This dissertation explores the emergence of a golden age of Arabic encyclopaedic literature in the scholarly centers of Egypt and Syria during the Mamluk Empire (1250-1517). At the heart of the project is a study of Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Nuwayrī’s (d. 1333) Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab (‘The Ultimate Ambition in the Branches of Erudition’), a 31-volume encyclopaedic work composed at the beginning of the 14th century and divided into five parts: (i) heaven and earth; (ii) the human being; (iii) animals; (iv) plants; and (v) the history of the world. My study examines the formal arrangement, thematic contents, and codicological features of this seminal work, arguing that the rise of encyclopaedism in this period was emblematic of a certain intellectual ethos, a systematic approach to the classification of knowledge which emerged in the discursive context of a rapidly centralizing imperial state. I argue that the Nihāya grew out of an amalgam of several genres (including the adab anthology, the cosmographical compendium, the chancery scribe manual, the dynastic chronicle, and the commonplace book), developing into a new form and serving a different purpose from its literary predecessors. Such texts, long considered tokens of intellectual and cultural decadence, demonstrate the strategies used by Mamluk religious scholars, chancery scribes, and littérateurs to navigate an ever-growing corpus of accumulated knowledge / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

This dissertation examines uncertainties about the supernatural among members of the urban middle class in Tehran, Iran. In particular, I attend to the ways in which the category of the supernatural (mavara) has become, for some people, an object of potential scientific (`elmi) inquiry that must be distinguished from approaches usually ascribed to the rural, the uneducated, and the poor, often deemed as either superstitions (khorafat) or parochically religious (dini). By examining a range of encounters with the supernatural - such as attempts to explain communications with the souls of the dead, make sense of spirit possession, and differentiate real magic from charlatanism - I highlight the varied modalities through which perspectives and forms of reasoning imagined to be rational and scientific are brought to bear on matters that are understood to lie, at least partially, within the purview of religious knowledge. I situate such supernatural encounters against a backdrop of state disciplinary and coercive measures, thereby illuminating important shifts in Iran's politico-religious landscape in the past two decades, such as the waning of the religious authority of the Shi`i ulama among certain sections of society. This declining authority does not necessarily imply a weakened interest in Islam (although this is sometimes the case). Rather, it has opened up a space for reception and deliberation of a multiplicity of sources of religious knowledge, both Islamic and non-Islamic. These include forms of Western-imported spirituality and occultism that have been entering Iran for over a century, with their most recent wave consisting of translated texts of New Age spirituality, self-help success literature, and popular psychology that have gained popularity since the end of the war with Iraq. The metaphysical models on offer through these spiritual systems are usually promoted and understood as scientific rather than religious. That is, rather than being seen as contradicting Islamic notions, these formulations are often viewed as parallel to them. By attending to such notions and their everyday manifestations, my project brings into focus various hybrid forms of religious-scientific knowledge, experience, and discourse that have largely been ignored in the study of modern Muslim societies.

The mediaeval Islamicate world was dominated by a language-obsessed culture that placed great value on words and their meanings. These words and meanings could, for those who used them, make the difference between both earthly success or failure, and salvation or damnation in the hereafter. Scholars were also conscious of the contingency of the links between words and their meanings, and the potential this created for ambiguity. This dissertation is about the mechanisms, models, and assumptions those scholars used to manage linguistic ambiguity. My investigation focuses on ar-Rāġib al-Iṣfahānī (fl. ≤ 409/1018), one such language-obsessed scholar. I provide a comprehensive review of his life, works, and times. He put together a portfolio of intellectual positions in exegesis, theology, ethics, and poetics that was guided by a philosophy of language which accepted and negotiated linguistic ambiguity. Underpinning that philosophy was a theory of meaning that used the pairing of expression and idea (lafẓ and maʿnā) to deal with polysemy, the intent of the speaker, and the function of the lexicon. Ar-Rāġib’s philosophy was emblematic of what I call the Arabic Language Tradition, the shared assumptions of which constituted an indigenous philosophy of language that was able to supply its own answers to the central questions of linguistics and then use those answers across all of the genres encompassed by its scholarship, from grammar to poetics, law, and theology. It was an Arabic Language Tradition that is best understood through comparison to an alternative Classical Language Tradition that had its roots in the Organon and a theory of meaning with little space for ambiguity. Re-telling Islamic intellectual history through the lens of language in this way shows us that in addition to the well-known and oft-studied Islamic engagement with Hellenistic philosophy there was another, indigenous, tradition with its own answers to the problems of mediaeval scholarship. This Arabic Language Tradition saw in language a solution to these problems, rather than seeing language as just another hurdle to be overcome. / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

