Pride is only for the people of knowledge, as they are
The teachers, well guided, for those seeking the path
Every person’s worth depends on what he knows best
While the ignorant are enemies for the people of knowledge
Succeed with knowledge and you will live forever
The people are dead and the people of knowledge are alive.
The Positive Valence of Imitation
Youshaa Patel’s book, The Muslim Difference, explores the Islamic discourse on reprehensible imitation (tashabbuh) that seeks to distinguish Muslims from others in the public space. In this piece, I want to use his insights to think about the positive valence of imitation, the moral meanings it expresses, and how it facilitated my own research at a madrasa in Britain.
Transcending Life-Worlds
Often the rhetoric filling our airwaves is about scapegoating anyone who is different, whether they are Muslim or otherwise. This rhetoric is divisive and guided by an Othering logic. This is not new. When 9/11 happened, I was a student at a madrasa in Great Britain. Buried in books, I was completing a six-year intensive classical curriculum and had very little time for anything in the outside world. Yet I recall how Muslims were portrayed as the Other, vilified and demonized. I was raised under the long shadow of America’s War on Terror that followed 9/11. It was this darkness that inspired me to undertake the first-ever ethnographic study of the modern madrasa, a dar al-uloom in Britain. Scholars had written about how madrasa students were among those Muslims who were most vilified in the western mainstream media and about the lifeworld of Muslim religious scholars (ulama) in the context of South Asia. But I wanted to speak to this misunderstanding of madrasas and Islam in a different context that broadens our understanding of the roles of madrasas in the Muslim community. The Madrasas are at the heart of serving and responding to the needs of the Muslim communities in Britain.
There were challenges to conducting this research. It would be wrong to assume that just because I graduated from a madrasa, I would be welcomed back with open arms to undertake research. I was worried that I would be perceived as a foreign “virus.” Viruses carry genetic information that invades healthy cells, or hosts. Having entered the secular academy to pursue Islamic Studies, would those in the madrasas think that I had become a virus that could infect my hosts with foreign ways of thinking and being? A madrasa graduate-turned-academic, Ebrahim Moosa highlights the general mistrust of the academy and antipathy towards modern secular education, which leads to graduates being stigmatized and marginalized. Although my identity as an academic at a secular liberal university had the potential to “Other” me as an invading virus, it is important to note that viruses also play an important role in breaking and restructuring cells in more productive ways. In Sufi thought, the term barzakh can denote a place between Paradise and Hell, whereas, in the Arabic lexicon, it is defined as a “barrier” between two things. My positionality as ‘alim and academic is like being between two worlds. Could my liminal position give birth to new ways of engaging in epistemic inquiry and sociality?
I want to answer this question by reflecting on how my role as an imam—that is, as a prayer and community leader at a mosque—at the time of my research, and my imitation of other imams and the ethical and social meanings it radiates, granted me access to my research subjects. This experience speaks to the broader question of living with Muslim difference under conditions of modernity, and this is where Patel’s book is also particularly insightful. Second, given my positionality, I want to place academic writing on Islam in conversation with traditional Islamic scholarship, which is part of a larger project on which I am currently working. This attempt speaks to the need to bring together different epistemes in order to produce fruitful harmony.
Imitatio Imam
Many of the senior teachers at the dar al-uloom were also imams at mosques. In a sense, I was imitating them in the way I approached my work. Imitation is a powerful social technology of becoming and belonging, which has received attention in recent academic scholarship on Islam. Patel’s pioneering book on imitation in premodern Muslim intellectual thought is based on the politically charged hadith: “Whoever imitates a people becomes one of them.” This hadith forms part of a tradition that has often been used to “other” non-Muslims. Recently, SherAli Tareen has explored a similar theme to show how the discourse on imitation has shaped Hindu-Muslim friendship under colonial modernity. The key Arabic term for imitation, tashabbuh, usually carries a negative valence. Yet, as Patel demonstrates, imitation can also be productive. For example, the hadith above can be deployed by Muslims to “expand the social boundaries of their spiritual communities,” (144) and it is this positive valence of imitation on which I want to reflect.
Across Islamic history, some Muslim scholars have drawn attention to the positive, transformative potential of imitation. In precolonial India, the polymath theologian, philosopher, and religious scholar Shah Wali Allah (d.1762) articulated the inner meanings of the Divine law when he wrote that fasting is “like imitating the angelic realm” (ka-tashabbuh bi al-malakut). Before him, Ibn ‘Arabi (d.1240) envisioned fasting as a way to imitate God’s self-sufficiency. For such thinkers, external acts express ethical meanings. This synthesis of ritual and law, ethics and mysticism, is embodied by many of my teachers, who are both Sufi masters and jurists (fuqaha). For them, the imam is the embodiment of the highest ethical virtues, something that classical Islamic legal manuals also emphasize. Shah Wali Allah argues that the imam is the preeminent object of ethical imitation for his congregationYet this congregational prayer led by the imam also symbolizes the transcendence of difference, with social inclusion where “hermaphrodites,” for example, are given a space to pray. As a scholar of Islamic law, reading Patel’s work alerted me to how this ritual act, though an individual obligation to God, emphasizes both a horizontal form of inclusion and an ethical philosophy. The opposite of this is both harmful and inauthentic to the Islamic tradition. As he states:
It is incumbent upon Muslims to acknowledge the moral damage that exclusivist religious discourses may inflict upon others in order to apply the Prophet’s universal ethical teaching: “Do not harm nor reciprocate harm” (219).
