it means to love God.
Con-text, then, in the heterogeneous totality of the historical product of
previous hermeneutical engagement with Pre-Text, Text, and Con-Text of
Revelation: it is the entire storehouse of means and meaning of Islam that are
under ongoing production (360, emphasis in the original).
It is clear that with this definition, there is nothing left in societies dom-
inated by Muslims that is not Islamic. If Islam is any hermeneutical engage-
ment with the pretext, text, and context, then Islam permeates everything
in majority-Muslim premodern societies, even the production of brass ewers,
given that they can be used in the ritual ablution, or of irz embroideries,
given that they use styles of calligraphy that were developed by Quran
calligraphers. In fact, nowhere in his book does Ahmed mention something

produced in a majority-Muslim society that he would not call Islamic. If
even Maimonides philosophy is Islamic Jewish, one should not expect any
cultural product not to be Islamic given that it all belongs to the context. In
fact, not only everything in majority-Muslim societies is Islam, the whole
world is Islamic. Muslims not only engage with the Revelatory Product (the
Text) but with the Revelatory Premise (the Pre-Text), and given that par-
allel to the text of revelation lies a Text as Revelation-in-the-cosmos that
lies behind and beyond the Revelatory event to Muammad, then Islam is a
phenomenon that renders the whole cosmos (including the world beyond
the Text) a source for Revealed Truth (355). Dazzling indeed!
Islams major product is means and meaning (356). The means allow
hermeneutical engagement, whereas meaning is what this engagement pro-
duces. Here Ahmed is playing with arbitrariness. From the Indian musician
Amr Khosraw (d. 1325) he quotes the remark that the Arabic word mughann
(singer) is just a single diacritical dot removed from the word man
(meaning, 425). Now, if one asks what man actually means in classical
Arabic, one enters a quagmire. In Medieval Latin translations of Arabic philo-
sophical texts man was rendered as intentio, which profoundly confused
many readers. The most basic translation of man is immaterial entity
or anything that exists and is not a body. Applied back to Ahmeds analysis,
one would need to admit that Islam produces something and all that we
know about it is that it is not a material product.
One might ask what benefit it has to define Islam broadly enough to poten-
tially include all activities by premodern Muslims and render vague what
Muslims aim at in their engagement with it (the production of meaning).
For Ahmed, the benefit lies in the fact that this definition explains the con-
tradictions he finds in the Balkans-to-Bengal complex. As long as Muslims
explore hermeneutical engagements of the pretext, text, and context of the
Muslim revelation (meaning as long as they do Islam), they will go into
different directions, which leads to the fact that in the historical Balkans-
to-Bengal complex in the period 13501850the space of exploratory con-
tradiction is very large indeed (381). Given that everything is Islam, Islam is
essentially contradiction: (C)ontratictory truth-claims are brought together
in juxtaposition and made to co-equate and co-exist as Islam (397).
Once Islam is defined as hermeneutical engagements in the pretext, text,
and context of the Muslim revelation, what is left for Ahmed is to apply his
definition and explain to us what, for instance, is Islamic in Islamic art, in
Islamic music (including its wine-songs), and in Islamic science (40835). The
answer in all these cases: the engagement with pretext, text, or context of
the Muslim revelation. Hence, a Sikh wrestler in Punjab who customarily

