American Journal of Islam and Society Vol 39 No 1-2.indb


6

Agents of Grace: Ethical Agency between 
Ghazālī and the Anthropology of Islam

A L I  A L T A F  M I A N

Abstract
This article contributes to theorizations of ethical agency in the 
anthropology of Islam by turning to the medieval moral theolo-
gian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (1058-1111). Building on Talal Asad’s 
engagement with Ghazālī, this article closely reads the latter’s 
writing on intentionality, which amply illuminates his theory of 

Ali Altaf Mian is Assistant Professor of Religion and the Izzat Hasan Sheikh 
Fellow in Islamic Studies at the University of Florida. His research interests 
include Islamic law and ethics, Islam in South Asia, and theory and method in 
the study of religion.

Acknowledgments: I am grateful to Basit Kareem Iqbal, Ebrahim Moosa, Mi-
chael Vicente Pérez, Anna Peterson, and Benjamin Soares for their insightful 
feedback on various passages that led to this article. I would also like to thank 
both Stefania Pandolfo (who spent an early September afternoon in Berkeley 
discussing with me the promises but also limitations of psychoanalysis vis-à-vis 
Islamic studies) and Brent Eng (who shared with me some of his brilliant ideas 
on Asad’s conceptualization of grammar vis-à-vis Wittgenstein). All errors of 
inscription and limitations of thinking found herein are, of course, mine.

Mian, Ali Altaf. 2022. “Agents of Grace: Ethical Agency between Ghazālī and the Anthropology 
of Islam.” American Journal of Islam and Society 39, nos. 1-2: 6–40 • doi: 10.35632/ajis.v39i1-2.2951
Copyright © 2022 International Institute of Islamic Thought



M i A N :  A G E N t S  O F  G R A C E     7

ethical agency. Ghazālī neither elaborates an idealist theory of 
ethical agency nor posits an ethical subject whose practices are 
“directed at making certain kinds of behaviors unconscious or 
nondeliberative” (Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 139). Rather, 
he articulates ethical agency as a site of contingency and ambiv-
alence, as action involves not only knowledge, resolution/will, 
and bodily capacity but also divine grace. Grace, this article 
argues, is a cipher for the non-sovereignty of the ethical subject, 
since for Ghazālī agency is split between the subject’s discur-
sive and material capacities (knowledge, resolution, and bodily 
strength) and a certain metamorphic spontaneity/enablement 
that is experienced as a gift of the Other (grace). By turning to 
Ghazālī, then, this article encourages serious engagement with 
the concept of grace for understanding ethical agency in the 
anthropology of Islam.

“[The pious ancestors] knew that intention is not what a person 
pronounces with his tongue when he utters, ‘I intend.’ Rather, it 
is the springing forth in the heart of the flowing stream of openings 
from God, [a springing forth] that sometimes happens easily and 
sometimes with difficulty.”

—Ḥujjat-ul-Islām Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī

Introduction
Talal Asad’s recent work allows us to rethink the cultivation of ethi-
cal and aesthetic sensibilities pursued within discursive traditions.1 His 
fresh focus on “the sensible body” attempts to bridge the gap between 
an analytic that listens to forms of language and one attuned to forms 
of life. Asad has thus expanded his earlier, extremely influential idea 
of Islam as a discursive tradition but has also demonstrated his capac-
ity to listen to the anthropological scholarship that took his ideas as 
points of departure. What the idea of Islam as a discursive tradition now 
implies—in terms of methodology for students and scholars of Islam 
in multiple disciplinary contexts—is “to focus on the ways language 



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directs, justifies, and permeates the senses of the living body through 
the repeated performance of virtuous action, thought, and feeling (what 
[the eleventh-century Muslim theologian] Ghazālī called ‘exercising the 
soul’).”2 Note how this articulation of discursive tradition can be—in fact, 
should be—read as Asad’s subtle response to the reception history of 
this analytical category in the anthropology of Islam, including in Saba 
Mahmood’s widely cited and debated Politics of Piety.3

In Secular Translations, Asad delicately offers a set of correctives 
to Mahmood’s theorization of ethical agency vis-à-vis Aristotle and 
Foucault. Let me briefly mention two inter-related illustrations. Recall 
that Mahmood reads her ethnography, based on her mid-1990s field-
work on “an urban women’s mosque movement that is a part of the 
larger Islamic Revival in Cairo, Egypt,” in light of poststructuralist ideas 
to demonstrate that the “desire for freedom from social conventions 
is not an innate desire.”4 While this argument promotes her political 
critique of secular liberalism, Mahmood pursues this line of reasoning 
without discussing what innateness means in her interlocutors’ forms of 
life and how it is articulated in their forms of language. Asad, therefore, 
notes the misfit between the poststructuralist critique of the subject and 
Islamic theories of the self concerning the question of innate desire and 
potentialities.5 Second, Mahmood uses Foucault’s ideas to theorize the 
micropolitical implications of her interlocutors’ ethical practices.6 Asad 
questions the utility of Foucault when he speaks of the latter’s “individ-
ualistic formulations.” Foucault’s aesthetic approach to “technologies of 
the self” does not resonate, at least for Asad, with a tradition of thought 
and practice that approaches ethical formation in a communal, inter-gen-
erational context.7 It seems to me, then, that Asad’s recent reformulation 
of discursive tradition offers a corrective to certain theoretical presup-
positions that have gained citational purchase in the so-called ethical 
turn in the anthropology of Islam.8

Yet, in another sense, Asad’s reformulation of discursive tradition 
only partially addresses certain salient critiques. For Samuli Schielke, 
Asad and Mahmood (as well as Charles Hirschkind) examine “the 
practice of morality and religion primarily from the perspective of 
coherence.”9 The multiple and ambivalent ways in which people relate 



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to religious ideals and practices, institutions and personages, are contin-
gent on several factors (from their personal histories to socio-economic 
opportunities). Hence, scholars, argues Schielke, “must find a way to 
account for views that are neither clearly nor consistently in line with 
any grand ideology, and lives that are full of ambivalence—not only 
between moral and amoral aims, but also between different, at times 
mutually hostile, moral aims.”10 Otherwise, we run the risk of putting 
forth, in the words of Benjamin F. Soares and René Otayek, “totalizing 
notions of the cultivation of virtue.”11 A more rigorous study of lived 
virtue ethics requires paying close attention to “struggle, ambivalence, 
incoherence, and failure” as noteworthy aspects of “everyday religiosi-
ty.”12 Such important critiques emphasize the diversity of ethical projects 
that might be integral to tradition as an assemblage of language and life; 
in fact, these critiques question the very idea of belonging—or, projec-
tive identification, in the language of psychoanalysis—to tradition as 
such.13 Let me briefly discuss how Secular Translations engages with 
these critiques.

Asad acknowledges how failure functions in moral language/life: 
“failure threatens the virtuous formation of the soul at every moment.”14 
He also distinguishes “discursive tradition” from “religion”—his rigorous 
understanding of the former resists the reification, and hence the total-
ization, implied in the latter. Moreover, he does not think that tradition 
as an assemblage of language and life has any necessary connection with 
“the absence [or presence] of secular freedom.” Finally, Asad recognizes 
the need to consider multiple forms of belonging to the tradition.15 His 
revised idea of Islam as a discursive tradition “signals an attempt to 
engage with the multiple temporalities of those who aspire to a shared 
inheritance—as well as those who reject it.”16 At the same time, Asad does 
not go as far as provincializing his privileged themes in this tradition, 
such as the “the concern with ‘essence’.” While he distinguishes the latter 
term from “authenticity,” he nonetheless privileges the contestation over 
“essence” as a major node of signification that facilitates the internal 
diversification of the discursive tradition.17 We could thus say that Asad 
does not adequately incorporate into his nuanced theory of “the sensi-
ble body” ideas such as contingency and ambivalence, to mention only 



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two conceptual supplements needed to discuss ethical practices without 
reifying ethical agency. Thus, Asad’s reformulations offer much-needed 
correctives, but also continue to theorize ethical agency in programmatic, 
hence problematic, ways.

This article extends the scope of Asad’s insightful engagement with 
the medieval Muslim theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (1058-1111). 
I take Ghazālī as a theorist of psychic life and closely read his writ-
ing on intentionality to highlight the significance of contingency and 
ambivalence in everyday ethical action.18 Ghazālī approaches ethical 
agency—that is, the capacity to transform self and society by means of 
ethical practices—as an open site of signification. Human action, for him, 
involves four prerequisites: knowledge, resolution/will, bodily capac-
ity, and the grace of God. I argue that grace for Ghazālī is a cipher for 
the ambivalence and contingency that haunt self-moralizing regimes. I 
further contend that Ghazālī’s ideas on action and agency problematize 
how Mahmood approaches agency. Ghazālī allows us to acknowledge 
the gaps and fissures that remain between forms of language and forms 
of life, which is to say that traditions do not totally map onto bodies. By 
being attuned to action as textuality as well as the play of grace in ethical 
agency, Ghazālī cautions us against the analytical, and by extension the 
political, aspirations of totalizing theorizations of agency.

Now, a brief description of what follows. The first section builds on 
Asad’s idea that prophetic traditions (ḥadīth texts) translate the transcen-
dental authority of divine scripture (the Qur’ān). I thus read two ḥadīth 
texts on intention (niyya) to elaborate its conceptual and practical con-
tours in Muslim thought and practice. This section also draws attention 
to the anthropological resourcefulness of ḥadīth texts by underscoring 
what I call “ethnographic illustrations.” The following three sections sys-
tematically discuss Ghazālī’s insightful writing on intention, his theory 
of human action, and his ideas about ethical agency. The penultimate sec-
tion begins by summarizing the previous three sections, before moving 
onto a compassionate yet critical assessment of Mahmood’s widely influ-
ential views on ethical agency. I draw on Ghazālī to question some of her 
assumptions about how ethical agency works in the Islamic tradition. 
The conclusion further clarifies my argument but also stresses the need 



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to take seriously resources in the Islamic tradition that might allow us 
to enrich what counts as “theory.”

