Over the past three decades, Talal Asad and his students have taken a leading role in applying Foucault’s influential work on ethics to the Islamic tradition. Such Asadian scholarship suggests that ethical bodily discipline has important effects on how Muslims interpret scriptural texts. Nevertheless, when these effects are discussed, little attention is given to the topic of “intentions” in relation to scriptural meaning. The proposed presentation argues for greater attention to this topic, showing how a focus on intentions opens up new perspectives on Islamic discourses and their relationship to ethical bodily discipline. The presentation has both an ethnographic component and a theoretical component. The ethnographic component examines debates over Islam and human rights in contemporary Egypt, with a focus on controversies related to personal status law. Data is drawn from fieldwork among local participants in these debates, including religious scholars, journalists, NGO-activists, and government officials. The presentation will show that such debates center largely on claims about the intentions behind scripture, which are attributed to God. Egyptian proponents of human rights standards hold that such standards are consistent with the intentions behind scripture, even if they often conflict with its literal wording. By contrast, religious critics of human rights standards see them as violating the intentions behind scripture. This brings us to the theoretical component of the presentation, which takes up the question of how individuals infer the intentions behind scripture. Here the presentation highlights a number of insights from the work of prominent philosopher Donald Davidson. According to Davidson, we infer the intentions behind the speech of others based on assumptions about their beliefs and desires. Moreover, all things being equal, we tend to assume that the beliefs and desires of others resemble our own. This line of analysis bears on Egyptian human rights debates, implying that when different groups attribute different intentions to God this is because they are projecting their beliefs and desires on to God. Pushing the analysis a step further, the presentation will suggest that in controversies concerning personal status law, the beliefs and desires projected on to God are rooted in specific embodied forms of family life to which participants are ethically committed. Participants strive to live in accordance with these forms of family life, molding their subjectivities accordingly. With this in mind, the presentation will consider how participants’ ethical projects shape their perceptions of God and His intentions.

This paper explores the reading practices of a key religious text within the Suffa foundation, a branch of the Nur movement in Istanbul. Inspired by the message of Islamic scholar Said Nursi (1887-1960), this revivalist Islamic community has distanced itself from classical patterns of Islamic learning by deemphasizing masters’ authority and stressing shared brother-to-brother pedagogies centered on reading Nursi’s masterpiece, the Risale-i Nur. A simplified form of Quranic commentary (tefsir) written in the vernacular language and drenched in the Sufi and Islamicate cultural repertoires of Anatolia, the Risale is today collectively read in Nur circles and provides guidance for a large public of ordinary Turkish Muslims. Reading the Risale occupies a central place in the Nur pedagogical path and is expected to engender a specific reflective state (tefekkür) in the reader that, to some extent, converges with modern ideas of knowledge as achieved through intellectual efforts. Drawing on ethnographic material from within the community, the paper highlights lines of both continuity and rupture between the reading-related intellectual exercise of tefekkür and the Islamic pedagogical tradition. I will argue that my interlocutors’ semantic and practical redefinition of tefekkür as a reason-based exercise represents an attempt to come to terms with modern epistemological and hermeneutical discourses. I will argue that their redefinition of reading as a technique for keeping in pace with the times should be understood in a similar way. However, I will also show that Nur reflective exercises still rely on a specific “sensitivity of the heart” that matches with the ethical sensibility of Islamic tradition. Although recent anthropological studies of Islam often stress a dichotomy between religious-embodied practices and secular-intellectual practices, I argue that Nur reflective exercises cannot be easily accommodated within such a framework. While acknowledging that embodiment processes have an important place in religious education, the paper uses the Nur case to suggest that more attention to reading and other reflection-based techniques can enrich our understanding of religious formation and ethical thinking within the Islamic tradition and beyond.

Using lectures, pamphlets, and newspaper articles, I examine a debate among Muslim scholars in the Levant in the 1920s and 1930s on the permissibility of the family waqf [endowment]. While the question rose to prominence because of wider shifts in notions and practices of charity, property, and economy, the debate was centered on legal reasoning and the place of texts in justifying the ruling [hukm] on the family waqf. The main question debated was whether the widespread Islamic family waqf was part of “religion.” Focusing on scholars opposed to the family waqf, I describe their arguments that the family waqf was not a “religious” endeavor and hence did not need to follow “religious law.” Instead, they proposed that the family waqf should follow the new laws of the economy. Because family waqfs appeared to harm the economy, the Islamic legal ruling on family waqfs ought to be changed from recommended to reprehensible or prohibited in order to avoid harm, based on the Islamic legal maxim that harm should be avoided. This argument, I contend, shows a rearticulation of the Islamic legal tradition with a new field conceived to be outside of “religion” and having its own rules: the economy. I argue that changing the ruling concerning the family waqf on the legal plane became possible through the introduction of a new statistical style of reasoning within the Islamic legal tradition. Unlike arguments based on analogical reasoning, arguments based on statistical styles of reasoning are presented as objective truths that are not based on textual interpretations, and that do not require any special ethical training in order to be correctly understood and applied. I suggest that introducing such styles of reasoning has had a deep impact on structures of authority in the Islamic legal tradition.