jumps into his fight-pit with a battle cry derived from the Arabic phrase y
Al! is making meaning for himself by hermeneutical engagement with
the Con-Text of Revelation of Islam. . . . In this moment, the Sikh wrestler is
not a Muslim: but he has committed himself to meaning-making in terms of
Islam (446). (Wh)ether or not an actor is Muslim is irrelevant to the matter
of whether or not the act or the product of the act is Islamic. . . . What matters
in the case of the non-Muslim is hermeneutical engagement with Con-Text
of Revelation to Muammad (449). Now, if the action of this non-Muslim
wrestler is an Islamic one (447), then this should equally apply to a Christian
audience of a Spanish bull-fight, who cheers the torero with shouts of ol,
a wordwe are told by etymologistsderived from the Arabic wa-Llh
(Dear God!). Is the action of the Spanish audience also an Islamic one even
if they are totally unaware of its connection with Islam? Or, applied to the
Sikh wrestler, is his shout really an Islamic action even if he does not intend
to evoke the spirit of Al ibn Ab lib but only blindly repeats a combination
of sounds that he or his predecessors might have adopted from the mouths
of Muslim warriors? Further, even if we admit that Maimonides Guide of the
Perplexed engages with pretext, text, or context of the Muslim revelation, is
its writing truly an Islamic act given that the author may have never intended
such an engagement?
By Ahmeds standard, the full history of both Aristotelian and Neoplatonic
philosophy becomes Islamic. Blocking out the whole question of the inten-
tionality of the engagement with pretext, text, or context of the Muslim rev-
elation allows him to claim pre-Islamic philosophical works as Islamic. He
tries to get this past his readers intuitive radar for contradictions by using
the Muslim names for the Greek sages: So, Aris, Jlns, Rustam, Kay
Khusraw and Iskandar are all . . . instances of the incorporation and making by
Muslim actors of units of meaning of non-Muslim provenance into the Con-
Text of Islam (444). Should we not, however, distinguish between a historical
Aristotle, who denied the possibility of revelation, and an Islamicized Aris,
who defended it? Isnt that Aris a mere literary fiction, just as Rustam in
the Shhnmah, and hence deprived of being a person whose actions created
meaning? The real actor here whose actions are Islamic are neither Aris
nor Rustam but rather the unknown translator who mistranslated Aristotles
teachings on prophecy10 or Firdaws (d. 1020), the author of the Shhnmeh,
10.Rotraud Hansberger, How Aristotle Came to Believe in God-Given Dreams: The

Arabic Version of De divinatione per somnum, in Dreaming across Boundaries: The
Interpretation of Dreams in Islamic Lands, ed. L. Marlow (Boston: Ilex, 2008), 5075.
who Islamicized Rustamif, in fact, that is what he did, which still remains a
matter of debate. Neither the historical Aristotle nor any historical Rustam
could have had any connection to Islam.
T H E T W O S T R E N G T H S O F W H A T IS IS L A M ?
The strengths of Shahab Ahmeds book lie in two fields: First, a well-informed
and well-argued critique of earlier attempts to define or characterize Islam.
This review tried to provide an overview of the wealth of material and the
depth of engagement with earlier contributions in Western Islamic studies
that can be found in the first three hundred pages of the book. Convenient
distinctions, such as that between religion and culture, religion and politics,
the sacred and the profane, or the religious and the secular, are shown to be
untenable for the study of premodern Islam. Most profound is Ahmeds cri-
tique of the mantra that our generation of students heard during the 1980s
and 90s, namely that Islam is a religion dominated either by its law (Makdisi,
Schacht, von Grunebaum, etc.) or by its deep piety (Hodgson). That short-
changes rationalist traditions in Islam (philosophy and kalm) as well as the
immensely rich world of Sufism. Ahmeds book should be read as an urgent
plea that Islam is much more than its shara. In its latter part, for instance,
the book includes an engagement with Persian akhlq literature (Nr al-Dn
al-ss Akhlq-i Nir and its successors). It argues convincingly that the
shara of the jurists was far from being the only normative discourse in Islam
(46073). Norms of human behavior were also shaped by philosophical ethics
and by the belles lettres (492502). There has always been, parallel to the law
of the fuqah, a second tradition of rulers law that was just as Islamic as
the first (485). The primacy of shara marginalizes the practice of tazr pun-
ishments under the Seljuqs, the tradition of siysa under the Mamlks, and
the canonization of rulers law by the Ottoman Sleyman I the Lawgiver
(Qnn, reg. 152066). Ahmed presents both the akhlq literature as well as
rulers lawthe two are closely connected (505)as Islamic law. The primacy
of shara also gives the wrong impression that antinomian movements in
Islamor just the willingness to disregard certain laws, such as the prohi-
bition of alcoholare utterly un-Islamic. They are not, Ahmed points out;
rather they are part and parcel of Islam in the premodern period. Ahmed
is not the first to point out that the description of Islam by Western Islamic
studies throughout the twentieth century is curiously similar to that devel-
oped by Muslim Salafists during the same period (219).
Ahmeds second strength is the refreshingly different picture he paints
of a postclassical Islamic society. He does not use the phrase postclassical,
but it becomes increasingly common in a field that recognizes how much
previous research on Islam has focused on its classical period, beginning

