Heresy or Hermeneutics
Authors: Hirschkind Charles 
Published: December 2020

Islam/IslamismThe debate I shall discuss here arose following Cairo University'sdecision to refuse tenure to a professor of Arabic language and literature,Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, in light of an unfavorable report by the tenurecommittee entrusted to review his scholarly work. Supporters of Abu Zaydquickly brought the case to national attention via the Egyptian press, therebyprecipitating a storm of often shrill writing from all sides of the politicalspectrum, in both the journalistic and academic media. Subsequently,as an Islamist lawyer tried to have Abu Zayd forcibly divorced from hiswife on the grounds that his writings revealed him to be an apostate, theforeign media also picked up the story and transformed the case into aninternational event.In what follows, I will focus on one comer of this debate concerningcontrastive notions of reason and history, issues which, I wish to argue, areimplicated deeply in the forms of political contestation and mobilizationoccurring in Islamic countries today. Such topics seldom appear in discussionsthat take Islamic movements or Islamic revival as their object, anomission perhaps attributable to the conceptual frames informing these discussions.As we may note, the idea of a social movement presupposes aself-constituting subject, independent from both state and tradition: a uni-linear progressive teleology; and a pragmatics of proximate goals, namely,the spatiotemporal plane of universal reason and progressive history, thetemtory of modem humanity. Such an actor must fulfill the Kantiandemand that reason be exercised autonomously and embodied in a sovereignsubject. In contrast, one may argue that the protagonist of a traditionof inquiry founded on a divine text is necessarily a collective subject, onethat seeks to preserve and enhance its own exemplary past. As such, Islamnever satisfies these modem demands and thus must always remain somewhatoutside the movement of history as a lesser form of reasoning. Indeed,the assumption of a fundamental opposition between reason and religion,an assumption that is central to the historical development of both modemconcepts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has meant thatinvestigations into the rationalities of religious traditions have rarely beenviewed as essential to the description or explanation of those religions.’Consequently, to pose a question in regard to Islam generally means thatone must either be asking about politics (the not-really-Islam of“Islamism,” or “political Islam”) or about belief, symbols, ritual, and so on,but not about styles of reasoning.We find, for example, that within political economy discussions ofoppositional movements in the Middle East, Islam is viewed generally aslittle more than the culturally preferred idiom through which opposition,be it class or otherwise, may be expressed.* Unquestionably, the best ofthese studies have told us much about the kinds of material conditions andthe specific intersections of capital and power that have enabled, orundermined, arguments, movements, forms of practice, including, amongothers, Islamic ones.’ Founded upon the same set of Enlightenmentassumptions mentioned above, these writings have provided conflictingaccounts of the kinds of modem forces transforming the contemporarypolitical structures of the Middle East but are ill-equipped when it comesto analyzing those dimensions of social and political life rooted in nonwesterntraditions ...