Analysis Of The Book What Is Islam By Shahab Ahmed

In his book, What is Islam, Shahab Ahmed presents an intrepid notion of Islam that is simple yet blunt and in contrast to many popular, conservative and radical perceptions. Ahmed takes a comprehensive and pluralistic approach to the eras of Islamic history, philosophy, science, theology, art, music, poetry and practice. He attempts to reconceptualize the religion as a hermeneutical association that is bold, contented and in conflict with its own great variety and diversity.

The book is structured in three sections that are divided into six chapters. In the first part, Ahmed reasons the need for a proper conception of Islam. In the second part, he records and critiques the previous attempts made to define Islam. The last section comprises of Ahmed’s elaborate conceptualization of Islam, demonstrated through several informative case studies.

Ahmed begins the book with a series of six provocative questions concerning philosophy, poetry and figural art that strive to stir in his readers an urge to define what Islam is. Ahmed states the reasons for his provocative questions to be threefold: the first is to form a concept of harmony in the face of downright paradoxes that confronts one, second is to show that these conflicting assertions were mostly made by Muslims who were key partakers in intellectual and socio-political discourses, and the third is to demonstrate that it is not possible to understand these contradictions under a binary of religion versus secular or culture.

The debate also includes wine consumption that is one of the prevalent and often venerated activity amongst Muslims. Ironically, the cover of the book contains the picture of a gold coin with the image of Mughal Emperor, Jahangir, perhaps, contemplating a chalice of wine. As Ahmed tells his readers, the premodern Islamic literature, poetry and prose in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu languages have surplus references to wine. Historically, many famous Muslim rulers and their courts have accounts of congregations that ran late into the night and was fuelled by music, women and alcohol consumption. Similar to the views of Hafiz, Avicenna, and renowned Sufi thinkers like Ibn Arabi, Ahmed also considers the act of drinking wine as “positively valued in non-legal discourse” although it is prohibited by Islam.

The archaeological site that Ahmed uses in his study is the “Balkans to Bengal complex”. Stretching from South-Eastern Europe to Central Asia and into North India, this site is the great belt of Muslim societies that immediately preceded modernity (fifteenth to nineteenth century). He considers this zone to be “the most geographically, demographically, and temporally extensive instance of a highly-articulated shared paradigm of life and thought in the history of Muslims”. However, he feels that the complex has not received its due recognition. Ahmed argues that exploring this site would allow one to perceive other Muslim areas in a different light and a fresh perspective.

Moreover, Ahmed analyses the current conceptualisations of Islam amongst Western academia, quoting and referencing to previous scholars who have worked around the subject. The argument describing Islam is analytically weak as it lacks in providing explanatory power rhetorically. This has made difficult for people to comprehend the “historical and human phenomenon that is Islam in its plenitude and complexity of meaning”. Ahmed observes that Islam, as what Muslims and Non-Muslims alike assert it to be, is more of a description than a concept. He concludes that the existing scholarship is flawed, misleading and ominously narrow. He contends that defining Islam appropriately and coherently would lead to a more “meaningful” and accurate understanding of it. Therefore, through this book, he aims to provide “a new language for the conceptualisation of Islam”, which is sensitive to the contradictory historical normative claims. While he admits that combing for the essence of Islam as a conception is futile, he retains the point that Islam “as an analytical category dissolves”. In the second chapter, Ahmed critiques the way Islam has been defined merely as ‘law’ (in terms of instructions and prohibitions) by many scholars, such as Hallaq, Katz, Fadel, and Schacht. He maintains that considering Islam solely as law ignores the enormous and much more prevalent ideas of Islam. He talks about the consciousness of Muslims being part of an “isolable and bounded domain of meaningful phenomenon”.

This idea of Ummah is universally held and experienced amongst Muslims and can be identified as a space of “mutual intelligibility and sympathy…for shared inter-personal meaning. He continues his discussion by expressing his rejection of the recent trend “Islam’s not Islam” as it drains the category “Islam” of all definitive meanings. He further rejects Marshall Hodgson’s concept of “Islamicate” because it divulges a vague unjustified binary between a “religious sense” of Islam as “faith” and a profane sense of “social and cultural complex”.