1/17 A Thread on SherAli Tareen's monograph, __Defending Muhammad in Modernity__.

This monograph offers detailed “close readings” of South Asian Muslim theological polemics about “divine sovereignty” and “prophetic authority.”

@SheraliTareen @stephenmalittle @MichelleSybert

2/17 Tareen’s researched analysis of these theological polemics throws light on the emergence of competing logics of tradition and alternative political imaginaries in South Asian Islam. Drawing on Arabic, Persian, and Urdu manuscript sources as well as printed texts, Tareen

3/17 identifies the particular hermeneutic structures and discursive strategies Muslim scholars deployed in order to elaborate competing visions of social reform, while also navigating the challenges of colonial governmentality and secular reason.

4/17 __Defending Muhammad in Modernity__ is a rigorous intellectual history of key nineteenth-century theological polemics that continue to define significant contours of contemporary Islam in South Asia and the diaspora.

5/17 While these theological polemics centered on the nature of “divine sovereignty” and “prophetic authority,” the scholars involved in these polemics also elaborated competing political imaginaries in response to colonial modernity.

6/17 Tareen examines two iterations of these theological polemics: first, the early 19th-C debates over “a thousand Muhammads” & “God’s capacity to lie,” which unfolded between Shah Muhammad Isma‘il (d. 1831) & Fazl-i Haqq Khayrabadi (d. 1861); second, the fin-de-siècle debates

7/17 over heretical innovation (bid‘a), celebrations of Muhammad’s birthday, & the Prophet’s capacity to know the Unseen. Two scholars--Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi (d. 1943) and Ahmad Raza Khan Barelvi (d. 1921)--pursued these debates intensely in various fatwas and theological treatises.

8/17 By the beginning of the twentieth century, these particular polemical exchanges had given rise to two “competing logics” of Sunni Muslim traditionalism in South Asia that were enshrined in the Barelvi and Deobandi normative orientations (masalik).

9/17 Tareen offers the first book-length study of the Barelvi-Deobandi polemic and uses this object of study to enrich our understanding of modern Islam, religion in colonial modernity, political theology, and the limits of secular liberalism.

10/17 Methodologically, Tareen demonstrates the analytical purchase of “close reading” and engagement with cross-disciplinary conversations in “political theology, secularism studies, ritual studies, legal theory, and narrative theory” (11). Tareen shows how

11/17 Barelvi-Deobandi debates “indelibly informed the critical question of what counts as Islam and what counts as a normative Muslim identity in the modern world, in South Asia, and indeed globally” (3). He thus connects his close readings of intricate

12/17 theological texts to broader questions about religion-making & political theology. The book models an approach to considering both text & context as well as discourse and ritual, thus advancing a new way to attend to what Talal Asad calls “Islam as a discursive tradition.”

13/17 In Tareen’s own words, it is imperative to practice “thinking (theory) that closely navigates the conflicting logics through which the parameters of a discursive tradition are fought out” (4). Tareen also participates in ongoing conversations about historicizing prophethood

14/17 and the legacy of Muhammad, engaging with the important work of scholars such as @kecia_ali (on the politics of translating and invoking Muhammad in modern Islam). He also builds on critiques of religion (such as the work of Arvind Mandair & Ananda Abeysekara) by deftly

15/17 demonstrating how divine sovereignty & “Indian Muslim identity were not independent but mutually co-figured in the discursive space” of theological polemics (130). Tareen thus contributes to wide-ranging conversations in religious studies and demonstrates how certain

16/17 often-invoked binaries, such as “legal/mystical” and “reformist/traditional,” and conceptual frameworks that privilege secular liberalism cannot account for the diverse ways in which “religion”

17/17 was constructed, contested, and corporealized by Muslim theological actors in colonial South Asia and beyond.

The book's website: https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268106690/defending-muhammad-in-modernity/