Visiting Firoz Shah Kotla has much to tell us about Islamic epistemologies, and much to tell us about how to think about Islamic epistemologies. Jinnealogy, like other books in this forum, join a field centered since the late 1980s around Talal Asad’s conceptualization of Islam as a “discursive tradition.” Asad’s intervention was groundbreaking: It displaced Ernest Gellner’s engagement with Islam as “blueprint of a social order,” and rejected typologies of popular and scripturalist Islam which long divided ethnographers from textualists. Above all, it prompted anthropologists to think not merely about what “Muslims say Islam is,” but to ask when and where they say it—and do it. Following Asad, anthropologists have asked: In what historical and institutional positions do Muslims endeavor to embody Islam? Through what institutions and media, and with what political, social, and pious effects, does such embodiment take place? How do Muslims look to the tradition and to the future to enact Islam as “apt practice”? Like others in this forum, Taneja accepts key insights of Asad’s approach, but also points toward dissatisfaction with its heretofore accepted limits. In exploring new ethnographic terrain, it aims to break new theoretical ground.
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On the advantage and disadvantage of history for life
On epistemic possibility: A reply to Hirschkind and Tambar
by
Alireza Doostdar
In their thoughtful reflections on The Iranian Metaphysicals, Charles Hirschkind and Kabir Tambar focus on my analysis of how different traditions of inquiry come together to create new possibilities for metaphysical thought and practice. The book shows, for example, that in the mid-twentieth century, Shiʿi scholars joined classical theology with the scientific empiricism of European psychical research to argue for the permanence of the soul beyond death. Some decades later, internet-savvy occult enthusiasts blended Islamic mystical philosophy with various strands of the New Age in their attempts to grasp the marvelous powers of God’s special friends. As experiments on the edges of Islamic orthodoxy, these and other examples enable a subtler appreciation for how a tradition like Islam sustains itself over time. Traditions persist to the extent they are able to maintain and enhance their time-honored modes of reasoning with their associated affective structures and ethical orientations. But they also endure by changing, whether through incorporating new kinds of reasoning, resignifying or excluding others, or undergoing affective and ethical shifts.
The future of enlightenment: Comparison, tradition, temporality
by
Kabir Tambar
In The Iranian Metaphysicals, Alireza Doostdar describes his work as contributing to “comparative anthropologies of epistemology”—“how people know things and how the conditions of their knowing undergo shifts over time.” The framework has particular purchase in a study that centers largely on things people cannot see—the occult and the metaphysical—and for which they must rely on capacities of discernment that, for the most part, they admit to lacking. In such encounters with what cannot be comprehensively known, the very task of knowing acquires a sense of anxiety, opening onto sentiments of discomfort and unease. To refer to this analysis as a comparative enterprise is to emphasize that knowledge—its conditions of possibility and its modes of production—is always historically specific. This basic premise is especially insightful in a study that grapples with an enduring scientific modernism that, in denouncing superstition and proclaiming rational religion, aspires to universality. But, apart from the emphasis on the contextually particular that it indicates, how adequate is the concept of comparison as a description of Doostdar’s account? What exactly is being compared in Doostdar’s analysis, and what are the analytical stakes of that comparison?