Gudrun Krämer

Religion, Culture, and the Secular
The Case of Islam

Working Paper #23

Working Paper Series of the Centre for Advanced Studies
in the Humanities and Social Sciences (CASHSS)“Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”
ISSN 2700-5518#23: Gudrun Krämer. “Religion, Culture, and the Secular: The Case of Islam.”Leipzig University, 2021.
© Gudrun Krämer
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Please cite as:
Krämer, Gudrun. “Religion, Culture, and the Secular: The Case of Islam.”Working Paper Series of the CASHSS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West,
Beyond Modernities” 23. Leipzig University, 2021.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36730/2020.1.msbwbm.23

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Contents

1 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 3
2 Conceptual Issues..................................................................................................... 8
2.1 The Concept of Culture..................................................................................... 8
2.2 The Concept of Religion...................................................................................14
2.3 Muslim Understandings of Islam.....................................................................21
2.4 Din, Iman, and Islam.........................................................................................24
2.5 Din, Dunya, and Dawla.....................................................................................29
3 Religion, Culture, and the Islamicate....................................................................41
3.1 Islam and Community-Building.....................................................................41
3.2 Muslims and Others..........................................................................................44
3.3 Islam and the Islamicate...................................................................................47
3.4 Writing the Islamicate.......................................................................................52
3.5 The Many Uses of Adab....................................................................................56
3.6 Illustrating the Islamicate.................................................................................61
4 Continuities, Ruptures, and New Vistas...............................................................68
4.1 Text and Context...............................................................................................68
4.2 The Stable and the Flexible..............................................................................73
5

Concluding Remarks..............................................................................................75

6

Bibliography.............................................................................................................80

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Religion, Culture, and the Secular
The Case of Islam
1 Introduction

Why jump into a sea, where everything is seemingly fleeting, floating,and fluid? There is not a single concept that offers solid ground to standon: ‘religion’ is problematic, ‘culture’ elusive, ‘secularity’ contested, and‘Islam’ one big question mark. ‘Identity’, to name that which looms solarge in modern contexts, fares no better. Yet jump we must if we are to
do more than critique conceptualisations that we consider flawed, andinstead provide what is expected of academics: critical reflection that does
justice to the subject at hand, while at the same time speaking to wider
intellectual, moral, and political concerns. This paper contributes to thedebate on multiple secularities by discussing conceptualisations of religion
and culture and their relevance to articulations of secularity ‘in Islam’.
Written from the perspective of historically grounded Islamic studies, witha focus on the period up to 1500, this paper nonetheless addresses current
concerns, for while the secular and hints at secularity can be identified in
pre-modern Muslim majority contexts, they only emerged as themes oftheoretically informed debate in the modern period.

The illustration shows Kay Khusraw crossing
Lake Zara, facing all sorts of dangers. Safavid
Shahname 1590–1600. Washington, Freer
Sackler Gallery FS-S1986.265_001.

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Islam invites reflection on the concepts of religion and culture because,
as a global phenomenon with a historical depth spanning well over amillennium, it has been plural from an early date. Plurality evolved into
diversity as Islam expanded geographically and socially to become aworld religion (well before world religions were supposedly “invented” by
European scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries). To identify the ‘Islam’
resulting from these processes, the interplay of religion and culture, or
civilisation, has been regularly invoked. Significantly, culture has usually
been defined in relation to religion, as ‘Islamic culture.’ As Louis Gardet
stated several decades ago:
Islam is a religion. It is also, almost inseparably from this, a community,
a civilization and a culture. It is true that many of the countries throughwhich the Qur’anic faith spread already possessed ancient and important
cultures. Islam absorbed these cultures, and assimilated itself to them invarious ways, to a far greater extent than it attempted to supplant them. But
in doing this, it provided them with attributes in common, with a common
attitude to God, to men and to the world…The history of the Muslim
peoples and countries is thus a unique example of a culture with religious
foundation, uniting the spiritual and the temporal, sometimes existing side
by side with ‘secular’ cultures, but most often absorbing them by becoming
very closely interlinked with them.1

The prevalent view today is that Islam is a religion that forged a civilisation,and that the two are difficult to keep apart. Islam is internally diversified
along various lines, some of them manifested in ‘sectarian’ affiliation (such1

I am greatly indebted to my fellow members at the Centre for Advanced Studies inthe Humanities and Social Sciences “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond
Modernities” at Leipzig University, in particular Florian Zemmin, Monika WohlrabSahr, Sushmita Nath, Mohammad Magout, Elliot Lee, Christoph Kleine, Markus Dreßler,and Vanya Bhargav for their knowledge, insights, and stimulating discussion. Warmthanks also go to Sarah Stroumsa, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Claus-Peter
Haase, Freie Universität Berlin, for their critical comments on an earlier version of thispaper. As always, the remaining errors are my own.
Louis Gardet, “Religion and Culture,” in The Cambridge History of Islam: 2B Islamic Society
and Civilization, ed. Peter Holt, Ann K. S. Lambton and Bernard Lewis (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1970), 569. The claim to uniqueness should be treated withcaution, as should several other claims contained within these few sentences. Islam is
not as unique as Gardet and others may think. ‘Catholic culture’, ‘Protestant culture’, andperhaps even more so, ‘Jewish culture’ have been subject to intense debate regarding
their constituent parts. If one were to look beyond the three monotheistic religions,Confucianism would offer itself up for inspection. More on this below.
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as Sunni, Shiʿi, or Alevi), others in specific understandings of theology
and piety (Sufi, Salafi), and yet others tied to culture and region. Culture
and region are seen as interlinked, and the Islamic world as divided
into a number of culturally distinct zones (the Arab world, a Persianate
sphere including Anatolia, the Indian subcontinent, and Central Asia,
Southeast Asia, China, sub-Saharan Africa, Europe), within which Islamis considered to be inflected in characteristic ways. Some question the
purpose and validity of drawing such lines, however, while others denythat Islam can even be Islam if it recognises culture as a factor ‘inflecting’it. The controversy over ‘European Islam’ is a case in point. At the sametime, contemporary discussions of Islam and Muslim identity, andabout Islamic reform, ethics, and politics are frequently predicated on a
distinction between religion and culture, with important consequences forthe conceptualisation of secularity.2 Examples range from the display ofIslamic symbols in public space (is a specific form of veiling designed and/or perceived as an expression of religion or of culture?), through issues ofgender and governance to patterns of consumption, aesthetics, and the arts.
Current debates in both academia and politics, on religion, culture,and the secular are very much concerned with the effects of power,
hegemony, exclusion, and marginalisation. But there is another element
relevant to these issues, which relates to flexibility rather than hierarchy. In
contemporary conceptualisations of an Islamic social, moral, and politicalorder, many Muslim speakers regard Islam as a stable religious reference
system (although this is not the term they would commonly use), one that isaccessible in widely different settings. These settings are frequently labelled‘cultural.’ Compared to those classified as religious references, culturalreferences are commonly considered to be softer, more malleable, andmore easily negotiable.3 The same applies to the boundaries derived from2

3

My focus therefore differs from Jeanette Jouili’s in her important article “Islam andCulture”, where she discusses the relevance of culture discourses for Muslim subjectivities
in the West, as well as their potential for Islam and Muslims gaining recognition within
their respective non-Muslim majority societies: Jeanette S. Jouili, “Islam and Culture:
Dis/junctures in a Modern Conceptual Terrain,” Comparative Studies in Society andHistory 61 (2019). Incidentally, I agree with Alexander Knysh that in many instances, theterm ‘subjectivity’ is synonymous with (if not to say: identical to) ‘identity’ (Alexander
Knysh, Sufism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 242n55).
During an encounter in the early 2000s, heavily veiled young female academics in
Yemen’s capital Sanʿaʾ declared the headscarf to be religiously mandatory and nonnegotiable whereas according to them, the face veil was a cultural symbol, tied to Yemeni
5them. The distinction that treats religion as the stable element and culture
as flexible, however, exemplifies the very approach that many consider afallacy. This approach posits what is said and prescribed by the normative
texts, first and foremost the Qurʾan and prophetic traditions (Sunna), as
the universal norm, corresponding to the Great Tradition (in the singular).
By contrast, it ascribes ‘what local people just do’ the secondary rank oflocal practice, corresponding to the Little Traditions (in the plural), which
are non-binding and non-normative.4 Yet it also refers to an establishedprinciple of Islamic legal reasoning that distinguishes between the stable
and the flexible, or mobile, elements of Islam. More on this below.
As I have previously dealt with the political and legal aspects ofsecularity and secularisation in Islamic contexts, with a focus on
the early modern and modern periods, I would like to refer readers
to these publications rather than repeating my arguments here.5
In the following, I will focus on particular distinctions relevant to theconceptualisation of religion and culture, adopting the very kind of
approach that Shahab Ahmed rejected as misguided in his thoughtprovoking, rambling, and occasionally irritating What is Islam?:
I will argue that the human and historical phenomenon of Islam is a fieldof meaning where truth is constituted, arranged, and lived in terms notof categories constituted by mutual exclusion, but rather by categories of4
5

custom and tradition, and dispensable in a different sociocultural context (such as on atrip to Berlin). For them, culture was possibly socially or discursively constructed but not
religion, or what they identified as religious.
See, e.g., Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2016), 255.
See notably Gudrun Krämer, Gottes Staat als Republik: Reflexionen zeitgenössischer
Muslime zu Islam, Menschenrechten und Demokratie (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1999);
Gudrun Krämer, “Gottes-Recht bricht Menschen-Recht: Theokratische Entwürfe imzeitgenössischen Islam,” in Theokratie und theokratischer Diskurs: Die Rede von derGottesherrschaft und ihre politisch-sozialen Auswirkungen im interkulturellen Vergleich,ed. Kai Trampedach and Andreas Pečar (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013); Gudrun
Krämer, “Secularity Contested: Religion, Identity and the Public Order in the Arab
Middle East,” in Comparative Secularities: Religion and Modernity in the Global Age, ed.
Marian Burchardt, Matthias Middell, and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr (Berlin: de Gruyter,2015) and Gudrun Krämer, “Piety, Politics, and Identity: Configurations of Secularity
in Egypt,” in A Secular Age beyond the West: Religion, Law and the State in Asia, theMiddle East and North Africa, ed. Mirjam Künkler, John Madeley, and Shylashri Shankar(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Gudrun Krämer, Der Vordere Orient
und Nordafrika ab 1500 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2016) seeks to integrate thesequestions into a broader historical narrative.
6

mutual intersorption and inter-locution that run athwart and conceptually
frustrate the secular/religious binary or religion/culture division. As such,the use of a vocabulary that seeks, in the first instance, to organize andunderstand phenomena by categorically distinguishing between religion
and secular, or between religion and culture, simply does not help us clearly
to see the human and historical phenomenon of Islam (and we should not
imagine that the solution to this is to argue that, in Islam, everything is‘religion’ – or that everything is ‘culture’).6 [my emphases]

I disagree, except for the last clause, set in parentheses. I argue that forheuristic purposes, it is productive to retain the categories of religion andculture, or civilisation, and to keep them apart conceptually, especially incurrent debates on the nature of Islam. This approach prioritises analysis –literally taking things apart and looking at, or even for, cracks and fissures– over the search for an integrated whole. But I am not the only one to draw
distinctions: Muslims past and present have done so in manifold ways. The
difficulties inherent in the exercise are not to be underestimated: bothreligion and culture are notoriously difficult to define. There is overlap,
ambiguity, and polyvalence, and boundaries are porous as well as shifting.
What is more, to distinguish between categories in social and cultural
analysis does not require setting them up as opposites, premised on mutual
exclusion. If religion and culture are distinct, they are nonetheless entangled
in multiple ways. The beauty of the term ‘entanglement’ lies precisely inthe fact that it allows for distinction without assuming separation, that it
explores the connections involved, that it is dynamic, and that it invites thesearch for actors, motives, sites, and driving forces without presupposing
a prime mover. The following will require some engagement with Islamicstudies, for without at least a cursory look at the theological and legal
ramifications of the arguments exchanged, the echoes they evoke andthe resonance they find among Muslim audiences cannot be understood.
Without a sense of these echoes we will get no feel for what is at stake in thedebates on religion, culture, and secularity ‘in Islam’.

6

Ahmed, What is Islam?, 116.
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2 Conceptual Issues
2.1 The Concept of Culture

Grand, sparkling, and mercurial, ‘culture’ tends to slip from the handsof those who seek to grasp it. Positions on the subject cover a wide range:
there are those who still work with the assumptions of the Kulturkreis
school, which regarded cultures as closed, homogeneous, enduring,and static units.7 These assumptions have been thoroughly discredited
among academics, but they continue to inform public discourse andidentity politics in many parts of the world. For this reason, they cannot
be ignored. Then, there are those who reject the concept of culture asa product of othering, which, based on an essentialist construction ofan ‘Other’, first fixes its character, preferably with reference to a given
textual tradition, to then use that Other as a negative foil for the superior‘Self’. Some want to abandon ‘culture’ altogether, declaring the concept
to be irredeemably tied to essentialist assumptions. Within the wider
field of Islamic studies, the rejectionist camp usually draws on postcolonial theory, with Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism visibly inthe foreground and Michel Foucault conspicuously in the back.8 A
minority of critics go further, claiming that the term ‘culture’ serves as aplaceholder for ‘race’, and that boundary drawing based on perceived or
alleged cultural differences is, in essence, racist (‘cultural racism’, ‘racism
without race’)9. Here Frantz Fanon, Étienne Balibar, and Stuart Hall loom
large. Except for the remaining partisans of Kulturkreis ideas, all of thesegroups are informed by post-structuralism and view boundary drawing
primarily as a strategy of exclusion.
Social and cultural anthropology, literary studies, cultural studies,
and, perhaps to a lesser extent, cultural sociology,10 have established
7

Ethnologist Leo Frobenius, who coined the term ‘Kulturkreis’ (‘culture circle’ or ‘culture area’)in the late 19th century (Leo Frobenius, Der Ursprung der afrikanischen Kulturen (Berlin:
Verlag von Gebrüder Borntraeger, 1898)), later distanced himself from the concept.
8 See notably Lila Abu-Lughod, “Writing Against Culture,” in Recapturing Anthropology:
Working in the Present, ed. Richard G. Fox (Santa Fe: University of Washington Press,
1991). For spirited defences of the concept of culture, see William H. Sewell Jr., “The
Concept(s) of Culture,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn
Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Christoph Brumann, “Writing for
culture: Why a successful concept should not be discarded,” Current Anthropology 40(1999); or Daniel Varisco, Culture Still Matters (Leiden: Brill, 2018).
9 Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, nation, classe: Les identités ambiguës
(Paris: La Découverte, 1988).
10 Notably represented in the USA by Jeffrey Alexander and his students. For German8

themselves as the leading fields in the academic debate (or what today israther innocuously called ‘conversation’) about culture, identity, and thediscursive construction of difference. Three of these (sub-) disciplines even
include the term ‘culture’ in their names. My own field, Islamic studies, hasbeen somewhat slow to join the debate, and its contributions have received
little attention outside the field.11 While the construct of cultural racism,
cast in the form of ‘anti-Muslim racism’, has been adopted and critiqued
within cultural studies, it is largely absent from Islamic studies broadly
understood, unless dealing with Islam in Europe and North America.
While I follow the argument that both race and culture can be construed
so as to suggest a solid box restricting those within in the way a prison
confines its inmates, I question the usefulness of a concept that transfers theconstructs of ‘race’ and ‘racism’ from their alleged biological determinants,from which there can be no escape, to socially constructed cultural ones,
which may certainly be restrictive but leave the escape option open. Even
conceding that American usage of the term race, focussing on the body,
blood, and the experience of slavery,12 differs from continental European
usages – in particular the German one – this transfer comes at the expenseof precision in a very sensitive domain, and I therefore do not endorse it.
My understanding of culture owes much to the ‘cultural turn’ andcomes close to the definition submitted by social anthropologist Andreas
Wimmer.13 Accordingly, culture is not a sub-system with its own systemic
language research, see Uta Karstein and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, “Culture,” in “Soziologie– Sociology in the German-speaking World,” ed. Bettina Hollstein et al., special issue,
Soziologische Revue (2020).
11 Stefan Conermann and Syrinx von Hees, eds., Islamwissenschaft als Kulturwissenschaft:
I. Historische Anthropologie. Ansätze und Möglichkeiten (Schenefeld: EB-Verlag, 2007).
By contrast, Shahab Ahmed’s What is Islam? has already triggered critical debate; see
Rushain Abbasi, “Did Premodern Muslims Distinguish the Religious and Secular? The
Dīn-Dunyā Binary in Medieval Islamic Thought,” Journal of Islamic Studies 31, no. 2(2020) and the discussion under the rubric of “Kitabkhana,” in Comparative Studies ofSouth Asia, Africa and the Middle East 40, no. 1 (2020).
12 For the US concept and context, I rely on Katrin Simon, Die Erben des Malcolm X:
Afroamerikanische Muslime zwischen Widerstand und Anpassung (Bielefeld: transcript,2015), esp. chap. 1. For the cultural racism paradigm, see, e.g., Tariq Modood,
Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity, and Muslims in Britain (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 2005).
13 Andreas Wimmer, “Kultur: Zur Reformulierung eines sozialanthropologischen
Grundbegriffs,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 48, no. 3 (1996)
and along similar lines, Carola Lentz, “Culture: The making, unmaking and remakingof an anthropological concept,” Working Papers of the Department of Anthropology and9logic, or one field of human activity among others. Rather, it consists ofa web of interpretations and representations of the self and the world,
or cosmos. The image of the web conveys a sense of coherence, stability,
and continuity, and yet the web and its individual threads are constantly
changing, conditioned by time, locale, and social context. The web is elastic
but it cannot be stretched ad libitum, and the stretching is done by humans.
This definition builds on decades of reflection on the meaning of culture,including notably Clifford Geertz’s famous reference to Max Weber,according to which “man is an animal suspended in webs of significancehe himself has spun”, and Geertz’s own attempts at “guessing” (his ownterm) the meaning of cultural signs and symbols.14 But the definition
goes beyond semiotics in highlighting the practices, processes, sites, andstructures that sustain these human-made webs of meaning(s). By thesame token, it is considerably broader than understandings that identify
culture with custom, tradition, and the weight of the past more generally;or with civilisation, refinement, and cultured behaviour; or with the artsand human creativity as a whole. Culture, as I understand it, pervades
different spheres of life and informs, or even shapes, individual thought,
emotions, and actions, as well as communal and societal order, particularly
as it is settled and solidified in discourses, artifacts, and institutions.
This definition of culture is broad and challenging, and it calls forconcrete examples to illustrate what exactly is meant by all those carefully
chosen words. Some issues are particularly significant, especially inintercultural comparison: the relationship with nature, the body andsexuality, disease, age and death, time, work and technology; aesthetic
preferences and emotional regimes; evaluations of social inequality,
gender roles, and gender relations; notions of honour and shame; rules ofcommunication and politeness; dietary prescriptions, sartorial styles, tablemanners, and forms of sociability, down to assessments of what it means
African Studies 166 (Universität Mainz: Institut für Ethnologie und Afrikastudien, 2016).
For an influential contribution, see Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the
Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Culture and Society (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1999).
14 The quote is from Geertz, not Weber. Geertz was, however, not entirely lost in the pursuitof meaning. In his controversial study of Islam in Indonesia and Morocco he stated that“religion is a social institution, worship a social activity, and faith a social force” (Clifford
Geertz, Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1968), esp. 19). For Weber, see Hans F. Kippenberg and Martin
Riesebrodt, eds., Max Weber’s “Religionssystematik” (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001).
10

to be alone, referring to solitude rather than loneliness. Much of this is
implicit rather than explicit, as argued by David McMahan in his study on
Buddhist modernism, who defined “a culture’s lived world” asthe daily repertory of practices, implicit ideas, and dispositions
that structure perception and action, allowing people to engage insocial intercourse, know what is appropriate and inappropriate,understand what to expect of each other, and discern power relations.15

