This paper explores how the political is theorized in the works of Mohammad Abed al-Jaberi, especially his four-volume Critique of Arab Reason. It examines how the notion of the political, and its attendant mode(s) of subjectivity, relates to other realms of human activity, namely the cultural, the religious, the social, and the economic. First, the paper situates Jaberi’s intervention in the broader philosophical debate in Arab intellectual circles on how best to achieve modernity in a postcolonial context. The paper then traces how Jaberi’s intervention seeks to deconstruct the basis upon which the debate had been conducted since the late 19th century, and to use that deconstructive effort as the launch pad for his subsequent Critique of Arab Reason. Next, the paper explores the various subject positions that Jaberi theorizes in his Critique, namely the epistemological, the political and the ethical subject. It analyzes the conceptual connections between these seemingly independent categories, and, more specifically, their relationship to, and consequences for, theorizing the Arab political subject. Finally, I compare Jaberi’s notion of the political with that of major figurations of the political in western political theory.

Y?suf al-Nabh?n? (d. 1932) was a traditionalist cleric, Ottoman judge and leading opponent of Islamic modernists like Rash?d Ri??. Against their rational and modern vision of religion, al-Nabh?n? championed the institutions of Sufism, sainthood and baraka. Amongst his writings was the J?mi? karam?t al-awliy?’, a massive collection of biographies of Muslim saints and the miracles they performed from the beginning of Islam to al-Nabh?n?’s own time. The course of miracles in Islamic history, however, has not been consistent. From limited reports in the early Islamic period to a colorful and sometimes outrageous flowering in the Mamluk and early Ottoman periods, stories of miracles differ in type and tone from age to age. Al-Nabh?n? had to negotiate this diachronic legacy and bring it up to his own day. This paper examines how al-Nabh?n? described and interpreted miracles and the powers that worked them amongst his own teachers and contemporaries. It analyses how he explained a present in which miracles were fewer and more mundane than in the past while upholding what he held to be the unchanging truth of sainthood and its wonders.

British Muslim writer and Qur’an translator Marmaduke Pickthall traveled to Cairo in November 1929 to revise his English translation of the Qur’an with the assitance of the Egyptian ulama. Expecting to receive a warm welcome, Pickthall was surprised to find much resistance to the idea of Qur’anic translation. Once news of his project spread in late December 1929, the former Vice Rector of al-Azhar, Muhammad Shakir, challenged the very permissibility of his project on the front pages of al-Ahram, igniting an exchange of views. What Pickthall did not fully appreciate upon his arrival was that his project intersected with a heated and on-going debate over the permissibility of translation of the Qur’an that had started a few years earlier and would continue throughout the 1930’s. Sparked by translations emerging from Turkey and India, the debate engaged many of the leading ulama living in Egypt at this time including the two-time Shaykh al-Azhar, Mustafa al-Maraghi, former Shaykh al-Islam Mustafa al-Sabri, and reformist Rashid Rida. Given Islam’s broad reach among non-Arab peoples from its earliest period, translation of the Qur’an was not, however, a new phenomenon in the early 20th century. Yet, no previous attempts at translation had evoked such spirited reaction among the ulama. This paper seeks to situate the debate in its socio-political context, while paying close attention to the arguments proffered on both sides, to understand how the various parties involved viewed the stakes of the debate and the factors that brought it to prominence at this particular moment. I begin by sketching the contours of the debate and the context in which this debate emerges. The fall of the caliphate in 1924 and the emergence of national ideologies that intertwine and bound the concepts of language and nation, I suggest, play a crucial role in heightening the stakes of the debate for participants with the symbols of the Qur’an and the Arabic language in marking Islamic identity taking center stage. I then examine conceptions of translation underlying the arguments of Mustafa Maraghi and Muhammad Shakir, leading figures of the pro and anti-translation positions, respectively. I argue that differing conceptions of what translation is – translation as replication versus translation as exegesis – serve as a key component generating the conflicting views on the permissibility of translation.