with the inception of Islam and ended in the twelfth century. The vast major-
ity of Western secondary literature as well as most undergraduate courses
on Islam taught at Western universities deal with the classical period. The
study of Islamic intellectual historymy own subfield of Islamic studies
has brought forth monograph after monograph on thinkers and schools who
were active before the twelfth century. Yet there is currently nobody in this
subfield who could answer the question whether al-Abhars (d. 1265) Hidyat
al-ikma, a short introduction into Avicennan philosophy used in madrasa
education up until the twentieth century, was written as an uncommitted
report by an opponent of these teachings or as something the author was
truly invested in. The point is true for the whole tradition of postclassical
philosophy in Islam: Currently we do not know whether people studied
Avicennism because they felt a commitment to its teaching or because they
thought these were challenging ideas and arguments that one needed to be
familiar with in order to rebuff them. The truth probably lies somewhere in
the middle, which brings me to an important feature of postclassical Islam:
ambiguity.
T H O M A S B A U E R S T O L E R A N C E O F A M BI G U I T Y
(AMBIGUITTSTOLERANZ)
Ahmed mentions ambiguity numerous times in his book as a feature of the

Balkans-to-Bengal complex (e.g., 201, 210, 402, 522, 526), but the unexplained
characteristic that triggered his revisionist depiction and analysis of that
society is not ambiguity but contradiction. In Ahmeds book, ambiguity
appears mostly together with a collection of other features that are derived
from the existence of contradictions in the Balkans-to-Bengal complex, these
being ambiguity, ambivalence, contradiction and paradox (201). Elsewhere
(423), he adds the multi-embeddedness of the two sides of reality, namely
metaphor and true meaning (aqqa). Ahmed approaches the ambiguities
of the Balkans-to-Bengal complex as the result of something that he regards
as more fundamental: contradictions.
Here Thomas Bauer, whose book appeared four years before Ahmeds,
takes a different approach. Bauers field is Arabic poetry, where he produced
a remarkably lucid and learned book on love-poetry in the classical period
of Islam.11 Bauer engages in Mentalittsgeschichte (history of mentality),
11.Thomas Bauer, Liebe und Liebesdichtung in der arabischen Welt des 9. und 10. Jahrhunderts:
Eine literatur- und mentalittsgeschichtliche Studie des arabischen azal (Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz, 1998).
a project that through literature tries to reconstruct what kind of attitude

past generations in bygone societies had toward such phenomena as love,
for instance. His next major project began to explore the attitude toward
ambiguity. The resulting book is a cultural history of Islam in flashlights
(Kulturgeschichte des Islams in Ausschnitten, 14) that looks at the Arabic schol-
arly world in the period 9001500 and compares it with modern Islam in the
past two centuries. The books main results are, first, the destruction of ambi-
guity in modern Islama process that elsewhere has also been observed in
the transition from premodern to modern societiesand, second, the detec-
tion of a remarkable degree of tolerance of ambiguity (Ambiguittstoleranz)
in premodern Muslim societies, so much so that it puts obstacles to our
(modern) ability of understanding them. Bauer borrows the concept tol-
erance of ambiguity from contemporary psychology. There it describes an
individuals ability to accept situations where truth (e.g., of a theorem, a
texts meaning, or a persons gender) or a right (e.g., of a persons action or
a right of way) cannot be fully established and where a multiplicity of truth-
claims and claims of right and wrong remain unresolved. Bauer wishes to
apply this concept in what in German is called Kulturwissenschaft (cultural
studies). His book explains distinct features of premodern Islam that illus-
trate its vast ability to tolerate ambiguity. For instance, the text of the Quran
has never been fixed down to every letter, but Muslim scholars agreed to can-
onize seven different readings of the unvocalized Arabic text that then in the
next step allow for a limited number of different vocalized readings (6168).
Bauer regards the Uthmanic collection of the Quran as an attempt at disam-
biguation that led to a crisis of ambiguity to which the community responded
with a collective ambiguation (75). The famous saying of Muammad that
disagreement within my community is a blessing (or: divine mercy, rama)
expresses that strategy of ambiguation. It is a means to avoid conflict and
violence and it appears in numerous instances during the development of
Islam. Further examples are the collection of adth (14356), the develop-
ment of four different schools of law (15781), or the existence of love poetry
that breaks through familiar categories of homo- and heteroerotic (26890).
Bauer does not say that the development in premodern Islamic societies
has always been in the one direction of greater tolerance of ambiguity. Far
from itthere have always been challenges to it. The reaction to Uthmns
Quran collection illustrates, however, that most often a crisis of ambiguity,
which might have been created by an authoritys attempt of dis-ambiguation,
was answered with the taming of ambiguity (Ambiguittszhmung), that is,
the strategy to allow for a limited number of parallel solutions to a problem
(146). Premodern Islam not only tolerated ambiguity to a much higher degree
than the West, it desired it (265). It led to side-by-side (Nebeneinander) or