In the modern period, culture has been closely tied to identity andidentity politics. High culture, popular culture, and mass culture, if wewant to use these aesthetic-cum-social categories at all, have their place
under the umbrella of culture. However, they are largely irrelevant to
the present enquiry. More relevant is the way culture, religion or moral
philosophy, and territory have been tied together in the construct ofregional cultures, or cultural regions: Confucian China and Korea, Shinto
Japan, Christian Europe, the Islamic Middle East, the Islamic world. The
case of Confucianism is especially instructive: Confucianism was and is
predominantly understood as an ethical and moral tradition or philosophy,
and as a constituent element of Chinese and Korean culture.16 But at times
it was articulated in religious terms, or elevated to the status of a state cult.
Equally, there were periods in which its founder was venerated and offeredsacrifices in elaborate ritual.17 Through century upon century of survival,
15 David L. McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008), 15.
16 For the debate, initiated by European Jesuits in the 17th century, on whether
Confucianism is a philosophy or a religion, see Zhao Dunhua, ed., Dialogue of
Philosophies, Religions and Civilizations (Washington, D.C.: The Council for Researchin Values and Philosophy, 2007); Anna Sun, Confucianism as a World Religion(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Sébastien Billioud and Joel Thoraval, “TheContemporary Revival of Confucianism: Anshen liming or the religious Dimension ofConfucianism,” China Perspectives 3 (2008). By contrast, John Lagerwey has adopted
a very broad conception of religion that subsumes virtually every aspect of thought
and behaviour under this rubric (John Lagerwey, Paradigm Shifts in Early and Modern
Chinese Religion: A History (Leiden: Brill, 2019)). I thank Elliot Lee for bringing thisimportant work to my attention even though I cannot seriously engage with it here.
17 Sun, Confucianism, 153–72; Xinzhong Yao, An Introduction to Confucianism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. 16–47 and 204–09 for the cult of Confucius. The
Kong Temple in Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius, in Shandong province, serves as an
excellent illustration of these trends; see James A. Flath, Traces of the Sage: Monument,
Materiality, and the First Temple of Confucius (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press,
2016). To explore the shifting relations of ritual, worship, religion, and culture in China
11

adjustment, and reinterpretation, the great and variegated Confucian
tradition proved remarkably elastic – a term, which, incidentally, I findmore helpful than ‘fluid’ or ‘hybrid’, which are often used in this context.
The ‘cultural region’ construct can be viewed as a nod to the Kulturkreis
school’s ‘cultural circles’, even though the region, theoretically speaking, ismore open than the circle.
It can of course be argued that religion is part of the web of meanings,
representations, discourses, practices, and institutions just described, andfor that reason is a facet of culture and not just embedded in culture. Froman agnostic perspective, both religion and culture are created by humans
and are thus ‘socially’ or ‘discursively constructed’. Yet one can endorse
this position and still hold that religion does not, as it were, dissolve into
culture, and that it is possible, productive, and in certain instances evennecessary, to distinguish between the two, not least because practising
adherents of the respective religions have done so in the past and continue
to do so in the present. Significantly, theoretically informed authors suchas David McMahan, whose focus is on religion, do not seem unduly
worried by the entanglement: they take it for granted that religion isculturally embedded and inflected, and that for this reason, culture
matters. But they do not dissolve religion in culture.18 The same is true ofthe great majority of scholars, Muslim as well as non-Muslim, researching
Islam and Muslim or Islamicate societies.
Still, many questions remain, beginning with who is interested in
the classification exercise, why they undertake it, and the criteria of theclassification itself: which kinds of idea, behaviour, object, emotion,or institution do they register as either religious or cultural, or both? A
fundamental question is whether within a given paradigm, one or theother takes precedence, providing the primary, if not the exclusive frame ofreference. Here either religion is made the roof under which a wide array ofphenomena can be accommodated as articulations of culture, or, conversely,
culture is placed on top with a number of phenomena fitted as ‘local’ or‘religious’ under its umbrella. In either case, both the logic and function
more deeply, I would have to engage with the work of Hubert Seiwert, which again I cannot
do, at least not here. I have, however, benefited from his “The Dynamics of Religions andCultural Evolution: Worshipping Fuxi in Contemporary China,” in Dynamics of Religion:
Past and Present, ed. Christoph Bochinger and Jörg Rüpke (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2017).
18 McMahan, Making for Buddhist Modernism, esp. 15–19.
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of the chosen paradigm need to be examined. With the emergence of themodern nation state, the latter has come to predominate in many parts of
the world, and not just in the West: collective identity has increasingly been
defined in terms of culture, under which religious loyalties and sentiments
have been subsumed. The court decision in the German federal state ofBavaria in 1995 that declared the crucifix to be a symbol not of religion
but of Bavarian history and culture, serves to illustrate the point.19 By thesame token, a hierarchy was established that made culture the arbiter ofwhat was acceptable in public life and what was not, and who belonged
to the community or nation and who did not. The political appropriationof culture features prominently in China, where Confucian values havebeen rehabilitated by the Communist leadership as the moral foundationof state and society, and, even more problematically, in India, where
Hinduism is being translated into a national culture, absorbing existing
local, moral, philosophical, and religious traditions.20 However, the trend is
not universal, and the emergence of the modern nation state has not been
identical with giving primacy to culture: most governments in the Muslim
world have moved in the other direction and made religion the yardstickof legitimacy, authenticity, and identity. This is the case even when thegovernment did not go so far as to establish Islam as the state religion,or Sharia as the main or exclusive source of legislation. The paradigm
holding culture as the determining factor raises the issue of secularity in aparticularly challenging manner. That positing religion as the determining
element might at first sight appear simpler in this regard, falling neatly into
the category of secularism, or rather the rejection thereof. Needless to say,reality is more complicated.
Significantly, Muslim debates on Islam and identity, as well as most of
the theoretically informed literature on Islam past and present (irrespectiveof the religious affiliation of its authors), largely focus on religion rather
19 See also: Mohammad Magout, A Reflexive Islamic Modernity: Academic Knowledge andReligious Subjectivity in the Global Ismaili Community (Baden-Baden: Ergon, 2020), 50–55.
20 I am aware that there is a vast corpus of literature for both countries. For China, I havedrawn on Yee Lak Elliot Lee, “Muslims as ‘Hui’ in Late Imperial and Republican China:
A Historical Reconsideration of Social Differentiation and Identity Construction,” in“Islamicate Secularities in Past and Present,” eds. Markus Dressler, Armando Salvatore,
and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, special issue, Historical Social Research 44, no. 3 (2019) andfor India, on Vanya V. Bhargav, “Between Hindu and Indian: The Nationalist Thought of
Lala Rajpat Rai” (Thesis, Oxford, 2018).
13

than on culture. It is no coincidence that there is hardly any research on
pre-modern Muslim concepts of culture in the broad anthropologicalsense, rather than in the sense of culture as custom, including customarylaw (ʿurf, ʿada, adat; also ʿamal, work, practice, praxis), and culture as
literature (adab), music, and the visual and performing arts. While culturestirs the imagination, religion still evokes passion. One of the questions
asked outside of Islamic literature – narrowly defined – is whether religion
is a valid concept to describe pre-modern Islam at all.
2.2 The Concept of Religion
Let me start with a pointed statement: Islam is a religion, formed, likeother religions and ethical-cum-moral traditions, in the (often conflictual)encounter of different religious, moral, philosophical, and cultural teachings,
practices, and actors. However unassailable and, indeed, politically correct
this statement may appear to those invested in ‘shared’ or ‘entangled history’,
it has been opposed both by devout Muslims who insist on Islam’s origin in
divine revelation, and by contemporary scholars who see religion, or at leastan abstract, generalised concept of religion, as the ‘invention’ of early modern
European scholarship. Many among the latter are informed by post-colonial
theory, though it was historians of (Christian) religion who traced theevolution of an abstract concept of Religion in Europe, and its dissemination,
rom the 17th century onwards,21 and it was Orientalists, some of them verymuch old school, who first questioned the suitability of an abstract conceptof religion for non-Western traditions such as Islam. Numerous titles speakof the ‘invention’ of a given religion, particularly Buddhism, Hinduism, andShinto, or of the concept of world religions, first by European scholars andChristian missionaries, and then by members of the respective traditions
eager to refashion themselves in the European image.22 Islam, as we will
21 See Reinhold Glei and Stefan Reichmuth, “Religion between Last Judgement, law andfaith: Koranic dīn and its renderings in Latin translations of the Koran,” Religion 42,
no. 2; Ernst Feil, Religio, 4 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986–2007) is a
study in conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte).
22 Markus Dressler and Arvind-Pal S. Mandair, eds., Secularism and Religion-Making(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) and Markus Dreßler, “Modes of Religionization:
A Constructivist Approach to Secularity,” Working Paper Series of the HCAS “Multiple
Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” 7 (Leipzig University, 2019) havecome up with the attractive term “religion-making”. For the inventors of invention, seenotably Talal Asad, Timothy Fitzgerald, Russel T. McCutcheon, Tomoko Masuzawa(cited in Christoph Kleine and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, “Research Programme of the14

see, posed more of a challenge.23 Needless to say, uncritically transplanting a
post-Enlightenment Western understanding of religion, derived from Latin
Christianity, to pre-modern and non-Christian contexts cannot be valid.24 But
there are, nonetheless, several problems, too, with the invention theory. Not
only does it construe a single modern (Western) understanding of religion
that does not even do justice to the many manifestations of Christianity pastand present, it also disregards, or does not consider carefully enough, premodern Muslim conceptions of Islam.
The more I read and listen, the more I am puzzled by the quantities of ink
and energy spent on demolishing, or ‘deconstructing’, an abstract concept ofreligion, quite independently of any kind of struggle against religion thatmight be based on secularist convictions. The Islamic, or Islamist, variant of
this critique has in fact little to do with the secularist goal to dissociate state,law, and public order from religion and the clerical structures associatedwith it. Quite on the contrary: it aims to liberate Islam (rather than religion
as a whole) from the shackles of the secular modern nation state to which
it had been subjected and to return it to an earlier state of power and glory.
Post-colonial scholars believe in the subjection story, with the modern
nation state as the chief villain in the piece, but they do not, as a rule, dream
imperial dreams. Rather, they seek to critique modernity and to identify
actors and factors ‘subverting’ it, potentially including holistic ideologies
based on religion, culture, and collective identity.25
The deconstruction drive has served to shake researchers out ofcomplacency, forcing them to look more critically into the terms they
HCAS ‘Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities’,” Working Paper
Series of the HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” 1(Leipzig University, 2016), 32 as well as Nile Green and Mary Searle-Chatterjee, eds.,
Religion, Language, and Power (London: Routledge, 2008).
23 For critical readings of the invention theory focusing on Islam, see Daniel Varisco, Reading
Orientalism: Said and Unsaid (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007); Magout, A
Reflexive Islamic Modernity, esp. 36–42. It has been argued that Western understandings of
Sufism were invented by late 18th-century European scholars (see, e.g., Carl W. Ernst, The
Shambhala Guide to Sufism (London: Shambhala, 1997), 1–18, 147) and, of course, thismakes an important difference; see Alexander Knysh, Sufism, 1–7, 238n14, 240n31.
24 See Michael Bergunder, “Was ist Religion? Kulturwissenschaftliche Überlegungen zum
Gegenstand der Religionswissenschaft,” Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 19, no. 1–2(2011), esp. 50–55. Reinhard Schulze provides a nuanced reading of the Protestantisation
thesis in his article “Islam und Judentum im Angesicht der Protestantisierung der Religionen
im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the Course of History: Exchange andConflicts, ed. Lothar Gall and Dietmar Willoweit (Munich: R. Oldenburg, 2011).
25 Ali Mirsepassi’s critique of Foucault’s idealisation of the Islamic Republic of Iran points
15

employ. Yet, in my view, many critiques of the modern concept ofreligion are themselves flawed, offering only a reductionist portrayal of
circumscribed religion, seeing it as represented by the Church and locatedin the heart, or conscience. This portrayal may correspond to the hopesand expectations of French Jacobins raising the flag of laicité, but it does
not adequately mirror the European and North American experience in its
diversity. The ‘Islamic’ variant ties together critiques both of the Catholic
Church and of Protestant understandings of religion. In this view of
Catholicism, it is the Church that supposedly controls the hearts, minds,
and bodies of the believers (who are then often identified with Christianity
as a whole).26 Conversely, Protestantism is held to understand religion asa faith exclusively located (or should we say, locked?) in the heart and, as
it were, cut off from the world. This depiction, however, chooses to ignore
the fact that the Catholic Church has never fully controlled even the
Catholics, and that Protestants, while subscribing to the priority of ‘inner’
faith, expect themselves and others to live by this faith, and translate it into
works large and small. For this reason, their faith cannot be fully private.
Significantly, little attention has been paid to the Protestant emphasison ‘practical ethics’, which Reinhard Schulze rightly underlined in his
critical reading of 19th-century ‘religion-making’ (not his term), mostly
in the German context.27 Practical ethics had a far-reaching impact on
the sociopolitical realm: Protestants have called for a sanctification of
everyday life (Alltagsheiligung), and Weber wrote on ‘The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’. Christians who live their faith do
not do so only in church and on Sundays and major Christian holidays.
Hence what is portrayed as the modern, Western concept of religion as
intensely private and narrowly confined to two sites – the Church, or ain this direction; Ali Mirsepassi, “Mistaken Anti-modernity,” Working Paper Seriesof the HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” 6 (Leipzig
University, 2019), esp. 5–6. Perhaps we should examine more closely how deconstructionof the concept of religion bears on conceptualisations of secularity – not so much with aview to the past as to the present and future.
26 The image of the Catholic Church dominating society and culture, hampering science andfreedom of thought, figures prominently in Muslim critiques of secularism; see, e.g., Krämer,Gottes Staat als Republik, and Daniel Kinitz, Die andere Seite des Islam: SäkularismusDiskurs und muslimische Intellektuelle im modernen Ägypten (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2016),
278. The argument that European Christians needed to invent secularism in order toliberate themselves from the suffocating grip of the Church, and that, for this reason, theybanished religion to a niche, is by no means restricted to Sunni Islamists.
27 Schulze, “Islam und Judentum,” 157–58.
16

comparable clerical structure, and the heart, or conscience – represents
a secularist model of what religion is and where it belongs. It gives
primacy to the perspective of the secular(ist) territorial state, and of
French laicité in particular, over the self-understanding of practising
Christians. In doing so, it misrepresents historical experiences andcurrent configurations, which do not (all) conform to the secularist
model but rather convey the many shades of secularity.
A clearer view is to be gained by distinguishing two understandingsof religion: on the one hand, religion as a set or web of beliefs and practices
guiding individual and possibly even collective life, which may or may not
be tied to a community and a given clerical structure; and on the other,religion as a neatly defined compartment of life centred in faith, with rites
and rituals relegated to the margins, if not altogether devalued.28 I see noreason why Islam should not qualify as a religion in the former sense,
irrespective of the time period we are looking at. It has a set of beliefs,
creeds, laws, and well-defined practices that are understood by Muslims
as worship of a god who declares himself (there is no way of making thisphrase gender-sensitive) to be the one and only God, un et indivisible(Ar., tauhid). This is not the same as a shared passion or ideology, such as
football, nationalism, capitalism, or communism. Islam has also inspired
a community built on this foundation, combining belief and belonging.
Based on its normative texts, which already reflect comparison, Muslim
scholars have systematically compared Islam to other religions and/or
moral traditions with respect to their (alleged) tenets and practices.
Like other believers, however, Muslims have had to deal with internal
diversity. Early on, the Muslim community fanned out (critics would say ‘split
and splintered’) into different schools of theology and law. They developed
distinct notions of correct belief and pious conduct, social order, political rule,and justice, the weight of faith as opposed to works, the correct methods ofderiving norms from the authoritative texts, the possibility of attaining truth
through non-textual means, the relationship of reason to revelation, and so on.
These notions varied according to time and place. The great communities ofSunni and Shiʿi Muslims, with their specific visual, emotional, and memorial
cultures (!), and their own doctrines of religious authority and legitimate rule,
28 In adopting this shorthand for ‘religion’, I do not wish to belittle the earnest search ofscholars of religion for their subject. At the same time, the present distinction only partiallycorresponds to Stausberg’s distinction between attributive, structural, and functional
differentiation, as summarised by Kleine and Wohlrab-Sahr, “Research Programme,” 20.
17

are part of this diversity. The same applies to the wide stream of Sufism, whichcuts across theological, legal, and ‘sectarian’ affiliation.

Sufi shrine in Hezheng, Gansu province, north-west China. Photo: Gudrun Krämer, 2015.

In the attempt to capture the effects of plurality and diversity, reference
has frequently been made to the tension between unity and diversity, andbetween continuity and change. Many of us have tired of these pairings,
and more imaginative ways of articulating the tension are available.
Following Clifford Geertz who had described culture as a ‘continent of
meaning’, Shahab Ahmed argued thatthe task of conceptualizing and understanding Islam becomes precisely
to discover and map its ‘Continent of Meaning’ and to make sense of that
continent as a continent: as a continuous, connected and contained – if
topographically, climatically and demographically variegated – entity. It is
to conceptualize how that continent is elaborated, articulated, constructed,
conceived and experienced as an undulating whole, even when its parts present
themselves in and as apparently distinct and disconnected local topographies.29

The image of the continent is, however, problematic, not least because Ahmed
highlights not just coherence but containment. By contrast, the insistence on
connectedness, or ‘connectivity’, is widely shared. Rather than evoking an“undulating whole”, or engaging with the complexities of signs, symbols, and
29 Ahmed, What is Islam?, 249–50.
18significations, which abound in recent discussions of culture and religion,others have described Islam more soberly as a set of references. These canbe employed to “elaborate, articulate, construct, conceive, and experience”
Islam as an inherently plural, changeable, connected, and contingent entity.30
Two elements are important here: the actor-centred approach, and the factthat the references need not be textual, let alone legal. An actor-centred
approach does not negate the reference function of the Qurʾan, which
Muslims take as the unmediated word of God, and the Sunna of the prophet
Muhammad, seen as its explication and, to some extent, its realisation. But
it does, however, shift the focus to reception and interpretation, which arecontingent and thus temporally, spatially, socially, and culturally bounded.
The emphasis is on what Muslims read, understand, and do rather than onwhat the Qurʾan and the prophet Muhammad say. Without going into therequisite depth at this juncture, this perspective could be described as a mild
form of constructivism: meanings are socially and discursively ‘constructed’.
The actor-centred approach was taken to its extremes by anthropologist
Gabriele Marranci when he stated that “it is not Islam that shapes Muslims,
but rather Muslims who, through discourses, practices, beliefs and actions,
make Islam.”31 But as long as Muslims in their various local contexts referto a shared corpus of foundational texts, they are tied to this corpus, whose
interpretation cannot be stretched arbitrarily.
Just as significantly, the insistence on references does not consider only
textual ones. It therefore does not suggest that Islam as text has always been
the prevalent way of understanding and living Islam. Islam is certainly adiscursive tradition, as Talal Asad has argued, following W. Cantwell
Smith, but it is not exclusively so. In many settings, Islam was mediatedthrough people rather than texts, and these people did not necessarily
either authenticate their behaviour or legitimise their claims to authority
through recital of the Qurʾan and prophetic Hadith. What Shahab Ahmed
called the ‘legal-supremacist mode’, propagated by today’s Islamists as the
only correct way of understanding Islam, does not adequately reflect how
Islam was understood and lived by Muslims for centuries.32 Saints andSufis were quite able to present their path to truth as valid and indeed
30 See, e.g., Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies, Renewal proposal, 2011.
31 Gabriele Marranci, The Anthropology of Islam (Oxford: Berg, 2008), 15.
32 Ahmed, What is Islam?, esp. 80, 117–29.
19superior, defying ‘legalist’ criticism of their teachings and practices.33 The
same holds true for philosophers, whose referral to their own body oftexts highlights the fact that a focus on text is not necessarily the same asa focus on law, or Sharia in particular. Yet irrespective of past trends, thetextual approach is the dominant one today, and it is dominated by legal
discourse. Within this frame, the references are ultimately containedin, derived from, or in some way related to, the foundational texts ofIslam. Under the conditions of globalisation and mediatisation, with themultiplication of means of access to the Qurʾan and the Sunna even for
those who cannot read Arabic, or who are not fluent in the language, thesetexts constitute the one and irrefutable reference for ‘constructing’ Islam.
In their vast majority, Muslims recognise certain core references
which give coherence and continuity to a global community that has no
unifying clerical structures and authorities comparable to the Catholic
Church or the great Buddhist lamas, and no communal offices, such as
congregations, parishes, monasteries, and priests, to hold it together (inthis respect, Islam comes closest to Judaism). I therefore subscribe to
Ahmet Karamustafa’s summary (albeit not to every word of it):
Islam does revolve around certain key ideas and practices, but is it
imperative to catch the dynamic spirit in which these core ideas andpractices are constantly negotiated by Muslims in concrete historicalcircumstances and not to reify them into a rigid formula that is at once
ahistorical and idealistic… There have always been and continues to bea multiplicity of perspectives among Muslims even about what the coreideas and practices of Islam are. Minimally, however, we can assume
a set of beliefs (a version each of monotheism, prophesy, genesis andeschatology) that underwrite a set of values (dignity of human life,
individual and collective rights and duties, the necessity of ethicalhuman conduct – in short a comprehensive moral program) in turnreflected in a set of concrete human acts (ranging from the necessityof greeting others to acts of humility like prayer). It is also necessary
to add, though this is an obvious point, that this nucleus is believed tobe contained in the fundamental sources of Islam, the Qurʾan and theexemplary life story of Muhammad. It is a version of this core that liesat the center of each and every one of the innumerable manifestations of
the Islamic civilizational tradition in human history. 34
33 Frederick de Jong and Bernd Radtke, eds., Islamic Mysticism Contested: Thirteen Centuries ofControversies & Polemics (Leiden: Brill, 1999); Knysh, Sufism, 4, 40–42, and chap. 3 and 5.
34 Ahmet Karamustafa, “Islam: A Civilizational Project in Progress,” in Progressive Muslims, ed.
20

