Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty, livre ebook

Ali Altaf Mian demonstrates how attention to genre and embodiment illuminates the concepts and practices of the Islamic tradition—and how theologians, Sufi mystics, and ordinary Muslims respond to the incapacitating tribulations of creaturely existence in modernity.

Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty is grounded in the vast textual archive of one of modern South Asia's foremost Muslim theologians and Sufis: Maulānā Ashraf ʿAlī Thānavī (1863–1943). Through a close examination of Maulānā Thānavī's corpus of writings, Ali Altaf Mian offers new insights into tradition as a discursive and affective crucible of ethical transformation and spiritual sovereignty.

Philologically attuned and philosophically oriented, Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty elucidates connections between traditions' forms of life and forms of language. Mian shows how intended and unconscious movements between genres in the life of tradition attend to the felt and perceived needs of the ensouled body at the dual scales of singularity and collectivity. Through a novel attention to textuality and psychic life, Mian elaborates a trans-genre reading practice to appreciate ritual law and ethical agency in the modern world. Insofar as modernity has been about individualism, the rise of literalism, and the disciplining of desire, religious traditions' capacity to respond to these hardships depends on renewing community, engaging textuality and the play of genres, and bracing the unknowability of desire.

The book in your hands stems from a wish to play with the religious tradition, even as this monograph aspires to be both a book about tradition and a book of tradition. We derive our aesthetic and analytical cues from the multiple genres that are operative in Maulānā Thānavī’s writings, but keep open in the background a range of questions from other bodies of knowledge. These questions include the following: Is the religious tradition a mode of what Martin Heidegger calls “attunement” (Gestimmtheit), a mode of attention toward the divine that allows one to cultivate and care for one’s “being-in-the-world” in solitude and in community? Is the relationship between the master and the disciple in the Sufi tradition comparable to Lacan’s teaching about transference? Are the pain and pleasure of the divine tribulation akin to what Derrida says about the event and the pharmakon? I read my sources and address these questions at the intersection of themes that pertain to forms of life (embodiment and habit formation, the training of outer and inner sensoria via ethical rituals, and the tribulation of the subject) and themes that pertain to forms of language (signification and textuality, discursivities and modes of epistemic transmission, and the play of genre). Tradition is here both appreciated and critically evaluated, as the crucible of ethical formation and eschatological horizon, but also as, in the words of Pandolfo, “the conundrum of an attachment impossible to dissolve, the death grip of a ‘culture in agony’ that is unlivable but that won’t let one go.”

Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty illuminates the life of tradition with a commitment to the dialectic of singularity and collectivity, maintaining a strict focus throughout on a concrete community of Muslim theological actors and mystical aspirants in modern South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. This book thus opens a translational interface between philosophy, psychoanalysis, critical anthropology, and Islamic studies. We pin down the analytical ambitions of our discursive enterprise to appreciate tradition’s forms of life and language in relation to some key concerns of ethics and politics, such as the question of moral responsibility, the demands of justice, and the relationship between political power and spiritual sovereignty. This translational labor, I hope, will advance the study of religious traditions, illuminating especially how their framing as “discursive traditions” concerns transference and consumes bodily desires and dispositions—at the level of both text and performance.

The idea and practice of Islam as a tradition rooted in textuality consumed Maulānā Thānavī’s entire being. Likewise, he encouraged Muslims to busy themselves with books and to use the capacities of their rational faculties to guide the body’s passions. Readers familiar with the longue durée of the Islamic tradition will say, and rightly so, that this is true for most, if not all, moral theologians. Yet this rationalized modulation of the bodily passions in the practice of moral and mystical theology was at once a new translation of the Islamic tradition that became politically necessary in the time of colonial modernity and a displacement of the latter within the epistemological and ritual spaces of tradition. Maulānā Thānavī activated traditional forms, such as correspondence between master and disciple, and underscored the elements of the Sufi tradition that spoke to the soul’s governance of the body and spiritual health as an ideal and a practice in a context wherein the colonial state sought to master intelligence-gathering and control and regulate “the population” for the sake of efficient capitalist production. His use of Sufi correspondence, as a register of an alternative practice of sovereignty, namely, spiritual sovereignty, was a significant displacement of the “colonial report,” a disruption of the colonial circulation of genres.

Condition (ḥāl): My master! I try to address my spiritual maladies by deploying this idea, which has proved to be effective for me: “I should be ashamed to persist in this malady while also claiming a spiritual relationship with Maulānā Ashraf ʿAlī Thānavī.” What do you think about this mode of self-disciplining?

Discernment (taḥqīq): It seems fine to me.

Condition (ḥāl): My master! How is it that thinking about you is more effective in shunning my sinful behavior than thinking about the threat of divine punishment?

Discernment (taḥqīq): Restraining oneself due to the fear of one’s spiritual guide is tantamount to restraining oneself due to the fear of God. This is so because your heart is attached to the spiritual guide because of his connection with the divine. Thus, the regard and reverence you have for your guide are in fact regard and reverence for the divine. The only difference is that the former is mediated, the latter unmediated. You should also understand that this does not accord greater effectiveness to the mediating link; rather, this happens because of our lowliness, on the one hand, and the sublimity of divine loftiness, on the other hand. This difference necessitates mediation. In fact, without mediation, a human being has no way to reach the divine. This mediated form of reaching the divine is therefore indicative of our incapacity and humility.

—An excerpt from Tarbiyyat-us-sālik, a voluminous work preserving the correspondence between Maulānā Thānavī and his disciples

(Excerpted from the Introduction)

Acknowledgments

Transliteration Key

Introduction. The Trans-Genre Traversal of Tradition

1. Remembrance and Transference

2. Genres and Genealogies

3. Prophetic Humor

4. Volition and Virtue

5. Vertigo and Virtue

6. The Gaze and the Traversal of Love

7. Ḥikma and Ḥukm, or Spiritual Sovereignty

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Notes

Index