What makes a religious text authoritative? In what does ‘authoritativeness’ consist, and how does it change? How are relations between Muslims and authoritative texts reimagined and reconstructed? This paper explores these questions by focusing on a recent debate in Turkey around the notion of ‘Kuran müslümanlığı’ (Quranic Muslimhood). Turkey has a long lineage of calls for a ‘return to the Quran’ (against, for example, ‘superstition’ or Sufi ideas) since the late Ottoman period; the current advocacy of ‘Kuran müslümanlığı’, however, departs from earlier discourses not only as a popular movement cohering around a broad coalition of Muslim groups and individuals, but also by aiming to establish the Quranic text as the exclusive authority on Islamic practices, from prayers to marriage. Many recent anthropological studies invoke the idea of ‘discursive tradition’ to highlight that authoritative texts (e.g., the Quran, hadith) are effective sources of articulating Muslim subjectivities in the present. Others, however, have suggested that this perspective limits its scope to the ‘puritanical’ orientations underlying contemporary revivalism’s argumentative style (thereby dismissing, for instance, dreaming as a mode of knowledge), or that it attempts to impose coherence on disparate manifestations. While these debates have been useful in highlighting contestations around the place and interpretation of authoritative texts in Muslim communities, this paper instead considers what is involved in Muslims’ relationship (or lack thereof) to specific texts. I focus, in particular, on how ‘Kuran müslümanlığı’ comes to be organized not simply around a textualist effort to reinstate the hierarchical status of the Quran, but also through its promotion of ‘evidence-seeking’ as a God-sanctioned obligation (farz). In my discussion of this reinvigorated and popularized interest in evidence (delil) concerning the shape or content of practices (e.g., daily prayer movements, fasting times, or hajj rituals), I first demonstrate how evidence-seeking becomes a fundamental component of the practices for which evidence is being sought. Second, I highlight that this discourse of evidence has generalized a traditional notion of religious doubt concerning 'probable evidence' from non-Quranic sources, while opening up a space for modern notions of certitude (e.g., knowledge unaltered by personal mediation or a privileging of written over orally transmitted sources).

While the prominent Muslim preacher Amr Khaled is widely known for his television programs that teach Islam to Egyptian and global audiences, he has recently turned to books as the ideal medium for his reformist project. His latest literacy and literary initiatives stress reading and books as vectors for personal and national improvement. His latest move to draw on, create, and emphasize the role of the written word is thus consonant with Egypt’s Islamic Revival that gave rise to modes of self-learning, often through newly accessible and low-cost books. In order to understand Khaled’s turn to reading as pivotal to Islamic reform, this paper telescopes from Khaled’s call to properly “live with” the Quran through reflective reading practices, to his broader appeal for cultural renewal through the habit of reading. Khaled develops a reading strategy that disciplines traditional Quranic practices that he dismisses as mere ritual in order to explicate Quranic reading regimens as a method to structure one’s life and generate productivity. He applies new meanings to old rituals by giving Quran reading regimens worldly justification. At the same time, the paper demonstrates how he turns to reading as an act of worship in itself, not only when one reads the Quran or other Islamic texts, but more broadly as an activity with potential to transform the reader into a cultured, responsible, and self-knowing subject. At the intersection of reading as a textual and embodied practice is what I call Khaled’s hermeneutic of success: autonomous reading as a technique that is not only necessary to understand a text’s true meaning, but that is essential to forming a particular kind of believing (and reading) subject. For Khaled autonomous reading is not only a way to reform Muslim encounters with the Quran, but to shape the life of a modern Muslim. This paper therefore inquires into how his efforts to reformulate “religious reading” may not only seek to rationalize but also secularize traditional Quranic reading regimes. How does the self-learning enabled by autonomous reading transform relationships to and conceptions of authority? How do appeals to reason redefine ideal Muslim engagements with God’s Word? In tending to these questions this paper goes beyond the program of a single preacher in order to investigate the pivotal practice of reading in Islamic reform.