These beliefs, values, and practices can be affirmed, modulated and,within certain limits, contested. Muslims have differed in terms of theirunderstanding of God, the role of the prophet Muhammad, the characterof the Qurʾan as text, the site of religious authority, the weight of reason in
relation to revelation, or of law in relation to Sufi and poetic experience,the evaluation of music and the visual arts, the definition of gender roles,
and the implementation of justice. There is no need to equate belief in acertain core that constitutes Islam with essentialism. And while it may
well be true that “Islam is always Islam to somebody”,35 it remains tobe seen who that somebody is, how many of them there are, and what
other Muslims have to say about them. There are more options thanjust essentialism on the one hand and unbridled relativism on the other.
Provided ‘religion’ is not turned into a straightjacket, with the strings madeof unbending rules enshrined in the Qurʾan and the Sunna of the prophet
Muhammad, and which Muslims have to wear if they are to be recognised
as Muslims, ‘religion’ seems entirely appropriate to describe Islam, or atleast a crucial dimension of it. As we will see, when it comes to our second
possible reading of religion, that of religion as a neatly compartmentalisedor ‘quarantined’ aspect of life, the situation is different.
2.3 Muslim Understandings of Islam
In their painstaking deconstruction of Western constructs of ‘religion’,the proponents of the colonial invention thesis have largely ignored
Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim teachings and experiences, almost as if
Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims as ‘colonial subjects’ had no voices of
their own, and no discursive tradition(s) with distinctive categories ofrites, beliefs, and community.36 Talal Asad, one of the leading and mostOmid Safi (Oxford: OneWorld, 2003), 108–09; see also below, section “Din, Iman, and Islam”.
35 Omid Safi, The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam. Negotiating Ideology and Religious
Inquiry (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 202. It is hard to beoriginal: in 1957, Wilfred Cantwell Smith stated blandly that, “To some extent each religion
is all things to all men… When we look beyond symbols to their meanings, we cannot but
recognize that each world religion has, in the last analysis, as many forms as it has believers”(Smith, Islam in Modern History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 8).
36 Other voices exist. For an important study that traces the interaction of Buddhists, or
sympathisers with Buddhism, from diverse sociocultural backgrounds, including Japan,
Sri Lanka, Tibet, Britain, and the US, see McMahan, Making of Buddhist Modernism,
who rather than invoking ‘invention’, speaks of a “cocreation of Asians, Europeans, andAmericans”; McMahan, Making of Buddhist Modernism, 6. Brian K. Pennington, Was
Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion (New21stimulating voices in the chorus, cannot be accused of silencing the natives
and ignoring Islamic tradition. But his critique nonetheless raises a numberof questions, not least because he is not particularly interested in detail, letalone philology. In his take on religion and Islam, we hear considerably morefrom Western authors than from Muslim ones. According to Asad, the postEnlightenment Western concept (and there appears to be only one) equates
religion with interior, individual, private belief as a “distinct mental state”.37
This he contrasts with an order in which belief is intimately linked to works,
woven into the social fabric, and tied to power relations.
Similar views have been frequently expressed by both post-colonial
and Islamist critics of modernity, in their respective idioms and with theirrespective agendas. Though their assessments of plurality and ambiguity in
pre-modern Islam may diverge sharply on closer inspection, they do tend
to agree that Islam constituted a coherent and integral whole prior to theirruption of colonial modernity, and the imposition of the modern nation
state. The influential Indian Islamic author and activist Abu l-Aʿla Maududi(1903–79) even spoke of a ‘seamless whole’. Like a blanket, Islam had covered
all – family and trade, gender and health, agrarian relations and urban life
– and provided rules for everything: business and divorce, devotion andsociability, aesthetics and politics.38 According to the same reading, colonial
modernity cut up this fabric to produce functional differentiation between
religion, law, politics, culture, the economy, and the arts, replacing integrity
and connectedness with incoherence and fragmentation. To be precise, I
should speak of ‘integrality’, however it is integrity that is most commonly
evoked in these critiques, used in the sense of moral uprightness, or inCharles Taylor’s sense of wholeness or fullness. To anyone sympathetic to the
Romantics’ critique of modernity, this argument will surely resonate.
From a critical perspective, it is worth looking more closely at thework of Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916–2000), noted scholar of Islam andYork: Oxford University Press, 2005) points in a similar direction. Reinhard Schulze in
his “Islam und Judentum” equally highlights interaction rather than invention, as does
Ammeke Kateman in her study Muḥammad ʿAbduh and His Interlocutors: The Concept
of Religion in a Globalizing World (Leiden: Brill, 2019).
37 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity andIslam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 45–48. He seriously engaged
with Islamic sources in the chapter “Reconfigurations of Law and Ethics in Colonial
Egypt,” in Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2003), 205–56.
38 For Maududi, see Krämer, Gottes Staat als Republik, 43.
22

comparative religion, committed Presbyterian Christian, and one of themost influential contributors to the present debate. Smith firmly believedthat religion is primarily about faith and that faith is the heart’s response to
the Divine. In his Islam in Modern History (1957), which predates his more
widely read The Meaning and End of Religion (1962) by several years, heinsisted on the crucial importance of inner faith to Muslims (“The realityof Islam is a personal, living faith, new every morning in the heart of theindividual Muslim”)39 and the meaning attached to “externalities”, such as
institutions and patterns of behaviour by those “who have the faith”. But healso declared that Islam was a religion, one distinct from other religions,first and foremost (Protestant) Christianity, through its close link between
faith, community, and practice, or what he called Islam’s “practical form”:
The community is based on, as it is integral to, individual faith. Not only is
Muslim society held together (as are other societies) by common loyalties
and traditions, and by a very carefully worked out system of values andbeliefs. Not only is it the product of a superb ideal. It pulsates with thevitality of a profoundly held and deeply personal conviction, a religious
conviction that is warm and meaningful for the individual member…
As a creed or theological system may be the expression in an intellectual
form of a personal faith – as is often the case, particularly with Christians– so a social order and its activities are the expression in a practical formof a Muslim’s personal faith… A good Muslim is not one whose belief
conforms to a given pattern, whose commitment may be expressed inintellectual terms that are congruent with an accepted statement (as is thecase generally in Protestant Christianity), but one whose commitment
may be expressed in practical terms that conform to an accepted code. 40

It is indeed true that prior to the late 19th century, Muslims did not conceive ofIslam as a clearly demarcated sub-system, constituted by, and limited to, faith
39 Smith, Islam in Modern History, 9 and 7–8; see also 307–08. “We hold that behaviour,
institutions, creeds, and other externalities are real and significant, but are not religion.
At least they are not all of it, and particularly are not faith. Religion, we suggest, is whatthese things mean to men” (Smith, 8n5). Given the widespread emphasis on orientalist
misunderstandings of other religious traditions, the respect Smith expressed forIslam merits attention: “For one thing, all religions, and most clearly the great world
faiths, are quite literally infinite. There is no end to their profundity; nor to theirramification, their variety. For each religion is the point at which its adherent is in
touch, through the intermediary of an accumulating tradition, with the infinitude ofthe divine” (Smith, 7). His “accumulating tradition” is obviously close to Talal Asad’s
later notion of ‘discursive traditions’.
40 Smith, 18–19 and 20. In the same context, he stated that, “Many have recognized that the23and worship, detached from social life, and unaffected by power relations. It
is also true that pre-modern Muslims did not have a concept of ‘conscience’,
which was only elaborated from the late 19th century onwards (in modern
Arabic, the most common terms are damir or wijdan).41 However, this does
not mean that prior to the advent of modernity, all Muslims conceivedof Islam as a seamless whole, covering everything. Nor does it mean that
Muslims had no possibility of distinguishing between religious and nonreligious matters, or that they did not do so in certain contexts. To makesuch a claim is to disregard a vast body of literature written by Muslims for
Muslims, in genres ranging from legal texts and philosophical treatises toreligious polemics to mirrors for princes, courtly prose, and Sufi poetry.
2.4 Din, Iman, and Islam

When trying to determine whether Muslims possessed a notion of ‘religion’
before their encounter with Western modernity, scholars have focused ondin, which today is mostly translated as either ‘religion’ or ‘the Islamic way oflife’. There are several problems with this approach: firstly, din is not the only
relevant term, and the Qurʾan is not the only relevant text; moreover, many
contemporary authors ascribe to din a single meaning, which is precisely
what it did not have among pre-modern Muslims.42 The term din is Qurʾanic,
community is not only a social group but a religious body; that ‘church and state’ are one, to use
the inappropriate language of the West” (Smith, 18). The language is indeed so inappropriatethat it should be avoided altogether. I also do not subscribe to his characterisation, andindeed celebration, of the wholeness of Islam as religion, society, and culture, with religious
law regulating “everything from prayer rites to property rights”, and the Muslim’s “entire life
activity being organized into a meaningful whole by this divine pattern” (Smith, 29).
41 Significantly, the Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān has no entry for ‘Conscience’, and theEncyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition refers to damir in the context of grammar, where it
signifies a pronoun. For relevant studies, see Oddbjørn Leirvik, “Conscience in Arabic and
the Semantic History of ‘Ḍamīr’,” Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 9 (2009); Schulze,“Islam und Judentum,” 155–57; and Florian Zemmin, “Validating Secularity in Islam.
The Sociological Perspective of the Muslim Intellectual Rafiq al-‘Azm (1865–1925),” in“Islamicate Secularities in Past and Present,” eds. Markus Dressler, Armando Salvatore, andMonika Wohlrab-Sahr, special issue, Historical Social Research 44, no. 3 (2019).
42 See articles Louis Gardet, “Dīn,” in The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition, vol. 3 (Leiden:
Brill, 1991) as well as Patrice C. Brodeur, “Religion,” in Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, vol. 4(Leiden: Brill, 2004); and Clare Wilde and Jane Dammen McAuliffe, “Religious Pluralism
and the Qurʾān” in the same volume. Stefan Reichmuth in: Glei and Reichmuth, “Religion
between Last Judgement,” 250–60, and in “The Arabic Concept of Dīn and Islamic
Religious Sciences in the 18th Century: The Case of Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī (d. 1791),” Oriens
44, no. 1–2 (2016) outlines the chronological evolution as well as the semantic scope ofthe term. Linguistic closeness notwithstanding, New Persian din (Avesta daena, Middle
24and hence Muslims have been at pains to elucidate the precise meaning of
the relevant references. These references are numerous, and as even a brief
survey reveals, they carry different meanings. Among the best-known
Qurʾanic attestations of din are the famous “The right religion with God is
Islam” (inna l-din ʿinda llah al-islam; Sura 3:19) and “There is no compulsion
in religion” (Sura 2:256). Beyond that, there is the din al-haqq (true religion,or the din of truth, i.e., God, as notably in Sura 30:30), the din Ibrahim (thereligion/cult of Abraham), the yawm al-din (Day of Judgement), and manyothers. The example of din, therefore, serves as a reminder that the Qurʾan
is a book of inspiration for believers, not a textbook for scholars of religion.
A number of Qurʾanic references identify din (which in Hebrew,
Aramaic, and Arabic is linguistically tied to debt, reckoning, retribution,
reward, and punishment) with the fulfilment of the obligations God
imposed on his creatures, that he created so that they should worship andobey him. It is in this sense that Sura 5:3 is commonly understood. In thetranslation by Tarif Khalidi it reads: “Today I have perfected your religion;
I have completed My bounty upon you; And I have sanctioned Islam as
your religion.”43 Sura 5, of which this passage forms but a small part, draws
the outlines of what was meant by din in this particular context: the sura
opens by calling upon the believers to fulfil their contractual obligations(ʿuqud), which Khalidi translates as “legal obligations”. This is an allusion to
Sura 7:172, which describes God’s conclusion of a covenant with humanity
at the dawn of creation, in which they acknowledged him as their lord.44
Sura 5 continues with a long list of prescriptions. These range from theparticular – when to hunt, what to eat, how to pray, what kind of women to
marry – to the general, exhorting the believers to “join hands in virtue andpiety (birr and taqwa)” but not in “sin and aggression” (5:1), and to conduct
themselves virtuously (bil-qist) before God, practise justice, and put theirtrust in God (5:6–11). The passage also includes what is known in Islamicscholarship as ‘promise and warning’:
Persian/Pahlavi, den) is even more difficult to capture than Arabic din, ranging as it doesfrom inner self, vision, or conscience to divine and human wisdom; see Mansour Shaki,“Dēn,” in Encyclopædia Iranica, vol. VII, fasc. 3 (London: 1994).
43 For the relevant references, see Muhammad Fuʾad ʿAbd al-Baqi, al-Muʿjam al-mufahras
li-alfaz al-qurʾan al-karim (repr. Cairo: Dar al-Hadith, 1978) entries din to mudayyinina.
44 The primordial covenant mentioned in Sura 7:172 raises a host of theological questions
regarding the human intellect, God-given nature, and predestination; see Gerhard
Böwering, “Covenant,” in Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 466.
25

God “promises those who believe and do good deeds (salihat) that theyshall have forgiveness and a glorious recompense. But those who blaspheme(kafaru) and cry lies to Our revelations, these are the denizens of hell” (5:9).

What emerges from these lines is a notion of din as piety (birr, taqwa,
ihsan), which requires a consistent pattern of conduct inspired by thefear and love of God, well beyond the observance of specific acts andtaboos. Thus defined, piety is very much in line with what Max Weber
described as Lebensführung, and has been rather loosely rendered as the‘Islamic way of life’.
The huge body of textual and non-textual materials relating to din fromthe early Islamic period to the 18th century still awaits systematic study,
which would require philological rigour, but should not be restricted tophilology. Stefan Reichmuth’s scrutiny of Arabic texts provides important
insights into the semantic shifts to be observed even within the religious
literature, narrowly defined.45 One strand of interpretation, which gained
salience in the context of Islamic reform, linked (Islamic) din to piety
in general and to the ʿibadat in particular: the ‘acts of worship’ throughwhich the believers express their gratefulness and obedience to theCreator. These acts of worship were not prescribed on a list sent down
through the Qurʾan. Rather, it was Muslim scholars who defined them,notably including the so-called Five Pillars of Islam: the profession of faith(shahada), the five daily ritual prayers (salat), alms giving (zakat), fasting
during the month of Ramadan (sawm), and, if physically and financiallypossible, the pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj). All were designed to be public
acts that could be seen, heard, and numbered. By the same token, they
signalled communal loyalty and affiliation. Significantly, Muslim scholars
also declared the ʿibadat to be immutable and non-negotiable, forming partof what is fixed and stable in Islam and distinguished from ‘social relations’(muʿamalat), which were said to be contingent upon time and place and,for this reason, more flexible and negotiable.46 I will return to this point
45 Reichmuth, “The Arabic Concept of Dīn”, and Glei and Reichmuth, “Religion between
Last Judgement.” I am a little surprised by Reichmuth’s conclusion that Arabic din attests
to “direct or indirect borrowing” from Middle Persian den, and that, “This might be
how dīn in Islam finally came out, as in Persian Religion, as a wisdom of divine origins
anchored within Man from the very beginning of the world [my emphases]” (“Religion
between Last Judgement,” 259). The reference is to the notion of fitra, inborn disposition(which he identifies with din), and the primordial covenant just mentioned.
46 The relevant technical term here is huquq Allah, the ‘rights of God’. Among the earliest
26

later. What matters here is that pre-modern Muslim scholars (and, it is
to be presumed, many other Muslims as well) did not, in fact, identify
Islamic din with faith as a “distinct mental state”. Rather, they viewed it asa web of beliefs, devotional practices, and specified acts of worship, as wellas pious conduct and obedience to God (taʿat Allah) more generally. For
this reason, din was more than the religio of late Republican Rome. Religio
described the correct performance of cultic and devotional acts towards
a deity or a number of deities, rather than describing a consistent way oflife, a textual tradition, or a community based on belief and belonging, asrepresented by Judaism, Christianity, and eventually Islam.47
Religious scholars were, of course, not the only Muslims to reflect
on the issue. That the scholars involved were theologians and jurists,
however, is evident in their manner of reasoning, with subtle arguments
predicated on fine distinctions, and many points of disagreement between
them. Notably, too, din was not the only term available to Muslims, indiscussing matters of belief and belonging. There was a whole array of
relevant Qurʾanic terms at their disposal, from iman to islam and fromscholars to classify the ʿibadat, or pious acts more generally, as ‘the rights of God’ was alHarith al-Muhasibi (d. 857). For the complexities of this distinction in modern writings,
see Krämer, Gottes Staat als Republik, 54–58, and below.
47 Here, I follow Jörg Rüpke, Pantheon: Geschichte der antiken Religionen (Munich: C.H.
Beck, 2016), 13, 395. Rüpke defines religion in the Italic/Roman context as the situatedcommunication of individuals with an entity or entities that they saw as superior but
whose presence, agency, and existence they could not plausibly demonstrate to others
beyond doubt. The relevant practices were dispersed and woven into different social andpolitical fields, and although certain functions required specialists, such as priests, they
were not systematised to constitute a distinctive religious field (Rüpke, 18–34, 76–77, 84,
136, 147–48, 171, 185–91, 222–23). According to Rüpke, these practices and functions
did not rest on a textual tradition, and it was only in the imperial age that a notionof religion as specialised knowledge that was also accessible through texts emerged(Rüpke, 166, 216, 223, 392–94). Significantly, Rüpke occasionally refers to experiencesthat might be understood as religious by us or by the actors involved, but we do not
get a sense of what they might have consisted of. What Rüpke makes abundantly clear,
however, is that religion is not a given and that religious ideas and practices need to
be explained, especially when they require high investments (Rüpke, 21). In a highly
original study of late antique and early Islamic Arabia, Ludwig Ammann made a similarargument with regard to the emergence of Islam: “Religion ist bei den alten Arabern
kein Glaubenssystem, kein Ort der Reflection, sie ist im Grunde nicht mehr als ein
käuflicher Nothelfer” (Ludwig Ammann, Geburt des Islam: Historische Innovation
durch Offenbarung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001), 33). Both authors support the basic
assumption of the Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe that, to put it very simply, religion was nota given, let alone everything, in the pre-modern era, either in Europe or beyond (Kleineand Wohlrab-Sahr, “Research Programme,” 19–20).
27

ihsan to milla or even from umma to shariʿa, none of them unambiguous.48
In addition, they employed terms that emerged only later, such as ʿaqida(creed or dogma) and iʿtiqad (creed, belief); for comparative purposes,
they also used din in the plural form of adyan or diyanat, which is not to befound in the Qurʾan and very rare in prophetic Hadith. Some distinguishedbetween din and islam, in the sense of ‘surrender’ and ‘submission’ toGod. Others placed iman (which is normally translated as faith), ʿaqida,islam, and ʿibada under the rubric of din. Still others used din and imansynonymously, or subsumed din under iman. In the Islamic sciences, andargumentative theology (kalam) more particularly, the usul al-din (“theroots of din”) deal with dogmatics. Iman, which is almost as difficult topin down as din, was crucial to definitions of belief and unbelief and to
the question of what decided the religious status of a Muslim, and what
excluded them from the community.49
This is not the place to go into the debate over the relative weight offaith and its profession, works, and consistent adherence to all obligations,commandments, and interdictions set down by God or the prophet
Muhammad – a debate which preoccupied Muslims for centuries, withmany (Sunni) Muslim scholars of theology and law defining both iman
and islam as comprising ‘word and action’ (qawl wa-ʿamal), i.e., theprofession of faith and praxis. This was an issue that gained added urgency
in the context of takfir, the exclusion of Muslims from the community
under the charge of heresy or apostasy.50 Nor is this the place to investigate
the fine distinctions some have drawn between belief and faith (such as,
48 For milla, see Markus Dreßler, “From ‘Religious Community’ to ‘Nation’: The
Transformation of the Term Millet in the Late Ottoman Context,” Die Welt des Islams,
under review (2020). As the set of ethical, moral, legal, and aesthetic rules, norms, andvalues that guide and shape individual conduct, communal life, and societal order,
Sharia is more than the Islamic law to which it is frequently reduced, and like din, it hasoften been described as ‘the Islamic way of life’. Muslims have disagreed and continue todisagree on what exactly is implied by ‘guide’ and ‘shape’. Some would say ‘determine’,largely ruling out human agency. However, this has never been the only position, letalone the dominant one.
49 In the most immediate sense, iman is what makes a person a believer, muʾmin, calling fora substantive definition; see Jane I. Smith, “Faith,” in Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, vol. 2(Leiden: Brill, 2002).
50 Faced with intra-communal strife, many Muslim scholars past and present have argued
that judgement on belief and disbelief should be left to God and not be passed by men(and women). See Camilla Adang et al., eds., Accusations of Unbelief in Islam: A Diachronic
Perspective on Takfir (Leiden: Brill, 2016), esp. Hossein Modarressi, “Essential Islam: The
Minimum that a Muslim is Required to Acknowledge;” also Smith, “Faith,” 170–72.
28

‘belief ’ as the confirmation of accepted teachings, or dogma, and ‘faith’ as
the individual’s inner feeling and experience). What matters here is that
influential (Sunni) Muslim scholars have always insisted that professed
belief was decisive in recognising a person as a Muslim, without denying
the importance of praxis, comprising correct ritual performance andhabitual pious conduct.
2.5 Din, Dunya, and Dawla

In the popular exercise of pairing and comparing, al-din/religion was
frequently combined with, and distinguished from, al-dunya/(this)world.51 The pairing and comparing will take us well beyond scholarly
circles, and into the literary salons of urban society as well as into the worldof rulers. The Qurʾan and Muslim tradition frequently link, and just as
often juxtapose, al-din with al-dunya, which literally speaking points tosomething spatially ‘nearer’ or ‘nearest’, but also ‘lower’ in both the physicaland the moral sense. Here, it designates the ‘nearer abode’, ‘this world’, orthe lowest heaven. Clearly, the two items are not of the same kind, with aldin referring to worship and piety and al-dunya to space and cosmology.
Significantly, al-dunya is easier to identify than its partners, al-din andal-akhira. Within a religious perspective, we can distinguish different
evaluations of al-dunya and what pertains to it (al-dunyawi): a salvational
approach devalues al-dunya as a lower sphere concerned with individual
bodily comfort and worldly success. But there is also a strong tradition
within theology and law that identifies the benefits of religion to individual
wellbeing and communal welfare in this world. As this type of reasoning is
deeply woven into Islamic theological and legal discourse, al-dunya cannot
be simply identified with the secular.
In what I have called the salvational approach, al-dunya was mostcommonly combined with al-akhira, the ‘afterworld’ or ‘otherworld’.
Muslims generally understood al-dunya as the (physical) world and present,‘lower’ life (al-hayat al-dunya) with its pleasures and desires, superficial,
51 For theological discussions broadly understood, Rushain Abbasi in his article, “DidPremodern Muslims Distinguish the Religious and Secular?” demonstrates that they
indeed did: the pairing, which was premised on a distinction, was common albeit
controversial. Abbasi also shows that pre-modern Muslims generally assumed the dunya
to be shared by all humankind, easily understood, and hence not in need of detailed
description. By contrast, din was thought to be specific and in need of explication(Abbasi, “Did Premodern Muslims Distinguish,” esp. 193–99, 200, 203).
29

fleeting, and deceptive. The world was worldly, caught up in the pursuitof power, pleasure, property, or wine, life, and lust, as the prominent 14thcentury scholar Taj al-Din al-Subki put it in his Tabaqat al-Shafiʿiyya. Here,
we also see the impact of culture, inflecting the pleasures and desires of thisworld and, by the same token, deflecting Muslims from the straight pathleading them to God. Sura 29:64 voices a familiar theme when it states
that, “The present life is nothing but frivolity and amusement. But theAbode of the Hereafter is the real life.” Sura 2:285–6 is more threatening,warning that, “Those who have purchased the present life in exchange forthe afterlife, for them punishment shall not be lightened, nor shall theyfind any to help them.”52
Muslim ideas and images were not derived solely from the Qurʾan
and the legal and theological tradition at large. There was a vast body ofeschatological and literary texts resting on other sources, creating a richtapestry of narrative as well as some visual material. As a result, Muslim
ideas and images of the afterlife, paradise, heaven, and hell were multifaceted
and multidimensional. To begin with, al-dunya and al-akhira have a spatial
dimension in addition to the temporal one. Al-akhira, comprising heavenand hell (which in themselves are layered), stands for an ‘otherworld’ thatexists in parallel to this world and not just as a ‘hereafter’, or ‘the world tocome’.53 The boundaries between this world and the other are permeable:
winds, scents, sounds, and material objects flow from one to the other,plants and animals can cross over, as can select men and women, either
physically or in their dreams. But there is also a hierarchy involved, forthe otherworld is superior to this world with its ‘lower life’. Still, it would
be futile to search for clear lines: when Christian Lange calls religion the
search not so much for the last things as rather for the ultimate things,
which are not far but near, the line between the two gets blurred, given
that, as stated earlier, al-dunya indicates the near. It is a paradox mirroring
the assumption that God is both near and utterly removed. When Lange
52 Trans. Tarif Khalidi; see also Sura 4:74. For the Qurʾanic references, see ʿAbd al-Baqi,
al-Muʿjam al-mufahras and Christian Lange, Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 37–39.
53 Lange, Paradise and Hell, esp. 4–13, 37–39, 67–70. For the relevance of this understanding
to Sufism, see Alexander Knysh, who stated that “The purpose of ascetic self-disciplineand self-imposed strictures is, as numerous Sufi masters have argued for centuries, topurify the soul and to prepare it for a vision of or communion/communication with God
here and now [my emphases]” (Knysh, Sufism, 10).
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describes al-dunya as the ‘ordinary reality’ and al-akhira as the ‘ultimate
reality’, separated by a divide which, however, can be crossed, we obtaina different idea.54 When al-dunya is interpreted as “signifying everythingthat befalls humans before death or every activity that is not aimed at
the service of God”,55 we perceive the distinction from din, or belief andworship. Of course, for the believer, much of what “befalls humans before
death” is, however, decreed by God and hence of religious significance.
In the context of modern concerns, the second pairing, which combines
al-dunya with al-din, is more immediately relevant. If al-dunya is themundane and ordinary sphere, then it stands to reason that al-din denotes
something else. This is commonly identified as otherworldly, spiritual,religious, and/or devoted to the service of a deity or a number of deities.
Muslim scholars have written at length on the subject, especially from the11th century C.E. onwards, elaborating on the respective properties of din
and dunya, and the proper ways of dealing with them. Drawing notably on
the noted scholar and bureaucrat Abu l-Hasan al-Mawardi (d. 1048), with
his influential Adab al-din wa-l-dunya, Sunni religious and legal scholars
attempted to delineate the fields of din and dunya. In the 13th century,
Muhammad b. al-Mansur Ibn al-Haddad tersely described them as follows:
There are two kinds of administration: the administration of dīn and theadministration of dunyā. The administration of dīn is that which brings
about the execution of (religious) obligations, and the administration ofdunyā is that which brings about the prosperity of the earth.56