Intentions and Actions

Asad famously wrote in his 1986 classic essay, The Idea of an Anthropology 
of Islam, “If one wants to write an anthropology of Islam one should begin, 
as Muslims do, from the concept of a discursive tradition that includes 
and relates itself to the founding texts of the Qur’an and the Hadith.”19 
In his reformulated version of this concept decades later, Qur’ān and 
Ḥadīth continue to serve as linchpins of the discursive tradition, but 
Asad now illuminates how transcendental authority is translated into 
bodily practice, into ethical and aesthetic sensibilities. The translation of 
a divine form of language into a human form of life is, in part, mediated 
by ḥadīth texts:

Translation in the Islamic tradition does not occur directly from 
divinity to the believer’s body; it occurs from traditional repre-
sentations of the Prophet’s life—that is, accounts of his sayings 
and actions transmitted down the years by a chain of named indi-
viduals beginning with his companions. Together with the words 
of the revealed Qur’an, these textual accounts are a major Islamic 
source that has been translated from the Arabic into the local 
languages of Muslims in various parts of the world—and thence 
into behavior patterns regulated and taught by Islamic tradition. 
The ultimate authority of these accounts resides in the Qur’an, 
which repeatedly commands the faithful to follow the Prophet, 
and it is the Prophet who sets up the paradigm of prayer in which 
verses of the Qur’an are recited together with repeated bodily 
movements expressing submission and reverence toward God.20

Note that these remarks belong to a broader discussion wherein 
Asad formidably challenges the misguided idea that the Islamic doctrine 
of Qur’ānic inimitability necessarily implies the nontranslatability of 
scriptural discourse into local contexts of lived religion.



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Yet Asad does not explore the ethnographic imagination contained 
in ḥadīth texts, and whether this imagination might complicate program-
matic theories of ethical agency. I would like to pursue here precisely this 
line of inquiry by engaging in a mode of close reading that resembles 
ethnography as attunement to the play between forms of language and 
forms of life and as an ethic of the encounter. This is to say that my mode 
of reading ḥadīth texts is also an opportunity for me to imagine, and to 
think about, what it means to be interpellated into a subject position 
by an ethical discourse that retains its soteriological significance as it 
mediates transcendental authority.

“Actions are indeed [evaluated] according to intentions” are the 
initial words of a text known as “the ḥadīth of intention” (ḥadīth an-ni-
yya).21 This textual fragment is one of the most widely discussed ḥadīth 
texts on the subject of intentionality in the Islamic tradition. For the 
early Muslim jurist Muḥammad b. Idrīs al-Shāfi‘ī (767-820), this ḥadīth 
“contains one-third of knowledge (‘ilm).”22 Thus, what Islamic theologi-
cal, legal, and Sufi texts have said on intention, a concept that intimately 
informs debates on the interplay between psychic life and social realities, 
might be seen as commentarial notes on this foundational ḥadīth.23 The 
key ethical principle here is that intention is the evaluative criterion for 
the moral status of an action, a view that encourages believers to med-
itate on the motives that infuse their bodily movements (including the 
affective movements of that vital organ, the heart).

When writing in a Sufi register, Muslim religious thinkers interi-
orize intention (niyya) by seeing it as an action of the heart. For them, 
intention is the embodied soul’s attentive search for goodness, beauty, 
and sincerity within intersecting spheres of relationality. Sometimes, 
the same authors approach niyya in a jurisprudential register, and adopt 
an empirical approach to illuminate the practical implications of inten-
tion in acts of worship, social relations, commercial transactions, and 
criminal acts. These two registers in fact flesh out the psycho-social 
investments of a unified ethical tradition, especially given that some of 
the most renowned Sufi authors who have addressed the subject were 
also steeped in jurisprudence and normative ethics. The significance of 
intention as a portal into understanding the interface between exteriority 



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and interiority becomes quite clear when we examine its finessed treat-
ment in the analytical hands of Sufi-inspired moral theologians such as 
Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (1058-1111). In his “Book of Intention, Sincerity, 
and Truthfulness,” Ghazālī theorizes niyya as a bridge concept between 
the inner and the outer, one that has profound ethical significance 
for Muslims in their everyday lives (the next three sections flesh out 
Ghazālī’s writing on niyya).

The remainder of “the ḥadīth of intention” offers what I call an 
“ethnographic illustration,” which encourages listeners and readers to 
appreciate the practical implications of the ethical principle at hand. 
“Rooted in living communities,” explains historian of religion Anna L. 
Peterson, religious ethics “emerge from practical experiences, and are 
meant to be practiced.”24 Thus, the full version of the above report alludes 
to a practical, even political, context: “Actions are indeed [evaluated] 
according to intentions, and in fact what belongs to a man is what he 
intends. So, whosoever migrates toward God and His Messenger, let it 
be known that his migration is for God and His Messenger. So, whoso-
ever migrates to pursue the world or to marry a woman, let it be known 
that his migration is for what he migrates towards.” This ethnographic 
illustration emphasizes that only a migration pursued for God’s sake, 
and in imitation of the Prophet, has soteriological significance and merits 
reward. The Ḥadīth literature is replete with ethnographic elaborations 
that specify the meaning of an ethical principle by imagining it as being 
practiced in a particular place by a particular person (hence provin-
cializing a universal ethical principle by recourse to singularity). These 
ethnographic elaborations are also pedagogically effective insofar as they 
stoke ethical imagination and encourage listeners and readers to reflect 
on their own practices. Thus, this particular ethnographic illustration 
might provoke the following question: What motivates my actions and 
whose pleasure do I seek?

Let me briefly comment on the particular “world” of the ḥadīth of 
intention. If the Prophet Muḥammad uttered these or similar words, he 
most likely did so after the hijra (the migration to Medina). Recall that 
many believers had already reached Medina when the Prophet arrived 
there in 622 CE. Others migrated afterwards. The act of migration was 



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not easy, since it demanded radical unbelonging, abandoning one’s prop-
erty and lifelong attachments to home. An act of pure fidelity, migration 
demonstrated one’s commitment to the faith community. Yet, there was 
the question of motive: What about the believer who migrates not to 
express his fidelity to the community, but for the sake of a prospec-
tive marriage partner or to pursue a lucrative opportunity? In a context 
where different believers might have had conflicting, or simply multiple, 
motives to migrate, the Prophet might have wished to distinguish those 
who had migrated “towards God and the Prophet” from those who had 
migrated to pursue their worldly interests. Ḥadīth commentators men-
tion that the Prophet might have had in mind a particular man who had 
migrated to Medina for the sake of marrying a woman by the name of 
Umm Qays.25 This man in turn was called “the migrant of Umm Qays” 
(muhājir Umm Qays).

Let us contrast the case of the migrant of Umm Qays with another 
ethnographic illustration. Recall the ḥadīth about those believers who did 
not join the Prophet Muḥammad during the Tabūk expedition in 630 CE 
due to poverty or physical disability. Imagine the following scene: The 
Prophet is sitting with some companions in Tabūk, hundreds of miles 
north of Medina, and wistfully recalls those friends and acquaintances 
who were absent from the expedition due to valid excuses. He shares 
with the believers sitting around him the thought crossing his mind: 
“There are many people left behind in Medina who have been with us all 
along. They were with us in every valley we crossed, every path [tactic] 
we deployed to trouble the unbelievers. They have a share in what we 
have spent and [will be rewarded for] the hunger we have felt.” The state-
ment confuses some of his companions, prompting them to ask: How 
can those who failed to join the expedition and stayed behind in Medina 
also be present here in Tabūk, hundreds of miles away? The Prophet 
informs them that he is thinking otherwise: “They are held back due to 
valid excuses, but they are with us by virtue of their good intention.”26 
This anecdote serves to underscore the value of virtual formations in 
Islamic ethics, such as good intentions of the heart.

The two ḥadīth texts I have discussed in this section emphasize the 
centrality of interiority and the primacy of intention over action. In this 



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way, these reports corroborate another ḥadīth according to which “the 
intention of a believer is better than his action.”27 I shall revisit and dis-
cuss in detail this report in a following section on Ghazālī’s theorization 
of ethical agency. To return to Asad, what we see in these two ethno-
graphic illustrations are the exact ways in which prophetic discourse 
translates transcendental authority. Thus, the ḥadīth of intention might 
be seen as, and in fact has been read as, translating the Qur’ānic words: 
“So call on God with sincere devotion” (40:14). I have therefore attempted 
in this section to attend to what Asad asks us to consider, namely how 
forms of language, such as transcendental discourse, have come to mean 
something practical in forms of life.

Let me underscore that the two illustrations of niyya examined above 
concern political acts, involving unbelonging and mobility. This context 
is significant since one of the original meanings of the word, niyya, is 
“the direction in which one travels.”28 One could thus say, “this cara-
van intends Yemen,” by observing the direction in which the caravan is 
proceeding. In other words, Yemen motivates this caravan as its goal or 
telos. And to say, “this caravan desires Yemen,” means the same thing, 
since the people of this caravan desire to reach Yemen. In fact, it is the 
latter valence—intention as desire—that animates Ghazālī’s insightful 
writing on the subject.

The Thirty-Seventh Book of the Iḥyā’

In the thirty-seventh book of his monumental work, Iḥyā’ ‘ulūm al-dīn 
(Resuscitation of the Sciences of Religion), Ghazālī elaborates niyya and 
two related terms, namely sincerity (ikhlāṣ) and truthfulness (ṣidq). This 
book follows his exposition of “love, longing, intimacy, and contentment” 
and precedes his discussion of “contemplation and self-examination.” He 
commences his elaboration of niyya by noting that our felicity—in this 
immanent world (al-dunyā) and in a future scene of transcendence called 
in Islamic theological discourse “the hereafter” (al-ākhira)—is contingent 
on knowledge (‘ilm) and devotional practice (‘ibāda). Yet, knowledge and 
action must be accompanied by sincerity (ikhlāṣ). Ghazālī approaches 
niyya under five subheadings: the virtues of good intention, its reality, 



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how intention is superior to action, the relationship between action and 
intention, and the difference between intention and choice.