competing and at times contradictory discourses. Bauers book is a celebra-
tion of this method, which for him leads to a relaxed view of the world
(gelassener Blick auf die Welt), much different from modern Islams multiple
anxieties. Premodern Islams indifference toward non-Muslim societies in
Europe or the Americas, for instance, make it in Bauers eyes a much better
world citizen than the Europeans, who came, saw, and destroyed (36775).
In the period that Bauer studies, Islam did not experience religious wars and
had no suppression of philosophy or the natural sciences nor a persecution
of rationalists (37778).
Similar to Ahmeds Balkans-to-Bengal complex, Bauer focuses on post-
formative Islamic societies (nachformativer Islam) elsewhere he vehemently
rejects the label postclassical12and maintains that these societies did not
live inworld of certainties but of probabilities (384). In several instances he
hints at developments in theology and philosophy, but admits that he lacks
the expertise for a competent discussion (4445). Numerous examples could
be given for a great degree of tolerance toward, as well as a taming of ambigu-
ity in, Islamic intellectual history. Unlike other monotheist religions, in Islam
we see the existence of several theological traditions within one society and
even one place. In philosophy, Bauers approach may offer a solution as to
why postclassical madrasa students had to learn the philosophy of Avicenna
even if it violated fundamental principles of the theological system in which
they were trained. It might explain why postclassical books in Islamic phi-
losophy offer such detailed discussions of problems in epistemology and
ontology without so as much as a hint of which solution is the correct one.
Ambiguity offers a more coherent way to describe postclassical Islam than
contradiction.
T H E T W O B O O K S A C H I L L E S H E E L : M O D E R N IS L A M
Both books offer innovative visions for our understanding of premodern,

particularly postclassical, Islamic societies, but their portrayal of modern
Islam is reductionist and coarse. For Bauer, modern Muslim societies are
busily destroying the ambiguities that have characterized their premod-
ern successors. In Ahmeds book, modern Islam appearsapart from a brief
polemical passage earlier on (245)only on the last forty pages (50441).
12.Thomas Bauer, In Search of Post-Classical Literature: A Review Article, Mamlk

Studies Review 11 (2007): 13767; available at http://mamluk.uchicago.edu/msr.html.
Whereas premodern Muslims in the Balkans-to-Bengals complex engage in