Several points make this statement relevant to modern concerns (and to
dismantling unfounded assumptions regarding pre-modern conceptions ofreligion and its others): for one thing, it takes the existence of distinct but
interrelated fields as a given without theorising about this distinction.57 It
54 Lange, Paradise and Hell, 12–13.
55 Lutz Wiederholt, “Profane and Sacred,” in Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, vol. 4 (Leiden:
Brill, 2004), 283r.
56 Ibn al-Haddad, Al-Jawhar al-nafis fi siyasat al-raʾis, ed. Ridwan al-Sayyid (Beirut: Dar
al-Taliʿa li-l-Tibaʿa wa-l-Nashr, 1983), 61–62, quoted from Abbasi, “Did Premodern
Muslims Distinguish,” 218.
57 I entirely agree with Rushain Abbasi in seeing what at some point he calls the “interactive
dīn and dunyā dynamic” (Abbasi, 190) as precisely that: dynamic and premised on a
distinction but as a rule not presupposing a separation. Unfortunately, Abbasi occasionally
undercuts his own argument by using the terms ‘separation’ and ‘separate’. At the sametime, he oversimplifies when he refers to divine law as one of the ‘things’ falling within the31does not spell out the limits to religious obligations, but it at least clarifies
that in this particular combination, din cannot signify an ‘Islamic wayof life’ encompassing everything, as many would have it. If that were thecase, al-din would have swallowed up al-dunya, or at least made positivereference to it impossible. Yet this is precisely what was happening:
the scholars and bureaucrats creating the relevant discourse may haveregarded al-dunya as the sphere of the mundane and ordinary, but they
did not devalue it. Rather, they carefully considered the religious (dini) andworldly (dunyawi) benefits deriving from specific actions and institutions
to the individual and the community, including notably their safety andprosperity. Both were taken seriously.58 The political logic underpinning
this discourse closely intersected with legal reasoning, which discussed(and continues to discuss) the benefits (masalih, manafiʿ) of individual
acts, techniques, and institutions for the welfare of the individual and,even more so, the community and society at large. For this reason, almaslaha al-mursala and al-maslaha al-ʿamma have frequently beentranslated as public interest.59
We are fortunate in that we do not have to explore the din-dunya
relationship solely through the lens of religious and legal scholars, which
tend to dye and all too often discolour our perception of Muslim social,
cultural, and political life. A mass of non-religious textual and material
religious field: “My paper will demonstrate that the medieval dīn-dunyā binary represented
a conceptual separation of the world into distinct religious and non-religious spheres
analogous to the modern religious-secular, with things like worship, prayer, and divine law
on one side and all worldly matters on the other” (Abbasi, 191). As he himself shows, and as
I have argued repeatedly, ‘divine law’ does not fall squarely within a religious sphere, and by
the same token, it is not outside the non-religious sphere; see above, n. 5.
58 In his characteristic high-flying style, Wilfred Cantwell Smith emphasised the dual
obligation: “Our thesis has been that Islam is essentially a religion, and as such profoundly
personal and also finally transcending all particularities and the confines of this mundane
world and all its affairs; nonetheless that is has been distinctively characterized by a deep
concern for these affairs. It has had a central conviction that the true Muslim life includes
the carrying out in this world of the divine injunction as to how mankind, individuallyand corporately, should live… At its fullest, this conviction has risen to the vision ofbuilding the ideal society” (Smith, Islam in Modern History, 39). For a superb case study
on the promotion of agriculture and irrigation as encouraged in Islamic advice literatureand put into practice by Timurid rulers in 15th-century north-east Iran (Khurasan), seeMaria E. Subtelny, Timurids in Transition: Turko-Persian Politics and Acculturation inMedieval Iran (Leiden: Brill, 2007), chap. 4.
59 For pre-modern (‘classical’) debates, see Felicitas Opwis, Maṣlaḥa and the Purpose of Law(Leiden: Brill, 2010). I cannot go into the vast and controversial modern debate on utility,
maslaha, and the ‘finality of Sharia’, or maqasid al-shariʿa.
32

evidence allows us to go much further. Names, sobriquets, and titles
provide an excellent entrance point, and they happen to have been afavourite object of historical study in previous decades, frequently in
conjunction with epigraphy and numismatics.60 In contradistinction
to their Umayyad predecessors (r. 661–750), who had refrained fromadopting regnal titles, the ʿAbbasid and Fatimid caliph-imams adopted
titles that highlighted their special relationship with God, be it in a
passive role (al-Mutawakkil ʿala llah, ‘the one who trusts in God,’ alMustansir bi-llah, ‘the one who is victorious through God,’ al-Mahdi billah, ‘the divinely guided one’) or in a more active one (al-Qa’im bi-amrillah, ‘he who implements God’s command’). From the mid-10th century
C.E. onwards, when the ʿAbbasids had become desperately dependenton military men of Turkic origin (commonly referred to as ‘the Turks’)within their realm, and were threatened by military forces of Iranian,Turkic, or Arab origin from abroad, they granted titles including theelements din, dawla (rotation, dynasty, dynastic realm),61 mulk (realm,
dominion, kingdom), milla and umma (religion, religious community,
Muslim community) to the military commanders and heads of the civil
administration on whom they relied. Whereas religious scholars tended
to hold titles including din, courtiers, generals, military strongmen, andhigh-ranking bureaucrats (‘secretaries’, kuttab) were given honorifics
marking them out as the pillar, support, friend, sword, glory, sun, or starof din, dawla, mulk, or milla: Salah al-Din (Saladin), Sharaf al-Dawla,
Nizam al-Mulk, Qiwam al-Milla, and so forth.
The significance of the specific element selected should not be
overstated: in spite of some attempts on the part of chancery scribes andbureaucrats to correlate titles to rank and functions (e.g., military or
60 For the following, see C.E. Bosworth, “Laḳab,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition,
vol. 5 (Leiden: Brill, 1998); for more detail, see, notably, Johannes H. Kramers, “Les noms
musulmans composés avec Dīn,” in Acta Orientalia 5 (1927); Hasan al-Basha, al-Alqabal-islamiyya fi l-taʾrikh wa-l-wathaʾiq wa-l-athar (Cairo: Maktabat al-Nahda, 1957);
Albert Dietrich, “Zu den mit ad-dīn zusammengesetzten islamischen Personennamen,”Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 110 (1960). Bosworth also points
to the fact that the granting of titles was a major source of caliphal income and, for thatreason, they had to be paid for in one way or another. Heribert Busse in his Chalif undGroßkönig. Die Buyiden im Irak (945–1055) (Würzburg: Ergon, 2004) provides detailed
evidence for the Buyid period (r. in Iraq 945–1055).
61 In Ismaʿili (Sevener) Shiʿi thought, to which the Fatimids adhered, dawla had acosmological and soteriological meaning and should be translated as ‘aeon’ rather than‘realm.’ I am grateful to Sarah Stroumsa for alerting me to this fact.
33

civil), no consistent pattern emerged between the 10th and 15th centuries.62
One and the same man could be awarded the title of Rukn al-Dawla(‘pillar of the realm’) one year and Rukn al-Din the next. The various
elements could be strung together in ever longer chains, for example in
the honorifics varying the dawla element, carried by all leading malemembers of the Buyid clan, Persian-speaking Shiʿi warlords from theregion of Daylam, on the southern shore of the Caspian, who, in 945/46
C.E. imposed their protectorate over the Sunni caliphs (Buyid rule wasalso known as dawlat al-Daylam). The practice reached a peak with ʿImadal-Din Sharaf al-Dawla Muʾayyid al-Milla Mughith al-Umma Safi Amir
al-Muʾminin (pillar of religion, honour of the realm, supporter of thecommunity and its provider, and true friend of the commander of thefaithful, i.e., the caliph). Rien ne va plus. The artillery of titles was clearly
meant to impress, eagerly coveted and dearly paid for. Title mania was,however, also censured by the pious and ridiculed by the urbane.
In the mid-11th century, the Iranian Shiʿi Buyids were displaced by theTurkic Sunni Seljuks, who imposed themselves even more forcefully on
the ʿAbbasid caliphs and adopted the title of sultan, which a few decades
previously had been introduced by Mahmud of Ghazna (d. 1030). By
that time, the Arabic title malik (king), which in earlier times had beendenounced as un-Islamic, had been rapidly gaining in popularity andwas either granted to, or arrogated by, a growing number of militarystrongmen. ‘King’ could be topped by ‘king of kings’, either in Arabic orin Persian. The Buyids had already adopted the ancient Persian title ofshahanshah, ‘king of kings’, underlining a claim to power that was basedon Iranian cultural heritage and kingship.63 Several Buyids and Seljuks
forced the caliph to crown them in a Sasanian-style ceremony and toconfer high-sounding titles on them, including ‘king in, or of, the eastand the west’ (malik fi or al-mashriq wa-l-maghrib).

62 The scribe who finished Nizam al-Mulk’s Siyasatname after the author’s death tried to
impose a firm distinction between titles given to military men (x al-dawla) and civilian
bureaucrats (y al-mulk)(Nizāmulmulk, Siyāsatnāma: Das Buch der Staatskunst, trans.
Karl Emil Schabinger Freiherr von Schowingen (Zurich: Manesse, 1987) esp. chap. 41).
He failed, as one would learn from looking at the titles of Seljuk dignitaries.
63 Busse, Chalif und Großkönig, 159–84, and Wilferd Madelung, “The assumption of thetitle Shāhanshāh by the Būyids and ‘The reign of the Daylam’ [Dawlat al-Daylam],”
Journal of Near Eastern Studies 27 (1969).
34

The Seljuks also seem to be the first to have been granted honorifics
pairing al-dunya and al-din, such as Muʿizz or Jalal al-Dunya wa-l-Din for
Sultan Malik-Shah (r. 1072–92).64 The combination of dunya and din echoed
an ancient Iranian trope according to which ‘religion and government are
twin brothers’. This idea was vigorously adopted by Muslim ‘theorists’ ofgovernment, first and foremost the famous Seljuk vizier Abu l-ʿAli Hasan
Nizam al-Mulk (d. 1092).65 The trope was, of course, not uniquely Islamic.
For Western Europe, it has perhaps been best studied with regard to
early modern England and France, and brought to life in Hilary Mantel’s
acclaimed trilogy on Henry VIII’s powerful counsellor and chancellor
Thomas Cromwell (d. 1540).66 In the Islamic context, the formula could beread as a broadening of the scope: dunya suggested more than either dawla
or mulk, which in the Sunni tradition referred to the realm controlled bya ruler, and by the same token designated the recipient as his servant. In
the late 12th and early 13th centuries, a number of Turkic rulers more or lessarrogated these titles to themselves. Among them, the Khwarezm Shahs
posed the greatest threat to the caliphate until their fall to the Mongols in
the early 1220s, followed some three decades later by the Mongol conquestof the ʿAbbasids themselves.

64 All Seljuk sultans, as well as their chief consorts/wives and sons, were addressed withhonorifics modulating the dunya wa-din formula (pillar, saviour, reviver, support, etc. of
al-dunya wa-l-din); see Nizāmulmulk, Siyāsatnāma, 384.
65 Nizāmulmulk, Siyāsatnāma. See notably Shaul Shaked, “From Iran to Islam: Notes on somethemes in transmission. 1. ‘Religion and sovereignty are twins,’ in Ibn al-Muqaffa’s theory of
government,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 4 (1984); Noah Feldman, “The Ethical
Literature: Religion and Political Authority as Brothers,” Journal of Persianate Studies 5,
no. 2 (2012); Neguin Yavari, Advice for the Sultan: Prophetic Voices and Secular Politics inMedieval Islam (London: Hurst, 2014), 29–37; Safi, Politics of Knowledge, 3–7, 106, 119. Safi
also documents the trenchant critique of the trope by the exciting figure of ʿAyn al-Qudat
Hamadhani (d. 1131) (Safi, chap. 6, esp. 182–89). For the reign of Nizam al-Mulk, dubbed“al-dawla al-Nizamiyya” by Muslim observers, who in his capacity as vizier and atabeg
combined administrative, fiscal, and military responsibilities, see Safi, chap. 2.
66 Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (London: Fourth Estate, 2009); Bring Up the Bodies (London:
Fourth Estate, 2012); and The Mirror & the Light (London: Fourth Estate, 2020).
35

Coins and medallions minted for the Khwarezm Shahs declare them torule both, din and dunya, as distinct units harmoniously brought together
under their aegis.67

Coin of the Khwarezm Shah Sultan ʿAla l-Dunya wa-l-Din Muhammad b. Tekish (r. 1200–20).

After the fall of the Ismaʿili (Sevener Shiʿi) Fatimids in Egypt, both theSunni Ayyubids (r. 1171–1250) and the Sunni Mamluks, former militaryslaves who displaced the Ayyubids and ruled until they were defeatedby the Ottomans in 1516–17, similarly used the dunya wa-din formula.
Baibars al-Bunduqdari, the de facto founder of the new political order(which was not strictly speaking a dynasty), who had risen to power
through murder and cunning, called himself “the sultan, the king, thevictorious, pillar of al-dunya and al-din (al-sultan al-malik al-zahir
rukn al-dunya wa-l-din)”. He managed to stay in power for seventeen
years (1260–77).

67 For more detail, see Lutz Richter-Bernburg, “Zur Titulatur der Ḫwārezm-Šāhe aus der
Dynastie Anūštegīns,” Archaeologische Mitteilungen aus Iran, n. s., 9 (1976).
36

Gold dinar of Sultan Baibars, title shown above the emblem of the leopard. Source: wikimedia.

Only rarely was din directly combined with dawla, as in the case of
Mahmud of Ghazna’s father Sebüktekin (Nasir al-Din wa-l-Dawla) or of
Aybak (Qutb al-Dawla wa-l-Din). Both were manumitted military slaves
who served a dynasty before founding de facto independent sultanates inpresent-day Afghanistan and northern India.68 What we see more frequently
is strings of titles carrying either din or dawla, such as Taj al-Din ʿAlaʾ
al-Dawla, or Jamal al-Din Sharaf al-Dawla. It would seem that the tropethat religion and government were twin brothers was generally expressed
through mulk rather than dawla, which may still have carried too muchof the dynastic association, at least for Sunni Muslims. It was only in the20th century, when dawla simply signified ‘state’, having long since shed its
dynastic associations and even more so its soteriological ring, that Islamists
proclaimed that ‘Islam is religion and state’ (al-Islam din wa-dawla), with afully developed political theory of its own.
Many Western observers have identified din/dini with ‘the spiritual’ anddunya/dunyawi with ‘the temporal’. This includes prominent Islamicists suchas Henri Laoust and Louis Gardet who assigned to the realm of the spiritual
what was based on revelation and to the temporal what was not.69 At best,
this interpretation is misleading. It evokes the mediaeval European doctrineof the two swords: a spiritual one held by the Church, and a temporal one
wielded by lay rulers. As the conflict over the investiture of bishops andabbots in 11th- and 12th-century Europe serves to show, things were more
68 Bosworth, “Laḳab,” 622, 623, and 629 is not entirely consistent. A Seljuk courtier carried thetitle Kamil al-Dawla wa-l-Din (Safi, Politics of Knowledge, 190–91). The Delhi sultan Iltutmish(r. 1211–36) held the title of Shams (‘sun’) al-Dunya wa-l-Din. However, in each instance thetitle was frequently shortened to “al-Din,” dropping either al-Dawla or al-Dunya.
69 Louis Gardet, “Dīn,” 295v; see also Gardet, “Religion and Culture.”
37

complicated, and not only because the feudal order itself was so complex,
defying all efforts at neat categorisation.70 Beginning with the Emperor of
the Holy (!) Roman Empire, a number of princes claimed not only to havebeen appointed through the grace of God but to have been anointed byGod. Even in mediaeval Europe, the lines separating the temporal from thespiritual were thus far from clear, and frequently disputed.
Similar points hold for the Near East: the men who from the 10th
century C.E. onwards made their way to power as amirs and sultans did
not uniformly see themselves as temporal rulers complementing thespiritual authority of the Sunni caliph. The great Abu Rayhan al-Biruni(d. 1048) did report in his “Chronology of Ancient Nations” that certain
astrologers had described the caliph as a mere figurehead with religious
authority (al-Biruni called it dini and iʿtiqadi) rather than temporal power(mulk dunyawi).71 Al-Biruni was, however, not a ‘political theorist’, andhe referred to the political realities of mid-10th century Iraq, rather thancaliphal theory. Regardless, one should be cautious of giving undue weight
to his words, given the intricacy and instability of the context and power
configuration he describes. To begin with, the concept of the caliph as apurely ‘spiritual’ figure is ill-founded. The ʿAbbasid caliphs laid claim togenealogical charisma (as defined by Max Weber) through their descentfrom the house of the prophet Muhammad, and were widely seen as thehead of the (Sunni) Muslim community, or Umma. They were able to use
their aura of religious legitimacy to confer legitimacy on other rulers, whowere in theory subject to them. The caliph’s function was to ‘uphold Islam’and to ward off heresy and disbelief; some transmitted prophetic hadiths,
others issued creeds carrying their names. The fuzziness of boundaries
notwithstanding, religious (here: doctrinal and legal) authority must be
distinguished from religious function.