This dissertation asks how it came to be that Amina Lawal, a peasant woman from Northern Nigeria, was sentenced to death by stoning in 2002 for committing the crime of zinā, or illegal sexual activity, three years after full Islamic sharīah penal law began to be implemented there by way of massive grassroots demand. Each chapter examines a factor I deem necessary to explore this question. Drawing on ethnographic evidence gathered during fieldwork in Northern Nigeria, I first examine "sharīah as social text," concluding that sharīah is thought to offer the radical societal ordering and historical and cultural legitimacy necessary to combat the corruption and poverty associated with the Federal State structure. However, the integration of the stoning punishment into the formative period of Islamic law (1st-3rd AH/ 7th-10 CE centuries), taken up in Chapter two, reveals stoning to have presented theological problems, challenging its reception in contemporary Nigeria as a symbol of stability. Chapter three traces the slow integration of Hausaland into a legalistic milieu identified with an eastward Arab-Islamic epistemic tradition by the eighteenth century, culminating in the Sokoto Caliphate's (r. 1809 - 1903) identification with the Mālikī school of Islamic law. The British arrival in the late nineteenth century ended the Caliphate, changed Islamic penal law, and promulgated the "Native Courts Proclamation," which outlawed the stoning punishment despite its absence during the Sokoto Caliphate. This history is often recalled in contemporary Northern Nigeria, but only recently, as the State weakens and the Muslim north loses political power. Chapter four analyzes Lawal's trial as the stage where the boundaries and mandates of post-1999 sharī'ah are delineated. I call several features of legal argumentation endemic of "post-modern Islamic law": legal reductionism, reliance mainly on primary texts, combining Islamic and constitutional arguments, and eschewing the jurisprudential tradition. These factors combine to make it easier (relative to Islamic history) to mete out stoning. Finally, I examine gender and the Western reaction to the case, arguing that these discourses collude to ironically elide the voice of Amina Lawal, Nigerian women more generally, and the stoning punishment per se.

This dissertation focuses on how the Marrakech-based Almohads and their independent Muslim rivals in eastern al-Andalus contested spiritual and temporal power. The rulers of Sharq al-Andalus opposed Almohad claims to a divinely granted authority rooted in a new messianic interpretation of the caliphate. Instead, they articulated a vision of legitimacy linked to earlier Sunni forms, and connected their rule more closely to the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad than any previous Andalusī dynasty had done. One minted coins that included the name of the Abbasid caliph, and another received official permission from the Abbasids to rule as governor of al-Andalus. This dissertation examines the written sources, coins and architecture produced in the courts of Andalusī and Almohad rulers to explore how they legitimated their authority. It argues that the conflict among these Muslim rivals in many ways superseded their battles against Christians. The Almohads saw anyone—Muslim, Christian or Jewish—who did not submit to their rule and their conception of Islam as infidels, and said that jihad against non-Almohad Muslims was more important than jihad against Christians. Nevertheless, later Arabic sources attempted to cast the conflict between the independent rulers of al-Andalus and the Almohads as part of a broader Christian-Muslim clash. The alliances Andalusī rulers made with Christian kings, and, in some cases, their Christian roots, made their religious allegiance to Islam suspect. This attitude has continued in modern scholarship as well. This dissertation instead argues that the independent rulers of al-Andalus and their Almohad counterparts were engaged in a broader debate, common to the wider Islamic world, about what constituted righteous Islamic authority. As the population of the territories ruled by Muslims became majority Muslim, new groups began to gain power, eroding the primacy of the Arab caliphate. Like their Persian and Turkic contemporaries to the east, the Berber and Andalusī rulers of the Islamic west struggled to negotiate between the caliphal ideal of Islamic unity and the increasingly decentralized political world they encountered. Analyzing the conflicts among these rivals illuminates the questions that animated the Islamic world as new spiritual and political forms were emerging.