Ghazālī draws the reader’s attention to the virtuousness of niyya by 
citing Qur’ānic verses, ḥadīth texts, and aphorisms of early Muslim lumi-
naries. In this citation-heavy section, he does not comment at length on 
any single quotation; rather, the section seeks to establish the scriptural 
and traditional significance of the topic under discussion. For example, he 
cites the Qur’ānic injunction addressing the Prophet Muḥammad (and by 
extension each listener): “And do not cast aside those who call upon their 
Lord, morning and evening, desiring His countenance” (6:52). This verse 
lends support to the idea I mentioned above that in Ghazālī’s discussion 
intention and desire assume semantic neighborliness, if not connotative 
equivalence. The ḥadīths and sayings (al-āthār) he cites highlight dif-
ferent valences of niyya. For instance, according to a report, “God sees 
neither your faces nor your riches; but what God sees are your hearts 
and your actions.”29 Ghazālī explains, “God sees what is inside, in hearts, 
since this is the place where intentions belong.”30 Yet he readily acknowl-
edges that the inside manifests in material existence, and so he draws 
the reader’s attention to the following report: “Whosoever fragrances 
himself for God will find himself on the Day of Resurrection smelling 
more beautiful than musk. But whosoever fragrances himself for anyone 
other than God will find himself smelling more disgusting than carrion.”31 
What is being conveyed here is not some essentialist interiorization of 
intention, but rather how our ordinary life translates our desires (the 
objects that motivate us).

To appreciate Ghazālī’s treatment of niyya, it is important to briefly 
examine how Sufi authors before him had broached the topic. In his 
Al-Ri’āya li-ḥuqūq Allāh, a text that was “composed in the form of coun-
sels given to a disciple in response to questions on his part,”32 the mystical 
theologian al-Ḥārith al-Muḥāsibī (d. 857) defines niyya as “the resolution 
on the part of the believer to align his action to an idea from among ideas. 
Hence, when he determines that he will perform this particular action for 
this particular idea, then such a resolution is called niyya, be it for God’s 
sake or for another’s.”33 Al-Muḥāsibī further emphasizes introspection 
and examining one’s motives:



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The heart’s corruption results from abandoning the act of exam-
ining one’s soul (al-muḥāsabat li’l-nafs) and being deceived by 
high hopes (al-ightirār bi-ṭūl al-amal). Thus, if you want to 
reform your heart then pause to examine your intention and 
every fleeting thought, accept what is for God and abandon what 
is for anyone besides Him, and seek [God’s] assistance against 
high hopes by consistently remembering death.34

We shall see below that Ghazālī retains the link between action and 
what al-Muḥāsibī calls idea (that is, between ‘amal and ma’nā, the latter 
also meaning, “mental content”).35 However, instead of ma’nā Ghazālī opts 
for a more psychologically-laden word, namely, gharaḍ (aim or purpose). To 
return to al-Muḥāsibī: “intention thus covers two meanings: the resolution 
to do a particular action and doing something while desiring a particular 
meaning [object of thought].”36 The Egyptian scholar Muḥammad ‘Abdullāh 
Drāz (1894-1959) characterizes these two valences as the moral and the 
psychological. The former pertains to the what, the latter to the why of an 
action. This is to say that Drāz distinguishes form and motive by using the 
terms intention and inclination.37 He explains that “the moral act is found 
in desire’s movement from the ideal to the actual—or, for that matter, from 
bāṭin to ẓāhir, or from thought to practice.”38 Ghazālī’s account of intention, 
as I discuss below, fleshes out how the inner and the outer are mutually 
constitutive domains of subjectivity, even if the inner is ultimately more 
significant than the outer from his soteriological vantage.

We should note, however, that Ghazālī, unlike Drāz, does not endorse 
any functionalist division between “intention” and “inclination,” since 
the former belongs to a threshold space between the moral and the 
psychological (see discussion below of niyya as an “intermediate attri-
bute” of the soul). The fact that a single human being’s actions can be 
at once good and evil according to a normative moral spectrum means 
that hearts have the capacity to long for competing objects. Desire is 
the force that splits the subject (I return to this below when I discuss 
Ghazālī’s ideas on “multiple motives”).

Let me mention another source of inspiration for Ghazālī, namely, 
Abū Ṭālib al-Makkī (d. 996), whose Qūt al-qulūb furnishes Ghazālī with 



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many of the sages’ aphorisms that decorate the pages of the Iḥyā’.39 
Al-Makkī takes a holistic approach to the centrality of niyya in every-
day ethics: intention/desire pervades not only formal devotional rituals 
but also “eating, drinking, attire, sleeping, and marital relations, since 
these are all actions for which one shall be questioned [by God]. If one 
performs these actions for God’s pleasure, then they increase his tally 
of good works. However, if one undertakes these actions in pursuit of 
lust or for the sake of another’s pleasure, then they end up amplifying 
the tally of evil deeds. This is [the meaning of the Prophet’s words] for 
every man is what he intends.”40 Al-Makkī additionally says that niyya 
is ultimately a gift of God and that a single action can contain many 
intentions, and in this way a single action becomes a source of plentiful 
merit. Such merit, however, is not only contingent on grace but also the 
doer’s knowledge of and assent to the revealed norms.41 I read what 
al-Makkī is saying here in light of Asad’s views: prophetic traditions and 
believers’ bodily behavior translate not only transcendental discourse 
but also divine grace. Ghazālī elaborates this point more fully in his 
treatment of niyya.

Ghazālī on Niyya

Ghazālī’s discussion of niyya is simultaneously systematic and elusive, 
an approach demanded by the subject matter at hand: “niyya is a secret 
known only to God.”42 Ghazālī alerts his readers that he uses the follow-
ing three terms interchangeably: intention (niyya), desire (irāda), and 
resolution (qaṣd). These terms, in turn, are connected to knowledge (the 
tree/thought) and action (the fruit/extension). Action, he explains, is an 
extension of thought that can be expressed in the form of bodily motion 
or voluntary rest (thought, for him, does not express itself through one’s 
involuntary motion or rest, which he sees as expressions of instinct 
rather than thought—and we shall return to the idea of instinct disrupt-
ing the conscientious subject).

The next point Ghazālī develops is that knowledge/thought is not 
the only foundation or prerequisite of action. Rather, action requires 
both desire (irāda) and physical capacity (qudra). He defines irāda as 



M i A N :  A G E N t S  O F  G R A C E     19

“the movement of the heart towards what it sees as agreeable to the aim, 
whether in the present or in the future.”43 In order to underscore this defi-
nition’s broader implications, he drives home the point that the human 
organism is predisposed to pursue what it perceives as beneficial and 
to ward off what it sees as harmful. In other words, we are attracted to 
those objects that yield us pleasure and we detest those things that cause 
us pain. The basis of our judgment concerning sources of benefit/plea-
sure and harm/pain is the knowledge we acquire from both our external 
and internal senses. Throughout one’s life, the knowledge one acquires 
keeps on modifying one’s perception of the beneficial and harmful. To 
put it otherwise, our knowledge of good and evil is contingent on our 
experience. For example, knowing the effectiveness of a bitter medic-
inal syrup allows one to become agreeable to, and ultimately desirous 
of, drinking something that opposes one’s disposition. Ghazālī’s point 
is that while human nature is predisposed to certain objects, acquired 
knowledge, such as the knowledge of God’s norms, can ultimately trans-
form disposition.44

For Ghazālī, the knowledge of good and evil is at once rational and 
revealed, albeit the ultimate standard or criterion remains revelation (that 
is, the law of the divine Other, or, heteronomy). Let me engage in an act 
of auto-theory to imagine what this might look like in a situated form of 
life. Suppose I take myself as both an addressee of the divine norms and 
an agent of critical thinking (which are, of course, overlapping subject 
positions). I encounter the prospect of extra-marital sexual pleasure, an 
encounter that also brings to mind all the rational reasons and revealed 
norms that censure this form of pleasure. At some psychic-cum-cognitive 
level, I have been convinced by both reason and revelation that illicit 
sexual pleasure is harmful or might lead to harm (here or hereafter). 
Yet my knowledge of harm itself is not enough to check my behavior. 
I therefore have to activate my inner resolution and bodily capacity to 
shun what I perceive as harming my secular and soteriological wellbeing. 
My initial, pre-meditated longing for sexual pleasure is what Ghazālī 
calls “the motivating aim” (al-gharaḍ al-bā’ith), which only becomes 
“the intended object” (al-maqṣad al-manwā) once my knowledge, res-
olution, and bodily capacity are collectively willing to transform aim 



20    A M E R i C A N  J O U R N A L  O F  i S L A M  A N d  S O C i E t Y  3 9 : 1 - 2

into object (note that this often happens subconsciously and sometimes 
unconsciously). Thus, Ghazālī should not be misconstrued here to mean 
that longing for an aim is the same as intending an object.