70 I will not go into the dispute over whether the term ‘feudal’ is heuristically valid, whether
anything like a ‘feudal order’ ever existed, what vassalage entailed, what the status of
bondage and serfdom implied, and whether the categories of Roman Law fitted social
reality. In the present context, the vital point is that bishops and abbots, in addition to
being high Church clergy, were also fief holders and vassals, and hence had to swear
loyalty to two masters, the Pope and their prince. These loyalties, and the status of theprince vis-à-vis ordained clergy, were seen quite differently by lawyers of the Church anddiverse emperors or kings, respectively.
71 See Abbasi, “Did Premodern Muslims Distinguish,” 216.
38

Contrary to what al-Biruni may have thought, caliphal claims to religious
authority were diffuse and disputed.72 In the so-called mihna (‘tribulation’,inquisition) of the first part of the 9th century, the caliphs failed in theirattempt to impose a specific doctrine on the scholars of theology and law(ʿulamaʾ), despite the latter’s lack of corporate institutionalisation and the
independent material resources tied to it. From the second half of the 9th
century onwards, the Sunni ʿulamaʾ were widely portrayed as the ‘heirs of
the prophets’, qualified to rule on religious and legal issues, on the basis of
the authoritative textual sources. Still, in their majority they continued toaffirm the caliph’s role as guardian of the faith and the Muslim community.
Muslim philosophers from al-Farabi (d. 950) to Ibn Sina (Avicenna, d. 1037)
to Ibn Rushd (Averroes, d. 1198), working and reworking important strandsof Greek tradition, offered their own understandings of caliphal authority
by variously identifying prophets, imams, and the philosopher king.73
By the 12th century, Sufi shaykhs, saints, and brotherhoods had emerged asadditional players in the field, adding yet another element to what was alreadya complicated configuration. As a result, religious authority was dispersed,
with considerable potential for competition, tension, and negotiation, evenwhile the rhetoric of collaboration was studiously preserved.
Unlike the ʿAbbasid caliphs, the Buyids, Seljuks, and Khwarezm Shahs
lacked genealogical legitimacy, as defined by Muslim religious scholars.
Additionally, they did not meet many of the other eligibility criteria thesame scholars had fixed, such as religious knowledge; many of them did
not even speak Arabic. Nonetheless, they were Muslims, and they wielded
power (shawka). The deficiency concerning their genealogy and religious
qualification did not impair their capacity to uphold both social order andcorrect religion. 11th-century Sunni scholars and bureaucrats eventually went
as far as to assert that what ultimately counted was order and justice, and not
72 Muhammad Qasim Zaman emphasised cooperation rather than conflict between caliphand ʿulamaʾ (Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Religion and Politics under the Early ʿAbbāsids:
The Emergence of the Proto-Sunnī Elite (Leiden: Brill, 1997), esp. 101–18, 201–13). Ira
M. Lapidus spoke of ‘tacit collaboration’ and a ‘tacit bargain’ (Ira M. Lapidus, A History
of Islamic Societies, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 264–65). His“Separation of State and Religion” no longer reflects current research. See also: Gudrun
Krämer and Sabine Schmidtke, eds., Speaking for Islam: Religious Authorities in Muslim
Societies (Leiden: Brill, 2006); Krämer, “Gottes-Recht bricht Menschen-Recht,” and below.
73 For a spirited contribution to a contested field, see Patricia Crone, God’s Rule –Government and Islam: Six Centuries of Medieval Islamic Political Thought (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004), chap. 14.
39

whether the ruler was a Muslim.74 How these rulers placed themselves visà-vis the caliph and the ʿulamaʾ depended on time and circumstance:75 theShiʿi Buyids showed themselves remarkably flexible in adjusting to changing
circumstance, exchanging mutually binding oaths of loyalty with the Sunnicaliphs, who in theory they should have considered illegitimate usurpersof an imamate rightfully belonging to selected male descendants of ʿAli
alone. The Seljuk Tughril Bey (r. 1055–63) started off by portraying himself
as the loyal sword rescuing his caliph from Shiʿi oppression at home andabroad, while taking on the titles of ‘exalted sultan’, padshah (emperor), andshahanshah. Both the caliph and the Seljuks granted honorifics including
din, dawla, and mulk to the military and civilian elites serving them. Thus thefamous Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk (‘order of the realm’), whose given namewas Hasan, eventually added Qiwam al-Din (‘pillar of religion’) and Radi
Amir al-Muʾminin (‘the one with whom the caliph is pleased’) to his titles.
The Seljuk Sultan Malik-Shah (r. 1072–92) went furthest by appropriating
caliphal prerogatives and titles (notably khalifat Allah, God’s deputy, and‘the shadow of God on earth’), and like several of his Turkic and Buyid
predecessors, endeavoured to rid himself of the caliph altogether.
The further we move from the writings of Muslim scholars of theology
and law, to consider other narrative genres, chancery documents, law inpractice, and major expressions of art and culture, the more clearly we
discern the power of a monarchical tradition, in which princes sought
religious legitimacy, and made considerable efforts to be viewed as pious,
but were nonetheless quite willing to assert themselves, even overriding
religious laws and regulations if necessary. Disdain for worldly pursuits
and pleasures was not the rule for rulers. If it had been, Muslim history
and historiography would have been very different.76 What is evident is
74 Omid Safi traces the remarkable shifts of the celebrated scholar and Sufi Abu Hamid alGhazali (d. 1111), who ended up legitimising any ruler provided he upheld justice (as it
was understood in his time and milieu) (Safi, Politics of Knowledge, chap. 4).
75 For the Buyids, see Heribert Busse, Chalif und Großkönig, notably 57–60, 103–04, 131–59, 185,
203–21, 261–74, 294–95; for the Seljuks, Safi, Politics of Knowledge, 3–7, 19, 21–22, 26–31, 35–42,
61–62, 75–76, 79. For Nizam al-Mulk, see the Seljuk secretary and historian Anushirvan b.
Khalid (d. 1137), quoted in the Introduction to Nizāmulmulk, Siyāsatnāma, 58.
76 In addition to the titles already cited, see Aziz al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship: Power and the Sacred in
Muslim, Christian and Pagan Polities (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001) and, with a focus on the Maghreb,
Jocelyne Dakhlia, Le divan des rois: Le politique et le religieux dans l’islam (Paris: Aubier, 1998); for
Timurid Iran and Moghul India, see A. Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship andSainthood in Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
40

that, irrespective of the precise arrangement, there was no neat separationof powers between ʿAbbasid caliphs, Buyid amirs, and Seljuk sultans: they
were all held responsible for din and dunya, ‘upholding Islam’, securing
peace and prosperity at home, and expanding the borders of Islam abroad.
Titles and power configurations changed with the early modern empiresof the Ottomans, Safavids, and Moghuls. The pattern of collaboration andcompetition did not.

3

Religion, Culture, and the Islamicate

3.1 Islam and Community-Building

It is one thing to ask whether Islam was historically understood by Muslims
as a religion. It is a different matter to investigate under which conditions
a religious community emerged, that was clearly recognisable as Muslim/
Islamic and demarcated from others: in its immediate sense, islam refers to
an attitude and an act rather than to a distinct community of believers. Islam
denotes ‘surrender’ (to God and his decree). One may translate ‘Islam’ as‘submission’, as Michel Houellebecq notoriously did, and as many Muslims
and students of Islam have done before him. However, one should thenequally read the Lord’s Prayer as an act of submission (“Thy will be done,on Earth as it is in heaven”).77 The relevant sources, including first andforemost the Qurʾan, suggest that Muhammad and his followers initially
had an open, inclusive understanding of islam and that all people who‘devoted themselves’ to the God of Muhammad and his followers could
be accepted as ‘believers’ (Arab., muʾminun).78 The question of how open
the gates were in reality, and whether they actually let in Jews, Christians,
and other seekers of the Divine (sing., hanif) defining ‘belief ’ according to
77 Evidently, this is not a comment on Houellebecq’s novel Soumission which has beenvariously read as utopia, dystopia, satire, and/or a culturally racist critique on Islam.
Houellebecq’s novel featured on the cover of Charlie Hebdo the day it was attacked bymilitant Islamists.
78 For philology see notably: James Robson, “‘Islām’ as a Term,” The Muslim World 44(1954): 101–09; and D.Z.H. Baneth, “What did Muhammad mean when he called his
religion ‘Islam’? The original meaning of aslama and its derivatives,” Israel Oriental
Studies 1 (1971). For the historical narrative and theological analysis, see Fred M.
Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Cambridge MA: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010); Yohanan Friedmann, Tolerance andCoercion in Islam: Interfaith Relations in the Muslim Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), chap. 1, esp. 32–35, and Smith, “Faith,” esp. 167–70.
41

their own criteria, remains unresolved, however. Whether this inclusive
approach applied to the entire prophetic era, i.e., the two decades between
610 and 632 C.E., is better left for specialist discussion. By contrast, thedistinction between believers and Muslims (muʾminun and muslimun)
retained its relevance and continues to be discussed to the present day.
Certain echoes of the more open understanding of Islam lingered on.
For example, in Islamic renderings of the Alexander legend, as incorporated
into the poetic works of Nizami and others, Iskandar/Alexander the Greatwas shown making the pilgrimage to Mecca. I will return to this issue later.

Iskandar/Alexander at the Kaʿba in
Mecca. Nizami, Khamsa 1560–61. Paris:
Bibliothèque nationale de France. BNF
Supplément persan 1956 f. 212v.

The historical record evidences a community built on a different basis, afact relevant to discussion of the nexus between religious bond and politicalloyalty and, by extension, the potential for secularity ‘in Islam’. According to
Muslim tradition, shortly after the journey (hijra) of Muhammad and his
followers from Mecca to Yathrib in 622 C.E., the Muslim refugees enteredinto a treaty alliance with several of Yathrib’s pagan and Jewish clans. Among
Muslims, Yathrib came to be known as Medina (madinat al-nabi, city of42

the Prophet). Muhammad headed the community in his dual capacity
as prophet among the believers (muʾminun, and only in a few instances
muslimun) and arbitrator among the hostile local clans. The alliance wasformally laid down in the so-called ‘Constitution of Medina’79 and wasbased on a distinction between religious and political affiliation, although
this distinction was not elaborated in any theoretical manner. Muhammad’s
claim to religious authority was valid only in the eyes of the believers. To
everyone else, he had to prove himself as a political leader – one reason
among others not to equate community building with identity construction.
The alliance sought by the Muslim refugees in their new environment was
based on politics, not cult and belief.
Some Muslims continue to invoke the alliance established in Medina
as the ultimate model of state- and community-building in Islam. Many
believe that in Medina, Muhammad created what resembled a modern
state, and that Muslims wrote the first constitution in human history. The
assertion serves an obvious function in the competition over primacy andsuperiority of claims, but it does nothing to elucidate what went on in
Medina in the 620s. Muslim historians tell us that the Medinan alliance
was short-lived. Within a few decades, Islam emerged as a community(umma) of its own, clearly distinguishable from that of the Jews, theChristians and the God-seeking hanifs, to which one either belonged ornot. The so-called Pact of ʿUmar, attributed to the second Sunni caliphʿUmar b. al-Khattab (r. 634–44) but only fully elaborated several centuries
later, was framed as a contractual agreement the Christians of Damascus
had sought from their Muslim conquerors. It prohibited non-Muslims
from dressing as Muslims did, wearing their hair and beards in a similar
fashion, teaching their children the Qurʾan, or practising their cult inareas inhabited by Muslims. Some of these clauses could easily be readas cultural. By the same token, the Pact fixed the social ascendency ofMuslims over non-Muslims in minute detail. The principle of rendering
religious difference visible could also be read as a strategy of conflict
prevention, a dual function that was carried into the modern era.80 If, in
79 There is no extant copy of the document that came to be known as the “Constitution ofMedina” (the text itself refers to a sahifa, a ‘book’ or ‘sheet of paper’) but it is widely considered
to be authentic, even among critical historians; see Michael Lecker, The Constitution ofMedina: Muḥammad’s First Legal Document (Princeton: The Darwin Press, 2004).
80 Albrecht Noth, “Abgrenzungsprobleme zwischen Muslimen und Nicht-Muslimen: Die‘Bedingungen Umars’ (aš-šurūṭ al-ʿumariyya) unter einem anderen Aspekt gelesen,”43the process, the external walls were raised, the gates still remained open to
those who were prepared to undergo the rather simple act of conversion.
However, the gates were only open in one direction: conversion was
declared irreversible, and abandoning Islam amounted to regressing toan inferior status of belief or even disbelief. Apostasy led not only to social
ostracism, it was subject to severe punishment under Islamic law.
3.2 Muslims and Others

The basic structure of Islamic theological, ethical, moral, aesthetic, andlegal teachings, practices, and institutions was erected over the course ofsome three centuries, particularly in the urban centres of Syria, Iraq, andEgypt rather than in Mecca and Medina. For that reason, Islam was not theArab desert warrior religion it was portrayed to be by European scholars up
to Max Weber.81 What emerged as ‘Islam’ resulted from continued exchangewith representatives of other religious, ethical, moral, and philosophicaltraditions, notably Jews and Christians, with the Qurʾan placing itself
squarely within the monotheistic tradition.82 While it would be fascinating
to systematically explore the sites, types, and conditions of interaction,
the persons involved, and the tools and mechanisms employed, I shall not
do so here. What matters here is that in the course of these encounters,
Muslim scholars elaborated in greater detail their understanding of the‘religion of truth’ (din al-haqq) and the properties of other cults and beliefs,
leading to sophisticated taxonomies that went way beyond the unsystematic
Qurʾanic references and prophetic hadiths. Qurʾanic verses such as, “Youhave your religion, and I have mine” (Sura 109:6), and “It is He Who sent
His Messenger with Guidance and the religion of truth, that He may exalt
Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 9 (1987); and Gudrun Krämer, “Moving Out
of Place: Minorities in Middle Eastern Urban Societies, 1800–1914,” in The Urban
Social History of the Middle East, 1750–1950, ed. Peter Sluglett (Syracuse NY: Syracuse
University Press, 2008).
81 For Weber, who never dealt with Islam systematically, see Wolfgang Schluchter, ed.,Max Webers Sicht des Islams: Interpretation und Kritik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1987); and Gudrun Krämer, “Islam, Kapitalismus und die protestantische Ethik,” in
Kapitalismus: Historische Annäherungen, ed. Gunilla Budde (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &Ruprecht, 2011).
82 The Qurʾan speaks of its own place in the chain of revelations; see Daniel Madigan,
The Qur’ân’s Self-Image: Writing and Authority in Islam’s Scripture (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2001), and Stefan Wild, ed., Self-Referentiality in the Qurʾān (Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz, 2006).
44

it above all religions [al-din kullihi], even if the idolaters find it abhorrent”(Sura 9:33), point to an acute awareness of plurality, competition, and thedetermination to establish a hierarchy. Thus Sura 3:110 famously declared,“You are the best community [umma] ever brought forth among mankind,commanding virtue and forbidding vice, and believing in God,” andMuhammad was credited with stating that “Islam is exalted, and nothing is
exalted above it” (al-Islam yaʿlu wa-la yuʿla).83
Scholarly elaborations on din in the singular and adyan or diyanat in
the plural, or on milla (pl. milal) as religious community/communities,
and on orthodoxy, heresy, and apostasy make it abundantly clear that for
the authors involved Islam was a religion comparable to, indeed superior
to, other religions.84 While Iranian traditions85 infused with Zoroastrianism
had a notable impact on Islamic law, administration, religious practices, andbroader cultural ideas, it was Jews and Christians that constituted the most
relevant other in the authoritative religious literature. In modern Arabic
parlance, the ‘heavenly religions’ (al-adyan al-samawiyya) comprising
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam correspond to the ‘Abrahamic religions’ ofWestern tradition. The ambivalent relationship between Muslims, Jews, andChristians was deeply significant to Muslim self-understanding and to thecontinuity of a community that rested on, and in turn demanded, belief andbelonging. This relationship allowed for connection as well as distancing,and for the recognition of commonality as well as claims to superiority.86
Based on Qurʾanic references, Muslim religious and legal scholars
expressed this claim to superiority in the shape of a pyramid: Muhammad
83 For the hadith, see Sahih al-Bukhari, kitab al-janaʾiz 79, no. 79 (Edition Beirut: Dar alArqam, s.d.), 284; for the axiom and its legal ramifications, see Friedmann, Tolerance andCoercion, esp. 35–39.
84 Out of the extensive literature, see again Friedmann, Tolerance and Coercion, chap. 2, whoamong other things shows (without explicitly addressing this claim) that the assertion
that the plural adyan was only created in the modern period is wrong.
85 I cannot go into the long and unresolved debate over whether to speak of ‘Iran’ (with theemphasis on territory) or of ‘Persia’ (with the emphasis on language, ethnicity, and ruleby ethnic Persians) for the period under consideration. Here as in many other contexts,
naming is not innocent. Rather, the debate is deeply embedded in cultural and political
battles; for a summary, see Sarah B. Savant, The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran:
Tradition, Memory, and Conversion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013),
8–12; see also below for discussions of a ‘Persianate’ sphere.
86 For the normative aspects, see Wilde and McAuliffe, “Religious Pluralism and theQurʾān” and Friedmann, Tolerance and Coercion; my article “Pluralism and Tolerance,” inIslamic Political Thought: An Introduction, ed. Gerhard Bowering (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2015) considers contemporary positions in more detail.
45

received the ultimate revelation correcting Jewish and Christian deviations
from, and outright falsifications of, the genuine heavenly revelations of earlier
prophets. Through this ultimate revelation, God “perfected” the religion(din) of Muhammad and the believers and made it “complete” (Sura 5:3);
hence rendering Islam the perfect religion. Difference translated seamlessly
into hierarchy. The parallels with the equally ambivalent relationship ofChristians to Jewish tradition, which also allows for both connection anda claim to superiority, are evident. It would be all the more interesting to
explore the Chinese concept of sanjiao, the ‘three teachings’, which describes
the multifaceted, occasionally tense but generally harmonious relationshipbetween Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism.87 It is important to note thatcoexistence between Muslims and non-Muslims could extend far beyond
the original triad of Muslims, Jews, and Christians, to include communities
that the majority of Muslim theologians and legal scholars did not recognise
as believers and hence denied the possibility of peaceful coexistence to.
Buddhists and Hindus in the Indian subcontinent as well as Confuciansand Daoists in East Asia are the most conspicuous examples. Some Muslim
theologians and jurists, applying their understanding of the Qurʾan,
Sunna, and Sharia, tried to work out rules that would enable interreligious
coexistence. Many other Muslims, first and foremost Sufis, did not botherwith such exercises and simply acknowledged the diversity of humankind,blithely stating the possibility that there was more than one path to truth
and the Divine. The ecumenical approach reflected a profoundly religious
approach, with no hint of a secular outlook. A number of philosophers, both
Muslim and non-Muslim, went further in asserting that all religions shared
a common ground and indeed were equally true. However, the philosophers
also argued that religion was for the masses, whereas an intellectual eliteattained truth through rational philosophy – a patently secular argument,
which was consequently denounced by religious scholars, who questioned
the philosophers’ status as believers.88
87 See Joachim Gentz, “Die Drei Lehren (sanjiao) Chinas in Konflikt und Harmonie:
Figuren und Strategien einer Debatte,” in Religionen nebeneinander: Modelle religiöser
Vielfalt in Ost- und Südostasien, ed. Edith Franke and Michael Pye (Münster: Lit, 2006)
and Xinzhong Yao, Introduction to Confucianism, 223–44.
88 These critics declared the claim that all religions were equivalent (takafuʾ al-adyan) toequal godlessness (Sarah Stroumsa, “Comparison as a Multifocal Approach: The Caseof Arab Philosophical Thought,” in Comparative Studies in the Humanities, ed. Guy G.
Stroumsa (Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 2018), 135–40).
46

Alongside the possibility of recognition, tolerance, and inclusion, Muslims
have always had the option of non-recognition, intolerance, and exclusion.
The latter could go well beyond discursive othering, and ‘submission’ to God
could entail fighting those who resisted the Muhammadan call (daʿwa). Just as
the Medinan alliance had served to defend the community against hostilities
from both outside and within, religiously sanctioned warfare (jihad) could bedirected against members of other religious communities as well as against
men and women who self-identified as Muslims. In the latter case, suchconflict required that the target first be excluded from the community (takfir)
because of ideas and practices they either espoused or were said to espouse, arequirement that left ample room for slander and defamation. In many cases,
this involved the charge of worshipping people at the expense of worshipping
God alone, which was equated with polytheism (shirk, ‘association’), violating
the core tenet of Islam that there is only one God (tauhid). Charges could also bebased on ideas and behaviour that the men and women concerned considered
perfectly legitimate within their own understanding of Islam, or that they
attributed to culture, custom, and tradition: festive celebrations and mourning
rituals, the consumption of alcohol and drugs, shared prayer with nonMuslims in times of drought and military threat, matrilineal succession, andso on. There was disagreement over whether a particular notion or behaviour
constituted a mere misdemeanour (‘minor sin’), which did not challenge theindividual’s status as a Muslim, or a ‘grave sin’, which excluded them from thecommunity and even justified taking up arms against them. These debates do
not concern us here, except that they highlight the importance of correct belief
and that they could be related to custom and culture.
3.3 Islam and the Islamicate

Under the influence of Michel Foucault and Talal Asad, scholars of Islam havebeen preoccupied, if not obsessed with the workings of power and exclusion,
particularly within the framework of the modern nation state. Yet power
entered the stage much earlier. Within the Islamic ecumene, the strongest
influence was Islam itself. As stated previously, Islam was formed in continuous
encounter with existing traditions, but this encounter did not occur in a
power vacuum. Islam, in the dual sense of a community of Muslims and ofa religious tradition in the making, established itself as hegemonic very early
on, in contrast to foundational developments in most religious and/or moral
traditions, including Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Judaism and47

Christianity. Two decades after Muhammad’s death in 632 C.E., Arab Muslims
ruled over a vast geographical expanse between what is today Morocco andnorth-east Iran, containing a demographic majority of non-Muslims and a
growing number of converts.89 The latter were integrated into the community
through the tribal institution of patronage (walaʾ), in which non-Arab converts
attached themselves as ‘clients’ (mawali) to Arab Muslim patrons.90 Ethnicity
should not have been a factor in conversion, as discrimination on such lines
ran directly counter to both Qurʾanic teachings and certain sayings of theprophet Muhammad that declared all believers to be equal (“like the teeth of acomb”) and piety to be the only marker of distinction recognised under Islam.
In this regard, modern scholars who celebrate Islam as having been global andcosmopolitan from the very beginning, skipping over a parochial period that
Judaism and Christianity passed through, have a point.91 But they overlook
the inequalities in power, social standing, and revenue derived from conquestthat non-Arab Muslims experienced in the early period. The Mawali madeimportant contributions to many fields of Islamic knowledge, including Arabic
grammar and lexicography. By the mid-9th century C.E. the taint attached toclient-status had largely faded into the background, although it could stillbe traced through the names of fathers, grandfathers, and other forebears.
Memories of Arab superiority were never entirely obliterated, though, asevidenced by the pride taken by Muslims from Senegal to Singapore in a pure
Arab lineage (which as a rule, was only ‘pure’ if one wrote out the women).
Within the Muslim empire, Islamic references shaped power, law, andadministration at both the imperial and, to varying degrees, the local level.
Hegemony, which initially derived from the role of Islam as the religion of
the ruling class, gained a broader base as more and more people converted
to Islam, both within the empire and increasingly beyond its borders. In the
Middle East, this process was by and large completed by the 14th century. Fromthen on, Muslims constituted not only the ruling class, but also the majorityof the subjects of Muslim rulers. Similar processes later occurred in Central
89 Wilfred Cantwell Smith tied Muslim attitudes concerning the separation of religion and state(secularity would have been the better term but was not yet in use) to their early success:whereas Christianity had been a “religion of adversity”, Islam had characteristically been the“religion of triumph in success” (Smith, Islam in Modern History, esp. 28–32, here 31).
90 See Monique Bernards and John Nawas, eds., Patronate and Patronage in Early andClassical Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2005); Ulrike Mitter, Das frühislamische Patronat: Eine
Studie zu den Anfängen des islamischen Rechts (Würzburg: Ergon, 2006).
91 Again, Shahab Ahmed serves as a prominent example (What is Islam?, 144).
48

and Southeast Asia as well as in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, though not in the
Indian subcontinent, where even under Islamic rule, Muslims continued to beoutnumbered by non-Muslims almost everywhere.
In his contribution to the Cambridge History of Islam, published in 1970,
Louis Gardet cautiously asked
whether a distinction should be made between a Muslim culture proper, inspiredby Islamic values and particularly by the text of the Qur’an, and a culture which
existed in Muslim territory, and which either interpreted the religious beliefs ofIslam in its own way, or ignored them or even opposed them.92

