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Religion, Culture, and the Secular the Case of Islam

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Religion, Culture, and the Secular the Case of Islam Gudrun Krämer Religion, Culture, and the Secular The Case of Islam Working Paper #23 Working Paper Series of the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (CASHSS) “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” ISSN 2700-5518 #23: Gudrun Krämer. “Religion, Culture, and the Secular: The Case of Islam.” Leipzig University, 2021. © Gudrun Krämer This Working Paper has been published online and can be downloaded from www.multiple-secularities.de/publications/working-papers or ordered in print via email to [email protected] The CASHSS’s Working Paper Series serves to disseminate the results of work in progress prior to publication to encourage the exchange of ideas and academic debate. Inclusion of a paper in the Working Paper Series should not limit publication in any other venue. Copyright remains with the authors. Please cite as: Krämer, Gudrun. “Religion, Culture, and the Secular: The Case of Islam.” Working Paper Series of the CASHSS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” 23. Leipzig University, 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.36730/2020.1.msbwbm.23 Leipzig University CASHSS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities“ Nikolaistraße 8–10 04109 Leipzig Germany The CASHSS is part of Leipzig University and funded by the German Research Foundation Contents 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................ 3 2 Conceptual Issues .................................................................................................... 8 2.1 The Concept of Culture .................................................................................... 8 2.2 The Concept of Religion ..................................................................................14 2.3 Muslim Understandings of Islam ....................................................................21 2.4 Din, Iman, and Islam ........................................................................................24 2.5 Din, Dunya, and Dawla ....................................................................................29 3 Religion, Culture, and the Islamicate ...................................................................41 3.1 Islam and Community-Building ....................................................................41 3.2 Muslims and Others .........................................................................................44 3.3 Islam and the Islamicate ..................................................................................47 3.4 Writing the Islamicate ......................................................................................52 3.5 The Many Uses of Adab ...................................................................................56 3.6 Illustrating the Islamicate ................................................................................61 4 Continuities, Ruptures, and New Vistas ..............................................................68 4.1 Text and Context ..............................................................................................68 4.2 The Stable and the Flexible .............................................................................73 5 Concluding Remarks .............................................................................................75 6 Bibliography ............................................................................................................80 1 Religion, Culture, and the Secular The Case of Islam 1 Introduction Why jump into a sea, where everything is seemingly fleeting, floating, and fluid? There is not a single concept that offers solid ground to stand on: ‘religion’ is problematic, ‘culture’ elusive, ‘secularity’ contested, and ‘Islam’ one big question mark. ‘Identity’, to name that which looms so large in modern contexts, fares no better. Yet jump we must if we are to do more than critique conceptualisations that we consider flawed, and instead provide what is expected of academics: critical reflection that does justice to the subject at hand, while at the same time speaking to wider intellectual, moral, and political concerns. This paper contributes to the debate on multiple secularities by discussing conceptualisations of religion and culture and their relevance to articulations of secularity ‘in Islam’. Written from the perspective of historically grounded Islamic studies, with a focus on the period up to 1500, this paper nonetheless addresses current concerns, for while the secular and hints at secularity can be identified in pre-modern Muslim majority contexts, they only emerged as themes of theoretically informed debate in the modern period. The illustration shows Kay Khusraw crossing Lake Zara, facing all sorts of dangers. Safavid Shahname 1590–1600. Washington, Freer Sackler Gallery FS-S1986.265_001. 3 Islam invites reflection on the concepts of religion and culture because, as a global phenomenon with a historical depth spanning well over a millennium, it has been plural from an early date. Plurality evolved into diversity as Islam expanded geographically and socially to become a world religion (well before world religions were supposedly “invented” by European scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries). To identify the ‘Islam’ resulting from these processes, the interplay of religion and culture, or civilisation, has been regularly invoked. Significantly, culture has usually been defined in relation to religion, as ‘Islamic culture.’ As Louis Gardet stated several decades ago: Islam is a religion. It is also, almost inseparably from this, a community, a civilization and a culture. It is true that many of the countries through which the Qur’anic faith spread already possessed ancient and important cultures. Islam absorbed these cultures, and assimilated itself to them in various ways, to a far greater extent than it attempted to supplant them. But in doing this, it provided them with attributes in common, with a common attitude to God, to men and to the world…The history of the Muslim peoples and countries is thus a unique example of a culture with religious foundation, uniting the spiritual and the temporal, sometimes existing side by side with ‘secular’ cultures, but most often absorbing them by becoming very closely interlinked with them.1 The prevalent view today is that Islam is a religion that forged a civilisation, and that the two are difficult to keep apart. Islam is internally diversified along various lines, some of them manifested in ‘sectarian’ affiliation (such I am greatly indebted to my fellow members at the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” at Leipzig University, in particular Florian Zemmin, Monika Wohlrab- Sahr, Sushmita Nath, Mohammad Magout, Elliot Lee, Christoph Kleine, Markus Dreßler, and Vanya Bhargav for their knowledge, insights, and stimulating discussion. Warm thanks also go to Sarah Stroumsa, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Claus-Peter Haase, Freie Universität Berlin, for their critical comments on an earlier version of this paper. As always, the remaining errors are my own. 1 Louis Gardet, “Religion and Culture,” in The Cambridge History of Islam: 2B Islamic Society and Civilization, ed. Peter Holt, Ann K. S. Lambton and Bernard Lewis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 569. The claim to uniqueness should be treated with caution, as should several other claims contained within these few sentences. Islam is not as unique as Gardet and others may think. ‘Catholic culture’, ‘Protestant culture’, and perhaps even more so, ‘Jewish culture’ have been subject to intense debate regarding their constituent parts. If one were to look beyond the three monotheistic religions, Confucianism would offer itself up for inspection. More on this below. 4 as Sunni, Shi i, or Alevi), others in specific understandings of theology and piety (Sufi, Salafi), and yet others tied to culture and region. Culture and region areʿ seen as interlinked, and the Islamic world as divided into a number of culturally distinct zones (the Arab world, a Persianate sphere including Anatolia, the Indian subcontinent, and Central Asia, Southeast Asia, China, sub-Saharan Africa, Europe), within which Islam is considered to be inflected in characteristic ways. Some question the purpose and validity of drawing such lines, however, while others deny that Islam can even be Islam if it recognises culture as a factor ‘inflecting’ it. The controversy over ‘European Islam’ is a case in point. At the same time, contemporary discussions of Islam and Muslim identity, and about Islamic reform, ethics, and politics are frequently predicated on a distinction between religion and culture, with important consequences for the conceptualisation of secularity.2 Examples range from the display of Islamic symbols in public space (is a specific form of veiling designed and/ or perceived as an expression of religion or of culture?), through issues of gender and governance to patterns of consumption, aesthetics, and the arts. Current debates in both academia and politics, on religion, culture, and the secular are very much concerned with the effects of power, hegemony, exclusion, and marginalisation. But there is another element relevant to these issues, which relates to flexibility rather than hierarchy. In contemporary conceptualisations of an Islamic social, moral, and political order, many Muslim
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