Ghazālī further complicates things by claiming that it is not the thing 
per se, but rather our perception of the thing, that informs the aim. What 
brings together knowledge, resolution, and bodily capacity to transform 
aim into object is a certain heartfelt movement. It is this movement of 
the heart that Ghazālī calls “intention” or niyya.45 Ghazālī interchange-
ably attributes this movement to the heart and the soul/spirit. He writes, 
“intention is the soul’s springing forth, direction, and inclination towards 
what it perceives as its purpose [intended object], in this life or in the 
hereafter.”46 The word I have translated as “springing forth” is inbi’āth, 
which can also be understood, according to Ibn al-Manẓūr, as indifā’, 
meaning plunging into something spontaneously. Inbi’āth also implies 
the doing of an action with haste; for example, to say, “he outpoured him-
self in the errand” (inba’atha fi’s-sayr) implies that “he rushed” (asra’u) in 
running an errand.47 “The springing forth of the soul”—inbi’āth al-nafs, 
which one might even translate as the flow of the inner onto the outer—is 
a beautiful phrase that captures the organic way in which niyya medi-
ates the ẓāhir and the bāṭin (we shall return to the word inbi’āth when 
discussing grace). This word also affirms my speculation above that the 
conjoining of knowledge, resolution, and bodily capacity, in the service 
of transforming aim into object, happens subconsciously or even uncon-
sciously. At any rate, this philological detour allows us to appreciate how 
niyya is a modality of a dynamic, not static self.

Ghazālī refers to the idea of niyya as taking place in-between ẓāhir 
and bāṭin when he calls it an “intermediate attribute” (al-ṣifat al-mu-
tawassiṭa) of the soul.48 Niyya thus translates, in an Asadian idiom, 
between two forms of subjectivity: ẓāhir (the empirical self) and bāṭin 
(the inner self). It is at this point that Ghazālī revises his definition of 
action, which he now defines as: “the rousing of bodily capacity to move 
the physical limbs in the service of desire (irāda).”49 To summarize what 
we have covered thus far, recall that action requires three prerequisites: 
knowledge, desire/resolution (irāda and qaṣd), and bodily capacity. (We 
will see below how the grace of God is the final prerequisite of action.) 



M i A N :  A G E N t S  O F  G R A C E     21

Ghazālī then addresses the question: What about actions driven by mul-
tiple motives?

Ghazālī’s offers a concise but complex account of “multiple motives.”50 
He understand how a single action is often located in multiple vectors of 
discursive formations, desires, relationships, and social practices. He theo-
rizes the relationship between action and motive as unfolding on four paths. 
The first involves “pure intention” (al-niyyat al-khāliṣa); here Ghazālī’s 
example is the man who runs when he encounters a wild beast. In this sce-
nario, the action of running is infused by a single motive: survival! At other 
times, one acts in response to two or more strong motives, what Ghazālī 
calls “the accompaniment of motives.” Take the case of someone who pro-
vides financial assistance to a poor relative because of a strong urge to help 
the needy and a strong desire to show kindness to kinsfolk. The Ḥadīth 
literature encourages both forms of charity and links them with salvation 
and reward in the hereafter. The third modality of motive is when two or 
more weak motives come together to prompt action (this Ghazālī calls “the 
partnership of motives”). In such a case, a single motive does not prompt 
action; however, two weak motives partner together in the realization of 
an action. Finally, there is the presence of a strong and a weak motive. For 
Ghazālī, “there is no virtuous deed that does not possess multiple intentions. 
Yet, these [multiple intentions] become manifest in the believer’s heart only 
when he makes the hard effort to seek the good. He has to embark upon 
and reflect the good. This [attention to one’s motives] makes actions pure 
and good deeds manifold.”51 The purpose of this typology is to emphasize 
that one must deliberate how strong and weak desires/motives undergird 
one’s actions. All this to say that the relation between forms of language 
and forms of life, insofar as intention elucidates this relation, are complex 
and prone to contingency, defying totalizing theorizations of ethical agency.

Ethical Agency as Textuality

Ghazālī further theorizes the relationship between action and intention 
by recourse to three themes: the superiority of intention over action, the 
jurisprudence of intention, and finally, the difference between intention 
and choice (ikhtiyār). This section discusses each theme successively.



22    A M E R i C A N  J O U R N A L  O F  i S L A M  A N d  S O C i E t Y  3 9 : 1 - 2

Ghazālī uses the ḥadīth, “the believer’s intention is nobler than his 
action,” to highlight the dynamic connection between action and inten-
tion. He first explains that this ḥadīth does not imply the superiority of 
intention over action in general, since action broadly conceived always 
already encompasses “actions of the heart,” such as contemplation. Nor 
does this ḥadīth imply that niyya is superior to action because of its tem-
poral longevity as compared to the temporary duration of most human 
actions. Rather, niyya is superior, he argues, because “the heart’s actions 
are undoubtedly nobler than the body’s movements.” Of the actions of 
the heart, nothing is nobler than niyya, since it is “the general inclination 
and desire of the heart towards what is good.”52 Here, as elsewhere in the 
Resuscitation, Ghazālī identifies interiority as the core locus of ethical 
excellence. Yet, he does not want his readers to think that bodily action 
is redundant or inconsequential. He thus discusses at length the precise 
relationship between intention and action and the exact sense in which 
the Prophet might have preferred the former to the latter.

Ghazālī explains that only a person familiar with the objectives and 
particular practices of the divine norms can grasp the wisdom behind 
the Prophet’s saying, “a believer’s intention is nobler than his action.” He 
shares with his readers a taste of this wisdom by means of an analogy: 
“When a person claims that bread is superior to fruit, what he means is 
that it is superior due to its capacity to nourish the body in relation to 
fruit.” The sound judgment that determines which foods are better for 
the body’s health belongs to the one who has intricate knowledge of the 
human body. The contemplative practices that nourish the heart and 
train this bodily organ to apprehend God, such as niyya, are therefore 
nobler than the bodily practices that merely express one’s desire. Ghazālī 
is fully aware of the erotic nature of the contemplative practices. He goes 
as far as suggesting that the heart’s true happiness is the pleasure it can 
derive from beholding God’s countenance. The ultimate encounter with 
the divine coincides with death itself: “No one will have the pleasure of 
meeting God except the one who dies loving God—as a knower of God. 
The only path to know God is that of loving Him and the only way to 
become intimate with God is to remember Him (dhikr). Understand, then, 
that intimacy [with God] is realized by means of constant remembrance 



M i A N :  A G E N t S  O F  G R A C E     23

(dhikr) and knowledge [of God comes about] by means of contemplation 
(fikr).”53

Note how carefully Ghazālī theorizes the relationship between affect 
and ritual. He connects the feeling of divine intimacy to the physical 
practice of moving one’s tongue in God’s remembrance (dhikr), and 
joins the mystical insight dhikr produces to an inner practice of the 
heart, namely, contemplation (fikr). Esoteric as well as exoteric—inner 
and outer—actions produce qualities of love and intimacy in the soul. 
Both types of actions are necessary as the believer has to train both the 
external senses (audition, touch, sight, smell, and taste) and the internal 
senses (including common sense, imagination, and the rational faculty).54 
Thus, Ghazālī’s two examples—namely, dhikr and fikr—are well-chosen, 
since they underscore the necessity of both inner and outer practices.55 
The mysterious meaning of the ḥadīth, “a believer’s intention is nobler 
than his action,” thus becomes disclosed once a practitioner grasps that it 
is the heart that is one’s instrument with which one apprehends, remem-
bers, and loves God. In this framework, the ultimate objective of piety is 
the movement towards communion with the divine.

The second theme Ghazālī uses to theorize the relationship between 
intention and action concerns jurisprudence and normative rituals. He 
acknowledges that from the vantage of everyday life, what we do with 
our bodies covers a dizzying array of experiences and practices, includ-
ing deeds and sayings, rest and motion, thought and recollection, and 
in short, all actions that pursue the desirable and shun the undesirable. 
However, from the vantage of normative jurisprudence, all human action 
might be divided into three types: acts of devotion (ṭā‘āt), acts of disobe-
dience (ma‘āṣī), and permitted or neutral acts (mubāḥāt). Ghazālī first 
tackles the second type, explaining that the ḥadīth, “Actions are indeed 
[evaluated] according to intentions,” does not apply to acts of disobedi-
ence. Of course, evil deeds contain their own intentions, but Ghazālī’s 
point is that a good intention does not change the moral status of an 
evil action. The act of stealing money, for example, does not become 
a virtuous act if the thief intends to feed the poor. Similar is the case 
of someone who furnishes a “highway robber with a sword, a horse, 
and other provisions, and then says, ‘My intention was to express my 



24    A M E R i C A N  J O U R N A L  O F  i S L A M  A N d  S O C i E t Y  3 9 : 1 - 2

generosity and to imitate the beautiful attributes of God. I therefore sup-
plied him this sword and this horse so he might fight in the path of God’.” 
The numerous ḥadīths that promise reward to the person who equips 
soldiers with swords and horses do not apply here. Ghazālī thus says, 
“the jurists are unanimous that this is forbidden, even though generosity 
is a virtue most dear to God.”56

Moving on to “acts of devotion,” Ghazālī explains, that they must be 
motivated by a desire to please God. Thus, longing for the divine is both a 
prerequisite for the soundness of an action and a means of increasing its 
merit and reward. He reminds his readers that the desire to attract atten-
tion towards oneself by means of a good deed is called ostentation (riyā’), 
which is forbidden and turns good deeds into causes of punishment and 
debasement in God’s sight. Lastly, he points out that the permissible acts 
can be transformed into virtuous deeds and acts of devotion if they are 
done to please God and to follow the Prophet’s normative example (sunna).

Ghazālī offers an extended example to underscore how niyya serves 
to deepen and expand the scope of everyday practices of piety. While 
this ethnographic illustration is not unique to Ghazālī (it appears in 
Abū Ṭālib al-Makkī’s Qūt al-qulūb), his sophisticated expository style is 
certainly unprecedented. Let me take some translational liberty to flesh 
out Ghazālī’s ethnographic illustration. Imagine a woman who wants 
to be pious by going to the mosque to offer her afternoon prayer (ṣalāt 
al-‘aṣr). The same woman then intends that another objective of her 
visiting the mosque is greeting fellow Muslims (a virtuous act discussed 
in Ḥadīth literature). While at the mosque, she remembers her sick uncle 
and raises her hands in an act of supplication to pray for his health (recall 
that this woman has now performed three good deeds!). Finally, she exits 
the mosque in such a way as to make sure that her right foot is the last 
foot to exit sacred space, and by doing so she is blessed yet again with 
another good deed (as exiting the mosque in this manner is to imitate 
the Prophet and all such acts of imitation merit divine pleasure, since 
the Prophet is God’s beloved). In fact, this woman can intend many more 
virtuous deeds while visiting the mosque.

