In an illuminating exchange, Charles Hirschkind and Alireza Doostdar debate the compulsory quality of modern scientific reasoning. Doostdar, in The Iranian Metaphysicals, emphasizes the agency of Iran’s “metaphysical” practitioners. Modern science, on this view, has opened the doors of knowledge production to social classes outside the old scholarly elite. As new “possibilities for reasoning become available,” Doostdar shows, a motley cast of healers, Spiritualists, and occultists appropriate them for their own, frequently heterodox, ends. Hirschkind, however, worries that this analysis is too optimistic: it presumes that the modern subject apprehends science through a free market of ideas. In fact, certain manners of thought are so basic to our everyday functioning that to say we choose them is to overstate our self-awareness, let alone our free will. “Scientific rationalism is not simply an epistemological possibility,” Hirschkind writes, “but an ontological condition.”
Latest posts
A liturgy of the soul
by
Omnia El Shakry
Reading and responding to Knot of the Soul deeply signifies a longstanding dialogue with my friend and interlocutor Stefania Pandolfo. For a decade now, we have discussed our shared interest in questions centered around ʿilm al-nafs—the “science of the soul.” What does it mean to talk about a “science of the soul,” both in its historical and ethnographic instantiations? Can the topographies of the nafs (soul, spirit, psyche) be considered and compared across diverse discursive traditions and intellectual formations? If my work unearths a genealogical connection between the Islamic concept of al-la-shuʿur (an unknown-known) and the Freudian notion of the unconscious, Pandolfo’s work explores a tradition of Islamic therapeutic practice that is convivial with the unconscious. If the nafs is, within this tradition, a space where the Divine can be manifested, then it is also a space for the potential transformation of the soul. What is this space of transformation within Islamic practice and does it find echoes in the psychoanalytic space of the clinic? Crucially, such questions are not merely academic but concern how we engage psychoanalysis in our own lives.
Time, gender-bending, and the medieval church
On continuity and rupture: A reply to Elshakry and Quadri
by
Daniel A. Stolz
By pulling at different threads of the book’s argument, Elshakry and Quadri expose a basic tension between the book’s emphasis on the emergence of new Islamic practices and debates in the early twentieth century, and the book’s insistence on tracing this radical moment to the oft-invisible work of people who did not see themselves as radicals at all. Rather than try to resolve this tension, I will take Elshakry’s and Quadri’s remarks as inspiration to clarify a few of its implications. . . . Quadri’s eloquent commentary underscores the depth of the fissure between the knowledge long cultivated by Muslim scholars (ulama), on the one hand, and the new sciences that were increasingly promoted by the late Ottoman state, on the other. . . . In Elshakry’s thoughtful discussion, however, a contrasting theme comes to the fore. Elshakry acknowledges the many ways in which Egyptian ulama practiced the celestial sciences with premises, purposes, and techniques that differed from their French counterparts. Her focus, nevertheless, draws our attention to facts that suggest commonality and continuity.
Encountering another science
by
Junaid Quadri
The Lighthouse and the Observatory’s learned account of nineteenth-century Egyptian astronomy’s imbrications with religion, empire, and the social realities and textual traditions they reside in draws so thoroughly on such a wide range of literatures that any simple characterization of it is bound to be an unjust one. But one way to read the book is by reference to its broad historical arc, its tracing of the complex record of departures and continuities that bring us to the unparalleled dominance of Rida’s conception. Daniel Stolz starts not with Ibn Hanbal, but rather the Egyptian-Ottoman-Islamic tradition of scholarly astronomy that both laid the groundwork for this modern conception and acted as its foil. Intellectual historians have often observed the changing signification of ‘ilm in this period—from a broad encompassing term for knowledge of many sorts to one which was identified primarily with science. . . But the valence of ‘amal also changed—intimately linked to science, but also to national, imperial, and civilizational projects of belonging and conquest. ‘Ilm-as-science, that is, was about mastery of the world, not mastery of the self.