Panel Proposal for the 33rd Deutscher Orientalistentag “Asia, Africa and Europe,” to be held from 18 – 22 September 2017 in Jena, Germany (http://www.dot2017.de/en/)
The themes of certainty and ambiguity provide compelling portals into the internal logics of modern Muslim thought and practice. As works by Thomas Bauer, Shahab Ahmed, and others have shown, since the mid-19th century mainstream strands of Islam have privileged epistemological absolutism over contradiction and ambiguity. While pre-modern Muslim jurists and theologians also sought to ground their legal and doctrinal positions in certain knowledge, they productively engaged with speculative knowledge and even conjectural methods in thinking about norms and beliefs. The dominant trend in modern Islam, however, systematically demotes sources of speculative knowledge, such as local customs, as expressions of inauthentic deviations. Reformist discourses also marginalize the social relevance of mystical experience and the personal purchase of esoteric conceptions of the transcendent. Instead, what appears to be prized most is certainty (yaqīn). A conceptual sibling of this new focus on “plain reading” and univocality is the predominant importance many modern Muslims, especially Salafis, attribute to the proof-text in order to settle specific arguments. Our panel takes these arguments seriously and seeks to unearth the mechanisms behind the production, dissemination, regulation, and displacement of certainty in modern Islam in the 19th and 20th centuries. To what extent can we attribute the increasing skepticism regarding manifestations of ambiguity to the rise of modern science or the decisive socio-political impact of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization? What accounts for the resilience of theology, with its less accommodating stance on internal Islamic diversity, in the 20th century? What happens to certainty as it moves from procedural hermeneutics in kalām and fiqh to self-taught, informal ways of interpretation in modern times? What is the link between certainty and fundamentalism? We welcome interdisciplinary perspectives on Muslim moral and legal thought, theology, philosophy, history, literature, poetry, and Sufism that focus on both specific localities and actors such as traditionalist scholars, state bureaucracies, and religious autodidacts or explore broader trends. In particular, we invite papers that show how, despite all evidence amassed to the contrary, ambiguity as a positive value is kept alive, kindled, and justified in modern and contemporary Islam.