Abbasid History Podcast

medium.com Mind the Gap — The Textual, The Social, and Anglophone Islam Mind the Gap — The Textual, The Social, and Anglophone Islam In Shahab Ahmed’s 2015 book, “What is Islam? — The Importance of Being Islamic”, he begins with a series of juxtapositions. How …

Kasurian Verified account @KasurianMag · Nov 1

What is Islam?

In When is Drinking Wine Islamic?, Imran Mulla (@Imran_posts) revisits Shahab Ahmed’s magisterial work that sought to answer this very question.

Some critics took Ahmed to mean that anything Muslims had ever done could be called Islamic. Others took him to mean that the word itself had no coherent meaning. Ahmed died in 2015, aged 48, and What Is Islam? was published posthumously. He was never able to answer his critics.

For centuries, Muslims from the Balkans to Bengal read the Persian poet Hafiz. In one of his verses, the ascetic longs to drink from the Fountain of Paradise, while the poet reaches for the wine-cup. Both hope for God’s mercy. A jade wine-jug belonging to the Mughal emperor Jahangir bore an inscription beginning, “God is Most Great!” At the Ottoman court, the traveller Evliya Çelebi recalled meeting Sultan Murad IV at a party where wine was served. Evliya abstained. The gathering ended with the afternoon prayer and a recitation from the Quran.

How do we make sense of this?

For Ahmed, the question turns on what Muslims understood themselves to know of God, and how they came to know it. The Quran directs its readers to look for God’s signs on earth and within themselves. Philosophers saw reason as one way to discover such truths. Sufis spoke of knowing them through experience. A reader of Hafiz could recognise in the wine of a ghazal both the cup passed between friends and the experience of intoxication with the Divine. The difficulty for a modern reader is that the poet could mean both at once.

Ahmed thought we did an injustice to Muslims of the past when we could recognise the Islam in a jurist’s ruling but scarcely recognise it in a poem that generations of Muslims had known by heart. We also, he wrote, did an injustice to ourselves.

For 14 centuries, in Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s words, the Islamic had been “one of the salient ways of being human”. Ahmed’s book closes with an invitation. “Let us understand, apprehend and benefit from the importance of being Islamic.”

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