He tentatively answered this question with the well-known trope (not fully
shared by me) that “Islam is, in its deepest sense, dīn wa-dawla, ‘religion andcity’, and too rigid a classification into separate sections would not be true to thehistoric reality”.93 At roughly the same time, the historian Marshall Hodgson’smonumental three-volume-study The Venture of Islam, significantly subtitledConscience and History in a World Civilization, was posthumously published.
In this work, Hodgson introduces the term ‘Islamicate’ to characterise acontext impregnated with Islamic references (my words not his) by Muslims
as well as non-Muslims, without being bound to religion and the normative
Islamic tradition at large. I do not completely support his classification ofreligion, culture, and society as Islamic, Islamicate, and Islamdom, respectively,
especially not in the distinction he makes between society and social relations(“Islamdom”) on the one hand, and culture (“Islamicate”) on the other. Hodgson
himself is not entirely consistent here, for only one page after introducing theseterms, he sums them up as follows:‘Islamicate’ would refer not directly to the religion, Islam, itself, but to the social andcultural complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims, both among
Muslims themselves and even when found among non-Muslims.94 [my emphases]

Consequently, the following interpretation is inspired by Hodgson but
reflects subsequent thinking including my own.
In the pre-modern Islamicate societies that evolved over time, it was
Islamic norms and conventions that had the greatest impact on how people
92 Gardet, “Religion and Culture,” 601.
93 Where Gardet speaks of a ‘Muslim’ culture, I use ‘Islamic’. And, as shown above, I do not
subscribe to the din wa-dawla thesis.
94 Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization,
3 vols. (Chicago, London: Chicago University Press, 1974), vol. 1:57–60, here 59.
49thought and lived, affecting aesthetic preferences and social practices evenamong those who did not belong to the Muslim community (though it
should perhaps be repeated that affecting, shaping, inspiring, and informing
is not the same as ‘determining’). This was true not only for domains inwhich one might have expected a certain degree of adjustment to Islamic
law, such as business, trade, and the establishment of pious foundations(waqfs). It could also be seen in language, clothing, architecture, and theart of the book, where such an adjustment was not necessarily required.
On the contrary, as mentioned above, during the early conquests, Muslims
had insisted on clearly marking religious affiliation, in order to be able todistinguish the Muslim from the non-Muslim at first glance. The ‘Pact ofʿUmar’ was designed to prevent the emergence of an Islamicate entity, inwhich Muslims and non-Muslims, believers and non-believers mixed freely
and could not easily be distinguished from one another.
Shahab Ahmed has made a passionate case that for Muslims in what hecalled the Balkans-to-Bengal complex in the half-millennium stretchingfrom 850 to 1350, the poetry of Hafez, the love of beardless youths, winedrinking, rationalist philosophy, and Sufi illuminationist thought, which allstood in flagrant contradiction to certain unequivocal legal injunctions in
the Qurʾan and Hadith, were not culture, or one locally or culturally bounded
expression of Islam among others, but Islam:... it has been to plant the seed in the mind of the reader that thesecontradictions cannot meaningfully be understood, as they generally
are, by separating them out as differences between the religious andcultural (or religious and secular) spheres of something called Islam,with integral Islam obtaining in a somehow self-evidently ‘religious’
space… Rather, I suggest that these contradictions call for – indeed,demand and require – a suspension of these received categories of
distinction in order to reconceptualize Islam as a human and historicalphenomenon in new terms which map meaningfully onto the import ofthe prolific scale and nature of the contradictory normative claims madein history by Muslims about what is Islam.95

Leaving aside its idiosyncratic style, this passage provides much food forthought – and query. The picture Ahmed draws of Islam as the experienceof Muslims is immensely attractive: open and generous, loving and
95 Ahmed, What is Islam?, 73. In a similar vein, he stated that “it is not at all clear how ‘culture’ is tobe filtered out of ‘religion,’ or ‘religion’ distilled out of ‘culture’. Indeed, it would appear that the
Muslim practitioners of art, literature and politics… are going out of their way not so much as tomake a conscious distinction as to confuse or confound any distinction – or if they are making a
distinction, they are being confoundingly confusing about it.” (Ahmed, 165, and chap. 1 and 6).
50

sensitive, daring but also modest, embracing ambiguity and contradiction,
prepared to agree to disagree, eager to explore, and keen to welcome new
possibilities.96 There can be no doubt that what he describes is not just a
figment of his imagination but reflects lived experiences as documented inpoetry, paintings, courtly prose, and Sufi writings. Less exuberant authors,such as Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen and Luca Patrizi have similarly stated
that, “The wine-obsessed libertine does not belong to another culture thanthe puritan ʿālim. He merely makes different choices.”97 Point well taken– but not accepted as a general rule; for what may have been true for theBalkans-to-Bengal gentleman, or the Arab libertine, was not necessarily
true for their non-Muslim neighbours or their fellow Muslims in othertimes and places, as illustrated by centuries of argument over love, music,
and the female voice, modesty and decency, ambiguity and certainty.
And did the wine-loving Muslims that they place so noticeably
in the foreground generally think of their ‘choices’ as not just normal
but normative, as Ahmed has argued with reference to major poets,
philosophers, and Sufi figures:
The primacy that is given to the constitutive determinacy of legal discourse
over other discourses serves to distort our perspective and effectively
prevents us even from recognizing – let alone understanding – that,
historically, Muslims have constructed normative meaning for Islam interms that allowed them to live by and/or with norms other than and at
odds with those put forward by legal discourse.98
96 On the final pages of his book, Ahmed makes it clear that his aim is not to engage innostalgia or to paint a rosy picture of Islam, with the “Sufi-philosophical amalgam”
serving as the “soft” face of Islam (Ahmed, 539). His statement would go some way
to placate (Western) scholars of Sufism, such as Bernd Radtke and Alexander Knysh,
who take issue with the romanticising approach to Sufism as the epitome of the
Muslim’s search for love and beauty, as represented by noted (Western) scholars such as
Annemarie Schimmel; see Bernd Radtke, Neue kritische Gänge: Zu Stand und Aufgaben
der Sufikforschung (Utrecht: M.Th. Houtsma Stichting, 2005); Knysh, Sufism, esp. 41–42.
97 Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen and Luca Patrizi, “Introduction,” in Ethics and Spirituality in
Islam: Sufi adab, ed. Francesco Chiabotti et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 19.
98 Ahmed, What is Islam?, 121; also 44–45, 80, 94–101, 117–29. Reading Nizam al-Mulk’s
Siyasatname, it becomes clear that for this ‘Order of the realm’ and ‘Pillar of religion’,drinking was perfectly normal for kings and caliphs, although they should avoid giving
out orders while drunk, but that respectable scholars did not drink; see esp. chap. 17
and 29, which deal with the ruler’s boon companions (sing. nadim) stating that theyshould be entertaining, able to keep a secret, know large parts of the Qurʾan by heart,and master chess and games of dice. Moderation is the word here as in all other affairs;
see notably chap. 50. Nizam al-Mulk also expands on the trope that heretics engage in51

Ahmed shows little interest in the social site of these positions. As an
aside, there is not a single woman in his picture: writing or listening
to poetry, holding a glass of wine, or making love to a youth. Perhaps
more immediately relevant to discussions of the Islamicate: what Ahmed
at some point calls “a common paradigm of Islamic life and thought”99
may have been Islam for many Muslims. But it cannot have been so for
non-Muslims who took part in the ‘paradigm’ without being part of the
Muslim community. He is also wrong when he claims that for Hodgson
and his followers, ‘Islamicate’ equals ‘less Islamic’ and hence less pureand authentic than Islamic.100 Hodgson was not a Salafist, and those who
use ‘Islamicate’ today are not concerned with purity and authenticity
but with inclusion, that is to say with the recognition that pre-modern
Islamicate culture was created by Muslims, non-Muslims, and possibly
some agnostics too. Ahmed misses the point entirely when he assertsthat Muslims “consciously constitute… their faith by incorporating andsynthesizing the ideas and behaviours of non-Muslims”, affirming that
Islam is there to “prune, correct, purge and complete” (their faiths), as
Kenneth Cragg put it so well.101 The point is not that Islam “incorporates”
and “synthesizes” other faiths but that living Christians, Jews, Hindus,
and Zoroastrians participated in a society dominated by Muslims, and tosome degree shaped by their socio-legal rules and aesthetic preferences.
It is when we move beyond the Muslim perspective that the necessity to
distinguish between religion and culture comes out most clearly.
3.4 Writing the Islamicate

Exchange resulting from encounters could take many forms, and thediscursive strategies employed varied greatly. Exchange could involve
competition in which individual elements were adopted and adapted so as toturn them against the other; it could be portrayed as the retrieval of ideas anddrink, drugs, and debauchery, esp. incest and the exchange of women; see notably chap.
47. For the Turco-Mongol Timurids, who tended to drink heavily, see Subtelny, Timurids
in Transition, 27–28, 78. It is clear from anthologies of Arabic poetry that drinking wine
was not the preserve of Turks, Persians, and Turco-Mongols.
99 Ahmed, What is Islam?, 75.
100 Ahmed, 171.
101 Ahmed, 173–74. The reference is to the Anglican bishop and noted scholar of Islam
Kenneth Cragg’s (1913–2012) The House of Islam (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1975), 5–6.
52

practices the other had preserved; or it could be appropriated, or outrightstolen so as to rebuild one’s own community (nostrification). Exchange could
be seen as a joint venture aimed at erecting a common edifice. Frequently,
exchange was not formally acknowledged or went unnoticed (“unintentionalborrowing”) but nonetheless left its trace.102 Among critical scholars,
terms suggesting unilateral action, such as ‘influence’, ‘appropriation’, or‘borrowing’ have come to be viewed with suspicion. ‘Inspire’ and ‘inform’
have largely taken their place, accompanied by ‘flow’ and ‘conversation’.
‘Assimilation’ is completely out. To highlight the multidirectional andfrequently unintentional character of exchange, the term ‘crosspollination’has been introduced by literary scholars, notably in translation studies.103 Allthese terms are doubtlessly subtle, attributing considerable agency to those
involved, but they are also liable to masking the element of power, which
both rests on and sustains asymmetrical relationships. Cultural flows do notoccur in neutral space, and the wind does not necessarily blow with equal
strength in all directions. By the same token, the notions of ‘shared space’ and‘shared history’, attractive though they are, need to be treated with caution so
as not to fall into the trap of romancing. Most golden ages have been shown
to be less glittering than assumed. If there is one field in which equality
was established among educated men across religious and confessionalboundaries, it was philosophy, at least at certain times and in certain places.
Sarah Stroumsa has persuasively argued that within Islamicate contexts,
philosophy constituted an extra-territorial sub-culture with remarkablestaying power. She also came up with the suggestive image of the whirlpool,in which “each drop contributes to the character of the whole body of water,
its own color changing in the turbulence.”104 But, and this is my image, it wasalso possible for different parties to draw from the same fountain to water
their own separate garden plots, barring entry to others.
102 Tacit appropriation has been shown to be common in the philosophical field, especiallyas regards Muslim lendings from non-Muslims; see Sarah Stroumsa, “Comparison.” For“unintentional borrowings”, see Philip Ivanhoe, “The Shifting Contours of the Confucian
Tradition,” review of Imagining Boundaries: Changing Confucian Doctrines, Texts, andHermeneutics, ed. Kai-wing Chow, On-cho Ng and John B. Henderson (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1994)”, Philosophy East and West 54, no. 1 (2004): 84.
103 See e.g. Anna Akasoy, James Montgomery and Peter Pormann, eds. Islamic Crosspollinations:Interactions in the Medieval Middle East (Cambridge: Gibb Memorial Trust, 2007).
104 See her articles “Comparison” (the whirlpool image appears on p. 143) and “The Literary
Genizot: A Window to the Mediterranean Republic of Letters,” Intellectual History of theIslamic World 8, no. 2–3 (2020).
53

Contact, exchange, transmissions, and flows were ubiquitous in the premodern realm of the ‘Islamicate’. A number of fields have allowed us to geta better sense of the sites, processes, discursive strategies, and outcomes of
the relevant encounters. Rational philosophy has just been mentioned as
one of the domains in which Muslims, Jews, and Christians engaged jointly,
sometimes in competition with one another, but more often working on theedifice together. Translation has been best studied for the 8th to 10th centuries
C.E., and is commonly referred to as ‘Greek-into-Arabic’, even though it
also involved other languages, such as Syriac, Middle Persian (Pahlavi), andSanskrit. Empirical science rested on even wider networks of exchange. The
religious field, conventionally understood, is particularly rich. Pilgrimage
was a fertile source of such cross-pollination. While Mecca and Medina were
exclusively reserved for Muslims, there were numerous shared sites, such as
Jerusalem or the innumerable tombs and shrines of holy men and women,
which were thought to be impregnated with their blessing power (baraka).
Sufism has been a prime field in which to study productive encounters,from the inspiration Muslim ascetics and mystics received from Christianneighbours to the impact of Sufi notions and practices on Near Eastern
Jewish pietists,105 and the encounters of Sufis, dervishes, Brahmins, and yogis
in the Indian subcontinent and the wider Persianate sphere. Overall, JewishMuslim encounters have perhaps been studied most intensively, covering
material as well as intellectual culture, from shared business and devotional
practices to joint engagement with mysticism, philosophy, theology, andlaw. Shlomo Dov Goitein’s six-volume Mediterranean Society serves as aprime example of what the Islamicate means and implies.106 Goitein spokeof a “Jewish Arab symbiosis”,107 though writing before the term ‘Islamicate’105 See Nathan Hofer, “Training the Prophetic Self: Adab and riyāḍa in Jewish Sufism,” in
Ethics and Spirituality in Islam: Sufi adab, ed. Francesco Chiabotti et al. (Leiden: Brill,2017) and Elisha Russ-Fishbane, Judaism, Sufism, and the Pietists of Medieval Egypt: A
Study of Abraham Maimonides and His Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
106 The Mediterranean horizon Goitein invoked has since been filled by other scholars
who, following in Braudel’s steps, explored ideas and anxieties shared by men andwomen in early modern Europe and the adjacent areas of the Islamic(ate) world. Cornell
Fleischer’s study of eschatology (“A Mediterranean Apocalypse: Prophecies of Empire in
the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the
Orient 61 (2018)) is a brilliant example of the inclusive approach.
107 S. D. Goitein’s Jews and Arabs: Their Contacts Through the Ages, 3rd ed. (New York:
Schocken Books, 1974) and A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of theWorld as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 6 vols. (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1967–93). For critical comment on the concept of symbiosis, see54became widely known. Subsequently, ‘symbiosis’, too, has gone out offashion to be largely replaced by convivencia. Jewish-Muslim convivencia inmediaeval Egypt, Syria, and most of all in Muslim Spain, al-Andalus, hasbrought forth some of the most sophisticated work in this domain, followed
by a growing interest in the Ottoman experience.
Yet it was not only non-Muslims who adjusted to Islamic patterns.
Muslims, too, adapted to local customs and sensibilities, even in regions
they dominated. The Delhi sultans and the Mughal emperors of India are
no doubt the best-known examples of far-ranging acculturation: as Sunni
Muslims of Turco-Mongol origin, they ruled over an overwhelmingly nonMuslim majority, and in the Indian subcontinent the pull of Islam proved
to be weaker than it had been in the Middle East and in Africa. In Iranand adjacent territories, Muslim conquerors and their successors adapted
to the language and culture of their subjects. From the 12th to the 18th
centuries, the Persianate cultural sphere stretched from Anatolia throughCentral Asia to South, East, and Southeast Asia. To describe a cultural
sphere largely defined by the principle language of court culture, MarshallHodgson spoke of a Persianate civilisation, Bert Fragner coined the term
Persophony (Persophonie), and Robert Canfield referred to Turco-Persia.108
The Mongol Ilkhans of the 13th century and, to an even greater extent, theTurco-Mongol Timurids of the 14th and 15th centuries provide the moststriking examples of these processes in areas as diverse as administration,
irrigation, music, poetry, and the art of the book.
Cultural exchange in the Persianate sphere was especially complex
as it offered a pool of prestige terms, goods, and institutions that could
easily compete with (Arab) Islamic ones outside of the religious sphere,
narrowly defined. Yet it also serves to illustrate an important dimensionof cultural encounter: retrojection into the past rather than preservationof a legacy of the past, as carefully studied by Sarah Bowen Savant.109 Shaul
Stroumsa, “Comparison,” 137–38, 144–45, and Stroumsa, “The Literary Genizot.”
108 Hodgson, Venture of Islam, 2:293. His term has since been widely accepted; see, e.g.,
Abbas Amanat and Assef Ashraf, eds., The Persianate World (Leiden: Brill, 2018). Bert
Fragner, Die Persophonie: Regionalität, Identität und Sprachkontakt in der Geschichte
Asiens (Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 1999); Robert L. Canfield, ed., Turco-Persia in
Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). To avoid giving
preference to one language over the others, Shahab Ahmed preferred to speak of theBalkans-to-Bengal complex (Ahmed, What is Islam?, esp. 32, 73–85).
109 For the following, see notably Savant, The New Muslims, 92; also 21–25, 34–37, 39–47,
72–73, 101–02, and chap. 4. Marshall Hodgson, too, commented on the elements of loss,
55

Shaked had earlier described the circularity of scholarly argument that firsttraced a given theme to its (presumed) Iranian origins to then postulate an
Iranian influence on the theme concerned. Faintly echoing Savant, Neguin
Yavari concluded that, “The Muslims chose and carefully crafted an imageof Sasanid lore that suited their own ends, and presented the result as a‘self-image’, a partially domesticated wellspring of ethical teachings andpolitical traditions.”110 For modern scholars, the pre-Islamic Iranian pastis difficult to access, as most of the relevant sources in Avestan and Middle
Persian have been lost, making it very difficult to establish either thecontinuity or modification of religious ideas and cultural patterns, frompre-Islamic to Islamic times. To Muslims and non-Muslims living after thedestruction of the Sasanian Empire in the 660s, more material seems tohave been available. In any event, most of the texts we have today werecompiled and written down in the Islamic era, and most of the authors who
wrote, reconstructed, or imagined the history, culture, and ‘wisdom’ of the
Achaemenids, Seleucids, Parthians, and Sasanians were Muslims. The
great compendium of Zoroastrian law and ethics, the Denkard (“Acts ofreligion”) was probably written down by Zoroastrians, in Middle Persian,in the 9th or 10th century C.E, that is, during the ʿAbbasid period.111 The
famed Shahname, the ‘Book of Kings,’ the most powerful source of moral
example, political doctrine, and entertaining lore in the Persian-speaking
world, was composed around 1000 C.E. by a Muslim author, Abu l-Qasim
Firdawsi, and dedicated to a Turkic Muslim ruler, Mahmud of Ghazna (whocared little for it). Persian andarz (‘good precepts’ and ‘practical wisdom’),
which drew on Parthian, Sogdian, and Persian sources and shared many
features with adab, was in large part written down in New Persian in the
14th century C.E., again in an Islamicate setting.112
3.5 The Many Uses of Adab