Note how this ethnographic illustration fleshes out the idea of 
multiple motives and the simultaneous focus on God as one’s object 



M i A N :  A G E N t S  O F  G R A C E     25

of devotion, the Prophet as one’s object of imitation, and relationships 
with human beings as objects of communal belonging. Actions are thus 
playful and ambivalent sites of signification—what Jacques Derrida calls 
textuality.57 Note also how this ethnographic illustration imagines an 
ethical subject who constantly considers how to multiply the moral 
and ethical scope of an action. In practice, this implies thinking about 
the dialectic of the inner and the outer in daily life, which involves, of 
course to different degrees, a disruption of mindless habituation. Thus, 
deliberation and introspection, which allow one to constantly attend 
to one’s motives/desires/intentions, are key elements in the formation 
and practice of pious selves. In fact, we could say that the repetition of 
devotional practices in the Islamic tradition presupposes the need to 
constantly refine one’s intention due to the “disjunction between will 
and body.”58 Repetition, here, is therefore not the same as automatism, 
but rather “repetition-with-difference.”

By means of contemplation and introspection, what appears to be a 
single act at first glance—visiting the mosque to partake in the congrega-
tional prayer—turns out to be a network of related motives and actions. 
When the woman frequenting the mosque thinks about her action, and 
certain other actions related to mosques in the Ḥadīth literature, she 
might ask herself: How can I change my single niyya for prayer into a 
double niyya by also intending to use my time at the mosque to engage 
in reflective isolation (i‘tikāf), or a triple niyya, by further intending to 
save myself from reprehensible actions that I might have done if I was 
in the market instead of the mosque? To engage in this kind of moral 
attentiveness both deepens the action at hand but also opens up possi-
bilities for continuous reflection and deliberation.59

Finally, Ghazālī turns his attention to the difference between niyya 
and “choice” (ikhtiyār). His purpose in this final section of Book 37 of the 
Iḥyā’ is to explain how niyya does not amount to ikhtiyār. The former is 
connected to one’s inclination and desire, while the latter is an exercise 
of the rational faculty. He says, “When there is no inclination, one cannot 
contrive or acquire it by means of pure will.”60 Imagine the case of a 
person who is overly satiated after consuming a grand meal at his favor-
ite restaurant. He eats so much of a delicious entrée that he reaches the 



26    A M E R i C A N  J O U R N A L  O F  i S L A M  A N d  S O C i E t Y  3 9 : 1 - 2

threshold where the same object switches from being a source of pleasure 
to one of unpleasure. Once he crosses this threshold, he can no longer 
tolerate looking at or smelling this entrée. He now comes to lack the 
biological factor or innate drive that had undergirded his desire for that 
entrée. In this case, this overly satiated person’s mere words, “I desire to 
consume this entrée and am inclined towards it,” would not be enough to 
reactivate the immanent drive. Here, I have translated Ghazālī’s example 
to convey his message: desire is a function of psychosomatic disposition 
and not the volitional self. At the same time, this does not imply that 
the volitional self has no relation to disposition; rather, it means that a 
gap always remains between desire and volition, even when the subject 
engages in practices that seek to transform instinct and disposition.61

Ghazālī’s broader point is that while one cannot use will power to 
completely control and/or change the nature of the drives, one can none-
theless transform one’s disposition by a humbler process that he calls “the 
cultivation of the means of desire.”62 This interpretive move enables Ghazālī 
to question both the autonomy of the will and the determinism of the 
drive. In other words, humans cannot align their disposition to social norms 
by means of their will power alone. They lack a will powerful enough to 
transform nature itself. For Ghazālī, our basic instincts are beyond the 
jurisdiction of resolution and reason. What lies in the capacity of the ethical 
self, however, is the performance of those practices that slowly shape dis-
position and steer human nature towards embodying the normative order.

Yet, sometimes the ethical practices fail to transform disposition, 
bringing the ethical agent face-to-face with his, her, or their limitations 
and non-mastery. This is a crucial point to grasp about ethical agency. 
While practices need to be performed regularly, so that one becomes 
inclined to adhere to one’s normative ideals, the ultimate metamorpho-
sis of ethical subjectivity is beyond one’s control. This means that while 
mindful repetitive ethical action can often transform disposition, this 
transformation is never an absolute event. Ghazālī is fully aware of how 
we can easily slip back into fulfilling more instinctual demands and 
desires that are indifferent to the normative order.

This is where divine grace enters the picture in Ghazālī’s discus-
sion: “[The pious ancestors] knew that intention is not what a person 



M i A N :  A G E N t S  O F  G R A C E     27

pronounces with his tongue when he utters, ‘I intend.’ Rather, it is the 
springing forth in the heart of the flowing stream of openings from God, [a 
springing forth] that sometimes happens easily and sometimes with diffi-
culty.”63 Recall from our discussion above that “springing forth” (inbi‘āth) 
implies spontaneity. Ghazālī is talking about an affective rigor that moves 
the heart to action, a sudden flood of feeling that inundates the heart like 
a frozen spring that gushes out water in melting temperatures. Grace 
changes temperament and warms up the heart to action.

This description of God’s enabling grace resonates with the Sufi dia-
lectic of consolation and desolation (basṭ and qabḍ, respectively). Thus, 
sometimes knowledge, resolution/will, and bodily capacity are there, but 
a virtuous action is not realized because one lacks the final ingredient, 
namely, an experience of enablement that acts as a metamorphic force. 
Recall that ethical agency is enmeshed in ambivalence toward right and 
wrong and is shaped by cognitive-cum-corporeal limitations and moral 
failures. The idea of grace further highlights the contingency of ethical 
agency. Because grace is the gift of the Other and not a function of an 
autonomous self, ethical agency remains a contingent project. Ethical 
agency, for Ghazālī, is an open site of signification and experience, since 
it involves interactions between knowledge, resolution/will, bodily 
capacity, and finally but importantly, the grace of God.

Ghazālī’s Intentional Subject and the Anthropology of Islam

Let me now summarize Ghazālī’s systematic exposition of intention-
ality, which is also an elaboration of his theory of ethical agency. The 
most basic unit of this theory is action, which he defines as intentional 
motion or rest. Action is thus an extension of thought and is contrasted 
to nonvolitional motion or rest, which are extensions of instinct. Ghazālī 
does not support the idea that we are creators of our actions as an exer-
cise of our free will; nor does he forward the notion that human beings 
are automatons whose actions are already determined by their natures 
(instincts and drives) or by an external sovereign. The former view would 
negate the presence of God, the latter would dissolve moral responsibility 
altogether (hence questioning the very idea of the normative order). He 



28    A M E R i C A N  J O U R N A L  O F  i S L A M  A N d  S O C i E t Y  3 9 : 1 - 2

thus rejects all monocausal understandings of human action. Rather, he 
affirms the view that action is contingent on four factors: knowledge, 
resolution, bodily capacity, and divine grace. Intention, for him, is the 
“intermediate attribute” of the soul that conjoins the first three factors, 
preparing the heart to receive the gift of grace, which is experienced as 
sudden inspiration and spontaneous enablement. This theory of action 
allows us to appreciate how agency is embodied in contingent ways, 
relational frameworks, and is open to both failure and ambivalence. This 
theory of ethical agency also resists the dominant view of agency in the 
anthropology of Islam, namely, Saba Mahmood’s writing on the topic in 
her influential Politics of Piety.

Mahmood’s book has generated wide-ranging debate and discussion, 
within and beyond the anthropology of Islam, about the question of 
gender and Islam, the limits of Enlightenment humanism and secular-
ity, and ethical agency and the political dimensions of pious practices. 
Mahmood critiques the universalist assumptions about human nature, 
agency, and politics that undergird secular-liberal governance and its 
attendant modes of sociality and subjectivity. She particularly questions 
the moral convictions and epistemological certainties of secular-liberal 
feminists and exposes the ethico-political dangers involved in the desire 
to transform the “sensibilities and commitments of women whose lives 
contrast with feminism’s emancipatory visions.”64 Politics of Piety encour-
ages the anthropologist (but also the general Anglophone reader) to ask 
of herself: “Do my political visions ever run up against the responsibil-
ity that I incur for the destruction of life forms so that ‘unenlightened’ 
women may be taught to live more freely? Do I even fully compre-
hend the forms of life that I want so passionately to remake? Would 
an intimate knowledge of lifeworlds distinct from mine ever lead me to 
question my own certainty about what I prescribe as a superior way of 
life for others?”65 To ask oneself these questions is to engage in reflec-
tive practices that importantly displace and parochialize “secular-liberal 
understandings of agency, body, and authority.”66 The recurrence of “life” 
in the above litany of questions—life forms, forms of life, and lifeworlds—is 
hardly arbitrary. Mahmood’s ethico-political intervention centers on rec-
ognizing her interlocutors’ lives as meaningful projects of world-making. 



M i A N :  A G E N t S  O F  G R A C E     29

Her attunement to alterity here might be seen as a springing forth of 
grace, since these questions open the self to the Other.

Mahmood draws on her mid-1990s fieldwork among women of the 
mosque movement in Cairo, Egypt. Mahmood’s focus is on their ethical 
practices, which she reads as micropolitical modalities for embodying 
agency “beyond the confines of the binary model of enacting and sub-
verting norms.”67 She resists translating her interlocutors’ life-worlds 
into the terms of a liberationist feminist grammar, an analytic that would 
have undermined the heterogeneity and specificity of her interlocutors’ 
particular ethical practices and experiences of selfhood.

