Islam, critique, and the canon: an introduction

Contemporary Islam (2024) 18:1–5 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-024-00555-y Islam, critique, and the canon: an introduction Sertaç Sehlikoglu1 · Mashuq Kurt2 Accepted: 15 January 2024 / Published online: 6 February 2024 © Crown 2024 Keywords Islam · Critique · Canon · Islamic Studies · Political Islam This special issue is one of the most exciting products of 8-year-long conversations with critical-minded friends and colleagues. The conversations have begun with the reading group that Dr. Sehlikoglu has hosted at Pembroke College, the University of Cambridge. In ‘Is Critique Islamic?’ reading group (2017–2020), we visited the classical Muslim scholars and polymaths from theology, philosophy and sciences to understand how concepts related to power, authority, critique and resistance were understood by some of the most acclaimed scholars ranging from Al-Ghazali to Ibn Khaldun, Al-Kindi, Maimonides and Ibn Taymiyya. Professor Humeira Iqtidar’s intellectual contributions to those meetings have been quite influential in conceptualizing the formation of the Islamic canon across time and space. These conversations played a crucial role in the 2-day conference Sehlikoglu co-convened with Mahvish Ahmad and Ayse Su Polat, Imaginative Landscapes of Islamist Politics: Aspirations, Dreams, and Critique, at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH) in 2018. The event hosted papers by Humeira Iqtidar, Khaled Fahmy, Katherine Ewing, Layli Uddin, Samuli Schielke, Irfan Ahmad, Charis Boutieri, Iza Hussin, James Caron, Nandu Menon, Sabiha Allouche and Mashuq Kurt. As Polat later stated in her reflections on the conference, ‘Central to the debates around decolonisation, dreams, and aspirations, were conceptual and methodological questions of power, sovereignty, and critique ‘ (Polat, 2018). Although the realms of imagination have been where the critical movements within Islam have sought refuge, it became essential for the participants of this conference to allow separate conversations in order to address the contours of critique in Islam and Islamic formations. Islamic ideas have, for a long time, been de-historicized, decontextualized and approached as if developed in isolation from broader intellectual and political * Sertaç Sehlikoglu Mashuq Kurt 1 University College London, London, England 2 Royal Holloway, Egham, England 13 Vol.:(0123456789) 2 Contemporary Islam (2024) 18:1–5 debates or as if only developed in a reactive relationship with other traditions of thought, including colonialism—a problem that has been pointed out repeatedly. Indeed, a growing scholarship is resisting the politically problematic accounts that centralize canonical Islam in their analysis as the primary reference and thus marginalize any critical Islamic voices as somewhat less Islamic (Al-Rasheed, 2015). One of the repeating errors contributing to this failure is where we locate the critique in Islam. The Durkheimian sacred-profane binary continues to resurface in studies of Muslims in the form of associated dualisms such as Islamic-secular, traditional-modern and pious-mundane. The ontological turn in anthropology provides a set of conceptual references to the scholars studying Muslim contexts and develops theories that are less ethnographic and more self-referential, leading to a reproduction of dualist thinking and a failure of comprehension. Is there a spectrum for Islamic-ness in evaluations and analysis of Islamic movements? Is the Wahhabi perspective more Islamic than a Sufi one, for example? We believe that such nuances join the intellectual care against dividing Muslims as pious vs non-pious, as if that was a zerosum game, as once put by Lara Deeb (2015). In different periods of time, Muslims argued for the possibility of pious intoxication as a spiritual transcendence (Gezer, 2021; Karateke, 2005; Kim, 2021), an idea that is foreign to orthodox Islam. Whether such diverse Islamic practices are to be categorically studied as marginal or alternative forms of Islam is the epistemological issue we are taking. Any claims on the canon and knitting a scholarship that inadvertently contributes to that zero-sum game would remain problematic. The process of forming and preserving an Islamic canon is then one of the questions we have to deal with as an ongoing process, within and beyond the scope of this issue. That is why we ask: Where do we locate the critique in Islam and in the studies of Islamic societies? Where are the loci of critique and source of sovereignty in various Islamist movements? Can the body be a locus of critique? How can we trace and capture the imaginative and ethical self as a realm of critique? How do we excavate, in the present or in the archives, the colonial imaginaries of brutalized subjects? How exactly do contemporary critical movements interact with ongoing debates about the canon within the Islamic tradition? Which elements are common, and which are at variance with other movements? As scholars working on Islam and different Muslim groups, we do not think these are questions that can be addressed in one single special issue. Instead, we hope that this issue will serve as a platform to open up more space for critique within Islam and Islamic thought. The papers in this collection allow an insight into some of these debates with a particular focus on Islamist ideas that carried tension in the desire to critique the canon while also claiming legitimacy through a return to some elements of it. Part of this issue deals with the ways in which the strongest anti-colonial critique of contemporary Islamist ideologies had been developed as an attempt to establish a new and populist canon to colonial encounter and thus inevitably reiterate the very same dualisms in their discourses. Often, populist angles end up being the most divisive ones, as we have seen with Maududi and Wahhabism (Iqtidar, 2020; Iqtidar & Scharbrodt, 2022). On the other hand, the less populist Islamic critique of 13 Contemporary Islam (2024) 18:1–5 3 colonialism would be much more nuanced and thus less black and white. In a time where an immediate threat is known so intimately, the non-populist voices would be forced to the margins and not become part of the canon of the time. The collection of articles joins this stream of thought to complicate some of the assumptions about the Islamic canon and engage with the question of critique within Islam and contemporary Islamic thought. It pushes the boundaries of existing scholarship through a reconsideration of what constitutes ‘the Islamic,’ with a particular focus on non-western lineages of critique and affective rather than rationalist registers of Islamic politics. The authors in this collection link the debates around critique within Islam and Islamic groups by simultaneously questioning the political and social processes that have formed a canon and a canonical Islam, which also happene (...truncated)