This takes us to the protean concept of adab. If Sufism is an ocean,adab is a sea with moving shores. Adab is one of the pillars of Islamicate
culture and is especially relevant here, as it draws attention to the fineretrieval, and reconstruction (Hodgson, Venture of Islam, 1:43–44).
110 Shaked, “From Iran to Islam,” 62 and 75–76; Yavari, Advice for the Sultan, 35.
111 See Philippe Gignoux, “Denkard,” in Encyclopædia Iranica, vol. VII, fasc. 3 (London: 1996).
112 See Shaul Shaked and Zabihollah Safa, “Andarz,” in Encyclopædia Iranica, vol. II, fasc. 1(London: 1987).
56

distinctions between culture and religion that existed before the irruptionof modernity, and as it was reconfigured as essentially secular in the 19th
century. In a nutshell, adab is knowledge put into exemplary practice as
good manners and proper behaviour, setting forth examples of how tolive a life of moral uprightness and refined civility, pleasing in the eyesof God and one’s fellow humans. More precisely, pre-modern adab in
the singular and the plural (ādāb, rules of adab) stands for the efforts
to cultivate and practise a behaviour that is appropriate to a given roleor setting, be it as a judge, a prince, a physician, a craftsman, a lover, ora Sufi.113 (I use the male form on purpose: adab literature was written
by men for men. Modern celebrations of adab as the foundation of acosmopolitan secular humanism tend to gloss over the gender dimension.)
What is deemed correct and proper is to a large extent socially and culturally
conditioned. Adab could define the ethics and conduct of the pious seeker ofthe Divine, modest, unassuming, and ascetic, or it could invoke the ideal of
the cultivated, courteous, and urbane urbanite, elegant in his way of speech,
dress, and gesture. In all its broad variety, adab was almost universally
appreciated as a cultural asset.
Irrespective of the precise context and definition, adab connects theexterior with the interior, relating bodily comportment, outer appearance, andpraxis with inner states and dispositions. To obtain adab requires education,
taming, and training, which discipline the body, the mind, and the self. At
the same time, adab denotes the media used to instil the desired virtues andhabits. At least outside a religious field, narrowly defined, these media weremeant to educate, edify, and entertain, combining wit and erudition. They didso, not through systematic exposition of a given theme, but through series of
113 The relevant literature is growing fast. For a brilliant introduction with extensive
referencing, see Peter Heath, “Al-Jāḥiẓ, Adab, and the Art of the Essay,” in Al-Jāḥiẓ: A
Muslim Humanist for our Time, ed. Arnim Heinemann et al. (Würzburg: Ergon, 2009).
The following titles are indispensable for the pre-modern period: Barbara D. Metcalf,ed., Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984); Francesco Chiabotti et al., Ethics and Spirituality
in Islam; Knysh, Sufism, 137–48, and the following entries in the Encyclopaedia of Islam
Three: Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, “Adab a) Arabic, early developments,” fasc. 2014–3;
Susanne Enderwitz, “Adab b) and Islamic scholarship in the ʿAbbāsid period,” fasc.
2013–4; Thomas Bauer, “Adab c) and Islamic scholarship after the ‘Sunnī revival’,” fasc.
2013–4; and Erik S. Ohlander, “Adab, in Ṣūfism,” fasc. 2009–1. Also Armando Salvatore,“Islamicate Adab Tradition vs. the Islamic Shariʿa, from Pre-colonial to Colonial,” Working
Paper Series of the HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” 3(Leipzig University, 2018), 7–15.
57

anecdotes, sententia, and reported statements meant to illustrate ‘how to do
things’.114 The ‘invitation to the banquet’ (maʾduba), to which linguists havetraced the origin of the term,115 was richly laid out. Some of its practitioners
included poetry and music, others restricted it to prose literature, though
as a rule this, too, would include ample quotations from poetry. Even whenrestricted to prose, adab literature was extremely wide-ranging, comprising
elegant prose, moral discourse, handbooks of courtly and of Sufi etiquette,bald humour and satire, expressions of Sufi sensibilities, religious critique,indifference, and agnosticism, the elaboration of cultured refinement, and thecelebration of eccentric and even outrageous behaviour. If religious scholars
tried to control adab through defining its ādāb, then they failed.
The position of adab between culture and religion is of particular interest.
The concept and practice of adab was shared by Middle Eastern speakers of
Arabic, Persian, and other languages irrespective of their ethnic and religious
affiliation, though they might conceive of its origins and properties in different
ways. Attempts to stake an exclusive claim on adab, declaring it to be wholly
derived from either Arab or Irano-Persian tradition were common, reflecting
the long-standing competition between Arabs and ‘Persians’.116 These claims
were largely expressed in terms of ethnicity, cultural superiority, and temporal
precedence (who was first, and who took what from whom?). Nonetheless, they
were also not free from religious connotation: for many Arab Muslims, Arabstood for Muslim, and for many Iranians, Persian also meant Zoroastrian. Thatadab drew on ancient Greek, Indian, and Persian ‘wisdom’ literature was widely
acknowledged.117 The celebrated littérateur al-Jahiz (d. 868/9), whom many
saw as the Arab humanist par excellence, described adab as the “accumulationof the wisdom and the learning of the past nations and generations.”118
At the same time, many valued elements of adab did not necessarily derivefrom an ancient treasure trove to be appreciated by later generations. Instead
114 Peter Heath compared this method to a slide show (Heath, “Al-Jāḥiẓ, Adab, and the Artof the Essay,” 155 and 163).
115 Mayeur-Jaouen and Patrizi, “Introduction,” 3–4, 35.
116 Known as shuʿubiyya (from Ar., shuʿub, “peoples”, “nations”) and hotly contested; for a brief
introduction, see Savant, New Muslims, 27–28, 51–52.
117 For Greek paideia and Indian ‘wisdom’, see Louise Marlow, “Among kings and sages: Greek
and Indian wisdom in an Arabic mirror for princes,” Arabica 60 (2013); for India, see also
Yavari, Advice for the Sultan, 56–64.
118 Hämeen-Anttila, “Adab,” 6; Mayeur-Jaouen and Patrizi, “Introduction,” 16–25. In spite of its
title, Arnim Heinemann et al., eds., Al-Jāḥiẓ: A Muslim Humanist for our Time (Würzburg:
Ergon, 2009) remains reserved regarding the claim to pre-modern Arab or Islamic humanism.
58

they were attributed to Greek, Indian, and Persian kings and sages to lend them
added prestige, irrespective of whether these elements had ever formed part oftheir ‘wisdom’. They stood for a retrojection into the past, not a legacy of thispast. Courtly literature of ‘mirrors for princes’ and heroic epics defined good
conduct through the combination of wisdom, virtue, and in the case of rulers,
strength and beauty. The exemplars of such conduct were kings and caliphs,
sages, physicians, ascetics, viziers, and prophets, irrespective of language,
ethnicity, and religion. Examples are manifold: Aristotle and Alexander theGreat; the Sasanian kings Anushirvan, Ardashir, Feridun, and Kay Khusraw;
Borzuye and Buzurgmihr the Wise; Moses and the prophet Muhammad;
ʿUmar b. al-Khattab, the second caliph recognised by the Sunni Muslims, ʿAli
b. Abi Talib and his son Husayn, but also the first Umayyad caliph Muʿawiya,
whom the Shiʿis detest; the ascetic Hasan al-Basri; the ʿAbbasid caliph alMaʾmun, the Buyid amir ʿAdud al-Dawla, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna, theSeljuk sultan Sanjar, and many others. Nizam al-Mulk’s Siyasatname, written
at the very end of the 11th century, serves as an excellent illustration of thisvirtue parade. Women are conspicuous in their virtual absence, except assources of socio-political disorder and moral corruption.119
The study of adab takes us back to Gardet’s statement that Islam“absorbed these cultures, and assimilated itself to them in various ways,
to a far greater extent than it attempted to supplant them.”120 If we replace‘assimilate’ by ‘adapt and adopt’ we get closer to current perceptions. In
any event, crossing or simply disregarding boundaries is not the sameas transgressing them, let alone subverting them. Adab is not per sea subversive genre. What matters here is that adab was largely seen as
part of culture, be it in the shape of a specific culture, either shared or
particular, or as the repository of a great tradition of wisdom and learning
shared by humanity.
Significantly, most of the Muslim scholars, Sufis, and littérateurs
practising adab distinguished it from the religious sciences, suggestinga separate field of Islamic religious studies.121 The same seems to have
119 For Nizam al-Mulk’s misogyny, see esp. Siyāsatnāma, chap. 43. As Omid Safi has shown,
his lashing out against ‘the veiled ones’ should also be seen in the context of his power
struggle with Malik-Shah’s powerful wife Tarkan Khatun (Safi, Politics of Knowledge, 67–74). Contextualisation is always welcome. Misogyny, however, is resilient and survived
the demise of our subjects.
120 Gardet, “Religion and Culture,” 569.
121 Louis Gardet explicitly speaks of a religious field made up of Islam’s ‘religious sciences’ and59

applied to Jews and Christians with regard to their respective religious
disciplines. Compared to the religious sciences, adab was more open in its
themes, formats, methods, and authors. Modern scholars have considered
it parallel to the ideals of urbanitas and humanitas of Antiquity and theRenaissance. Some portrayed it as the core of an Islamic humanismthat was essentially secular and separate from the ‘scholasticism’ of
the religious scholars. Yet treating adab as separate from the religious
sciences did not necessarily amount to removing it from the purview
of religion. Adab could incorporate religious norms and maxims, anddraw on the Qurʾan, Hadith, and the rich body of Islamic lore; manyof its practitioners were (also) ʿulamaʾ. For this reason, Charles Pellat’s
verdict that adab literature was “clearly profane” and as such constituted
the “core of Islamic culture”, is untenable.122
In the pre-modern era, dissociating adab from religion was a
possibility but not a general rule. By the late 19th century, the lines
had been more firmly drawn: as literature, adab was largely restricted
to belles-lettres, specially in Arabic.123 At the same time, it wasincreasingly understood as an alternative, non-religious register ofcultured refinement, one not primarily inspired by the Qurʾan andprophetic example. For this reason it was considered essentially secular.
This shift in understanding came not from Western orientalists but
from some of the leading lights of the ‘Arab Renaissance’ (Nahda), such
as Jurji Zaydan (1861–1914), who, it should be added, was a Christianintellectual. Within the new discourse on civilisation, and the ethics
and practices upholding it, adab was to an extent displaced by akhlaq,
religious morals and morality. This, though, takes us well beyond thepresent enquiry. Suffice to say that even in the twentieth and the earlylearning (Gardet, 600).
122 Charles Pellat, “Variations sur le thème de l‘adab’,” Correspondances d’Orient 5–6 (1964),
quoted from Mayeur-Jaouen and Patrizi, “Introduction,” 17. George Makdisi was perhaps
the most prominent advocate of this view: The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and theChristian West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990). For critical comment, see
Heinemann et al., Al-Jāḥiẓ.
123 For the following, see the monumental conference volume Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, ed.,Adab and Modernity: A ‘Civilising Process’? (Sixteenth-Twenty-First Century) (Leiden: Brill,2020) which ventures far beyond the Arab world. For Arabic adab in general, see also Boutros
Hallaq, “Adab e) modern usage,” in Encyclopedia of Islam Three, fasc. 2014–2; Anne-Laure
Dupont, Ğurğī Zaydān 1861–1914 (Damascus: ifpo, 2006) and her more recent article, “Unadab des classes modernes,” in Mayeur-Jaouen, Adab and Modernity.
60

21st century, Sufi and religious adab, broadly defined, continued toflourish in familiar as well as in entirely new formats.
3.6 Illustrating the Islamicate

Within the Muslim empire, many non-Muslims who did not convert toIslam despite powerful incentives to do so, nonetheless adjusted culturally
to an environment that was politically dominated by Muslims. Adjustment
could cover a broad range: from simple borrowings that caused littlechange in the prevalent patterns of thinking and living, to various types ofadaptation, to manifest acculturation. For an example from the religious
sphere narrowly understood, Syrian Bibles and homiletic texts written in
the 13th and 14th centuries closely resemble manuscripts of the Qurʾan in
their aesthetic design.124

The Gospel according to St.
Matthew, copied in Palestinein 1336. British Library Add.
MS. 11856 f. 1v-2r

Borrowing even occurred in regions not under Muslim rule, inspired by
the power, prestige, and aesthetic appeal associated with imperial Islamic
culture. Phillip Wagoner illustrated this phenomenon in his study of theSouth Indian kingdom of Vijayanagara, where in the 15th century, the kingand court adopted what they identified as Islamic dress and titles.125
Adaptation could also affect ‘sacred architecture’. A prominent example
is the Armenian Vank Cathedral built on the orders of Shah ʿAbbas (r.
124 See Meliné Pehlivanian, Christoph Rauch, and Ronny Vollandt, eds., Orientalische
Bibelhandschriften aus der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – PK: Eine illustrierte Geschichte (Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz, 2016) or Barbara D. Boehm and Melanie Holcomb, eds., Jerusalem 1000–1400:
Every People Under Heaven (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). Exhibition catalogue.
125 Phillip B. Wagoner, “‘Sultan among Hindu Kings’: Dress, Titles and the Islamicizationof Hindu Culture at Vijayanagara,” Journal of Asian Studies 55, no. 4 (1996).
61

1589–1618 in New Julfa (today a district of Isfahan) for the local Armenian
community, which the shah had forcefully deported from their home
town of Julfa at great cost of lives and goods. The cathedral’s decoration
was decidedly Christian (including European-style putti) but its domed
interior was designed to resemble a mosque by its Muslim architect.126

Dome of the Armenian Vank Cathedral, New
Julfa, Isfahan. Photo: Gudrun Krämer, 2016.

In other instances, the ‘Islamic imprint’ went well beyond simple
borrowing. 19th-century Armenian Christian women wearing a face veilin an Ottoman environment are a case in point. This example, however,highlights the ambiguities inherent in the process, for while veiling could
be seen as a result of acculturation, it could also be read as a desire to escape
notice as non-Muslims and to become invisible in public space. As such,it ran directly counter to the overall aim of the ‘Pact of ʿUmar’, which had
been to render religious difference visible.
126 For the larger picture, see Mohammad Gharipour, ed., Sacred Precincts: The Religious
Architecture of Non-Muslim Communities Across the Islamic World (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
62

Chevalier Auguste de Henikstein: Turques, Arménienne, Grecques (Turkish women, an Armenian
woman and two Greek women). Album, 1825. Source: Wiki Commons (Romanian Academy
Library, via europeana.eu)

Entanglements were often complicated: the long-established Jewish
communities in Iran spoke and wrote Judeo-Persian. Between the
17th and the 19 th centuries, Jews, Armenians, and Zoroastrians wererepeatedly exposed to strong government pressure including forced
conversion. Given that the ruling Shiʿi elite also suppressed Sunni
Muslims, Sufis, and various other Muslim groups and sects, however,their policies cannot be seen as directed solely against non-Muslims,
let alone Jews. At the same time, Jewish patrons had the biblicalstories written by Jewish Persian poets illustrated with motifs drawn
from non-Jewish Iranian sources. These included the great epic
poems, as well as popular stories of Muhammad and other prophets
recognised by Islam. A 17th-century illustrated manuscript of Shahin-i
Shirazi’s ‘Book of Moses’ (Musaname) depicted Moses according tocontemporary Muslim convention, with a nimbus of fire and a veil63

covering his face.127 In Imrani’s ‘Book of Conquest’ (Fathname), Joshua,
the Israelite leader who conquered the Promised Land, is depicted as a
Safavid Iranian hero, again with a halo of fire surrounding his head. 128
In post-Mongol iconography, the nimbus of fire primarily marked theprophet Muhammad, other prophetic figures, and the Shiʿi imams,
and was probably adapted from China.
In these examples, a pre-Islamic Persian literary and aesthetic tradition
was crossed with an Iranian Islamic one, with Chinese influences added tothe blend, to illustrate constitutive
episodes of Jewish collective
memory that could easily beclassified as religious. There arecertain caveats, though, as almost
none of the extant Judeo-Persian
manuscripts were signed, andthere is some speculation among
art historians as to whether
the Jewish patrons may havecommissioned the illustrations inMuslim ateliers.

Moses and the Angel of Death. Shahin-i
Shirazi, Musaname, Iran 1686. British
Library Ms. Or. 1704

127 Shahin-i Shirazi’s Musaname was written around 1327 and illustrated in 1686; see Vera
Basch Moreen, In Queen Esther’s Garden: An Anthology of Judeo-Persian Literature (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 2000) and Dennis Halft OP, “Das ‘Buch der Bücher’ auf
Persisch,” in Orientalische Bibelhandschriften, ed. Pehlivanian, Rauch, and Vollandt.
128 The Fathname by the Judeo-Persian poet Imrani (1454–1536) was composed in Isfahan
in around 1474. Illustrated manuscripts from the 17th and early 18th centuries are heldat the British Library (Ms. Or. 1704) and the Ben-Zvi Institute of the Hebrew Universityof Jerusalem; on the Jerusalem manuscript, see Vera Basch Moreen, The Bible as a
Judeo-Persian Epic: An illustrated manuscript of ‘Imrani’s Fath-Nama’ (Jerusalem: Ben
Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East, 2016).
64

In the context of this discussion, however, this is of secondary import.
Irrespective of whether the artists were Jews or Muslims, they illustrated
manuscripts that were clearly marked as Jewish. Jews participated inIslamicate culture in Iran as much as did Zoroastrians, Armenian
Christians, and Muslims of non-Shiʿi denomination. Cultural
participation, however, said little about hierarchies and inclusion in thesocial and political spheres, in which (Shiʿi) Muslim dominance wasclearly expressed – one more reason to keep religion and culture apart.
For Muslims, adoption, adaptation, and acculturation were notlimited to intermittent borrowings; they sometimes extended deep into
the religious imaginary. In Ibn Husam Khvafi’s Khavaranname, written
around 1426 C.E., ʿAli b. Abi Talib (d. 661 C.E.) – cousin and son-in-lawof the prophet Muhammad, fourth ‘rightly-guided’ caliph of the Sunniand first legitimate imam of the Shiʿi Muslims, and one of the iconic
figures of Muslim memory and imagination – accomplishes the deedsof the ancient Iranian heroes, as celebrated in the Shahname and other
Persian heroic epics.

ʿAli slays a dragon. Ibn Husam
Khvafi: Khavaranname. Bukhara, 15th century. Tehran, Reza
ʿAbbasi Museum. Photo: Gudrun
Krämer, 2016.

65

Sarah Savant has explored the many ways Iranian/Persian heroes, events, andlocales were “written into” prophetic history.129 Echoes of such operations canbe found, for example, in 16th- to 19th-century manuscripts of the Shahname
depicting the great hero Isfandiyar thanking God after having slain a dragon,
or escaped from a deadly snowstorm. Here, entanglements run deep: while
Islamic prayer may to some extent have been patterned on Zoroastrian
precedent,130 Zoroastrians pray standing, whereas Muslims alternately standand kneel. In several Kashmiri manuscripts from the 19th century, Isfandiyarand his paladins clearly pray in an Islamic style. In the Khavaranname, bycontrast, it is not Iranian tradition that is being Islamised, with Rustam andother noble warriors made “honorary Muslims”.131 The reverse is true: ʿAli, theIslamic warrior-hero par excellence, is embedded in the Iranian tradition. The
Khavaranname is far from obscure: translations into a variety of languages
spoken by Muslims, including Turkish, testify to its popularity, as does thesignificant number of extant manuscripts from the 15th to 19th centuries.132
Even more threads were woven into ‘The Chronology of Ancient
Nations’ (al-Athar al-baqiya ʿan al-qurun al-khaliya) by the Shiʿi polymath
129 Savant, New Muslims, e.g., 59–60. The Iskandar/Alexander praying at the Kaʿba in Mecca
shown above serves as another example.
130 Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices, 2nd ed. (London:
Routledge, 2001), 32–33.
131 As Shahab Ahmed has argued with regard to descriptions of Muslim rulers as replicas of theevil king Zahhak (Ar., al-Dahhak), and their enemies mirroring good king Feridun, one of
the most popular heroes in the Shahname, who ultimately defeated and executed Zahhak(Ahmed, What is Islam?, 442–44). The links connecting ancient Iranian and Shiʿi ideas
and rituals are difficult to trace. The evidence to support speculations that the mourningodes and rituals for ʿAli’s martyred son Husayn were inspired by the mourning for the pureand innocent martyr prince Siyavush is inconclusive. Yann Richard, L’islam chi’ite (Paris:
Fayard, 1991), 132–33, is slightly more detailed than Heinz Halm, Die Schia (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988), 180; see also Mehr Ali Newid, Der schiitische
Islam in Bildern: Rituale und Heilige (Munich: Edition Avicenna, 2006), esp. 94–117.
132 Ibn Husam Khvafi or Khusfi lived 1381–1470; see Julia Rubanovich, “ḴĀVARĀN-NĀMA
i. The Epic Poem,” in Encyclopædia Iranica, online edition, 2017, available at http://www.
iranicaonline.org/articles/khavaran-nama-1 and Raya Shani, “ḴĀVARĀN-NĀMA ii.
The Illustrated Manuscripts,” in Encyclopædia Iranica, online edition, 2017, available at
http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/khavaran-nama-illustrations; also Raya Shani, “TheShahnama Legacy in a Late 15th-Century Illustrated Copy of Ibn Husam’s Khavaran-nama,
The Gulistan Palace Library, Tehran Ms. 5750,” in Shahnama Studies III: The Reception of
the Shahnama, ed. Gabrielle van den Berg and Charles Melville (Leiden: Brill, 2018). Pages
of a manuscript of the Khavaranname, illustrated in the so-called Turkman Commercial
Style in Shiraz 1476–87, are available online from the Metropolitan Museum of Art andthe Brooklyn Museum, New York. For a broader sweep, showing ʿAli as the quintessential
Islamic warrior and icon of sacred kingship, see Moin, Millennial Sovereign, 37–55.
66

Abu Rayhan al-Biruni (d. 1048). In this work, al-Biruni tells the story of
Ahriman, the Zoroastrian embodiment of evil, and Mashya/Mishi and
Mashyana/Mishiyana, the children of Gayumarth133, first man, or rather the“prototype of humanity”, according to Zoroastrian cosmogony. By the 11th
century, Zoroastrian motifs had been liberally crossed with biblical, Qurʾanic,
and prophetic ones, relating Ahriman to Iblis/Satan and Mashya and Mashyana
to Adam and Eve. The latter are included in the Qurʾan, which, however,concentrates entirely on Adamand mentions his companion
only anonymously; Eve’s Arabic
name Hawwa is post-Qurʾanic.
Islamic tradition subsequently
embellished the story.
An illustrated manuscript of the‘Chronology of Ancient Nations’from the early 14th century shows
Ahriman/Iblis/Satan appearing as
an old man in a garden (the text
speaks of the mountains) to tempt
the naked human couple withfruit, after they had gone without
food and drink for fifty years. Even
with the biblical apple exchanged
for a pomegranate, Muslims, Jews,
and Christians had no problem
identifying the scene.
Al-Biruni, Kitab al-athar al-baqiya. Illustrated ms.
dated 1307–8. Edinburgh University Library, Ms.
161 f. 48v. Copyright The University of Edinburgh.

133 Boyce, Zoroastrianism, 12–13. For the Qurʾanic story, see Cornelia Schöck, “Adam andEve,” Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2001); for the link to Zoroastrian
tradition, see Savant, New Muslims, 140–50, and 42–45, 57–59, and Albert de Jong, “First
Man, First Twins. The Origins of Humankind in Zoroastrianism,” in Religious Stories inTransformation: Conflict, Revision and Reception, ed., Albertina Houtman et al. (Leiden:
Brill, 2016). For al-Biruni’s story, the English translation (pp. 107–09) of the relevant
passage in Eduard Sachau’s German annotated edition (Leipzig 1878) is considerably
longer than what is found in the illustrated mss. held in Edinburgh and the Bibliothèquenationale de France. BNF Ms. ar. 1489 f. 32v. There are also various spellings for thenames: in the Edinburgh and Paris mss., it is Maishi and Maishiyana.
67

There is always another turn of the screw, and the results could stretch
the notion of the Islamicate to its limits: the Arabic inscription on the tombstone for the Turco-Mongol conqueror Timur (d. 1405), in Samarkand,identified a son of ʿAli b. Abi Talib as the ‘being of light’ that according
to Turco-Mongol lore, entered Alanqoa, the virgin ancestress of Chengiz
Khan and Timur. The inscription also quoted Qurʾan 19 (Surat Maryam),verses 17 and 20, which speak of Mary’s immaculate conception of Jesus.134
With Alanqoa set in parallel to Maryam/Mary, and with a son of ʿAli named
as their ancestor, the Mongols were written into Islamic salvational history
without sacrificing their claims to the most illustrious Mongol genealogy.
The entanglements and transpositions presented here did not alter
the communal affiliation of the respective artists, scholars, and theiraudiences. However, they create challenges in demarcation with regard
to cultural affinity, which for non-Muslims was not bound up with
their religious affiliation, and even for Muslims was less clear-cut thanis often presumed. Religion and culture, belonging and identity did notnecessarily coincide in this period, and they do not always do so today.