the pretext, the text, and the context of Muslim revelation, modern Muslims
limit their engagement to the text. The modern Muslim, to Ahmed, is a new
species of human being who is engaged in the downsizing of Revelation
from Pre-Text, Text, and Con-Text, to Text more or less alone (516). The
unseen world (al-ghayb), which is such an important realm for premodern
Islam, is lost (517) and particularly the practices and discourses of the Pre-
Textphilosophy and Sufism experience intellectual, practical and social
depreciation and invalidation of [their] authority (517). Bauer even detects
hate of modern Muslims toward their own history (53, 113). Both books
tend to assume that all modern Muslims are either Aligarh-style modern-
ists or outright fundamentalists, focused in an almost Protestant manner on
the text of the Quran. Or they are Salafists, who take their religious author-
ity from the adth corpus. Yet even now in the twenty-first century, we see
Muslims visit and pray at shrines, assemble for dhikr, study kalm in circles
that resemble the madrasas of old, recite the poetry of fiz and Rm, and
tell themselves stories of Khir or the Seven Sleepers. After more than two
centuries of modernization, these phenomena cannot simply be the atavisms
of a long bygone Islam, but must have their intrinsic attraction and value
within modern Muslim societies. Ahmed sounds patronizing when he talks
about the difficulties that modern Muslims have when attempting to con-
ceptualize Islam in a way that combines the modern with the premodern.
His book shall help us understand the fundamental difficulties that mod-
ern Muslims have in answering the human and historical question What is
Islam? (514).
Did Shahab Ahmed himself succeed in answering it? Pointing out the
two major strengths of his book, this review also made clear that his own
attempt of conceptualizing or defining Islam as the hermeneutical engage-
ment with the pretext, the text, and the context of the Muslim revelation
suffers from a lack of attention toward the intentionality of the actors. If a
definition of Islam ends up trying to tell us that Maimonides was an Islamic
Jewish thinker and make us accept the battle cry of a Sikh wrestler as an
Islamic action, then it doesnt offer an explanation of how we all use Islam.
Ahmeds point is, of course, that we should reconceptualize and change our
use of the word. For many, that may simply be too high a price to pay for the
offer of a cohesive definition of Islam. Indeed, Bauer vehemently rejects
what in his opinion is an overuse of the attribute Islamic triggered by the
age-old Western belief that the religion of Islam is so heavily imprinted upon
its societies that it controls everything therein (200203). Ahmed duly takes
him to task for his failure to interrogate the categories of religious and
secular [or] of culture (210).
As an academic discipline, religious studies is famously characterized by
its inability to define religion. We can point toward religious phenom-
ena and we may have learned that they can be very different from the kind
of things that Christianity and Judaism regard as part of their religions.
Understanding the great variety of these phenomena, however, has brought
us even further away from defining what religion as a category consists of,
to which classes of beings it belongs, and what distinguishes it from other
beings in that class. Just as it seems hopeless to define religion, the same
may be true about Islam. We might be forced to say that we know what it is
when we see it. Here, Ahmeds book makes a valuable contribution by point-
ing to multiple phenomena that are indeed Islamic but that have not always
been acknowledged as such. In precisely defining Islam, however, Ahmeds
suggestion seems as unsuccessful as the many attempts he so successfully
criticizes in his book.

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Contradictions and Lots of Ambiguity:

Two New Perspectives on Premodern

KEYWORDS : Islam Muslims Islamic orthodoxy religion culture civilization

Bustan: The Middle East Book Review, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2017

In 1975, in a programmatic article about what is orthodox in Islam, George

1. . . . car lislam est avant tout nomocratique et nomocentrique. Georges Makdisi,

Makdisis view of Islam as nomocratic and nomocentric must be seen in

his book. Not all Westerners subscribed to these theses as enthusiastically as

What for othersincluding this reviewermay be contradictory elements in

of a legal iconoclasm, pictures (mostly miniatures in books) can play such an

Ahmeds rejection of a distinction between Islam as a religion and Islamic

The notion of Islam that gives normative and constitutive primacy

In addition to Schacht and von Grunebaum, whom I have mentioned earlier

The assumption of a legal-supremacist conceptualization of Islam/

When we conceive of Islam as religion we are ineluctably entering into a

In short, religion is a concept that was formed in post-Enlightenment

to hermeneutical engagements, which means it is an engagement by an

calligraphers. In fact, nowhere in his book does Ahmed mention something

the Muslim revelation. Hence, a Sikh wrestler in Punjab who customarily

10.Rotraud Hansberger, How Aristotle Came to Believe in God-Given Dreams: The

previous research on Islam has focused on its classical period, beginning

Ahmed mentions ambiguity numerous times in his book as a feature of the

a project that through literature tries to reconstruct what kind of attitude

than the West, it desired it (265). It led to side-by-side (Nebeneinander) or

Both books offer innovative visions for our understanding of premodern,

12.Thomas Bauer, In Search of Post-Classical Literature: A Review Article, Mamlk

Whereas premodern Muslims in the Balkans-to-Bengals complex engage in

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10.Rotraud Hansberger, How Aristotle Came to Believe in God-Given Dreams: The

12.Thomas Bauer, In Search of Post-Classical Literature: A Review Article, Mamlk