This dissertation examines the transmission of Islamic legal knowledge in modern Egypt. It is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo among formally trained Islamic scholars. With governmental permission, I was able to attend classes at both al-Azhar’s Faculty of Sharīʿah and Cairo University’s Dār al-ʿUlūm. I also participated in the network of traditional study circles operating in and around al-Azhar mosque. Combining ethnographic data with extensive archival research, I trace the effects of government-led initiatives over the past century and a half to reform traditional religious learning. Such have revolved around increased incorporation of Western educational methods. There are two themes on which I focus. The first centers on ethics and subjectivity. Talal Asad has suggested that for pre-modern Muslim jurists, accurate understanding of sacred texts presupposed an appropriate "habitus". Drawing on Wittgenstein and Bourdieu, I elaborate Asad’s brief remarks along the following lines. Given that how a text is read depends upon the attributes of the reader, religious authorities insisted that proper interpretations could only be generated by proper character. The way in which to produce proper character was to mold it through a suitable program of ethical discipline. I demonstrate that pre-modern Islamic educational techniques were structured with the aim of imparting a particular habitus (modeled on that of the Prophet) by enjoining meticulous and constant imitation of the Prophet’s personal habits (Sunnah). By transforming themselves into living replicas of the Prophet, jurists believed that they acquired the ability to mirror his textual interpretations. I then describe how traditional linkages between knowledge and ethics have been eroded by the importation of Western learning techniques, scrutinizing the effects of these changes on substantive legal doctrine. The second overarching theme of my research examines how changes in pedagogical methods have produced a corresponding shift in "episteme". Using Foucault, I argue that premodern religious learning was dominated by an episteme centered on language and grammar. I proceed to describe how modern educational reforms have succeeded in inaugurating a new episteme modeled on the natural sciences. I assess the impact of this shift on modes of legal reasoning. / Anthropology

This dissertation charts how the legal regulation of Islam in colonial India fostered a conception of religion that focused on dividing it from secular economy and politics. Colonial law segregated religious law from other branches of law through intersecting binaries that pitted religion against reason and family against the economy. These binaries continue to shape both popular and scholarly approaches to South Asian religion. Unsettling these common assumptions, the dissertation reveals the close relationship between contemporary conceptions of religion and the imperatives of imperial governance. By segregating religious from secular law, the British developed a bifurcated strategy of governance that balanced contradictory commitments to preserving Indian traditions with introducing modernizing reforms. Scholars have traditionally located the origins of the colonial approach to administering Indian religious laws in the early decades of Company rule. The dissertation argues instead that the conceptual framework of religious personal laws emerged between the second and third quarter of the nineteenth century. Changing concepts of sovereignty, an evangelical commitment to spreading Christian civilization, and the integration of colonial production into global markets led colonial officials to look for ways to consolidate the authority of the colonial state. Due to the history of Mughal rule, colonial officials viewed Islamic law as posing a particular threat to colonial suzerainty, placing Islam at the center of these debates. Limiting religious laws to the sphere of domestic relations and ritual performance allowed the colonial state to maintain the rhetoric of respecting Indian religions while consolidating new bodies of criminal, commercial, and procedural law. The boundaries colonial law drew around religion, however, proved unstable. By bringing different definitions of religion into dialogue, legal adjudication in courts unsettled the boundaries between religious and secular authority that colonial legislation and legal texts attempted to solidify. The dissertation looks at legal debates occurring in different levels of the judicial system and in the wider court of public opinion, turning to newspaper coverage of trials and literature on Islamic law. The dissertation uses this broadened archive of legal contest to explore alternative understandings of the relationship between religion, politics, and economy. / History

<p>This dissertation is a critical exploration of certain authoritative discursive traditions on the limits of Islam in 19th century North India. It investigates specific moments when prominent Indian Muslim scholars articulated and contested the boundaries of what should and should not count as Islam. This study does not provide a chronological history of Islam in colonial India or that of Indian Muslim reform. Rather, it examines minute conjunctures of native debates and polemics in which the question of what knowledges, beliefs, and practices should constitute Islam was authoritatively contested. Taking 19th century Indian Muslim identity as its object of inquiry, it interrogates how the limits of identity and difference, the normative and the heretical, were battled out in centrally visible ways. </p><p> The set of illustrations that form the focus of this dissertation come from an ongoing polemic that erupted among some members of the Muslim intellectual elite in colonial India. At the heart of this polemic was the question of how one should understand the relationship between divine sovereignty, prophetic authority, and the limits of normative practice in everyday life. The rival protagonists of this polemic responded to this question in dramatically contrasting ways. One the one hand was a group of scholars whose conception of tradition pivoted on establishing the exceptionality of divine sovereignty. In order to achieve this task, they articulated an imaginary of Prophet Muhammad that emphasized his humanity and his subservience to the sovereign divine. </p><p> They also assailed ritual practices and everyday habits that in their view undermined divine sovereignty or that elevated the Prophet in a way that shed doubts on his humanity. One of the chief architects of this reform project was the early 19th century Indian Muslim thinker, Shâh Muhammad Ismâ`îl (d.1831). His reformist agenda was carried forward in the latter half of the century by the pioneers of the Deoband School, an Islamic seminary cum ideological formation established in the North Indian town of Deoband in 1867. Another group of influential North Indian Muslim scholars sharply challenged this movement of reform. </p><p> They argued that divine sovereignty was inseparable from the authority of the Prophet as the most charismatic and authorial being. In their view, divine and prophetic exceptionality mutually reinforced each other. Moreover, undermining the distinguished status of the Prophet by projecting him as a mere human who also happened to be a recipient of divine revelation represented anathema. As a corollary, these scholars vigorously defended rituals and everyday practices that served as a means to honor the Prophet's memory and charisma. This counter reformist movement was spearheaded by the influential Indian Muslim thinker Ahmad Razâ Khân (d.1921). He was the founder of the Barelvî School, another ideological group that flourished in late 19th century North India.</p><p> This dissertation describes these rival narratives of tradition and reform in South Asian Islam by focusing on three pivotal questions of doctrinal disagreement: 1) the limits of prophetic intercession (shafâ`at), 2) the limits of heretical innovation (bid`a), and 3) the limits of the Prophet's knowledge of the unknown (`ilm al-ghayb). It argues that these intra-Muslim contestations were animated by competing political theologies each of which generated discrete and competing imaginaries of law and boundaries of ritual practice.</p> / Dissertation