4

Continuities, Ruptures, and New Vistas

4.1 Text and Context

In line with the perspective of ‘entangled history’, the historical-critical method
applied here to the formation of Islam as a religion and community showed
Islam to be the result of continuous exchange and friction. This approachstands in marked contrast to the convictions of most Muslims past andpresent. They see Islam as grounded in revelation, with an archetype of ‘thebook’ preserved in Heaven and ‘sent down’ to Muhammad in its definite formin Arabic.135 From the believer’s perspective, the Qurʾan is the word of God,
134 Moin, Millennial Sovereign, 37.
135 See Jane Dammen McAuliffe, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Qurʾān (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006). I cannot go into the dispute, culminating in the 9th
and 10th centuries C.E., over the createdness of the Qurʾan, which declared God’s word
to either be eternal and uncreated, or created by God. At the time, the dispute had apolitical dimension in addition to the theological one; see Gerhard Böwering, “God andhis Attributes,” in Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2002). For the doctrineof iʿjaz, the inimitable linguistic beauty of the Qurʾan constituting the miracle his scepticalcontemporaries demanded from Muhammad to prove his prophethood, see Matthias
Radscheit, Die koranische Herausforderung (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 1996) and Richard C.
Martin, “Inimitability,” in Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2002).
68not the product of human creativity. It is God who is speaking in the Qurʾan,
not Muhammad in dialogue with the community of believers. Switching toa different register, Islam is the result of a top-down rather than a bottom-up
process. It is not a social construct. When Muslims write of the Qurʾan being‘compiled’, they are not describing a creative process of editing oral and writtenmaterials, but of ‘collecting’ the revelations received by Muhammad over thecourse of two decades, providing Muslims with a book equal to what the Jews
and Christians already had. Significantly, Jews and Christians are referred to in
the Qurʾan as the ‘People of the Book’ (ahl al-kitab).
According to Islamic doctrine, the Qurʾanic revelation occurred ina specific time and place, and thus necessarily a sociocultural context; its
message, however, is not tied to this context. It is of universal and eternal
validity. Belief in revelation therefore did not spare Muslims the challenge of
how to resolve the tension between the assumed unchanging character of the‘message’ on the one hand and its ever-changing ‘realisations’ on the other.

World time and local time. Great Mosqueof Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, Central
China. Photo: Gudrun Krämer, 2015.

If God was addressing a specific audience, this audience had to be
linguistically and mentally capable of understanding what he said (thisview is also shared by those studying Islam from a believer’s perspective).
To be understood, revelation therefore had to be phrased, or evenframed, in the language of the audience, which in this case consisted of
the townsfolk, oasis farmers, and nomadic herders on the north-western69

Arabian coastal strip in the 7th century C.E., that is to say late Antiquity.
Revelation was not only conveyed through the Arabic language, it wasalso inevitably tied to this sociocultural setting and its prevalent culturalcode, or idiom (on this point, ‘critical’ Islamic studies part from thebeliever’s perspective). If Islam, however, was to continue to be relevant
to all people over space and time, then as with other religions and moralcum-ethical traditions and philosophies, its adherents had to either
distance themselves from the original sociocultural milieu (‘Arab Islam’),or try to reshape their own environment so as to fit their conception of
the original setting.136 This was not merely a theoretical challenge. It was
debated through the centuries, creating one of the great dividing lines
within the Muslim community. If there were those who looked back towhat they imagined the early community to have been, others understood
Islam from their own sociocultural and political contexts and adapted it
to these where necessary.
In the modern period, identity and identity politics could and can be tied
to both the defence of ‘local’ expressions of religion and culture and the notionof an original, unchanging Islam solely inspired by revelation. Both could andcan be used to draw boundaries around the group and enforce conformity
within it. Resistance against any kind of adjustment, which was well known
in the pre-colonial era, intensified in colonial and post-colonial settings.
Today it is represented by Salafists, who consider any attempt to adjust Islamic
theology and law to post-prophetic conditions to be an illegitimate innovation(bidʿa) if not apostasy and disbelief. By the same token, they call for a faithfulemulation of the prophet Muhammad and the first generations of Muslims(the salaf salih, the ‘pious predecessors’) down to the minute details of daily
conduct.137 The conduct of the salaf largely reflected the norms and customsof the Arabian Peninsula and adjacent territories in late Antiquity. Critics ofemulation did not always present a consciously articulated and theoreticallyunderpinned alternative, distinguishing religion from culture, custom, or asecular sphere. Most simply lived as Muslims and considered what they did
and thought to be Islam. But there were also those who sought to reinvigorate
Islam, or rather the Muslim community, through a reading of the message that136 Hodgson, Venture of Islam, 1:34; for a different context, see Gardner, Confucianism, 48.
137 See Bernard Haykel, “On the Nature of Salafi Thought and Action,” in Global Salafism: Islam’s
New Religious Movement, ed. Roel Meier (London: Hurst, 2009) and Daniel Lav, Radical
Islam and the Revival of Medieval Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
70

reflected contemporaneous concerns, rather than seeking to resuscitate theoriginal Arab community in another location. Under modern conditions, thiseffort could not avoid affecting conceptions of ‘identity.’
The presence and global influence of Salafi theologians and activists, who,
citing the Qurʾan and the Sunna of the prophet Muhammad, seek to unify
Muslims on the basis of their understanding of original (Arab) Islam, have been
assisted by funding from powerful donors in the Arab Gulf. By the same token,
the Salafi agenda has also provoked resistance from those who defend theirown understanding of Islam from external influence, Muslim as well as nonMuslim, by referring to local custom, culture, and tradition. Examples include
Islamic movements in northern Nigeria, Tunisia, Sudan, and Indonesia, which
do not pursue liberal ideals, but invoke their own role models, including anticolonial jihad movements of the 18th and 19th centuries. These movements
reject the influence of Arab Gulf States as culturally alienating and politicallypatronising, if not neo-colonial. The defenders of local religious and cultural
traditions also include some of those who propagate a vision of a liberal,‘enlightened’ Islam.

Female members of the revivalist piety movement Tabligh-i Jamaat in India. Source: Agnès De
Féo, “Behind the Veil, In the Ranks of the Tablighi Jamaat,” August 18, 2017. https://talesoftheveils.
wordpress.com/2017/08/18/3994/

71

To return once more to the invention-of-religion thesis: it is true that fromthe late 19th century onwards, Islam was rethought in the encounter with
Western notions of religion, culture, and civilisation, which challenged
Islam’s status as a religion and civilisation capable of promoting reason,
science, and progress.138 Some responded by calling for a return to thefoundations of Islam as a religion and civilisation, or ‘way of life.’ Others
advocated a clear break not just from the Islamic tradition as a humanmade edifice erected on the foundations of true Islam, but from Islam as areligion and civilisation. A number of Sunni reformers did, in fact, adjust
to a Protestant understanding of ‘real’ and ‘true religion’, one centred in‘inner’ faith, without, however, discarding ‘outward’ ritual altogether.139
They insisted on communal worship, epitomised by the Five Pillars, as an
indispensable marker of Muslim identity. However, they denounced much ofwhat had hitherto been Islam to millions of Muslims, including their social
elites, as being articulations of popular religion and superstition, which had
rendered Muslims passive and impotent and had debased Islam in the eyesof the world. Sufism, unless expressed ‘soberly’ as refined spirituality, served
as a primary target of reformist zeal. Reform in the shadow of modernity did
entail new ways of looking at the foundational texts and Islamic tradition atlarge, but it did not ‘invent’ Islam on the Protestant model.
In this context, it would be worth investigating the attempts of Muslim
scholars in 17th- and 18th-century China to portray Muhammad as a sage
from the West analogous to the Confucian and Daoist masters of the East,
all of whom could claim authority and respect within their own sphere, andto depict Islam as a moral tradition analogous to Confucianism (the “Daoof Muhammad”).140 These efforts were noteworthy because, in a conscious
138 For relevant case studies, see Birgit Schäbler, Moderne Muslime: Ernest Renan und dieGeschichte der ersten Islamdebatte 1883 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2016) and
Kateman, Muḥammad ʿAbduh and his Interlocutors. For concrete examples, see Muhammad
ʿAbduh, “al-Din al-islami, aw: al-islam,” in al-Aʿmal al-Kamila 3:465–501 and adopting asecular perspective, Rafiq al-ʿAzm, as analysed in Zemmin, “Validating Secularity.”
139 See Gudrun Krämer, “Renewal and Reform in Sunni Islam,” in The Protestant
Reformation in a Context of Global History: Religious Reforms and World Civilizations, ed.
Heinz Schilling and Silvana Seidel Menchi (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2017) and withdifferent emphases Schulze, “Islam und Judentum,” and above.
140 See Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late
Imperial China (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); James D. Frankel,
Rectifying God’s Name: Liu Zhi’s Confucian Translation of Monotheism and Islamic Law(Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011).
72effort to be accepted as an integral part of Chinese civilisation and society,they presented Islam in terms of Chinese conceptions of ethics, morality,
and cultured behaviour. In the Chinese context, this was not an exceptional
occurrence: the first Buddhists who arrived in China portrayed the Buddha
as a Confucian sage or Daoist deity. Even after Buddhism had become
more clearly understood in China, the analogy of Buddha and sage wasstill occasionally invoked.141 At the same time, the Muslim rapprochement
to prevalent Chinese patterns was not altogether different from portraying
Islam as part and parcel of modern civilisation and society. In any event, it
represented a significant step towards adapting religion to (the dominant)culture. The Chinese case is revealing in that the Muslim scholars ultimately
failed to convince the majority of Chinese-speaking (Hui) Muslims and Han
Chinese, who as a rule, showed little interest in their religious teachings.
While hurting themselves in the face of the Han Chinese bureaucracy, theyalso appear to have overtaxed the imagination of Chinese Muslims who
conceived of Islam as more than a moral philosophy.142
4.2 The Stable and the Flexible

In his influential study, What is Islam?, W. Montgomery Watt illustrated
the tension between the idea of Islam as a unified and unifying whole, andthe flexibility built into its fabric. Watt started off by saying:
The word translated ‘religion’ is dīn, which in Arabic commonly refers toa whole way of life… which permeates the whole fabric of society in a wayof which men are conscious. It is – all in one – theological dogma, formsof worship, political theory, and a detailed code of conduct, including evenmatters which the European would classify as hygiene or etiquette.143

At this point Watt gives us the widest possible stretching of din/Islam, as
it was invoked in the past and even more so in modern Islamic discourse.
141 The interaction of the great traditions, which beyond the three teachings (sanjiao) would
have to include popular religion/cults and Christianity, is much too complex to be dealt
with here, particularly by a non-specialist; for the Buddhist experience, I have relied on
Xinzhong Yao, Introduction to Confucianism, 233–37.
142 For a nuanced assessment of the situation under the Qing dynasty, see, however, Tristan
S. Brown, “A Mountain of Saints and Ages: Muslims in the Landscape of Popular Religion
in Late Imperial China,” T’oung Pao 105 (2019). I am again grateful to Elliot Lee forhaving brought this paper to my attention.
143 Montgomery Watt, What is Islam?, 2nd ed. (London: 1979), 3.
73

Regarding political theory, he is simply wrong, as would be shown in any
serious study of the topic not written by a contemporary Islamist. Watthimself modified his statement when he went on to say:
In general it will be found that the Islamic vision permeates and informs
the whole life of society and individuals in the Islamic world. This does notmean that the vision or religious belief absolutely determines the wholeof life, for there are various aspects which have a relative autonomy, but it
exercises a certain control or pressure on the whole. Such a conception of thefunction of religion is closer to the Muslim conception of dīn than to theusual occidental conception.144 [emphases mine]

The “relative autonomy” within the boundaries of the “Islamic vision”
points to an established principle of Islamic theology and law, which
distinguishes between immutable and moving elements, or, as it iscommonly put, the stable and the flexible (al-thabit wa-l-mutaghayyir).145
Combined with the legal concept of indifferent issues and neutral spaces,
this distinction has the potential to create significant room for manoeuvre.
By declaring certain acts or institutions to fall within what they definedas the morally “indifferent” domain (al-mubah), or neutral space, Muslim
scholars did not remove or separate them from the purview of Islam.146
Rather, they carved out spaces that could be regulated by human-maderules, provided that those rules did not openly violate Islamic norms
and values (which, of course, could be a matter of contention). These
rules could then be designed to cater to the specific requirements of thesituation. The concept of the morally indifferent aspects or neutral space,regulated by their own particular rules, is deeply relevant to conceptionsof both culture and secularity. It is also exceedingly complex, intersectingwith the considerations of public interest and individual benefits (maslaha,masalih), which are integral to Islamic legal reasoning, though they did
not carry as much weight in the pre-modern period as they do today. It
also touches on the sacred-profane binary dear to Western analysts but
notoriously difficult to apply to Islam. The least problematic way to capturethe ‘profane’ within a normative Islamic framework may be to characterise
144 Watt, What is Islam?, 4.
145 The distinction between the stable and the flexible is generally traced back to Taqi al-Din
Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), one of the most influential authorities for modern Islamists. For
modern Muslim debates, see Krämer, Gottes Staat als Republik, esp. 54–65.
146 They did, however, step on a slippery slope, for linguistically, mubah is closely related toibaha, which also signifies licentiousness, or libertinage.
74

it ex negativo as certain times, acts, states, objects, and places that are
not subject to specific taboos regulated by Sharia.147 In this regard, the‘profane’ overlaps with both al-dunya as the ‘ordinary’, ‘lower world’ andthe neutral space defined as mubah, but it is not identical to either. Islam,as the religious scholars understood it, remained the ultimate arbiter ofthe rules of the game. Its guardians decided on the size and place of theholes in the fabric. But this is only part of the picture. Even in the premodern era, Muslims took it upon themselves to define the scope of theirroom to manoeuvre. We would expect artists, Sufis, and freethinkers to
be at the forefront of those trying to enlarge their breathing space. In a
stimulating study of Islam and science, Ahmad Dallal has argued that in
the 11th century C.E., Muslim scientists and intellectuals developed anunderstanding of science as a neutral space: freed from the epistemologicalhegemony of religion, science was able to claim validity for its findings on
the basis of empirical observation and secular reason, independently of
religious reason and revelation.148 Accordingly, scientists observed nature
not in order to unravel the marvels of divine creation, confirm the truth
enshrined in the Qurʾan, and prove the existence of God, but instead
analysed natural phenomena for their own sake. This was not a subversive
act, and indeed many of the scientists involved were religious scholars. As
emphasised by Dallal, this was not a matter of establishing a new hierarchy,
with religion being subordinated to science. But the elements of autonomy
and dissociation must not be underrated, either.

5 Concluding Remarks

There are many Muslims today who seek to liberate Islam from theaccumulated weight of the legal tradition, with its detailed rules andregulations, to reconstruct Islam as an ethical and moral message. They
do not look to reproduce the sociocultural structures and values of late
147 Azfar Moin is not the only one to have signalled that in Islamicate contexts, the normative
Sharia approach is by no means the only one, and that very different notions of the sacred
may hold sway, not only among the masses but also among the social, cultural, andpolitical elites.
148 Ahmad Dallal, Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2010), 147–48.

75

antiquity Arabia, but instead respond to modern ideals of justice, freedom,human rights, and human creativity.149 There are those, especially in Europe
and North America, who cast Islam as a fount of ‘spirituality’ for a societythat cannot live on constitutional patriotism alone. Some self-identify as‘cultural Muslims’. Very few openly embrace secular positions (the term
‘secularity’ is virtually untranslatable in the majority of languages spoken by
Muslims outside the West). With their emphasis on the ethical and moral
character of Islamic teachings, Muslim reformers face challenges similar to
those of oriental Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Buddhists, who
equally strove to make their respective traditions ‘modern’.150 The translationof Sharia into a set of ethical and moral principles may be easy to convey
to those Muslims who focus on piety and religious experience rather than
the strict observance of the law. These Muslims do not necessarily selfidentify as Sufis. By contrast, it may prove harder to convince the majority of
those Muslims who, while possibly disregarding many of the injunctions of
Sharia in their own behaviour, cannot envisage parting entirely with its legal
provisions. In this instance, work is required to satisfy their demand for textual
proof. The requisite tools are nonetheless available, ranging from Qurʾanichermeneutics to sophisticated methods of legal interpretation (maslaha, the‘finality of Sharia’, ‘pragmatic eclecticism’) which, at least today, are designed
to widen the scope of flexibility and, by the same token, of Muslim agency.151
They favour what they identify as the overarching values of the message, andthe ‘spirit of the law’, over its letter. In doing so, they draw on the relevant
scholarly traditions rather than discarding them, while recalibrating them insubtle and sometimes not so subtle ways. Not only have the relevant methods
been honed in small reformist circles, but they have also been applied by thehighest judicial authorities in Muslim majority societies.
The contextualisation of Qurʾanic references and prophetic hadiths,
which treats them as valid but contingent, opens up the possibility of
149 Out of a huge body of literature, see Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naʿim, Toward an Islamic
Reformation: Civil Liberties, Human Rights, and International Law (Syracuse NY: Syracuse
University Press, 1990).
150 The literature is growing. In addition to the studies of McMahan on modern Buddhism andPennington on modern Hinduism, see e.g., Monica M. Ringer, Pious Citizens: Reforming
Zoroastrianism in India and Iran (Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011).
151 Again, I cannot go into this matter here. For maslaha, see Opwis, Maṣlaḥa and the Purposeof Law; for pragmatic eclecticism, see Ahmed Fekry Ibrahim, Pragmatism in Islamic Law:
A Social and Intellectual History (Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015).

76

distinguishing even more sharply between belief, faith, or ‘spirituality’,on the one hand, and law, custom, and culture on the other. If thisprocess sounds like a translation of Islam into the type of privatised,compartmentalised, secularised religion its critics have identified asmodern, Western, and essentially Christian, this is indeed a possibility.
But it is not a given. For most Muslims, the mandatory acts of worshipare not to be abandoned: Islam will not be cut down to inner faith andrendered invisible. Sharia will not be abolished in its entirety but instead
refashioned as a moral and ethical frame that accords with the universal
values of justice, peace, and compassion. In the process, the external walls
sealing off the Muslim community will be lowered, commonalities withother religious, moral, and philosophical traditions enhanced, and theclaim to religious superiority muted. If developed consistently, this process
could ultimately overcome the equation of Islam, Sharia, and identity,
which has been reinforced under the combined pressure of colonisationand globalisation. It could normatively support internal plurality andcultural adjustment, which in many places have always been the reality,
and accommodate an understanding of secularity that allows all to breathe,devout Muslims, non-Muslims, and agnostics alike.

Tehran shop window.
Photo: Gudrun Krämer, 2016.

77

To come back to the conceptual challenges addressed by the Centre
for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences “Multiple
Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”, this paper confirms
several of the assumptions shared by many, albeit not all, members of thegroup: for pre-modern configurations of Islam (in its broadest sense), it does
make sense to distinguish between processes of differentiation on the one
hand and conceptual distinctions on the other. Distinctions are not only
obvious to the modern observer; they were made by pre-modern Muslims
and non-Muslims living in Islamicate contexts and expressed in textual
as well as in non-textual form. Pre-modern Muslims did have a conceptof religion, which was not limited to din in all its semantic variety. By thesame token, they distinguished between din/religion and dunya/world.
Concerning governance, they differentiated between din, mulk, and dawla,
with the latter two referring to princely rule, or dynasties,152 rather than thestate in the modern sense. The legal and moral injunctions of Islam, andSharia more particularly, were frequently ignored or openly flaunted, andnot just by the powerful. Muslim scholars of theology and law elaborated
concepts of ‘neutral space’ of indifferent moral and religious status, which
could be claimed by princes, merchants, artists, scientists, as much as by‘ordinary people’. It would be a complete misunderstanding of pre-modern
Muslims and their lifeworld to imagine that religion covered and regulated
every aspect of it. At the same time, challenges to religion in general, and to
Islam in particular, from within the Muslim community (I am not speaking
about interreligious polemics here) were rarely openly voiced.153
When we ask about religion’s others in an Islamic context, we are for themost part talking about Islam’s others. The others existed, but they are noteasy to identify: they could be understood as culture, custom, or neutral space,or, if religion is narrowed down to Islam, shared space, or indeed the secular.
Even when secular values, customs, and traditions were openly invoked, they
were not as a rule set up as rivals or opposites to religion, or to Islam more
specifically. Adab, morality, good governance (‘justice’), and the empiricalsciences are cases in point. In addition, non-religious actors and domains
tended to be even less firmly institutionalised than Islamic ones: there existed
no independent secular academies and no secular scientific institutions able to152 As mentioned above, Ismaʿili notions differed from the Sunni concepts described here.
153 See Sarah Stroumsa, Freethinkers in Medieval Islam: Ibn al-Rāwandī, Abū Bakr al-Rāzī,
and Their Impact on Islamic Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1999).
78

survive the changing moods of princes. The adjudication of conflict in courts
set up by the rulers, or even headed by them (notably the so-called mazalim
courts), formed a major exception. While it might be worthwhile searching forthe ‘reference problems’ addressed in specific contexts, and I would suspectthat balancing religious diversity and enabling the autonomous developmentof functional domains of society would have some role to play, I see little use inconstructing ideal types for the pre-modern period.
Secularity existed at certain times, rather than at specific junctures, andwithin specific fields. It did not, however, evolve into an overarching ‘guiding
idea’ anchored in specific groups of society, with resilient autonomous
institutions to rely upon. Still, such secularity as existed was rich enough to
be taken up and refashioned in the modern period, when it was propagated
for the sake of individual rights and liberties, balancing religious diversity,
societal and national integration and development, securing the autonomous
development of functional domains of society, or a special blend of all these.
Its advocates were thus able to refer to local traditions, or even Islam, rather
than acquiring a secularity package from the West.154

154 See Monika Wohlrab-Sahr and Marian Burchardt, “Revisiting the Secular: Multiple
Secularities and Pathways to Modernity,” Working Paper Series of the HCAS “Multiple
Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” 2 (Leipzig University, 2017), 20–24;
Kleine and Wohlrab-Sahr, “Research Programme,” 15.
79

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