I find compelling Mahmood’s call to experiment with modes of 
analysis that pay attention to “the morphology of moral actions” for 
observing alternative practices and spaces of world-making that are 
otherwise depoliticized by secularist conceptions of society and polity. 
This methodological move encourages us to avoid seeing “religion” in 
epiphenomenal terms in postcolonial studies, feminist scholarship, and 
area studies disciplines (such as Middle Eastern studies). Mahmood’s 
book certainly raises a set of compelling questions and asks several fields 
of academic study to rethink their assumptions about agency, freedom, 
and resistance, the diversity of ethical striving, the subject of political 
participation, and the need for critical self-reflexivity.

A creative and nimble engagement with the ethical philosophies of 
Aristotle and Foucault enables Mahmood to contrast her interlocutors’ 
ethical practices to the liberal subject that is presupposed in secular fem-
inism. Ethics in the Aristotelian-Foucauldian framework neither assumes 
the inner conviction of a duty-bound autonomous self nor the calculated 
pursuit of pleasure on the part of a free-floating neoliberal self. The 
mosque movement’s women embody a performative virtue ethics that is 
rooted in the practice of devotional rituals elaborated within the Islamic 
tradition. There is no “true inner self” that precedes the practice; rather, a 
sustained bodily engagement with these rituals generates practitioners’ 
sense of self and informs how they inhabit socio-political norms and 
exercise their agency. When performed consistently, these ethical prac-
tices shape the women’s capacities so that the doing of virtuous deeds 
becomes a “nondeliberative aspect of one’s disposition.”68 The point of 



30    A M E R i C A N  J O U R N A L  O F  i S L A M  A N d  S O C i E t Y  3 9 : 1 - 2

cultivating a habitus—an acquired disposition based on “human indus-
try, assiduous practice, and discipline”—is precisely to free the self from 
always requiring “revelatory experience or natural temperament” to 
motivate virtuous behavior.69 Mahmood says, “The appeal of this notion 
to Christian and Muslim theologians is not hard to understand given its 
emphasis on human activity and deliberation, rather than divine grace 
or divine will, as determinants of moral conduct.”70

Mahmood calls on us to become attuned to “the morphology of moral 
actions,” that is, the particular rules and techniques involved in a practice, 
the substance (body, heart, feelings, and so on) that it seeks to shape 
and transform, the forms of ethical reasoning that undergird it, and the 
discursive tradition from which it derives its historical force. As men-
tioned above, here she privileges two ethicists: Aristotle and Foucault. 
The legacy of Aristotle, she explains, “continues to live within the con-
temporary da‘wa movement in Egypt,” as is evident “in the frequent 
invocation of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali’s spiritual exercises and techniques 
of moral cultivation, found in popular instruction booklets on how to 
become pious, and often referred to in ordinary conversations within 
the da‘wa circles.”71 While Mahmood does not document citations and 
the circulation of the medieval theologian’s ideas among her interloc-
utors, Ghazālī serves for her as the bridge between Aristotle and her 
ethnographic site.

Mahmood thus justifies her deployment of Aristotle due to the cita-
tional presence of Ghazālī in the contemporary Islamic Revival in Egypt. 
Here, Mahmood problematically assumes Ghazālī to be more or less a site 
for the reproduction of Aristotelian ethics. While the Greek tradition was 
important for Ghazālī, recent scholarship has demonstrated the original-
ity with which he reinterpreted Greek philosophy as well as its reception 
by earlier Muslim philosophers such as Farabi and Avicenna.72 Ghazālī, I 
argue, is not merely a bridge between Aristotle and contemporary ethical 
practices in the Islamic Revival. Rather, contemporary Muslim practices of 
ethics assume a broad genealogical base and reflect important differences 
from Aristotelian (and Foucauldian) ethics. For example, Aristotle and 
Foucault are not open to grace, while Ghazālī certainly is (as I demon-
strated above). This raises the question: What happens to Mahmood’s 



M i A N :  A G E N t S  O F  G R A C E     31

theorization of ethical agency if we treat Ghazālī as a theorist of ethical 
agency in his own right? My question, put otherwise, is: How can we 
enrich our understanding of ethical agency in the contemporary Islamic 
Revival by approaching our interlocutors as agents of grace?

Before I proceed further with my critique of Mahmood, let me remind 
readers that what I offer below in fact builds on her argument about lis-
tening closely to “the morphology of moral actions.” I begin my critique 
of Mahmood's theorization of ethical agency with the theme of desire 
(before addressing intentionality and grace). Mahmood justly questions 
the universality of desiring freedom (as defined in the secular-liberal 
tradition). The liberal universalization of the desire for freedom presup-
poses a constant tension between the autonomous individual and social 
structure/political authority. Here, Mahmood urges us to consider the 
case of her interlocutors: how they inhabit norms and assert agency 
in traditionally patriarchal religious spaces. Mahmood thus points to 
a practice of agency that presupposes neither the universalized desire 
for freedom nor the actualization of agency through resistance. Yet, the 
very tradition in which the women of the mosque movement practice 
their agency serves as their scene of subjectivation. Here, desire works 
differently, contends Mahmood. For her, the logic of her interlocutors’ 
practices teaches us that the desire for prayer, for instance, is not innate 
but the product of repeated bodily action.73

The idea that all desires, including the desire for God, are products of 
a performative ethics is problematic, to say the least. This view ironically 
reproduces the very autonomy Mahmood so fiercely opposes. We saw 
above that Ghazālī is careful here; he neither affirms a completely free 
agent nor a totally passive ethical subject. Rather, he alludes to the play 
of ethical agency through the trope of grace. My point here is not that 
we must be true to Ghazālī; rather, the point is that Mahmood does not 
explore how her interlocutors approach the question of desire and its 
innateness and transformation. Moreover, she forecloses a productive 
engagement with this critique by insisting that to ask of her interlocutors 
such questions is somehow “to underwrite all over again the narrative of 
the sovereign subject as the author of ‘her voice’ and ‘her-story’.”74 This 
is, for me at least, the least persuasive part of her otherwise important 



32    A M E R i C A N  J O U R N A L  O F  i S L A M  A N d  S O C i E t Y  3 9 : 1 - 2

intervention, since here Mahmood reinforces the sovereignty of the 
anthropologist, who becomes the arbiter of when someone’s “her-story” 
matters and when it does not. It also contradicts Mahmood’s own call for 
greater attention to the specificity of her interlocutors’ discursive logics 
and the morphology of their moral actions.

Let me now consider how Mahmood treats the notion of intention-
ality. She vacillates between affirming the constant need for intentional 
“work” that one must do to shape one’s habitus to become virtuous, 
on the one hand, and highlighting that the “goal” of her interlocutors’ 
repeated actions is to make “consciousness redundant to the practices of 
these virtues,” on the other hand.75 Put differently, Mahmood’s appreci-
ation of her interlocutors’ ongoing monitoring of their intentions runs 
counter to her insistence that their repeated ritual observances are aimed 
at producing an “unconscious or nondeliberative” mode of action.76 It 
seems to me that Mahmood’s interlocutors often center “intention” in 
their practices, but she is at pains to undermine their invocation of inten-
tions, since intentionality is one of the foundations of the autonomous 
subject. However, I have demonstrated above that if we read Ghazālī 
closely, intentionality cannot be collapsed into autonomy.

The conceptual equivocations in Mahmood’s theorization of ethi-
cal agency also relate to her neglect of the concept of grace in Islamic 
thought. She seems to think that Aristotelian ethical ideas appealed to 
“Christian and Muslim theologians” because he furnished them with a 
theory of “moral conduct” that did not presuppose “divine grace or divine 
will.”77 To the contrary, many Muslim theologians, such as Ghazālī, artic-
ulated a theory of moral conduct that does presuppose “divine grace or 
divine will.” The key methodological problem that generates such distor-
tions is Mahmood’s neglect of available theoretical resources internal to 
Islam as a discursive tradition.

Ghazālī’s ideas on desire, intentionality, and grace, which I have 
attempted to translate above, enable us to attend to the specificity of the 
Islamic discursive tradition. He articulates ethical agency as a site of play, 
contingency, and ambivalence, since it involves not only knowledge, 
resolution, and bodily capacity but also divine grace. Grace, I argue, is a 
cipher for the non-sovereignty of the ethical subject, since for Ghazālī 



M i A N :  A G E N t S  O F  G R A C E     33

agency is split between the subject’s discursive and material capacities 
(knowledge, resolution, and bodily strength) and a certain metamorphic 
spontaneity/enablement that is experienced as a gift of the Other (grace). 
Grace, put otherwise, underscores the relational context of ethical agency 
and an openness to alterity. Ghazālī’s theoretical framework, I contend, 
might help us to deepen our understanding of ethical cultivation and 
world-making in the contemporary Islamic Revival.

Conclusion

My readings of the “ethnographic elaborations” found in ḥadīth texts and 
Ghazālī’s Resuscitation have highlighted a robust theoretical framework 
for understanding agency in the Islamic tradition. I have demonstrated 
that action for Ghazālī is akin to what Derrida calls textuality, a scene 
of signification that is informed by several sources of contingency and 
ambivalence: knowledge, resolution, bodily capacity, and finally, but 
importantly, grace, that is, the enabling presence of the Other. In this 
way, Ghazālī offers us a dynamic moral theological discourse that posits a 
self that can always lapse, a self that is forgetful, and therefore remains in 
constant need of both personal recollection/effort and repeated encoun-
ters with the Other.