<p>Contrary to later Muslim tradition, the first Muslims initially looked favorably upon assimilating Jewish and Christian religious and cultural practices. As Muslim collective religious identity conjoined with political power, Muslims changed their religious policy from imitation to distinction; they began to define themselves both above and against their arch-religious rivals. They visibly and publicly materialized their unique brand of monotheism into a distinct religious community.</p><p>This dissertation is the first attempt to map the Muslim religious discourse that expressed this deliberate turn away from Jews, Christians, and others across pre-modern Islamic history. First, I argue that this discourse functions as a prism through which to view the interplay of religion and politics; a key function of both empire and religion in a pre-modern Muslim context was to uphold hierarchical social distinctions. Next, I show that Muslims imagined these distinctions in very concrete terms. In contrast to conventional studies that emphasize the role of abstract doctrine in making Islam a distinct religion, this study highlights the aesthetic mediation of Muslim distinction through everyday quotidian practice such as dress, hairstyle, ritual, festivals, funerary rites, and bodily gestures - what Sigmund Freud has called, "The Narcissism of Minor Differences." These acts of distinction illustrate that Muslim religious identity was not shaped in a social and cultural vacuum; its construction overlapped with that of ethnicity, gender, class, and the even the human. What this study reveals, then, is how Muslims attempted to fashion more than just a distinct religion, but an ideal moral order, or social imaginary. In this robust Muslim social imaginary, human beings were mimetic creatures; becoming, or subject-formation, was inextricably related to belonging, being part of a community. Despite the conscious attempt of religious scholars to normalize Muslim distinction, this study contests that both elite and ordinary Muslims continued to imitate, and ultimately assimilate, foreign practices within a Near Eastern cultural landscape of sharedness. </p><p>Drawing upon approaches from religious studies, history, and anthropology, this interdisciplinary study foregrounds both text and theory. It interweaves theories of difference, imitation (mimesis), power, embodiment, semiotics and aesthetics with a broad range of Arabic literary texts spanning theology, law, Quranic exegesis, prophetic traditions, ethics, mysticism, historical chronicles, and biography. More specifically, this study highlights the critical role of prophetic utterances (hadith) in shaping the Islamic discourses of Shari'a and Sufism. It foregrounds the contributions of two pre-modern Damascene religious scholars in their historical contexts: the controversial Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), and the underappreciated Najm al-Din al-Ghazzi; (d. 1651), who authored a remarkable encyclopedia of mimesis and distinction hitherto ignored in both Euro-American and Islamic scholarship.</p> / Dissertation

<p>This dissertation is a legal history of debt and economic life in the Indian Ocean during the nineteenth and early-twentieth century. It draws on materials from Bahrain, Muscat, Bombay, Zanzibar and London to examine how members of an ocean-wide commercial society constructed relationships of economic mutualism with one another by mobilizing debt and credit. It further explores how they expressed their debt relationships through legal idioms, and how they mobilized commercial and legal instruments to adapt to the emergence of modern capitalism in the region.</p><p>At the same time, it looks at the concomitant development of an Indian Ocean-wide empire of law centered at Bombay, and explores how this Indian Ocean contractual culture encountered an Anglo-Indian legal regime that conceived of legal documents in a radically different way. By mobilizing written deeds in imaginative ways, and by strategically accessing British courts, Indian Ocean merchants were able to shape the contours of this growing legal regime.</p><p>Most broadly, the dissertation argues that law and courts became increasingly central to economic life in the Indian Ocean, and that economic actors in the region employed a wide range of different legal strategies in adapting to a changing world of commerce. In the Indian Ocean, as elsewhere, the histories of commerce and law were inextricably intertwined.</p> / Dissertation