Alongside being an “imitatio imam,” I maintained a sociality of companionship (suhba) with my teachers. No human is an island. The tradition in which I was trained requires one to fully embody Prophetic guidance by imitating others in order to intuit wisdom. Just like pages are bound to books to produce a coherent narrative, bodies, placed together, generate wisdom and moderation. What our project on researching imams in Britain demonstrated, and what madrasas expect their graduates to embody is a selfless service (khidma) to society. This is important, Cyrus Zargar notes, “since a virtue-based society will be led and populated by those who have also perfected their own characters” (9). Imams ought to be the most visible embodiment of this vision. It was this imitation of fellow imams and the ethical meaning it embodied, I argue, that inscribed itself on my identity while researching a madrasa. I think my experience at the dar al-uloom speaks to a broader conversation about how the Sharia, as a socially based moral system of values, can play a productive role in engaging and living with the other in modernity where morality is an afterthought. The Sharia, on the other hand, is infused with moral and spiritual concerns.
A Morally Infused Theocentric Worldview
As Wael B. Hallaq reminds us, even the so-called “ritualistic” parts of faith are deeply imbued with a synthesis of morality, law, theology, mysticism, and philosophy but also an anthropological foray into Muslim subjectivity all of which engenders a paradigm that is intellectual, social-communal, and psychological. The Prophet, we are told, deftly combined all of this with what I would term an imitative art form. For example, Shah Wali Allah shows that the wedding sermon (khutba) in pre-Islamic society was a mechanism for blameworthy ostentation and showboating. Yet, it served a positive function. It publicly announced the coming together of two people, and thus crucially served as a beneficial civilizational purpose (maslaha). The Prophet thus imitated this practice while coloring it with a theological-moral hue by emphasizing an awareness of God (the supreme Other) over and above oneself. In doing so, he kept “the original [act] while changing its [negative] attribute.” Following this example, we can note that the spiritual and legal tradition of Islam provides a reservoir to replenish ways of living wherein Muslim political theology is no longer the de facto state of affairs. Crucially, Patel recognizes the need for the humanistic impulse of Islam in a context of virulent discrimination:
This principle is particularly relevant today amid the alarming spread of Islamophobia across the globe, which has normalised anti-Muslim discrimination. Instead of reciprocating harm, Muslims must struggle to “respond in a better way [ahsan]” by exhibiting self-restraint and refusing to categorically demonize the Other. The outcome of treating the religious Other with dignity, equality, and humanity, promises Q 41:34, is that “your bitter enemy will become like an old friend (219).
The emphasis on ethical living—that is, everyone living as “imams” in a socio-moral sense—transcends the destructive distrust pervading society. For Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d.1111) love is a unique characteristic of a sentient being. One cause of this love is a beautiful character: someone who possesses moral traits of knowledge and intellect, chastity, bravery, piety, and generosity, among others. This is because there is something in our very nature, freed from the calls of the ego, that is innately attracted to inner beauty. It is to this beauty which transcends otherness that is key:
… the spiritual objective of subjugating the self to God prevails over the social objective of subjugating others to the self…. The spiritually undisciplined self (nafs) obsessed with power seeks to be above others, but the spiritually disciplined self shuns self-aggrandizement, fearing abasement before God. By denying the impulse of the self to rise above the religious Other, the flattening of religious hierarchy onto a plane of social equality acts as a form of spiritual discipline (ta’dib) that cultivates a virtuous self (nafs) (223)
Transcending the Self
In Sufism, one seeks to erase the facile border between self and other. The mystic Jalaluddin Rumi (d.1273) writes that duality can only be erased through self-annihilation, exemplified in the statement by the martyred mystic Mansur al-Hallaj (d.922): “I am the Real” (Ana al-haqq). He paid the ultimate price in his search to remove ontological difference. For Rumi, Hallaj’s friendship with God reached an apogee, where duality—between him and God —ceased. For, as the mystics tell us, it is pretentious to say “He is God” due to the “stench of duality.” The third person “he” only emerges when there is an “I.” Once erased, sameness turns enmity into amity. Another cause for love is benevolence (ihsan). Friendship is the outcome of serving and caring for others, something that madrasas seek in producing carers of others. I would say that it is this very “social suhba” of living with others ethically while being theologically rooted that paves the way for a productive imagining of Muslim difference with others today. Muslims in the West, like others, can maintain and hold on to their theological claims, while beautifying their social presence with and among others. Patel’s work has helped me think outside of the “insider-outsider” dichotomy of research access, and how imitation, infused with ethical meanings, can open up doors not only to madrasa but others in our often fractured and increasingly pluralistic world.