Ghazālī understands the human self as volatile but always already 
open to transformation. In other words, while scriptural sources say that 
the true nature of the self is its forgetfulness and ignorance, both scrip-
tural sources and Muslim theologians have in fact identified in ethical 
deliberation, which activates the power of grace, a provisional antidote 
to forgetfulness and ignorance. In this way, Ghazālī’s focus on grace 
does not collapse into fatalism.78 Rather, he is immensely relevant for 
contemporary discussions of agency since he underscores relationality 
and contingency, and critiques monocausal understandings of action. In 
other words, the play of knowledge, resolution, bodily capacity, and the 
grace of God complexify the idea and practice of ethics. Thus, Ghazālī’s 
moral theology posits a form of life that is open to multiple forms of lan-
guage, such as Greek philosophy, scriptural sources, and Sufi discourse 
(among others).



34    A M E R i C A N  J O U R N A L  O F  i S L A M  A N d  S O C i E t Y  3 9 : 1 - 2

To conclude, let me acknowledge that the specter of a certain decon-
structive psychoanalysis has informed my above reading of Ghazālī. 
Yet, what I have documented and analyzed in this article also reflects 
close engagement with Ghazālī’s Resuscitation and the capaciousness 
of his thinking about ethical agency. I have written this article to ask a 
trans-disciplinary question, from a scholar of Islam based in religious 
studies to scholars of Islam, and religion more broadly, based in (cultural) 
anthropology. That question is: Can we take on board a serious engage-
ment with Ghazālī’s complicated theory of ethical agency, and what 
might it mean to pursue fieldwork among agents of grace? I intend myself 
in this “we,” since my thinking about method has benefited immensely 
from the gifts given to students and scholars of Islam by anthropologists 
of religion such as Asad and Mahmood.



M i A N :  A G E N t S  O F  G R A C E     35

Endnotes
1 See the following three texts: Talal Asad, “Thinking about Tradition, Religion, and 

Politics in Egypt Today,” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (2015):166-214; Talal Asad, Secular 
Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason (New York: Columbia 
University Press, 2018); “Thinking about Religion through Wittgenstein.” Critical 
Times 3, no. 3 (2020): 403-442. To rehearse the various nuances in Asad’s approach 
to tradition between the mid-1980s and more recent publications is beyond the scope 
of this article. For a nuanced, meta-analytical engagement with his anthropological 
thinking, see Basit Kareem Iqbal, “Thinking about Method: A Conversation with 
Talal Asad.” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 26, no. 1 (2017):195-218.

2 Asad, Secular Translations, 92. 

3 Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject 
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

4 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 4; Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 152.

5 He does this by engaging with Ghazālī’s definition of nafs or soul as “a set of divinely 
implanted potentialities and tendencies within which there are continuous tensions 
but always containing the possibility of awareness of what one is in the fullest 
sense” (Asad, Secular Translations, 71). 

6 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 122. 

7 Asad thus writes: “Michel Foucault and others have famously written about the 
‘care of the self,’ but in contrast to individualistic formulations of that process, 
my emphasis here is on how the self gradually learns to develop its abilities from 
within a tradition that presupposes generational collaboration in the preservation, 
teaching, and exercise of practical knowledge that is rooted in a vision of the good 
life” (Secular Translations, 74.). 

8 Secular Translations also elaborates self-correctives; a case in point being Asad’s 
complication of what he had said earlier concerning the link between agency and 
intentionality in Formations of the Secular (in the chapter titled, “Thinking about 
Agency and Pain”). In the latter, Asad assumed a rather reductive view of inten-
tionality, often attributing it to liberal autonomy. However, Secular Translations 
demonstrates the need for renewed engagement with intention in Islamic thought 
and practice. To that end, Asad engages briefly with Ghazālī’s views on intention. 
My discussion of intention below is in part inspired by Asad, but note that I have 
offered a different, more textually grounded, take on the theme of intention in 
Ghazālī’s thought. Let me mention here why I remain somewhat skeptical of Asad’s 
treatment of intentionality. He points out how knowledge and “will or intention” 
shapes our “practical orientation to an object” and makes a problematic claim when 
he says that “the agent’s causal energy,” or the idea of his, her, or their will as the 
origin of action, paves the way “toward secularity” (Secular Translations, 72). He 



36    A M E R i C A N  J O U R N A L  O F  i S L A M  A N d  S O C i E t Y  3 9 : 1 - 2

further locates this turn toward secularity in Descartes and the seventeenth century 
(Secular Translations, 88). As I demonstrate below, for Ghazālī human actions are 
shaped not only by knowledge and resolution (what Asad calls will) but are also 
contingent on bodily capacities and the grace of God. As opposed to the sovereign 
notion of will that appealed to philosophical liberalism, Ghazālī is able to resist a 
monocausal theory of action while equally emphasizing the agent’s causal energy 
and the relational context in which actions are performed (including the relation 
to God through grace). Asad’s view that the transition from inclination to origin 
is an ingredient in the making of modern secularity is therefore reductive, if not 
outrightly dubious, since the idea of human beings as origins of their own actions 
is one of the key questions debated in the contentious conversations on secondary 
causality among classical Islamic philosophers and theologians, and thus can hardly 
be seen as modern or originating in the seventeenth century. For a discussion of 
this with special reference to Ghazālī, see Frank Griffel, Al-Ghazālī’s Philosophical 
Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 128-146.

9 Samuli Schielke, “Being Good in Ramadan: Ambivalence, Fragmentation, and the 
Moral Self in the Lives of Young Egyptians,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological 
Institute (2009):S24-S40, at S25.

10 Schielke, “Being Good in Ramadan,” S25-S26. 

11 Benjamin F. Soares and René Otayek, “Introduction: Islam and Muslim Politics in 
Africa,” in Islam and Muslim Politics in Africa, eds. Benjamin F. Soares and René 
Otayek (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007):1-24, at 18.

12 Filippo Osella and Benjamin F. Soares, “Islam, Politics, and Anthropology,” in Islam, 
Politics, and Anthropology, 11. 

13 Ranjana Khanna’s wide-ranging work on unbelonging has touched what I am think-
ing here. See, for example, Khanna, “Touching, Unbelonging, and the Absence of 
Affect.” Feminist Theory 13, no. 2 (2012):213-232. 

14 Asad, Secular Translations, 73. 

15 Asad, Secular Translations, 92. Already in his 2015 Critical Inquiry piece, Asad had 
said: “Tradition is singular as well as plural. For subjects there are not only con-
tinuities but also exits and entries. Tradition accommodates mistakes as well as 
betrayal; it is not by accident that tradition and treason have a common etymology” 
(“Thinking about Tradition, Religion, and Politics in Egypt Today,” 169).

16 Asad, Secular Translations, 92. 

17 Asad writes: “A living tradition is not merely capable of containing conflict and 
disagreement; the search for what is essential itself provokes argument. A concern 
with “essence” is therefore not quite the same as a concern with authenticity” 
(Secular Translations, 95). 

18 I am here, as elsewhere, indebted to Stefania Pandolfo’s Knot of the Soul, which 
models for me how to take Ghazālī and other Muslim thinkers as serious theorists 



M i A N :  A G E N t S  O F  G R A C E     37

of psychic life. See Stefania Pandolfo, Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, 
Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). For how I approach Pandolfo’s 
broader recasting of psychoanalysis and Islam, see Ali Altaf Mian, “The Play of the 
Qur’anic Trace: Engaging Stefania Pandolfo’s Knot of the Soul,” Qui Parle: Critical 
Humanities and Social Sciences 28, no. 1 (June 2019):189-210.

19 Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” 14. 

20 Asad, Secular Translations, 66-67.

21 Abū ‘Abd Allāh Muḥammad b. Ismā‘īl al-Bukhārī, Al-Jāmi‘ al-Ṣaḥīḥ bi-ḥāshiyat 
al-muḥaddith Aḥmad ‘Alī al-Sahāranfūrī, ed. Taqī al-Dīn al-Nadawī, 15 vols (Beirut: 
Dār al-Bashā’ir al-Islāmiyya, 2011), 1:180-181. This ḥadīth, which is the first report 
recorded by Bukhārī in his Ṣaḥīḥ, appears with slight modifications in six additional 
“books” of this collection. Here, I cite the opening version, but have used italics to 
indicate a phrase that is included in many other versions in and beyond Bukhārī’s 
Ṣaḥīḥ. For an insightful analysis of this report, see Ignazio de Francesco, “Il Lato 
Oscuro Delle Azioni: La Dottrina Della Niyya Nello Sviluppo Dell’Etica Islamica,” 
Islamochristiana 39 (2013):45-69.

22 Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī, Muntahā al-āmāl fī sharḥ ḥadīth innamā al-a‘māl, ed. Muṣṭafā 
‘Abd al-Qādir ‘Aṭā (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya, 1986), 43. 

23 I discuss the rich commentarial tradition on this ḥadīth in a book chapter titled “The 
Ḥadīth of Intention and Islamic Ethics” (forthcoming). 

24 Anna L. Peterson, Works Righteousness: Material Practice in Ethical Theory (Oxford: 
Oxford University Press, 2020), 5. 

25 Aḥmad b. ‘Alī b. Ḥajar al-‘Asqalānī, Fatḥ al-bārī bi-sharḥ Ṣaḥīḥ al-Imām Abī Abdillāh 
Muḥammad b. Ismā‘īl al-Bukhārī, ed. ‘Abd al-‘Azīz b. ‘Abd Allāh b. Bāz, 13 vols. 
(Cairo: Al-Maktabat al-Salafiyya, 1969), 1:10; Suyūṭī, Muntahā al-āmāl, 37-38.

26 Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, Iḥyā’ ‘ulūm al-dīn, eds. ‘Alī Muḥammad Muṣṭafā et al., 6 
vols. (Damascus: Dār al-Fayḥā’), 6:132.

27 Ghazālī, Iḥyā’, 6:140.

28 Jamāl al-Dīn b. al-Manẓūr, Lisān al-‘arab (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1984), 15:347-348.

29 Ghazālī, Iḥyā’, 6:131. For this report, see Muslim, Ṣaḥīḥ, Kitāb al-birr wa’l-ṣila wa’l-
adab, bāb taḥrīm ẓulm al-muslim…” It is ḥadīth # 2564. 