In his treatise Fay?al al-tafriqa bayna al-Isl?m wa-al-zandaqa, Ab? ??mid al-Ghaz?l? (d. 1111) delineates three categories of non-Muslims: (1) those who never heard of the Prophet; (2) damned unbelievers who learned of the Prophet’s true nature but were arrogant, resistant, or negligent in investigating his message; and (3) those who heard only negative rumors about the Prophet. Al-Ghaz?l? asserts that God on Judgment Day will not condemn the first and third groups. The same is also true of non-Muslims who learned of the Prophet’s message and then investigated it with “sincerity” – even if they passed away as non-Muslims. Not so fortunate, however, are non-Muslims who encountered the Islamic message in its true form yet rejected it because its truth was not evident to them. This criterion for non-Muslim salvation was adopted and revised considerably over eight centuries later by Mu?ammad Rash?d Ri?? (d. 1935) in his periodical al-Man?r. Whereas al-Ghaz?l? avers that learning of the Prophet’s message, his attributes, and his miracles provides “sincere” non-Muslims – including those who had previously heard only negative things about the Prophet – with “enough incentive to compel them to investigate,” Ri?? repeatedly makes a distinction between learning of these things and being provided with “enough incentive” to investigate. As Ri?? would have it, the former does not necessarily lead to the latter. This, even though Ri?? cites al-Ghaz?l? as the primary source for his soteriological pronouncements. In a September 1910 fatwa published in al-Man?r, Ri?? (immediately after citing al-Ghaz?l?) notes that those things that motivate investigation into the Islamic message vary from era to era. According to Ri??, the only non-Muslims whom God will not excuse for remaining outside the fold of Islam are those for whom the truth of the Islamic message was evident, yet rather than accept or investigate it, they resisted it. To substantiate this assertion, Ri?? points to Q. 4:115, a verse that condemns those who “oppose” the Prophet and who “follow a path other than that of the believers” after “guidance has been made clear” to them. In the present paper, I shall discuss the ways in which Ri?? modifies and reinterprets al-Ghaz?l?’s criterion for non-Muslim salvation. Taking into account recent scholarship on salvation in Islamic thought, I shall also explore some of the underlying causes for modern soteriological paradigm shifts and the broad implications of these shifts.

Ahmad Muhammad Shakir (1892-1958) was one of the most influential Egyptian Muslim scholars of the twentieth century. In addition to serving on the Shari'a supreme court and authoring a number of works on the modernization of Islamic law on such topics as divorce and the Muslim calendar, Shakir was a prolific editor, producing the first scholarly editions of numerous medieval works on law, Hadith, and the Arabic language. Shakir's editions played a significant role in the cultural rediscovery of these texts and their establishment as classical reference points in the construction of Muslim intellectual identity. This paper examines Shakir's editing projects as a window into the construction of a Muslim religious tradition by a modern and modernizing Muslim scholar. In the introduction to his partial edition of al-Tirmidhi's Sunan (Cairo, 1937), Shakir argues for the crucial importance of accurate editions for the reclaiming of the Muslim intellectual past. He emphasizes that such editions should be made by Muslims rather than Orientalists, as some of the latter, in his view, follow agendas that amount to intellectual colonialism. Shakir demands modern standards of critical edition, but argues that these standards were not invented by Europeans; rather, he claims that classical Muslim scholars had already developed similar standards in their works, as shown by the writings of scholars as far back as al-Jahiz (d. 869). Shakir’s groundbreaking edition of al-Shafi'i's Risala (Cairo, 1940) demonstrates the precision of a truly critical edition, and set the model for all subsequent editions in the Muslim world. Shakir's insistence that critical standards of editing were already present in medieval Muslim scholarship is connected to his substantial reformist agenda. By editing and publishing works that had fallen out of scholarly usage, such as Ibn Hazm's Muhalla (Cairo, 1929-1934) and al-Shafi'i's Risala, Shakir revived texts that he then used to challenge the legal institutions of his day, in particular the hegemonic schools of law (madhahib). In order to harness classical works for such a purpose, Shakir had to be able to rely on their textual integrity, which required the production of reliable editions from the still-extant individual copies. The tools of critical editing thus offered an alternative criterion of authenticity to replace the unbroken chain model of scholastic tradition, and thereby provided an alternative basis of religious authority.