I am honored and humbled by the great care and critical attention with which Naveeda Khan and Emilio Spadola have read my book Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi. In their responses, both Khan and Spadola craft exquisite images that advance the conceptual work of the book. Or, to use Spadola’s preferred term, they think figurally: the images are neither symbol nor meaning, but thought itself, thought that “inhabits and motivates discourse but cannot be reduced to it.” {...} The bringing together of thought and affect has much to teach, I believe, not only to scholars of Islam, but to the wider world of humanities and social sciences. How do we think not just about affect but with and through affect? How might mourning and joy and hairat contribute to forms of thinking about the world and our political and ethical responses to it? Khan sees an appropriateness, for instance, in which the tone of mourning allows us to fully engage with the bureaucratic destruction that has marred the Islamic landscapes of Delhi. Spadola similarly pushes us to think with the figural, to what inhabits and moves discourse but cannot be reduced to it.
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Islam in shadows
by
Naveeda Khan
Anand Vivek Taneja’s Jinnealogy is an elegant contemplation of the ruins of the fortress built by Firoz Shah Tughlaq, who ruled Delhi from 1351-88 AD. Its elegance is borne out especially by the author interweaving his own experience of the compound with the voices of those he met in passing and those he came to know over the course of his fieldwork within this space and its environs. Its elegance is evident also in the cinematic references that animate Taneja’s imagination and those of his interlocutors, and the Urdu literary textual tradition readily at hand. Taneja demonstrates a serious commitment to redressing the archival and national amnesia at work in a contemporary India determined to make all things Muslim/Islamic foreign, polluting, and anti-nationalist. Not only does he insist upon the Indic nature of Islam, he claims that Islam is indexed within the lives of non-Muslim Indians through a form of stranger hospitality that is distinctly tied to the culture of Muslim shrines. And in this manner he provides the important reminder that many, besides Muslims, have ongoing relations to such shrines . . . While I might question the presumption that Islam constitutes a stable and unified object of study, or that it needs saving, whether from nationalist amnesia or from itself (as in Taneja’s insistence that what he witnesses is necessarily progressive, anti-hierarchical, and non-patriarchal), I do not doubt that this book is the labor of much scholarship and love.
Hidden figures in Jinnealogy
by
Emilio Spadola
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.
On the advantage and disadvantage of history for life