30 Ghazālī, Iḥyā’, 6:131. 

31 Ghazālī, Iḥyā’, 6:135-136. 

32 Margaret Smith, An Early Mystic of Baghdad: A Study of the Life and Teaching of 
Ḥārith b. Asad al-Muḥāsibī A.D. 781-A.D. 857 (London: The Sheldon Press, 1935), 44. 

33 Al-Ḥārith al-Muḥāsibī, Al-Ri‘āya li ḥuqūq Allāh (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya, 
n.d.), 246. On al-Muḥāsibī, see Smith, An Early Mystic of Baghdad; Gavin Picken, 
Spiritual Purification in Islam: The Life and Works of al-Muḥāsibī (London and New 
York: Routledge, 2011). Picken describes Al-Ri‘āya as “essentially a book concerning 



38    A M E R i C A N  J O U R N A L  O F  i S L A M  A N d  S O C i E t Y  3 9 : 1 - 2

sincerity to God, cleansing the heart, purification of the soul and a life of com-
plete moral, ethical and behavioural perfection” (Spiritual Purification in Islam, 69). 
Regarding this text, Margaret Smith writes: “This is al-Muḥāsibī’s great treatise 
on the interior life, which reveals a profound knowledge of human nature and its 
weaknesses, while in the means which he suggests for combating these weaknesses 
and for attaining to the single-hearted service of God, he shews also the discerning 
wisdom and inspired insight of a true spiritual director and shepherd of souls” (An 
Early Mystic of Baghdad, 45). See also ʻAbd al-Ḥalīm Maḥmūd, Al-Moḥâsibî: Un 
mystique musulman religieux et moraliste (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1940); ʻAbd al-Ḥalīm 
Maḥmūd, Ustādh al-sāʼirīn al-Ḥārith b. Asad al-Muḥāsibī (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub 
al-Ḥadīthah, 1973); Şahin Filiz, “The Founder of the Muḥāsabah School of Sufism: 
Al-Ḥārith Ibn Asad Al-Muḥāsibī,” Islamic Studies 45, no. 1 (2006): 59-81.

34 Cited in Picken, Spiritual Purification in Islam, 202. Translation revised.

35 The intellectual historian Key has recently demonstrated that the word “meaning” 
does not fully capture the Arabic term ma‘nā (Language Between God and the Poets: 
Ma‘nā in the Eleventh Century [Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018]). 
He proposes that we view this latter term as signifying “mental content.” In his 
eleventh-century Arabic sources spanning the work of lexicographers, logicians, 
theologians, and literary critics, ma‘nā was wedded to ḥaqīqa (accuracy) in two 
important ways. First, ma‘nā implied an accurate correspondence between mind and 
language, as if words mirrored mental images. Second, ma‘nā implied an accurate 
correspondence between mind and reality, as if the mind mirrored the external 
world but also the essences of things. By wedding ma‘nā to these two meanings of 
“accuracy,” Key’s sources established the validity of such a thing as pre-linguistic 
meaning or “mental content.” It was this picture of language that Wittgenstein 
questioned most forcefully by suggesting that language does not reflect some 
pre-linguistic given, but is an ordinary phenomenon. 

36 al-Muḥāsibī, Al-Ri‘āya, 246.

37 For Drāz, “the moral good, in general, is neither encompassed by an internal reality 
nor by a bodily manifestation, but it consists of communication between the two” 
(see Muḥammad ‘Abd Allāh Drāz, Dustūr al-akhlāq fī’l-Qur’ān, trans. into Arabic 
from French by ‘Abd al-Ṣabūr Shāhīn [Kuwait: Dār al-Buḥūth al-‘Ilmiyyah, 1972], 
446, translation mine). For the original French, see Mohamed Abdallah Draz, La 
morale du Koran (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951). For the English 
translation of this landmark study, see M.A. Draz, The Moral World of the Qur’an, 
trans. Danielle Robinson and Rebecca Masterton (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008). 

38 Drāz, Dustūr al-akhlāq fī’l-Qur’ān, 448. 

39 On Abū Ṭālib al-Makkī’s influence on Ghazālī, see Kojiro Nakamura, “Makki and 
Ghazali on Mystical Practices,” Orient 20 (1984):83-91. 

40 Abū Ṭālib al-Makkī, Qūt al-qulūb, ed. Maḥmūd Ibrāhīm Muḥammad al-Riḍwānī, 3 
vols. (Cairo: Maktabat Dār al-Turāth, 2001), 3:1342. 



M i A N :  A G E N t S  O F  G R A C E     39

41 al-Makkī, Qūt al-qulūb, 3:1343. 

42 Ghazālī, Iḥyā’, 6:140. 

43 Ghazālī, Iḥyā’, 6:137. 

44 Ghazālī, Iḥyā’, 6:137-138. Let me note in passing that this same insight was devel-
oped more fully in colonial India by Mawlānā Ashraf ‘Alī Thānavī (1863-1943).

45 Ghazālī, Iḥyā’, 6:138. 

46 Ghazālī, Iḥyā’, 6:155. 

47 Ibn al-Manẓūr, Lisān al-‘arab, 2:117. 

48 Ghazālī, Iḥyā’, 6:138. 

49 Ghazālī, Iḥyā’, 6:138.

50 Ghazālī, Iḥyā’ ‘ulūm al-dīn, 6:138-139. 

51 Ghazālī, Iḥyā’ ‘ulūm al-dīn, 6:150. 

52 Ghazālī, Iḥyā’, 6:142. 

53 Ghazālī, Iḥyā’, 6:141. Alexander Treiger sheds further light on this point: “There is 
no doubt that al-Ghazālī’s understanding of felicity is indebted to the Arabic phil-
osophical tradition, where the term ‘felicity’ refers specifically to the bliss in the 
afterlife (al-sa‘āda al-quṣwā, ultimately going back to the Greek εύδαιμονία), and 
knowledge of God is regarded as the telos of human life and the prerequisite to the 
attainment of that bliss” (Inspired Knowledge in Islamic Thought: Al-Ghazālī’s Theory 
of Mystical Cognition and its Avicennan Foundation [London: Routledge, 2012], 47). 
Ghazālī’s invocation of “meeting God” in a discussion of sincere intentions is sup-
ported by the Qur’anic verse, “Say: ‘I am only a mortal, the like of you; it is revealed 
to me that your God is One God. So let him, who hopes for the encounter with his 
Lord, act righteously, and not associate anyone with his Lord’s service” (18:110). 

54 Ghazālī, Iḥyā’, 6:137. Cf. Jules Janssens, “Al-Ghazzali and His Use of Avicennan Texts,” 
in Problems in Arabic Philosophy, ed. Miklós Maróth (Budapest, 2003), esp. 37-49; Frank 
Griffel, “Al-Ġazālī’s Concept of Prophecy: The Introduction of Avicenna Psychology 
into Aš‘arite Theology,” Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 14 (2004):101-144, esp. 129-130. 

55 The following saying attributed to a son of ‘Abdullāh b. Mas‘ūd also emphasizes how 
the interplay among fikr and dhikr transforms interiority: “Glad tidings belong to 
the one who purifies his devotions and supplications to God, and does not let what 
his eyes behold preoccupy his heart, and does not let what his ears hear become a 
cause for forgetting the remembrance of God, and does not let [the wealth] given 
to others sadden his soul” (Ibn Abī’d-dunyā, Al-Ikhlāṣ wa’n-niyya, ed. Iyād Khālid 
aṭ-Ṭabā‘a [Damascus: Dār al-Bashā’ir, 1992], 36). 

56 Ghazālī, Iḥyā’, 6:146.

57 Derrida’s conceptualization of “textuality” is not a valorization of play qua play (or, 
ambivalence qua ambivalence). Rather, his point is that texts at once intend mean-
ings and exceed their intentions, and one is always already thinking in form when 



40    A M E R i C A N  J O U R N A L  O F  i S L A M  A N d  S O C i E t Y  3 9 : 1 - 2

trying to subvert genre or when aspiring to realize a transcendental opening. See 
Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992). 

58 I am grateful to Basit Kareem Iqbal for this point. 

59 This introspective practice can be seen as another type of migration, one that 
involves the traversal of psychical instead of physical distance.  

60 Ghazālī, Iḥyā’, 6:155.

61 Again, let me note in passing that this same insight was developed more fully in 
colonial India by Mawlānā Thānavī. 

62 Ghazālī, Iḥyā’, 6:155.

63 Ghazālī, Iḥyā’, 6:157. The Arabic original for what I have italicized in the transla-
tion is: inbi‘āth-ul-qalbi yajrī majrā’l-futūḥi min allāhi-ta‘ālā. By framing how God 
enables human actions through the expression, “the flow of openings from God,” 
Ghazālī maintains his ambiguity around secondary causality, an ambiguity that also 
characterized his teacher al-Juwaynī’s ideas on this issue. See Griffel, Al-Ghazālī’s 
Philosophical Theology, 128. 

64 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 197. 

65 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 197-198. 

66 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 191.

67 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 29. 

68 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 137. 

69 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 137.

70 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 137.

71 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 137. 

72 Ebrahim Moosa, Ghazālī and the Poetics of Imagination (Chapel Hill, NC: University 
of North Carolina Press, 2005); Griffel, Al-Ghazālī’s Philosophical Theology; Treiger, 
Inspired Knowledge in Islamic Thought. 

73 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 126. 

74 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 154. 

75 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 139. 

76 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 139. 

77 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 137. 

78 For an argument that has some resonance to this point, see Amira Mittermaier, 
“Dreams from Elsewhere: Muslim Subjectivities Beyond the Trope of Self-
cultivation,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18, no. 2 ( June 2012): 
247-265. However, I have emphasized in this article a different conceptualization 
of intentionality than what is presupposed in Mittermaier’s account. My thanks to 
Basit Kareem Iqbal for this reference.